But we also make a ton of music together. Now we’re 10 years deep, so we still do office stuff together and I run the store with Billy. “I couldn’t believe I was getting the opportunity of a lifetime. “My mind was just fucking blown,” Wendel says. After learning that Wendel had graduated from recording engineer school, Basinski offered him a part-time job helping out with mail orders from his web store while he hit the road on tour.
Basinski was attending a dance performance around the corner and initially thought he was being cruised by the beaming experimental music fan behind the counter. The unlikely musical bedfellows first met in 2013 when the younger half of Sparkle Division was working at Abbot’s Habit, a (dearly missed) coffee shop in Venice Beach. “I’ve basically just been staying home for the past 16 months, but I’m very grateful to have this beautiful place.” “It’s much more relaxing here,” Basinski says. He responds by turning the camera to show me the crystal blue pool outside of his mid-century modern home. I ask how the sunny change of scenery has affected his process. When I reach Basinski, along with Wendel, on Zoom, it becomes clear within seconds that he goes by “Billy.” After living in New York for 30 years (“I did my time, honey!”), the former Brooklynite has settled into a new life in L.A. This was controversial enough that one letter-writer described the musician as a “poseur” who he expected to see on “ Love Island or a porn mag.” Basinski responded by turning himself into a Bernie meme. The Wire magazine’s November 2020 cover story captured the 63-year-old in his finest chainmail, cat-eye sunglasses and red leather boots relaxing poolside at his home in Los Angeles.
Yet once you separate the art from the artist, Basinski is revealed to be a wisecracking, glamorous life of the party-quite the opposite of what you might assume from his music’s solemn gravity.
This vast, mournful masterpiece is as sombre as the events that inspired it. Alongside Basinski’s haunting footage of the New York City skyline in the aftermath of the World Trade Center’s collapse, his music is now displayed permanently in the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Like many of Basinski’s releases over the past two decades, it began with the source material of his tape pieces dating back to the late 1970s, using the natural deterioration of the analog medium as a compositional technique. The ambient composer, originally from Texas, will likely forever be associated with his monolithic four-album collection, The Disintegration Loops, an achingly beautiful set of decaying drones completed against the backdrop of 9/11.
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