Instead it sounds like noises that you would hear in the world: the sound of a bomb exploding in the distance, a crashing wave, and eventually, silence. Akin to the slow-burning mournfulness of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, Basinski’s work exhibits change in minute, almost imperceptible increments until the music no longer bears the imprint of an instrument. Dlp 1, a piece that’s over an hour long, tracks the gradual decomposition of an audio segment that once held the sound of a trumpet. The meditative four-part collection can be seen as a manifestation of the slow motion effect that happens in people’s heads when they’re processing and remembering instantaneous destruction. The following year, the tapes were issued as The Disintegration Loops, nearly five hours’ worth of extremely haunting noise, borne from audio snippets that were originally only five to 10 seconds long. It became “the soundtrack to the end of the world,” as Basinski once described it. The deteriorated composition, which was once an orchestral piece that stood for romantic American ideals, now represented one of the most cataclysmic and fatal events in the country’s history. The next day, he reviewed the footage and paired it with his newly made sound piece, beginning to ascribe a new meaning to the music. Shortly after he digitised these new sound pieces, Basinski found himself watching the September 11 attacks from his Brooklyn loft, and started ideotaping the twin towers crumbling across the water. The iron oxide particles that coated the plastic tape were turning into dust, and more gaps of silence were breaking into the piece of music. After one particular piece was looping for a while, he realised that the tape was gradually crumbling with each pass around the head of his digital recorder. In 2001, the New York-based composer Basinski was looking to archive some “sweeping pastoral pieces” that he had recorded in the 80s onto analogue tape. But a more unlikely, musical portrayal of the phenomenon can be heard in William Basinksi’s The Disintegration Loops, one of the most poignant, devastating pieces of ambient music that has come to serve the tragedy of 9/11. Tachypsychia has been rendered visually ad infinitum – just take a look at any car commercial that’s showing off the impressive reaction rate of their air bags. Scientists say that this temporary sense of “slow motion” is triggered when a person is bombarded with so much information at one time, their memories become more densely packed in order to process all the stimuli. This neurological phenomenon is called tachypsychia, and it can come on when someone undergoes a near death experience, like a car crash. An event that passes in the blink of an eye can feel like it goes on for minutes. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation.When people are enduring a particularly emotionally intense event, their perception of time can begin to slow down. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently, gracefully, beautifully. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. He developed his meditative, melancholy style experimenting with short looped melodies played against themselves creating feedback loops." About The Disintegration Loops: "In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. In 1978, inspired by minimalists such as Steve Reich and Brian Eno, he began developing his own vocabulary using tape loops and old reel to reel tape decks. I find the disintegration part to be a relief overall, as the horror ends. "William Basinski is a musician, composer, auteur who has worked in experimental media for over twenty years in NYC, expanding the boundaries of the aural landscape. Dark and long (both 2.1 and 2.2 together) the audio simply fades in 2.1 and starts to disintegrate in the latter loop. This series of 4 Disintegration Loops has become one of the true phenoms of post-9/11 experimental music - totally legendary stuff at this point. First widely available release on Basinski's own label (other releases on Raster, Idea, Durtro, Headz, etc), from early 2003.
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