Review Summary: A perfect mistake
Countless stories have been told through the medium of music. Whether it’s lyrically or instrumentally, the most affecting albums often weave a tale that the audience can relate to; a story they can superimpose their own experiences onto, find solace in, and use to find closure for their problems. Since beginning to make a conscious effort to explore different kinds of music, I have listened to hundreds of these kinds of albums, but all of them pale in comparison to what William Basinski has crafted here. No album lives and breathes its subject matter quite like
The Disintegration Loops, which not only conveys its concept impeccably to the listener, but stands as a perfect aural representation of the inevitability of decay.
Many are familiar with the circumstances that gave birth to this masterpiece, but understanding them is absolutely imperative to appreciating what is found here. In 2001, he came across old tapes in the basement from an ancient project he experimented with in the 80’s. He decided to digitize the recordings so they weren’t lost to age, but when the first tape had been recording for a short while, he realized that the tapes were falling apart during the recording process. He had planned to record simple ambient loops for future projects, and ended up with this crumbling, decaying piece of music. He set out to record the individual deaths of each of the tapes left in his collection, and completed this on September 10th. On September 11th, he was awoken to the twin towers burning and collapsing. Basinski set up a camera to record the final hour of daylight while his newly recorded project played in the background and the smoke enveloped New York. Still frames from this video serve as the album art for the 4 associated releases, and both the video and the albums have been inducted into the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
The loops themselves are absolutely gorgeous, but it’s the invasive moments of silence amongst the repetitions that carry the albums weight. Fundamentally, these pieces are simply loops ranging from 5 to 10 seconds that are repeated for up to an hour. Sometimes the cracks and tears in the tape can be heard forming in the first minute of the song; sometimes it takes nearly 10 minutes for the holes to be visible. The slow progression from a beautiful melody to nothingness is not often linear, speeding up and slowing down unpredictably from one repetition to the next, and it’s not until you hear the loops from 30-40 repetitions apart that you can really hear how much is changing as the music progresses. If you get distracted and lose track of the piece, it’s easy to miss an important part of the songs life, or alternatively, its death.
The fundamental concept of recording loops repeatedly until they die doesn’t exactly lend itself to variation. Despite the fact that many of these tracks are simply one loop repeated hundreds of times, the difference between each loop is quite significant, and this enables the package to evade stagnation in its documentation of the loops deaths. d|p 1 is a stately melody that warps at a sluggish pace, taking minutes before the initial cracks begin to appear. The track pridefully stands against the quietus, but is eventually enveloped by its imperfections and buried beneath the hum and static, invoking the melancholy of a fallen hero who lost against overwhelming odds. Pieces like d|p 2.2 and d|p 4 stand in stark contrast, consisting of colder ambience with most of the loop sinking extremely quickly beneath the waves of silence, and it becomes akin to a record of their death throes rather than a celebration of their life. d|p 3 is perhaps the most affecting track in the entire compilation; a grandiose and engrossing loop, teeming with life, whose slow but steady collapse feels more like a natural course than an untimely demise. It feels more organic than many of the other pieces, and gives an extra layer to the veritable parfait presented here.
It is hard to call this either an accessible, or a difficult listen. Hours of ambient repetition sounds far from appealing for many, but taken in context, it becomes a rare musical achievement capable of transcending musical boundaries and standing as an evocative depiction of life and death. The intimacy of these recordings can be both unnerving and saddening at times, but it’s this unabridged honesty that makes Basinski’s opus so charming and endearing. These pieces are incredibly multidimensional in their appeal; whether it is a love of ambient music, an appreciation for the fairy-tale attached or a morbid fascination with death, most music critics will find some facet of the album that resonates with them personally. There is a depth to the collection that is impossible to manufacture, and simply exists because of the beautiful accident that brought it to life.
The Disintegration Loops is an awe-inspiring work that has stood the test of time, and is a classic in the truest sense of the word.
