William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops

While I do praise the music and even the usage of Basinki's cover art being the final hours of the attacks then the World Trade Centers collapsed, there's something so...I dunno...disrespectful of the back cover of the album of them posing like a New Age musician. The later entries don't have that, so it just feels so surreal and awkward for them to essentially slap a photo of themselves posed like that in what is essentially a tribute piece of the 2000+ victims of the Sept. 11th Attacks.

The Disintegration Loops are one of the finest example of the most hauntingly beautyful and down to earth, but also out of this world sounds recordings of human beings. It doesn't need words, nor it doesn't need any explanations, it just exists in our reality and is ready whenever you are to consume the energy from it.

This is clearly one of the best musical illustrations about life, death and the afterlife. And it was clearly by accident.

To quickly summarize the story: William Basinski was archiving tapes to digital but his archiving process was destroying already ancient tapes and he ended up recording the death of his self-made ambient loops. To add more to this, he ended up listening to the playbacks on 11 September 2001 and it became for him a personal soundtrack for the tragic events unfolding before his very eyes in New York City. Whether you see this as a 9/11 soundtrack, this is without a doubt a moving piece of work ... all four discs to be precise.

The loops themselves are quite beautiful and very much follows the tradition of ambient music a la Brian Eno's Discreet Music and Ambient 1/Music for Airports. Interestingly enough, not only it follows it in of theory and sound choice, but also it utilizes a simple set up where the insignator is no longer in control of the output. All Basinski did was push play and record and the machinery did its magic. The process is interestingly very organic. Of course this is due to capturing the disintegration of organic material containing musical information. This is part of its charm. The other part is the loops themselves: using washes of pads and percussion and brass emulators there is a melancholic beauty that permeates the loops. Basinski intended it to evoke pastoral landscapes. But the fun is letting the imagination of the listener take hold ... and this leads into why this release is in the end amazing.

As stated earlier, I see it as an illustration of life, death and the afterlife. Each of us has a life with our own sounds and melodies emitting throughout our time and walk on earth (i.e. the loops). Each of us are subjected to a drawn-out bodily deterioration (i.e. loops disintegrating). But in spite of the process where we seem to disappear, it is the hope that there is an eternal memory and the loops will continue to reverberate, long after we are gone. This is our hope and our prayer at times ... and I think this music is a sign that it very well be the course of nature.