William Basinski's Disintegration Loops (and other fugitive riffs)

p.s. he's playing at the Ukrainian Federation Sept 15, 8pm, as part of Pop Montreal.

Disintegration Loops (2011)

In a healthy state, analog tape is pale brown, the color of the magnetic audio recording contained therein. In 2001, William Basinski, looking to digitize a collection of older tape loops he’d made out of easy listening music, found that the tape began to flake a bit as it played, like paint peeling. Playing the loops repeatedly, they began to lose their composition as the tape disintegrated. What starts as a snippet of a forlorn brass instrument eventually degraded into a pale imitation, as though he’d produced a composition and then, immediately after, performed its faded memory. 

The Disintegration Loops is immensely long (the first of its four parts is over an hour), but it is made up of repeated snippets sometimes as short as five or 10 seconds. Over the course of that mammoth running time, you hear the piece fall apart, literally. “I’m recording the life and death of a melody,” Basinski said in a 2011 Radiolab interview. [...]

Basinski made the accidental discovery of the tapes’ disintegration in 2001, shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center. From his home in Brooklyn on September 11th, he made a short film of the light just before the evening’s end. When Disintegration Loops was released, a still from that film made up its cover. The music has since been entwined with the loss of that day, and rightfully so, but it represents forward momentum, too. Hearing the sound slowly degrade, it's clear it will eventually disappear entirely. But until then, it keeps going, trying its best to play before reaching the end. –Matthew Schnipper

It's possible to use this music in the quintessential ambient sense, allowing it to play in the background while doing something else. The sound is uniform and drone-like, so you can adjust the volume and not worry about it intruding. But there is something uncanny about the affect and emotion embedded in this music. It never feels neutral.

https://youtu.be/mjnAE5go9dI Dp1



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJBfJq8GjPI&list=RDLGddm-hw-Xc&index=7  Dp 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGddm-hw-Xc  Dp 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSNU918VDOk&list=RDLGddm-hw-Xc&index=6  Dp 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KtiFY63jZM  Dp 5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UBWgeSJlWw   Dp6


*my personal favorite from him is this though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5s-KLGVcTI


I am Sitting in a Room (1969)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk



via ubweb: I AM SITTING IN A ROOM" (1969)

for voice and electromagnetic tape.

Necessary Equipment:
1 microphone 2 tape recorders amplifier 1 loudspeaker
Choose a room the musical qualities of which you would like to evoke.

Attach the microphone to the input of tape recorder #1.

To the output of tape recorder #2 attach the amplifier and loudspeaker.

Use the following text or any other text of any length:
"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physi- cal fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."
Record your voice on tape through the microphone attached to tape re- corder #1.

Rewind the tape to its beginning, transfer it to tape recorder #2, play it back into the room through the loudspeaker and record a second genera- tion of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1.

Rewind the second generation to its beginning and splice it onto the end of the original recorded statement on tape recorder #2.

Play the second generation only back into the room through the loud speakerand record a third generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1.

Continue this process through many generations.

All the generations spliced together in chronological order make a composition the length of which is determined by the length of original statement and the number of generations recorded.

The versions in which one recorded statement is recycled through many rooms.

Make versions using one or more speakers of different languages and in different rooms.

Make versions in which, for each generation, the microphone is moved to different parts of the room or rooms.

Make versions that can be performed in real time.


mini playlist for thinking with the former:

aphex twin-#3

John Fahey 08 How Green Was My Valley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjqW1D1N4lU