a review of The Disintegration Loops, by William Basinski

Now, up until about 7-8 years ago I'd never even heard of William Basinski, or the Disintegration Loops, let alone ambient music in general, as I'd probably laugh at the idea of listening to anything "ambient"...  I can't tell y'all when or where I first heard about these works. But they've stuck in my mind until now, and I've recently had the chance to listen to the series. I won't lie, it's pretty damn long (about 300 or so minutes), and I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to listen to what is essentially the same loop slowly degenerating over time. I'll get to that in a bit. I'd like you to listen to the series eventually. Not all at once, if that doesn't suit you, nor right this moment. But when it does suit you, go ahead and listen to it. This work is a pillar of avant-garde and ambient music.

I figured the best place to start this off would be with the historical context, and the creation of this work.

In the early 1980's, William Basinski recorded a lot of sounds from various places, like shortwave radio. Shortwave radio seems to be a theme for him. In mid-late 2001, he found the old recordings. Some sources say he forgot about them, and some don't. I'll have to ask the guy myself about that one. As he transferred the old tapes onto a digital medium, he discovered that some bits of the metal on the tape were being peeled off by the tape head of the device he was using.

This is known as Sticky-shed syndrome.

He let the tapes self destruct during recording, and those are the pops, scratches, skips,  and other various sounds of tape degeneration that you hear while listening. Honestly, it's reminiscent of some of James Leyland Kirby's work as The Caretaker.

Some sources say he finished transferring the tapes on September 11, 2001. Some say he had finished it long before then, and only listened to the series while watching and recording the World Trade Center collapsing (what would later become known as Ground Zero). Some frames from the video he took on his handheld camcorder are used as the cover art for each part of the series. In the liner notes, William Basinski dedicated the series to the victims of the attacks. He said that "the events gave new meaning to the musical pieces created by catastrophic decay in my studio a few weeks before".
The series is now an installation in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, as it plays in certain areas there.

I'll cover the first album below.

The piece itself is slow and distant, like a memory on the tip of your tongue. The sample degrades in a way that reminds me of how a thought drifts away, after thinking about anything else, and the effort that it takes to recall even a small amount of what the original thought was. Overtime, it feels cold, and lifeless. It begins to feel like being left out, in a way. Always being just around the corner from the thing that would make you feel better. And yet, it grows more distant. It begins to fade away, and it leaves you with nothing but the thought that "hey, this part is just gone now", and then that thought is replaced with another of a similar nature, as more and more of the sample degenerates. The tape decays more, and more, and more, until all that is left are small snippets of notes, a pulsing reverb, and the memory of the thing just around the corner. Eventually, the sample is gone entirely. All that's left is the droning reverb. And yet, even that slowly fades away.

Then the track switches to dlp 2.1, and you're brought back into a sample that was most likely half a second from an actual song, stretched out and distorted by time, and decay. This sample sounds reminiscent of the pads Akira Yamaoka would use in the music from early Silent Hill games. And once again, after a small period of time, the decay starts again. The sample slowly disappears and goes away, like the last one. I noticed more parts in the reverb after about halfway through. Once the sample is gone, the only thing that's left is the reverb. And yet, even that slowly fades away.

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