12/31/2022 0 Comments The disintegration loops![]() ![]() This has resulted in a disconcerting perennial tinnitus and led me to plumb the depths of my music collection for something which would be less of an assault on the cochlear than all the Russell Haswell and Prurient I’d been listening to lately (this is admittedly a bit of an exaggeration, I’ve always balanced the extremes of my aural delicacies: for every Maurizio Bianchi a Stars of the Lid etc) I decided, then, to revisit William Basinski’s epic (and epic is certainly the word) which, while sonically the opposite of a sound physical pummelling, packs an affecting punch which, say, Whitehouse could never assail with their pantomimic histrionics. Quite aside for my interest/awareness in Basinski being replenished/piqued by his remarkable release 92982 earlier this year (sure to be a fixture on many a top 10 come Christmas) and a recent interview in The Wire featuring an image of this middle-aged man nonchalantly smoking wearing shades and a safety-pin festooned Ziggy Stardust t-shirt – a measured decadence so clearly contrived yet still so fucking cool – my ears were ceremoniously buggered by standing very close to the speakers without earplugs during Sunn O))) at this years’ Supersonic Festival (I can blame no-one but myself). Contextually, Basinski had no prior knowledge that the decimation of this music would soundtrack a very different and far more tragic destruction: as the music died, so did 2,993 people as the World Trade Centre was toppled and Basinski stood on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment in disbelief, watching the towers’ collapse as the loops played over and over and over again. Stylistically, Basinski did not know that as his magnetic tape passed by the read/write head the ferrite would detatch from the plastic backing and fall off, slowly destroying the very music it was meant to be preserving. The legend is renowned enough to save my recounting it in depth here, needless to say that much of the work’s power (and indeed its defining titular adjective) was determined by forces which were entirely aleatoric. What with all this talk of hypnagogy and hauntology reverberating down the hallowed halls of avant-garde music journalism, its easy to forget that the summit of powerful emotive pugilism swathed in fragile ephemerality and witnessed through a chronological fog was scaled back in the fledgling years of this century, when William Basinski attempted to salvage recordings he had made on magnetic tape in the early eighties by transferring them into digital format and the result was released as The Disintegration Loops. ![]()
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