Thanks to Renee for passing on this article from The Brooklyn Rail. She knows that I’m a huge fan of Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. Joel played Disc 1 for me at some point last spring, and I drifted off to sleep listening/loving Loops 1.1, giddy about writing to it in the future. I also published a piece with The New Yinzer about this particular track. So yes, a love. And a very interesting read about art and decay.

a picture of Basinski conducting Alter Ego as they play Disintegration Loops 1.1

The Music Was Dying
by Brandon Kreitler

“Sound and image flakes falling like luminous grey snow—falling softly from demagnetized patterns into blue silence.”—William S. Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded

In 2003, American composer William Basinski released a four-disc set entitled The Disintegration Loops. The music on these discs was not initially intended for release, nor was it even really composed music at all. In August and September of 2001, Basinski discovered some loops of mostly orchestral music that he had recorded on then-standard magnetic tape in the early 80s. Because magnetic tape degrades over time, and because its use is becoming increasingly rare in the digital age, Basinski set out to transfer the music to digital form to preserve it. However, as the twenty or so-year-old tape passed over the reader, tiny bits of the tape were scratched or flaked off, sometimes to land in other places on the reel. The tape had begun to disintegrate in its long storage. The process of this degradation was slow and not initially noticeable to Basinski, who let the tapes roll. The music on the tapes underwent a long decay and endless reconfigurations during the digital transfer, which captured the results.

The individual loops last anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes. The listening experience, while initially languid and somber, becomes enthralling and disorienting as each piece progresses. The music begins as repetitive and transparent, over time revealing the infinite complexity and depth in even a short clip of audio information. The music becomes a ghost of itself. In a remarkable coincidence, as Basinski was listening to his loops destroy themselves in his Brooklyn apartment, two planes flew into the World Trade Center towers across the East River in downtown Manhattan. He and a few friends watched smoke and the haze of destruction cover the skyline across the river. Could there be a music more analogous?

The Disintegration Loops breaks with the notion of music as a composed experience that can be mapped in linear time. While the movements may feel repetitive, there is in fact no genuine repetition of an identical loop. The music is, literally and in sensory experience, slowly pulling itself apart. It is a gradual disintegration, not only of the magnetic tape, but of the linear order of each loop; as the piece progresses it can no longer be said to be a sequence of loops, but rather a continuous rearrangement and destruction of shards of sound. Like Eno’s tape variations on Pachelbel, the beginnings of each movement in The Disintegration Loops have a sense of shifting alteration of a theme, but the Loops eventually collapse the model from which they derive. As Basinski said, “it was as if the music was dying.”

…
We are after history, but drowning in its artifacts: slabs of etched vinyl, wax, cassette tapes, film reels, the frequency spectrum, binary code. But the essence of information is always slipping, elsewhere. It is in the end without body, without territory, undead. And as Derrida says, “The future belongs to ghosts.”

Read the rest of the article about art & decay here.