He and his friends set up a video camera to record the last hour of daylight, the toxic smoke of death and destruction billowing across the sky as it slowly faded to black. Listening to The Disintegration Loops throughout the day, their sad, slow decay took on a new poignancy. Basinski watched the World Trade Center burn and fall from the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building. Unsure what he might do with them, Basinski completed their digital transfer on September 10, 2001. Not surprisingly, other tapes from this stash also exhibited the same degradation and he decided to call the collection The Disintegration Loops. Barinski allowed the loop to sputter on to its final death, an hour or so later. When he returned, he was shocked to discover the sound had radically deteriorated-in fact, the 20-year-old tape was gradually disintegrating, shedding flakes of ferrite with every pass over the playback head-and the sweet, pastoral original was being slowly obliterated.
Basinski put the first loop into the tape machine, added a plaintive, synthesized horn line and left the studio to let it record for a while. These were tapes he made back in the 1980s by recording snippets of the local Muzak radio station in New York and then looping and layering them to create melancholic washes of sound. In the summer of 2001, composer William Basinski decided to digitize a number of old analog tape loops found in a closet, in order to preserve them for his archives. The story of The Disintegration Loops is truly astonishing and key to understanding its significance as a work of art.
0 kommentar(er)
