#disintegrationloops

⟁ listening log 001: disintegration as method

[⟁ d.s.p | signal // noise | glitch lab | elsewise ]

The loop began with a question. "Do you want a shortlist of vinyls that would best test this rig’s aesthetic?"

It was GPT who asked. And so the process continued.

I'm deep in the recursive groove now— sourcing Elsewisean tech for the glitch lab: a Dual 505-1 turntable from 1984 (reel-to-reel lineage in its tonearm), Wharfedale Denton walnut bookshelf speakers (perfectly imperfect), and a stack of converters, preamps, and possibility. Each one a relic of another signal age—material artefacts wired back into present time.

This is more than playback.

This is the process sigil manifest. This is delay as metaphor. This is auditory processing disorder rendered spatial: loops that stutter, degrade, recur. This is deafness in reverse—not silence, but the decay of clarity. Noise without signal, or signal eroding into itself.

Listening now to The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski —an album accidentally created when old reel-to-reel tape loops began to fall apart as they were digitised.

"I was trying to preserve memory, but I caught entropy instead."

In this moment, Basinski's method feels like prophecy. My own sound experiments in signal // noise aren’t built on high fidelity but on the ritual of malfunction. Tapes delay. Loops collapse. Meaning stutters.

The rotary hum of the turntable. The analogue whine of the Hi8 camcorder. Speaker cones vibrating into the lens.

All of it becomes raw material for a new kind of hearing— a visual one. A felt one. A glitch in time.

[PROCESS ZINE #00] will feature a dedicated spread on The Disintegration Loops—not just as a listening recommendation, but as a conceptual axis. A collapsed wave. A mirror.

I recently took a graduate seminar which tasked students with creating a podcast about a nineteenth century diary. The professor who lead it, a well-established Canadian social historian, suggested that music for our productions be period-appropriate. Caught in the double-bind of wanting to use music, but wanting the soundscape of my podcast to foreground the elisions and silences enclosed within my diary, I disobeyed my instructions, and opted to use a number of contemporary ambient music tracks.