![]() The music’s repetitive, soft, familiar nature becomes the ultimate drug for reflection and thought, if only given the chance. ![]() And there’s a beauty in the ability to wax poetic about the ongoing stream of a few repeated seconds, looped over and over and over and over again. But it’s hard to predict what someone will get out of life. It’s hard to predict what someone will get out of The Disintegration Loops. There is more reflection - on the piece, on music, on art, on the self. The increasing frequency of quiet, dimming beats creates more moments of pause, demonstrating the power silence can have. For those who make it all the way through The Disintegration Loops, there are a hundred things to think about. The music goes from a military march to the harmony of angelic choirs. Time passes at a seemingly different rate than it once did. Something is actually, physically happening as you listen to the loops. To focus only on its bleakness ignores the beauty buried within. But that’s because it’s an album about life and time. The Disintegration Loops is still an album about death. Now it seems to be about so much more - it’s not an album about the eventual end, but instead one about the moments one hears in between. Only an hour ago the album was about eventually, inevitably vanishing into nothingness. ![]() The themes of mortality creep back into the mind, but in a new light. There are changes, but they’re not sudden and flashy. It seems to go on forever.īut why is it boring? Basinski’s loops are like the procession of life. Other things happen while it’s playing and it becomes background noise, a drone to fall asleep to or just to have on for its own sake. The Disintegration Loops is what some people might call the definition of insanity - the same thing over and over again. It isn’t precisely the same sounds it started out with, but there is still a recognizable ghost in what is currently being heard. And dreamy it is, halfway through the project, the music exists in a kind of limbo. The meaning of art exists in the mind of the consumer, and the actual sounds on the tapes can be anything the listener dreams of. This is the magical section of the loops: when imagination takes over. At some point during The Disintegration Loops, the listener has to pay attention. It is, like all art, whatever you imagine it to be. It’s metal grinding against metal in an Oregon mill. It’s the funeral chant of an alien civilization. It is creaks ringing out through the hull of a washed-up ship. If one chooses to continue, however, the loops will be allowed to go uninterrupted on their churning, unending musical journey. Listeners may convince themselves that consuming the piece in its entirety isn’t a necessity, at least not this time around. The idea is understood, and that should surely be enough. No one will know if a listener only played half of “dlp 1.1” before calling it quits. The uncertainty of whether or not The Disintegration Loops is “worth it” to listen to creeps in. Early into the first listen, a decision has to be made: How far is the listener willing to go? It’s easy enough to sit through five or six minutes of repetition, but an hour? Five? The listener has to decide if the story behind Basinski’s music is more important than the music itself. Five hours long, if you’re listening to it all the way through. But that’s not all the project has to offer. Its base subject matter, on mortality and inevitability, is tied to a moment that served as a turning point in American culture and politics. The sheer coincidence of its production has tied it permanently to Sept. The history of The Disintegration Loops is legendary. As the World Trade Center smoldered across the city, he played the music for his friends and recorded the wreckage as it burned. He finished this digitization process on Sept. When digitizing these tapes, they would slowly corrode after being scanned over too many times, creating the haunting, fading loops for which the project is named. In the late summer of 2001, Basinski began digitizing a collection of audio snippets he had recorded onto cassette tapes in the ’80s. For some, just knowing the story of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops is enough.
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