William Basinski is a classically trained musician and composer who has been working in experimental media for over 30 years. Employing obsolete technology and analogue tape loops, his haunting and melancholy soundscapes explore the temporal nature of life and resound with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time.
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William Basinski
CEM live
His 4-disc masterwork, The Disintegration Loops received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 50 albums of 2004 by Pitchfork Media. The Temporary Residence deluxe LP box-set reissue from 2012 was awarded best re-issue of the year and a score of 10 on Pitchfork. Installations and films made in collaboration with artist-filmmaker, James Elaine have been presented in festivals and museums internationally, and his concerts are presented to sold out crowds around the world. Basinski was chosen by Music Director, Antony Hegarty to create music for the Robert Wilson opera, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic which had its world premiere at the Manchester International Festival in July 2011 and toured Europe in 2012 and North America in 2013. Orchestral transcriptions of The Disintegration Loops by Maxim Moston have been performed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queen Elizabeth Hall and La Batie Festival in Geneva, Switzerland, Dark Mofo Festival in Hobart Tasmania and most recently Pitchfork Midwinter Festival with the Chicago Philharmonic.
Basinski is currently touring the world in support of his latest work, On Time Out of Time which was released on March 8th, 2019 on Temporary Residence/2062/USA.
CEM live is one of the experimental and surreal musical vehicles of the interdisciplinary Austrian born Berlin based artist Cem Duran. With particular lean onto introspective journeys, his productions explore sonic landscapes creating fields of hallucinatory realms. This universe of remote soundscapes proclaim an experience on a dichotomy between light and shadows, with hints of sacralized chants and instruments, partially reminiscent of his family’s Sufi background.Cem’s geo-diverse cultural territory loses its own location as a mirage proposing new sites which strive to accentuate the power of the inner monologues and their expansion, opening up a world rich in manipulated acoustic atmospherics. We hear a dialogue cast between machine sounds and real instruments with storytelling field recordings that recreate the sense of a distant but yet tangible space.
