William Basinski’s Evocative Tape Art

newyorker:

Sasha Frere-Jones on the composer William Basinski:

Basinski’s loops are defined by the fact that machines are always in the process of failing, and that change itself is a form of composition. Like hip-hop producers, who develop sample banks of favored snares and hi-hats from old songs, Basinski has built a career from fragments of thirty-year-old tape.

Illustration by Stamatis Laskos