The Music Folder’s special guest today is William Basinski, the avant-garde composer and musician whose experimentations with tape loops, delays, found sounds, and shortwave radio static led him to create some of the most influential works of ambient music. With The Disintegration Loops, his most famous work, Basinski created a melancholic, drone-laden tapestry of electronic loops and cracks as the tapes he was trying to digitize kept deteriorating further and further, reaching completion as the 9/11 attacks started to unfold.

Interviewed by art critic Francesco Tenaglia, in this episode of The Music Folder William Basinski reflects on how the iconic Disintegration Loops unexpectedly became a defining milestone in electronic music, introducing personal emotion, nostalgia, and a melancholic, romantic aesthetic into an otherwise process-driven genre. He also shares anecdotes about his formative years, his influences (from classical training to John Cage), his compositional approach, his Brooklyn loft Arcadia, the interplay between his music and physical spaces, and memorable encounters, including opening for David Bowie.

Interview by Francesco Tenaglia, Milan 1 october 2018. 
The Music Folder is a talk-series, curated by Archivio Storico Ricordi, which investigates the intersection of music, memory, and arts.