SAN FRANCISCO
William Basinski
An evening of transcendent sound + light with the icon of ambient music
Friday, September 13, 2024
Grace Cathedral
7pm (doors) 8pm (performance)
All ages
with Flore Laurentienne
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Join Reflections for an unforgettable night with ambient legend William Basinski. Live mixing 40+ year old tape loops and archival piano recordings from Arcadia, his former loft in Brooklyn, he’ll premiere a new work – a prayer for peace, channeled via 1970s Uher tape machines and digital feedback.
Canadian composer Flore Laurentienne shares a deeply moving opening set for live string quartet and analog synths. We’ll pair the sounds with a visionary, projection-mapped light show, transforming this historic cathedral – and ourselves – in a ritual of immersive, melancholic beauty.
William Basinski
William Basinski is a classically trained composer who has been working in experimental media for over 30 years in NYC and most recently, California.
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. His epic 4-disc masterwork, The Disintegration Loops, received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 50 albums of 2004 by Pitchfork.
Basinski was chosen by music director Antony Hegarty to score the Robert Wilson opera, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. 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. With Preston Wendel he released a jazz-inflected LP under the name Sparkle Division, with special guests such as the late Henry Grimes on upright bass. In March 2022 the album “. . on reflection” by William Basinski & Janek Schaefer was released by Temporary Residence, Ltd.
Flore Laurentienne
Canadian composer Mathieu David Gagnon, aka Flore Laurentienne, draws inspiration from the rivers and rugged wilderness of his native Quebec.
His mesmerizing Volume I and II albums were released on RVNG Intl. in 2022, summoning beauty through repetition and constraint. For his Reflections performances, he’ll share a new work featuring a live string quartet and a range of analog synths and keyboards.
Grace Cathedral
Nestled in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood, Grace Cathedral was designed by architect Lewis Hobart in the French Gothic style and is the third largest Episcopal cathedral in the nation. The use of raw concrete and steel for the cathedral fabric is daring and unusual, but the 1906 earthquake made structural strength necessary. The building is an ADA accessible space.
1100 California St, San Francisco, CA 94108
© Reflections 2024. In time, out of time ☀︎