Listening to The Disintegration Loops during wildfire season.
William Basinski’s seminal album, as a meditation on looping thoughts, physical disintegration, and fire.
In 2001, William Basinski began digitizing his collection of analog tape loops. While living in Brooklyn, he set up a tape machine, hooked it to a digital recorder and began recording these short loops, knowing that the tape would eventually deteriorate if left in storage. But what he didn’t expect was that these short repetitive melodies and fragments of music would begin to change right there.
All we talk about is the smoke. Where I live it has replaced the weather. Both conversationally and to some degree physically. Fire has become its own season, largely ousting summer apart from a few weeks after the solstice.The old worn out magnetic tape began to slowly flake off as he digitized them. The loop would start out fully-formed but as it ran through the machine over and over and over, bits of tape peeled off and the sound morphed in real time.
I have not had a conversation in over a month that didn’t at least touch on the smoke.He immediately realized that he was recording the life and death of a melody, as it devolved, and distorted, and disappeared.
But really that’s only if you’re lucky. Because if you aren’t talking about the smoke, it’s because a fire has come close enough to talk about that instead. Close enough to our houses or friends houses or favorite places in the mountains that we watch slowly be eaten by a red line as the Facebook group updates the fire perimeter.The day Basinski finished The Disintegration Loops was a Tuesday — September 11th 2001.
Basinski interview with Cinemacy.
Tags, Topics and Mentions: William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops, Wildfire, Fire season, environmental journalism, fire in the west, music journalism, living with fire, living with smoke, disintegration, fire, land ownership, caldor fire, tamarack fire