William Basinski at The Empty Bottle

$20 (adv.), $25 // 21+WILLIAM BASINSKI performing 'On Time Out Of Time'----------1.3 billion years ago, two massive black holes in a distant galaxy surrendered to one another’s inexorable attraction and merged, in a collision so powerful that it shook up the very fabric of the universe. On September 14th, 2015, the ripples in spacetime that were produced by the astronomical force of their collision — exerting more energy than all the stars in the observable universe combined — finally reached the surface of the Earth: its gravitational waves are the first ever to be detected by humankind...

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$20 (adv.), $25 // 21+WILLIAM BASINSKI performing 'On Time Out Of Time'----------1.3 billion years ago, two massive black holes in a distant galaxy surrendered to one another’s inexorable attraction and merged, in a collision so powerful that it shook up the very fabric of the universe. On September 14th, 2015, the ripples in spacetime that were produced by the astronomical force of their collision — exerting more energy than all the stars in the observable universe combined — finally reached the surface of the Earth: its gravitational waves are the first ever to be detected by humankind. The lovingly dubbed “heartbeat of the universe” marks the opening of an entirely new sensory field for astrophysics, as sound now enters the stage as a new kind of cosmic signal.In “On Time Out of Time,” (2017) avant-garde composer WILLIAM BASINSKI uses exclusive recordings from LIGO’s interferometers — the fantastic machines that captured the signal — to create a visceral experience of inconceivable magnitudes. In his continued musical exploration of the temporal mysteries of nature, and with his signature mastery of extended processes of entropic decay, BASINSKI’s piece navigates the 1.3 billion-year gradual disintegration of these trailblazing waves as they journey to Earth, after detonating with the colossal violence of their cosmic conception. Stretching and lagging the sonified samples, the sound cascades outwards, becoming increasingly musical through the addition of subtle melodies, synthesizers, and loops, meticulously assembled in an all-embracing drone composition that succeeds in the impossible: to unveil Time in her most exotic guise — as an outlandishly curvaceous, pliant, and irrepressibly animate component of the universe.This epochal piece places BASINSKI firmly within an obscenely immodest tradition of historical greats, creating with the first actual recordings of bending spacetime a “Music of the Spheres” that Pythagoras, Gustav Holst, and David Bowie could not in their wildest dreams have imagined.

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