William Basinski has a remarkable ability to seemingly distil the essence of a moment in time and stretch it out to epic durations. So it seems appropriate for him to tackle the subject of black holes, where gravitational time dilation means that (to an outside observer) a clock will appear to slow and stop as it approaches the event horizon (as any fule know). On Time Out Of Time features an audio conversion of data from LIGO’s ground-breaking gravitational wave detection events, which is pretty darned exciting. (Basinski, who is surprisingly feisty when he’s not actually engaged in the serious business of time-stretching and the like, describes this as the sound you get “when two black holes fuck”.)
The result is 39 minutes of ethereally delicate ambient music that really does seem to float out of time. (The vinyl has two 19-minute tracks, On Time Out Of Time and On Time Out Of Time (The Lovers). The digital release has a single 39-minute version, plus a 10-minute bonus track which I don’t really think adds much.) I described 2017’s A Shadow In Time as “Basinski’s subtle magic at its strongest”. It’s just possible that he might have outdone himself again here.
I bought this from Juno. They call it Ambient / Drone.
dogrando writes about some records 
One reply on “William Basinski: On Time Out Of Time (LP, Temporary Residence, March 2019)”
[…] Time Out of Time by William Basinski (from the album of the same name) — Using sounds based on the gravitational wave detection signal from LIGO, this does seem to […]
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