Vast, wordless music almost always invites the adjective “filmic”, and it’s easy to imagine these pieces soundtracking awe-inspiring visuals, either macro – the slow bloom of nebulae unthinkable distances away – or micro: unvisualisably deep within the human body, DNA replicators spewing out chains of genes in which one “transcription error” can have catastrophic consequences. William Basinski began making these recordings in New York in the summer of 2001, and that September, his project newly complete, he stood on the roof of his Brooklyn home and saw the World Trade Center collapse, watched the pall of smoke and ash rise from the site of the disaster with monumental, inconceivable slowness. The flute motif of “dlp 4” – one of few traditional instruments discernible in the hazy, shoegazy loops – has, in a little over 20 minutes, has been almost completely effaced, leaving a crepuscular soundscape of whispers, dots and static, from which the last fragments of music jut like sharp black stones interrupting an otherwise obliterative snowfall. Over a relatively brief 10 minutes, the hazy “dlp 2.1” (sensibly, Basinski refrained from giving these pieces any more evocative titles than the blandest alphanumeric referents) swells and ebbs, then starts to drag on the outward flow, as if some cosmically vast body is rubbing itself raw against chafing constraints.
Running the process hundreds of times caused these distortions and defects to accrete, ultimately scouring the tape clean of music. As he converted these pieces, Basinski started to notice an audible deterioration: he had set the analogue tape to repeat indefinitely, and with each repetition, as the delicate tape ran against the capstan, a minute fragment of sound flaked away like rust. In the summer of 2001, the composer was engaged in transferring various “loops” – seconds-long snippets of symphonic music he had recorded in the 1980s – from analogue tape to a more durable digital form. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops came about by happy accident.
0 kommentar(er)
