Disintegration Loops: Explorations of Noise and Time

frame from videotape of 9/11, The Disintegration Loops, William Basinski

A while back, searching through old notes for sunken thoughts, I came across these verses, dated August 2nd 2021:

Spirits of slow decay

Lure our feeble dreams

Behold the solemn crackling

The sound of peaceful death flows through me

I remember writing these words while listening to the opener off of William Basinski’s 2002 ambient record, The Disintegration Loops. I believe the best way to talk about this very special album, which is the first of a quartet of equally beautiful releases following in its footsteps, is to begin with the story behind its crackling.

Priorità di tempo, camera roll

Back in the 1980s, Basinski started developing his artistic vocabulary by experimenting with tapes, feedbacks and loops, creating a collection of sweeping pastoral pieces born out of short melodic samples, gleaned from radio listening sessions. Fast forward to 2001, when the composer decided to digitize his early material for his personal archive. While leaving the first cassette running on the recording machine, luck struck: the plastic tape’s fine iron oxide coating started slowly deteriorating, leaving cumulative scratchings, crackles and silent gaps as the music went on. The dynamics created by the accident where soon pursued by the captivated artist, which then replicated the mistake on many of his past recordings.

Days after the fortuitous discovery came the September 11th attacks. On that evening, as the smoke cloud still loomed across the skyline, Basinski watched and videotaped the scene from his Brooklyn apartment. The elegiac nature of the footage, charged with destruction and melancholy, was soon paired to the decaying feedbacks of the ambient compositions. And so, the two became a single entity, merging youth with death, tenderness with violence, opposites unified in draining transience.

The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, William Turner, c.1834

Upon first hearing the music, I was not aware of its history. Nevertheless, when first listening to Dlp 1.1, the hypnotic symphony serving as the opener for the first album, it seriously overwhelmed me. For a while, the lush and rotting soundscapes became the soundtrack of my life, amplifying many moments of serenity and melancholy in that now distant summer of 2021.

With time, I grew closer to all the tracks off the album series. Each one of them engulfs you in a different emotional sea. Dlp 2.1, for example, has a more anxious and drony tone, similar to the more haunting tracks off of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Dlp 3 and 5 are perhaps the most cinematic compositions, with enormous horn samples cycling themselves to dust. The opener of the third album, Dlp 4, is instead the track in which the metallic scratches of the deteriorating tape are most violent, so far as to open a window on the liminal space between the realms of sound and silence, of music and noise.

Parallels to the minimalism of Erik Satie and Steve Reich, or to the electronic soundscapes of Brian Eno and Boards of Canada are all fitting, and liking any of those artists should definitely serve as an invitation to give Basinski’s work a try. I hope you will be left puzzled by the mystery timidly inhabiting the solemn crackling of the tapes, just as I once was.

The sonic meditations of The Disintegration Loops will open your sight to the subtle violence in decay and on the solemn grandeur of a fragile epilogue, holding your hand in sorrow and bracing your soul in tears. You just have to be willing not to look away (keep your headphones on).

Here is a playlist with the tracks referenced in the article.

P.s. perfect for long study sessions.