![]() If the title of THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS offers instructions for the piece’s creation, the aesthetic pageantry surrounding it offers explicit instructions for its interpretation-Basinski has hitched his art to the wake of a terrorist attack (one which he believes was a controlled demolition, no less) and seemingly declared himself the event’s poet laureate. Basinski has created this narrative association on purpose, deliberately dispelling with any ambiguity in the piece while tacitly admitting its forged nature. Often, this happens unintentionally, and at the expense of the artist’s actual intent-take Belong’s OCTOBER LANGUAGE, an album often discussed as “THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS of Hurricane Katrina” despite the New Orleans-based band’s insistent explanation that it was recorded before the storm, or Daniel Johnston’s straightforwardly appealing music being inseparable from the story of his mental health challenges that makes him an “outsider” artist rather than simply an artist. Meaning-making in art is an extraordinarily personal thing, but music in particular seems to have a habit of finding itself attached to tragic metanarratives. Basinski is, very literally, inserting himself into the aftermath of a tragedy, dressed as an artist known not only for their tragic death, but also for their deception. ![]() ![]() If you were to look solely at the front cover, it might appear subtle-a superimposed wisp of fabric in the smoke clouds on the left of the frame-but unfold to reveal the rear cover and you’ll see the whole story: a “portrait of William Basinski as the dead Thomas Chatterton,” a proto-Romantic poet and, more importantly, literary forger who killed himself at the age of 17. The covers of volumes II-IV appear to be unedited stills, but for the first installment, a change had been made. While watching the unfolding destruction, he realized that the loops might make a fitting soundtrack, setting up his video camera and filming the sunset through the smoke as DISINTEGRATION LOOPS 1.1 played, stills from the footage he took later becoming album art. The way the story is often told, Basinski watched the towers fall as his tapes finished digitizing-a story which is, in fact, too poetic to be true, as they’d been finished for weeks. The loops were finished by August of 2001 and released in installments from 2002 through 2003, but they are inexorably tied to the events of 9/11. The four installments, taken as a whole, form a fairly remarkable and cohesive work, one of the most detailed and direct portraits of the mechanical and (if you must reach for further meaning) conceptual end of a recording medium you can find, a haunting elegy for the analog era, and, more famously, for something else. Occasionally intruded by Basinski’s Moog Voyager, the recording process is extraordinarily gradual, with the shortest of the numbered loops lasting 20 minutes and the longest (excerpted into three parts cut from the same recording, released on volumes I and IV of the series) running over 90 minutes. The process behind the work is transparent: each individual loop is a real-time documentary record of a portion of the slow, reverberated erosion of the information on a single piece of tape. William Basinski’s THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS series fits Reich’s definition, perhaps process music’s closest brush with the popular mainstream (as opposed to the more academic, perhaps slightly ivory tower context these ideas are typically found in). I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” In this essay, he works to define the notion of process music, which “ not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.” ![]() In legendary minimalist composer Steve Reich’s 1968 manifesto Music As A Gradual Process, he says the following: “I am interested in perceptible processes. ![]()
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