william basinski - the disintegration loops

File under I have no idea why I like this stuff but I do - William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops.

 

Basinski is a New York composer who mainly works with synths and avant garde drones. In 2001 he began the process of archiving some of his older experiments. He had a number of tape loops of ambient fragments that were still held on old reel to reel tapes. But, as he played the tapes for the first time in years in order to digitize the music, the ferrite began to separate and the magnetic tapes literally disintegrated as they were played. 

 

Basinski found this process fascinating and let the tapes play for as long as possible. The loops gradually accumulated crackles, distortion, cracks and drop outs as the tapes became almost unplayable. The break up of the music becomes ever more part of the recording as the repeated loops layer themselves into new and unintended music. In the end Basinski found he had nearly five hours of this new disintegrating music.

 

You'd think that such disintegration would be unlistenable, but it resolutely isn't. The results of these experiments ended up as dark ambient soundscapes of astonishing power. It's incredibly hard to describe the emotional pull of this music, for it is, surprisingly, terribly emotional. The listener gets utterly drawn into the soundscapes, the looped music exerting a hypnotic spell, at once both calming and dreamy, but also bewitching and captivating, and sometimes a little disturbing. This is not relaxing background ambient music - as each piece progresses it becomes clear that it's impossible to play The Disintegration Loops in the background - it draws the listener in, closer and closer, deeper and deeper. Some of the pieces run for over an hour, others for 20 minutes or so. It doesn't matter, time seems to stand still when listening to them. 

 

In theory this all ought to be very very dull, and annoying too, as the music is progressively interrupted by break ups and glitches and even silence, but, bafflingly, it’s utterly compulsive listening and I find myself totally absorbed in the layers of sound. Really amazing.

 

After I'd had the Loops for some time I looked into the background of this music. Basinski worked on the Loops across the summer of 2001 and in early September he invited some friends over to hear the completed music. They all sat on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment block to listen to the new work but watched in shock as the Twin Towers were destroyed, the Disintegration Loops remorselessly playing out as the background to the horror that was unfolding.  

 

The four CDs of the Loops each have a different picture of the pall of smoke from where the Towers fell, pictures taken by Basinski from his rooftop that day.

 

Yet despite the circumstances surrounding the completion of the Loops it would be wrong to let the events of 9/11 overshadow what is an astonishing musical achievement. These loops easily stand alone, monolithic slabs of music captured forever in its own death throes.