Title: The Disintegration Loops, Vol. 1
Year: 2001
Label: Temporary Residence
Duration: 74 min
Genre: Avantgarde, Electronic, Minimalism
Styles: Tape Music, Conceptual Art
A work of minimal, process-based tape music, experimental composer William Basinski's Disintegration Loops series achieves astonishingly moving and evocative states through relatively simplistic means. In the process of transferring aging reel-to-reel tape loops to a digital medium, Basinski found the reels (originally recorded in 1982) were so old and decrepit that the tape would shed slightly with each pass of the loop. This gradually affected the sound coming through, blurring the short, pastoral phrases of sound into an increasingly ghostly and unintelligible ambient landscape. Basinski discovered this process in the final months of the summer of 2001 and was listening back to the loops on the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment on the fateful morning of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, adding a haunting subtext to the entire project. The first volume of four finds a glowing fragment of tubas and chamber percussion slowly fading into a submerged glow over the course of its hourlong deterioration. (AMG)
