If you were to look solely at the front cover, it might appear subtle-a superimposed wisp of fabric in the smoke clouds on the left of the frame-but unfold to reveal the rear cover and you’ll see the whole story: a “portrait of William Basinski as the dead Thomas Chatterton,” a proto-Romantic poet and, more importantly, literary forger who killed himself at the age of 17. The covers of volumes II-IV appear to be unedited stills, but for the first installment, a change had been made. While watching the unfolding destruction, he realized that the loops might make a fitting soundtrack, setting up his video camera and filming the sunset through the smoke as DISINTEGRATION LOOPS 1.1 played, stills from the footage he took later becoming album art. The way the story is often told, Basinski watched the towers fall as his tapes finished digitizing-a story which is, in fact, too poetic to be true, as they’d been finished for weeks. The loops were finished by August of 2001 and released in installments from 2002 through 2003, but they are inexorably tied to the events of 9/11. The four installments, taken as a whole, form a fairly remarkable and cohesive work, one of the most detailed and direct portraits of the mechanical and (if you must reach for further meaning) conceptual end of a recording medium you can find, a haunting elegy for the analog era, and, more famously, for something else. Occasionally intruded by Basinski’s Moog Voyager, the recording process is extraordinarily gradual, with the shortest of the numbered loops lasting 20 minutes and the longest (excerpted into three parts cut from the same recording, released on volumes I and IV of the series) running over 90 minutes. The process behind the work is transparent: each individual loop is a real-time documentary record of a portion of the slow, reverberated erosion of the information on a single piece of tape.
#DISINTEGRATION LOOPS SERIES#
William Basinski’s THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS series fits Reich’s definition, perhaps process music’s closest brush with the popular mainstream (as opposed to the more academic, perhaps slightly ivory tower context these ideas are typically found in). I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” In this essay, he works to define the notion of process music, which “ not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.” This is vital music for the human condition.In legendary minimalist composer Steve Reich’s 1968 manifesto Music As A Gradual Process, he says the following: “I am interested in perceptible processes. "The most important minimal compositions of the past decade." - ARTINFO "It's the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like." - Pitchfork (10) Best New Reissue Not only lauded by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork, NPR and dozens more, The Disintegration Loops have become considered by many to be “one of the most pre-eminent American artistic statements of the 21st Century.” The very passage of time is its most effective instrument. From its 20-year gestation period to its infamously fateful completion, The Disintegration Loops is one of the most powerful manifestations of the inevitable cycle of life ever committed to tape, even as it documents the inevitable decay of all that is committed to tape. For a collection of music built around the poignant inevitability of decay, there has been a great many hopeful and inspired words devoted to William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops: stunning, ethereal, majestic, transfixing, life-affirming… and for good reason. The audio was remastered in 2012 from the original master tapes, and the artwork is packaged in deluxe old-style tip-on gatefold jackets. For those who missed out on the now-legendary, highly sought-after (and highly sold-out) box sets, we are now offering the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops suite as separate, individually packaged albums.
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