William Basinski: From 'NASA Brat' to Space Cowboy

About this episode

The episode explores William Basinski's journey in experimental music and the creation of The Disintegration Loops amidst the backdrop of significant historical events.

In the fall of 2001, an obscure experimental musician decided to revisit some analog tape loops he had made back in the early eighties. Inspired by the work of Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp, William Basinski had created his own distinctive practice of taping easy listening music off the radio, cutting the tape into loops, roughly a foot long, and then slowing it way down. The result transformed music into something profound as these brief loops of time became capacious ambient spaces. William Basinski's, eighties creations anticipated coming trends in loop based production, noise, ambient and slowed, and reverbed music, but very few people were paying attention at the time. Then in the summer of 2001, Basinski decided to digitize some of his favorite loops from his 1980s archive, and that's when everything changed. As he played the old tapes back, the magnetic ferrite that had captured the music began flaking off the plastic backing of the tape. The very act of digitally preserving the tapes was also destroying them. Basinski could hear the sound of decay, the death of an old medium captured by a new one. Grounded in decades of art practice, Basinski recognized what he…

People in this episode

Guest: William Basinski

Topics covered

• experimental music
• ambient music
• loop-based production
• art practice
• music preservation

Keywords

• William Basinski
• ambient music
• loop production
• tape loops
• music decay

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Disintegration Loops

Places: Brooklyn

More episodes of Phantom Power

• Digital feeds, malnourished students · June 12, 2026 · 45 min
• Did Moog ruin synths? Suzanne Ciani reveals analog's original sin · May 29, 2026 · 59 min
• Anonymous Sounds: Library Music · May 15, 2026 · 52 min
• How to Listen Like a Fish with Marine Biologist Sophie Nedelec · April 10, 2026 · 57 min
• Talking Back to the “The Oral Theory of Everything” · March 27, 2026 · 41 min
• The Internet Promised Creative Freedom. What Happened? · March 13, 2026 · 50 min