09 December 2008

William Basinski - 2001 - The Disintegration Loops I-IV

Quality: 5 out of 5
Trip-O-Meter: 5 out of 5

This collection of sounds really rates more as an experience than music. The concept at work here came about purely by accident. Basinski intended to simply convert some loops from tape to digital. Unfortunately (at first), his tape machine was slowly destroying the tapes. In a stroke of inspiration, Basinski simply let the tapes run on to their end, and that's exactly what we hear on this album. No music is really being legitimately played, and we hear only the sounds of slow decay. As a strange coincidence, Basinski converted and thereby intentionally destroyed some of these tapes with the smoke of 9/11 billowing over his NYC apartment (I think I saw a very well done 9/11 documentary that used this and ambient street sounds alone on its soundtrack to account for the events of that day; unfortunately I saw the doc on TV before becoming familiar with these discs, so I'm not entirely sure). Far from exploitational, this drives home the concept of mortality as the tapes degrade. This makes the music potentially depressing, but I find the loops far more intellectually stimulating than simply being depressing would entail. I think it's best to view this as a zen experience as we hear something beautiful fade away into absolute oblivion.

The loops themselves are mostly ambient sounding orchestral bits. Yes, this are intensely repetitive sounds, and just by listening, you would notice little change. If you skip around, though, you'll find that over time there are major changes to the loops until they finally sputter beyond the veil of any defined sounds. The tracks go on as long as is needed for the sounds to disintegrate. The shorter ones run out of gas in about 10 minutes or so, but some of the loops go on for more than an hour. All in all, there are four distinct loops heard in various stages on different tracks

This is the last thing that you're going to grab for your next party, and I would wager than this is best experienced in solitude. If you put in the effort to really listen to these very avant-garde sounds, I think you may find the dividends very rewarding. If you have any interest in ambient drones (like Coil's Time Machines), you very well may consider this an absolute masterpiece. As the rating above suggests, I do.

11 comments:

Kevin said...

excellent choice. i have the first two discs, but not 3 or 4. i notice that you put the "part 1" twice, but no "part 2". would you mind checking that please? thanks a ton!

Anonymous said...

very interesting. but... no part 2 makes me wonder if this will unrar?

Anonymous said...

Whoops! Here are the correct links:

http://rapidshare.com/files/171783164/William_Basinski.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/171792734/William_Basinski.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/171803270/William_Basinski.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/171830162/William_Basinski.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/171839842/William_Basinski.part5.rar

Kevin said...

thanks for fixing that. if you get a chance to see him live, i'd highly recommend it. i saw him a few months ago. watching him with his various tape loops and hearing the results was mesmerizing.

Anonymous said...

Why do most blogs continue to use the "seedy" .rar files? why not use a common .zip file that is more user friendly. There is no benefit from a .rar

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this.

fdg2012 said...

Thank you very much, this is an excellent work.

ElementaryPenguin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Your Mom is Seedy....Wow How old are you? What an incredibly stupid thing to say.

ElementaryPenguin said...

I received Dlp 1.3 from The Disintegration Loops IV in a mix from a friend. At first I thought it must have been from a movie soundtrack. This is truly awesome and effecting music.

ElementaryPenguin said...

P.S. I apologize for the "mom is seedy" comment which I removed. I just happened to be in a very silly mood after watching a movie with dumb "your mama" jokes and didn't think twice about it.