"Out of work and at a loose end, the experimental composer had decided to digitise some recordings he'd made in the early 1980s snippets of orchestral music and muzak he found on shortwave radio stations. He was planning to add his own instrumentation, but as the tapes started playing on a loop he noticed something else was happening: the music was gradually degrading."
"The recordings were so old that the iron oxide particles were falling off the tape as they played. Soon, there would be nothing left but crackles and then silence. It was every musician's worst nightmare. But for Basinski it was like striking gold. Luckily, he says, by that point in my career, I was mature enough to know when to just get out of the way and see what happens."
"Two months later, on 11 September, Basinski woke up and watched the twin towers burn and collapse from the roof of his home in Williamsburg, New York. While trying to process the fallout, he did what he had done every other day over the previous weeks and cranked up the beautiful, stately recordings he would name The Disintegration Loops. That's when it struck him. Everything changed that day, he says."
William Basinski digitised shortwave-sourced tape recordings of orchestral music and muzak from the early 1980s while unemployed. As he played those tapes on loop, iron-oxide particles flaked off, causing the music to progressively degrade. Basinski spent two days recording a series of loops that collapsed over 20 to 60 minutes and shared them with his friend Anohni. On 11 September 2001 he watched the twin towers burn and collapse from his roof in Williamsburg, and the loops became, for him, an elegy rather than a newsreel. The Disintegration Loops was first released in 2002 and became an important 21st-century recording.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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