The Disintegration Loops III (Remastered)

Experimental composer William Basinski's Disintegration Loops series is an astonishing work of minimal, process-based tape music, achieving moving and evocative states through relatively simplistic means. In the process of transferring aging reel-to-reel tape loops to a digital medium, Basinski found the reels (originally recorded in 1982) were so old and decrepit that the tape would shed slightly with each pass of the loop. This gradually affected the sound coming through, blurring the short, pastoral phrase of sound into an increasingly ghostly and unintelligible ambient landscape. Basinski discovered this process in the final months of the summer of 2001 and was listening back to the loops on the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment on the fateful morning of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, adding a haunting subtext to the entire project. The third volume of the series contains two pieces. The first is a slowly crumbling fragment of a particularly melancholic orchestral piece that melts into dreamier and dreamier soundscape territory before disappearing eventually into a noisy rumble and then into nothing at all. The second loop has a similar sound, perhaps a more triumphant movement of the same original orchestral piece. The loop deteriorates more organically into a bass-heavy shadow of itself over the course of almost an hour.