“Almost by accident—or fate—Basinski created one of the first major works of the 21st Century.”
The story of The Disintegration Loops is truly astonishing and key to understanding its significance as a work of art. In the summer of 2001, composer William Basinski decided to digitize a number of old analog tape loops found in a closet, in order to preserve them for his archives. These were tapes he made back in the 1980s by recording snippets of the local Muzak radio station in New York and then looping and layering them to create melancholic washes of sound. He hadn’t listened to them for decades. Basinski put the first loop into the tape machine, added a plaintive, synthesized horn line and left the studio to let it record for a while.
Originally published by Spectrum Culture.Read it on Spectrum Culture