PERFORMERS

American born composer and New York City resident William Basinski has been composing works for tape, electronics and classical instruments for nearly three decades, yet has only recently found wider recognition since the release of the highly regarded Disintegration Loops series in 2004. Cited as a progenitor of Derridean 'hauntology'
in modern music, Basinski's work transcends such simple codification and genre alignment in its timeless resistance to faddish conceptualization. As a classically trained composer, it has been the use of painstaking magnetic tape process that has marked his work out from the dominance of digital sampling and software-based composition in contemporary electronic music. Often through thematic explorations of decay, loss and time, his technique mirrors this thematic content by literally subjecting tape loops and recorded excepts of his own instrumental compositions to physical breakdown, magnetic decay and the wearing factors of extended time. A singular composer of his generation, William Basinski has been released on such lauded experimental labels as Raster-Noton, Line, Die Stadt and his own 2062 imprint.

Basinski will be headlining the "OPTICAL 1 Showcase", Friday night at the Northwest Film Forum.