“The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It’s been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results. Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smouldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day.” (x)
“Memories are loops, our memories are made of loops. We have loops that constantly go around and around, sometimes it’s bad feedback loops that continue to plague people and cause them pain and stuff like that. These things need to be resolved. The loops helped me to resolve my own bad feedback loops and let them go. Our world is in a bad feedback loop right now. Feedback, when you put a microphone next to a speaker, it’s just a screech. Feedback needs to be surfed, you have to be very careful if you want to work with feedback because otherwise it just destroys everything. We’re at a point right now where we need to get rid of some bad feedback loops and it’s happening. It’s not gonna be pretty but eventually things will resolve.” — William Basinski
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