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Listening Report on William Basinski‘s The Disintegration Loops

 

Sarah Kumar

Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath

The Future of (American) Music

06 Mar. 2023

Listening Report on William Basinski‘s The Disintegration Loops

The album The Disintegration Loops features the same melody for about forty-one minutes that keeps repeating itself over and over with the only difference being the background noise, sounding like something disintegrating, increasingly growing distorted. This distorted noise is the sound of Basisnki’s taped recordings disintegrating; he had them keep playing despite their state, thus creating this loop of their disintegrating sound. As the album progresses, the sound only becomes more distorted, although it is hardly noticeable unless one were to skip forward at once. The loop, after a while, can put a person in trance, and the repetitive sound with minimal changes for a long-time make the brain blend some sounds together or tune out any changes that might have occurred.

            Near the end of the album, the deterioration of the tape recording is becoming much more evident. It starts to influence the overlaying melody that so far has stayed consistent throughout. The distortion engulfs the melody, reminding me of a machine, or a robot like in the movies, nearing the end of its life. The title is therefore an interesting choice, because loops mean that something is repeating for either a fixed amount of time or endlessly, but of which the end still connects to the beginning, while disintegration is a term used to indicate that something is falling to pieces. I imagine there to be an end to the disintegration of an object or a body, while a loop – usually visualized as a circle – is a never-ending occurrence.

            The last few minutes of the album are extremely distorted, not much of the original sound from the beginning is left. The ambience, however, is still the same. It is inevitable that this loop has an end as the tape recording cannot hold on forever; disintegration, after all, is not an endless process, even if it might take a long while. It can be thought of in this way: the destruction of something gave something else life; the destruction of the tape recording and loss of sound in it created a new work. Thus, the loop does start anew again, because even if the new recording might not be on tape, machines are not indestructible and fallible as well; one day, when this album falls apart – be it the physical medium that does so or the digital one – it can be sampled again to be used as the life of something new.

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