Bryston B1353
Out of the blue, a forever friend I hadn’t spoken to in years called and asked me to join him at Riverside Church for a concert of William Basinski performing his renowned Disintegration Loops. Dedicated to the victims of 9/11, the work was completed as Basinski watched the airplanes crash into the World Trade Center from his Brooklyn rooftop.
The Riverside Church’s Ambient Church1 presentation of Basinski’s performance was scheduled for the evening of September 11, 2021—a Saturday. Saturday is my date night, which is sacred, so I was forced to decline.
Happily, though, my friend’s call reconnected us as friends who talk about art. It also prompted me to revisit, via the miracle of streaming, the 63 minutes of emotional gravity that emanates from Basinski’s disintegrating loops of magnetic recording tape (16/44.1 FLAC, Temporary Residence/Qobuz).
The inspiration for this multimedia elegy was Basinski’s attempts to transfer some aging reel-to-reel tape loops to digital. Each time the brittle tape passed the recorder’s playback head, more magnetized ferrite detached from its cellulose backing, leaving less and less of the original synthesizer tones behind. Intrigued, Basinski let these loops keep playing and recorded the “path to their demise” on a digital recorder. Later, he flooded these recordings with artificial reverb.
The art of lies in how Basinski’s repeating loops of peeling tape modulate his imposed sea of reverb. To this listener, the physical tape loops appear (anthropomorphically) to be “playing” Basinski’s artificial ocean of ethereal reverb as if it were a theremin. Performing as surrogate musicians, these disintegrating loops modulate the
