The Disintegration Loops

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.

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. 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. 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.

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). 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.

The loops in question are numbered from one to six, and over the album’s five hour course they more-or-less progress numerically, except for a coda of two tracks which revisit the first loop. Entirely composed of rich string or synthesiser chord progressions backed by arpeggiated countermelodies, one can imagine that the unadulterated recordings would present a listener with the kind of prescriptively poignant feelings and atmospheres suited to, for example, the soundtrack for a Hollywood film. Or an airport, for that matter, and Basinski was surely influenced by Eno’s contemporary ambient eureka when composing the music thirty years ago.

Yet such easy-listening is confounded by the aforementioned technical serendipity, which drapes the whole album with a shimmering aural mist, alienating the listener from music which would otherwise be familiar and accessible, and slowly tears the sound apart.

The fact that the music is slowly decomposing initially becomes evident at about the 40 minute mark of the first track, when the immensely affecting phantasmal fanfares which herald the record’s opening also mark its first demise: they begin to arbitrarily break apart and are swathed in a heavy, pregnant silence.

The second loop, which extends over two tracks labelled 2.1. and 2.2, is an aquatic funereal march conjuring the kind of warm enveloping ambience so favoured by Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project. Its deterioration is extremely gradual, to the point that it’s barely noticeable and it comes as something of a shock when you realise that an intermittent crackle is all that remains of the initial submerging warmth.

There’s no such confusion in loop four, though. Relatively short at twenty minutes, the piece’s fibrous glacial yearning (a mood subsequently replicated with a similarly phrased ostinato in loop five) is breaking apart from the very beginning, and halfway through the track there are already large gaps of white noise as the melodies fight and struggle against the ferocious current of age. The fragility and tenderness of the music itself seems to invite this, though, and its leprous corrosion seems almost expected. In stark contrast, the decaying of loop six seems far more momentous. Its robust harmonies have none of the prior two tracks’ open-ended cadence and the fog which surrounds the whole record here evokes the majesty of something seen from afar, such as the indistinct pinnacle of mount Olympus.

Since I am writing in a publication which doesn’t specifically cater for ‘esoteric’ tastes I should probably add a caveat detailing that this music ‘isn’t for everyone’, perhaps cracking a joke about how no-one possibly has this much time to spare on one album in these pick ‘n’ mix itunes jukebox days. But that would be bullshit. This is by no means an elitist record, this isn’t twelve-tone or musique concrete (The work’s sonorousness is as important as its musicality, not more); no-one could possibly condemn Basinski for snubbing his nose at the proletariat who couldn’t possibly appreciate his genius. This is music which goes straight for the endorphins and doesn’t let go and, irrespective all the value in modern classical’s sonic and conceptual exploration, sometimes that’s all you need. This isn’t a “difficult” record; this is music for everyone.