The evening will see the London Contemporary Orchestra perform an orchestral arrangement of The Disintegration Loops and a solo performance of 2020’s Lamentations by the man himself.įor more information and tickets, click through here. The Disintegration Loops has been described as “ambient waves of sound, like heavy breath that washes through the listening body: deeply emotional sounds filled with multiple textures, tones, drones and shades that are as hauntingly beautiful as they are sombre.” It’s an astonishing sonic experience.
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The concert will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the magisterial four-album series The Disintegration Loops – a work born literally from disintegrating tape loops slowly deteriorating as they passed over a tape head – the unexpected results of the artist’s attempt to transfer his earlier recordings to digital format. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the. And I find that astounding.INCREDIBLE news for lovers of the drone and the textural New York sound artist and composer William Basinski is to bring his masterful degrading tape-loop work The Disintegration Loops and last year’s set for Temporary Residence, Lamentations, to the awesome brutalist architecture and superb acoustics of London’s Barbican next summer. The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. To me it’s just another example of how some disintegrating tape can wield equal power to fire and chaos. To many, the events of that day are forever linked to the music. However, for a collection of albums so entwined with the values of death and loss, there could not be circumstances more suitable.
Having the crumbling World Trade Centre as a backdrop to the very first listening of your music destroying itself is not something many people can stake a claim to. The fairytale surrounding the initial listening of the recording seems hard to believe, but infinitely fitting to all that the album has become possibly because the event itself developed the previously recorded loops to the grandeur that they hold today. Eventually the whole loop is silent apart from this intense outburst a startling display of resolution in such a desolate environment.įurther context of this collection’s birth only does it favours. “dlp 4” degrades differently, in that most of the loop sinks under static rather quickly except for about two seconds of tape that stubbornly refuse to quieten. The horn-led swings are gradually smothered and, although you can still make out the original melody, the momentum and uplifting nature of the loop are slowly sapped away leaving what can only be described as a hollow, lifeless, utterly disturbing shell. “dlp 1.1”, the hour-long epic that introduces The Disintegration Loops, conjures up images of the orchestra that continued to play as the Titanic sank. What is left - the death throws of beauty - offer a perverse contrast with what came before, and the character the music adopts at this point can vary tremendously.
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By repetition the crack will spread, and more will join it, until soon the picture in front of you swarms will imperfections and shatters. Sooner or later, however, a crack - a sharp intrusion of silence - will invade what has so far been a simply tranquil experience. A track will start akin to a glorious celebration: with slow drum beats underlying a cacophony of swollen synthesisers a fantastic display of optimistic escapism. Instead, it’s what the music can represent to the individual.
Truth be told, the most powerful thing about The Disintegration Loops is not the music. While hard to notice at first, the loops slowly distort and decay until - under a sea of static silence - they draw their final breath.Įxactly why this has such a powerful effect is at first quite puzzling, but soon becomes self-evident.
The painstakingly beautiful loops composed to echo the endearing qualities of nature began to die. For some unknown and morbid reason he allowed it to happen and as he sat there on his roof in Brooklyn on September 10th, 2001, his tapes began to take on a life of their own. The story goes that in the process of converting his old magnetic tapes to digital format, Basinski noticed that his tapes had begun to literally fall apart. The origin story of The Disintegration Loops is one that passed to legend and then to myth, and what must have started as fact now seems buried under romantic hyperbole. It seems mad to me that music comprised of simple loops can become a mesmerising celebration of death let alone that the music to do this would come into existence entirely by accident. Review Summary: Overburdened with all its connotations.
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