The Disintegration Loops

There's a part of me that enjoys music on a visceral level. The groove, the noise, the fist-pumping euphoria. Running in almost direct opposition to this is a more nuanced appreciation. Metaphor, existential meaning... You know, the pretentious bit of me that likes to write wordy blog posts. It's this sphere of thought that knows William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops is the zenith of musical achievement.

A lofty claim, and one that becomes even more unexpected upon discovering The Loops' origins. In the 1980's Basinski constructed a number of loops sampled from an easy listening radio station. In 2001, wanting to preserve these loops, which were stored on magnetic tape, he fed them through a digital recorder and then left them running. What he soon discovered, however, was that the tapes were being worn away by the machine, the thin magnetized coating on which the audio was stored was flaking off. This physical damage was picked up by the digital recorder and gaps and silences began to appear in the sound as the loops were repeated. Each track on The Disintegration Loops charts the process of one of these strips of tape being put through this process. These tracks (across the 4 CD's on the box-set that I have) are between 20 minutes to an hour long.

My attention-demanding, primitive brain does not care much for the resultant sounds. It struggles with the patience required for ambient music. It craves jump cuts, dynamism, energy, surprise. The Loops give it none of that. The same 10 second loop repeated hundreds of time over the space of an hour, there's a part of me that will always find that tedious. But life is tedious and our 24-hour entertainment culture cannot mask that. I think I need to learn how to appreciate the pure Zen of boredom. However, there is very significant change in The Loops. Both sudden and gradual silences introduced by the decaying tape. When the thinky brain starts pondering on this aspect, wow do I love this music!

Listening to each track one's attention can dip in and out but come the end there is nothing quite as moving as realizing the journey you've just been on. You realize how much the loops decayed while you were listening to them. Some pock marks in the sound you barely registered and others you immediately recognized as momentous battle scars. You became accustomed to these changes and forget that they weren't even part of the original loop to start with. More appeared though, 5 minutes later, sometimes 10 or 20. They continued to accumulate until, like all things. the loop came to an end.

The Loops are the perfect music as metaphor. I often like to imagine each loop charts the middle-to-end stages of a human life. We go through our routines that are generally uneventful. Something changes however. We start to forget little things, a misremembered name here, a forgotten birthday there. These build up until our character starts begins to alter. We don't recognize ourselves or those around us anymore. We become a ghostly fragment of our previous selves.

Not all of The Loops' cycles of decay follows this Alzheimer's like degradation. The stuttering noise that encroaches on Dlp 4 is like an arthritic limb that becomes a frustrating chore to move. Other tracks are terrifying in their sudden and quite prolonged silences, on Dlp 1.2 they hit like a cardiac arrest. The Loops are poignantly sad when viewed like this but at the same instance they are incredibly optimistic. They soldier on despite their wounds. They accumulate character like the gnarled face of a village elder. Dignified until the end.

Non-human readings of change and decay are possible too. The Loops are essentially a memorial to the audio format that birthed them. A fragile means of storing data with none of the certainties of mass digital storage. That which we created will turn to dust just as we.

Credit to needs to be given to the original loops. They are stunningly beautiful and show that there is great art even amongst what might be considered by some to be the most artless music. But I'm grateful for the decay process that defines The Loops as otherwise listening them is like gorging on too much rich food. Crucially the loops are not Ozymandian. This music isn't mocking civilization or man's achievements but instead their somber melodies chart the inevitable decay of the individual. They are delicate but also sometimes humorously pompous, Dlp 1.1 for example conjures up the image of a Captain Mainwaring character or a faded portrait of a general of the British Raj. These are of course my own cultural impressions. I would hope that other people would have their own varied impressions.

A major factor that may have contributed to The Loops entering the pantheon of "great works" was the horrific 9/11 terror attacks which immediately followed the completion of the tapes' digitization. Basinski captured this with a series of moving photographs taken from his rooftop. These adorn the cover and accompanying art book of the box-set and so will forever attach The Loops to the immense tragedy of that day. Personally, though I will always appreciate the loops on a general, individual scale. An ode to any soul departing this Earth.

To me this music is truly remarkable but to where should my plaudits and appreciation go. While the original loops themselves were masterfully arranged, the music is little without the damage those tapes suffered. So I've essentially just spent several paragraphs attaching poignant metaphor and impressive compositional insight to a natural process. (Incidentally this was what John Cage was getting at, somehow all my blogs eventually link back to 4'33"...) The Loops are somewhat of a symbiosis, man steered by nature into creating a transcendent listening experience. It's this aspect of The Loops that fascinates me the most and has inspired me to want to create my own approach to it. I'll talk about this project in my next blog.

Everything must end and The Disintegration Loops are the ultimate celebration of the inevitable. Right, now I'm off to find something I can dance to...