disinegrtn lp

Hope you're in for the long haul.

The Disintegration Loops could be classified as experimental music, I guess, but truly it's the exact opposite: it's accidental music. William Basinski found some old loops and drones that he recorded 20 or so years ago: the barest fragments of music, each about 10 or so seconds long. He started to record them on to hard disk, but as he did so, they started to fall apart, right inside the machine. As they went round and round, notes scratched themselves out of existence and static and silence encroached. The tapes tore themselves to pieces, and the Disintegration Loops are what's left.

The Disintegration Loops is 6 long (longlonglong) tracks – over the four CDs there's about five hours of music – and the anatomy of each is the same: one short phrase of music, a few notes of pastoral calm, takes as long as it needs to to play itself to death. And until you've listened to one the whole way through, you have no idea how unbelievably fucking depressing that is. The references - to time passing, entropy and death - are obvious, but no less poignant for it. The whole thing is some of the most striking music I've heard in ages.

So! If, somehow, every minute of your waking life wasn't reminder enough of the fact that life is a brief, painful trudge towards an inevitable, meaningless oblivion, here's the Disintegration Loops! Hooray!

Disintegration Loops I
Disintegration Loops II
Disintegration Loops III
Disintegration Loops IV


(If you don't want to download the whole thing, I'd recommend just getting Disintegration Loops III - the first track on there is probably the best of the whole lot. But don't be a wuss and get everything. It's fucking wonderful)