“There are but four ways to die a sardonic spirit might have said to me
There is dying that occurs relatively suddenly
There is dying that occurs relatively gradually
There is dying that occurs relatively painlessly
There is the death that is full of pain
Thus by various means they are combined
The sudden and the gradual
The painless and the painful
To yield but four ways to die
And there are no others.”

During his performance this past Tuesday at the Sugar Club, Dublin, William Basinski told the crowd about his mother Patricia having just passed away following a battle with dementia. He told us of finding out in Heathrow, after having played a show in London just a few days before. He told us about the hospice experience. Told us about how the bills came coldly and immediately. Told us about the swift ushering from a still ward. Told us about their reconciliation, about their familial Catholicism, about how she forgot herself, forgot everything.

Dementia is a fucking nightmarish thing. An affliction that targets the already-ill, the already-infirm, the already-alone. Something that robs you of your body and mind. Die in a carcrash, burn in a fire, bleed to death in a robbery. There’s some romance, beauty to a lot of it. Poetry. A death that occurs relatively gradually and full of pain is robbed of that. Dementia isn’t the preservation of some crystalline death mask, nothing beautiful frozen in place. It’s the gradual, horrible fucking disintegration of a person.

Two men diametrically opposed in the long lineage of the homosexual provocateur, William Basinski and Yukio Mishima – men who’s works are juxtaposed in their relationships with death and sensuality. Most importantly, vitality is always at play in Mishima’s fiction, even in death – there’s action, will, immediacy, all integrated into his longing, almost jealous depiction of heroic death. At the end of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Ryuji reflects on his giving up of a seafaring life of danger and death for a life of relative domesticity. This contentment is punished by Mishima – Ryuji is unaware that he’s sipping from a drugged thermos of tea, and that his stepson is planning to vivisect him in order to restore his heroism. A slow death does not go unpunished in Mishima’s work.

Basinski however keenly highlights decay – it’s what has made him so widespread, what gives him an immediate pull outside of the realm of experimental music. Alongside the likes of The Caretaker, Basinski’s music and intent are more readily identifiable, more easily malleable to individual experiences than an Alvin Lucier or Charles Ives. His most famous longform work, The Disintegration Loops, have been reified and mythologised almost beyond examination. Inseperable in analysis from 9/11, the millennium, Fukuyama, The Disintegration Loops was in reality only incidentally related to all of this – being the chance result of digitising magnetic tape on an infamous day. What always existed was the decay, that disintegration.

Basinski’s work is a slow death – or rather that gradual death that is full of pain. That persistent, muffled fanfare of dlp 1.1.1 exists in the same musical continuum as the five-note trumpet phrase from Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. There’s abject futility at play. How pertinent this decay is in the face of dementia. Of aging, of slow death, of everything.

Even his work in SPARKLE DIVISION occupies this space – for all its loving tackiness, the new record FOXY is temporally torn. Easy-listening memories being mauled by swamping reverb, skittish beats threatening to wash away a tracks intent, like a patient unable to collect their thoughts.

Basinski told us of his mother’s passing about halfway through his set. It imbued his performance with a truly rare intimacy. Finishing his set, he sarkily offered us “pudding” in the form of an edited version of his “hit single” Melancholia 2. Smiling, he walked off stage. Pumping through the Sugar Club soundsystem, the warped, looping piano notes took on a percussive quality. In that moment, it felt less melancholy but meekly confident – something small and powerless retaining some control through a simple rhythm, a happy musical sisphyus. It felt like Basinski making a point on the reclamation of control, of self-actualised action. It was hard not to associate it with his mother.

He seemed visibly emotional by the end, even behind his sunglasses, immaculate hair and ten-on-ten coat. In spite of everything, he left the show with something approximating hope. That even in disintegration, there’s hope.

Christ, I’d hope so.