Image by Ken Douglas
This morning and yesterday just felt like an absolute wall of resistance. Berlin is falling into it’s grey, damp and dark winter pattern that is my least favorite thing about it. The trip to school with my son and my trip back alone was disrupted by transit issues and so I spent a lot of time standing in the cold waiting and feeling frustrated. In those moments I try to reflect, unclench and be present but it’s hard to do when I’m cold. Stifling heat makes me sluggish and maybe a bit irritable but cold really eats at me. I guess I’m a true summer baby.
Facing the blank page feels like a chore today. However, I do have a lovely, sublime and dark William Basinski piece to share, so maybe we’ll take a moment to enjoy that together.
Basinski’s music inspires poetic commentary from his fans on YouTube. It’s very interesting to see how certain special pieces of music inspire people to open up to strangers on the internet.
Scale The Fretboard writes “This song like waiting for a bus that never comes.” Very appropos for my morning experience and evocative of the timelessness Basinski’s work evokes. That feeling of floating outside time, though for me the experience is different from waiting. Endymion766, 3 years ago, writes “It’s the sound of dread that there may be no gods.” Jacob Wruebel describes it as “the sound of the abyss”. Junie Marin compares it to that classic of video game fog horror Silent Hill. Interestingly for me the piece is somber and beautiful but I don’t detect darkness, more a kind of sublime and vast melancholy. Basinski reminds us that slowing down and clearing things away can open huge spaces inside us.
As much as I feel ambivalent and critical about YouTube and our relationship to similar content curation algorithms, I discovered Basinski through YouTube, and am much richer for it. Experiencing it in the strange environment of the internet is quite different from having sought it out, downloaded it or bought a record or CD. There’s a light, loosely connected relationship to the music which in many cases renders music disposable. In the case of Basinski however I kept returning again and again. Partially this has to do with the way it fits into my life. I’m listening now while I’m writing and I find it’s perfect for putting me in a certain state. This idea of ‘useful’ music or music which fits into certain moments activities is one I’m quite interested in but also a bit suspicious of. It feels like a step removed from elevator music, which Basinski is emphatically not. I think one distinction is that certain music I use to change my mood in a certain context. If I’m feeling a certain way and want to direct my energy and emotions along a certain path I choose certain pieces of music. For writing and thinking at the computer, Basinski is perfect. For walking around and keeping warm while trying to get home, I’ve been listening to a lot of Atlanta trap artists Gunna and Lil Baby, who are both getting a lot of (deserved) attention and are great. So perhaps this is a useful way to think about it, strong music we put on not as background but as a kind of emotional lighting, to change the scene and the way we feel. Basinski definitely works that way for me, and I’m grateful for it.
