Hearing the music on vinyl, with its inherent imperfections, and imagining the records changing over time, lends another layer of poignancy.
We're listening to music as it disappears in front of us. This music reminds us of how everything eventually falls apart and returns to dust. With Basinski's pieces, the metaphor couldn't be more simple. Even 10 years later, the internet is generally a poor space for contemplating the end there are few digital metaphors for the process of dying. There's an irony to the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops appearing here on vinyl for the first time, since the defiantly analog origin of the music is central to its appeal. The moods and textures of these pieces are all different but they become more powerful in relation to one another. "Dlp 3" feels like a snippet from an impossibly lush and shimmering Debussy piece stretched to infinity and then lowered into an acid bath. The source material on "Dlp 4" sounds like a soundtrack to an educational film, not terribly far from the warble of an early Boards of Canada interlude, but the chaotic ripples of distortion make it seem even more uneasy. "Dlp 2.1" is more of a metallic drone, filled with anxiety and encroaching dread. "Dlp 1.1", marked by a plaintive horn sound, has the air of a dejected fanfare, a meditation on death and loss (it was this loop that was paired with the 9/11 video).
Each of the nine pieces on the original four volumes has its own character, yet all are related and function like variations on a theme. There are plenty of pieces that work in a similar way- the beat-less drone pieces of Gas, a few of Gavin Bryars' most heartrending works, the experiments in memory by the Caretaker- but it's hard to quantify this music's special pull. The beauty of the music is not easy to explain. The video is included with the four volumes of the music and two new live pieces in this lavish and impressive box set. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them.
DISINTEGRATION LOOPS VINYL SERIES
It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right.
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