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William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops Listening Report

 

As the name suggests, „The Disintegration Loops” consists of a looping score that gets gradually distorted and degraded in the form of cracking sounds and low-quality playback. The actual score is for an Avant-Garde artist traditional and minimal. The structure is more experimental, a continuous repetition of what seems to be a short combination of ambient music. The distortion comes slowly and gradually over the time span of more than an hour. The context is almost equally important to the actual sounds. Coincidentally, the completion of the album occurred with the attacks on 9/11. This and the distortion give it a deeper meaning and resemble the passing of time with its almost destructive nature. After hearing it completely, there arises a sense of a long passage that was completed. There is enough time to adjust to the state or degradation until I noticed a change that was there before but took its time to be noticed - just like time. We often don’t know how fast time passes and often notice change much later than its occurrence. In addition, there is a resemblance to how our memory works. Change feels so prompt but noticing it takes time and almost a focused and intentional style of thinking. It is difficult to recall the state of how the music was a minute or 10 minutes ago, the state of degradation gets fuzzy and indefinable. Basinski showed us that the structure or the state of a musical piece, or art in general, can produce massive results on its effectiveness. Without the degradation, this would have been just a slow, ambient-like piece of music, but the medium and the context give it artistic weight.

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