By Hermione Hoby
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In the summer of 2001, William Basinski found a Tupperware box of tape loops that he’d made almost a decade earlier. As he set about transferring them to CD, the American composer realized that the tapes themselves were disintegrating, their iron oxide particles turning to dust, leaving moments of silence in the new recording as they did so. As Basinski wrote at the time: ‘When the disintegration was complete, the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered.’
This physically decaying music formed The Disintegration Loops, a preternaturally mesmeric series of pieces which, completed shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center, became freighted with even more emotional resonance. As Ronen Givony, founder of the Wordless Music Series writes, ‘it seems fitting that the most appropriate and convincing memorial to date is also a work that was technically finished well before 9/11. Perhaps this is because only a piece of art made in oblique or indirect response to a tragedy could conceivably represent that tragedy, by means of metaphor and symbol, and thereby give language to the unspeakable.’
Now, The Disintegration Loops have been re-released as a nine-LP box set (which also includes five CDs, a DVD and a book), including a live recording of an orchestrated version of the first loop, scored by composer Maxim Moston. Basinski talked about their reissue from his home in Los Angeles.
Does it still seem moving and miraculous to you, the way this music came about?
It really does. A little while ago the doorbell rang and there’s a truck with my shipment of the box set and good lord those are some big boxes. I just opened up my one copy and was listening to it on LP when you called. It’s just really something what happened in that studio that day – amazing what happens when you show up for work sometimes. It blew my mind while it was happening, and then after it happened, just to have the profoundly moving realization that this was like lives being redeemed – that the whole life and death of each of these melodies was remembered and recorded. And it was such a struggle back then – I’d worked for many, many years and no one knew who I was and I didn’t think anyone ever would know – the fact that I survived and managed to live long enough to have the work known and loved, that was just something I never thought would happen. It was a long time coming.
You finished work on The Disintegration Loops just before 9/11. What was it like listening to them that day?
My friend had just come back from Holland and was banging on my door at 9 o clock, saying a plane had hit. And I was lying in bed going ‘ugh’ because I was going to get up and apply for a job at the World Trade Center, Creative Time had an administrative assistant position there and I was desperately needing work. I thought the banging on the door was my super[intendant], giving me notice. But it was my friend, babbling, ‘The Word Trade Center’s on fire!’ so I ran back to my bedroom, pulled back the curtains, and we could see the Twin Towers, these two gaping holes and smoke going off to the east. The sky was crystal blue, you couldn’t even see a heat signature in front of the World Trade Center like you usually could. Everyone was up there, all of the roofs over Brooklyn, and we all just stood there with our mouths dropped open.
The LP box set includes an orchestral version of the first loop. How did it come to be scored?
Oh this is just another level, it’s a dream come true for me to have the work go into the orchestral repertoire. Max [Moston] is a dear friend of mine and has an incredible ear and is a really elegant orchestrator. It was just so interesting to see how he chose to do it. How the conductor made it work. There’s a lot of tricks. I never finished university – I ended up quitting to go play with tape loops so I could never do what Max did, because it’s so much besides the particular kind of ear training you have to have – there are physical limits to not only what ranges instruments can play, but what can physically be done. For example, he has the trombones carrying the lead theme and it sounds very simple because it’s just the same thing, with slight variations, over and over again, but that takes its toll on your lips, so he has it doubled – just little things like that.
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Was there any part of you anxious that the music might lose some of its power when played by instruments?
No, not really, I was just thrilled that it was getting done because I knew I could never do it – and to see how he did it is just as fascinating to me as to hear it happen organically in the studio. To have just all acoustic instruments, all people, living creatures, playing instruments, to do this piece, is just a whole other loop in the chain for this evolving thing.
Another act of preservation?
Yeah!
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Do you feel as though what you do has more to do with contemporary art practice than music?
Yeah, that’s something that people your end of the telephone line like to talk about! [laughs] I am an artist and my medium is music – sound. I don’t call myself a sound artist but certainly because of the nature of what happened with this particular piece, the art critics and the critical world definitely was very interested. And you know it’s been described mostly in visual terms, I guess because it’s so cinematic. I think it creates pictures for people because of the organic nature of the way it unfolds, so there’s a lot of visual resonance that is stirred in people, individually. And also, it’s kind of hard to describe simply in musical terms. After The Disintegration Loops happened I was calling all my friends saying get over here, you won’t believe what happened, and my friend Howard Schwarzberg came over and he said, in this great Coney Island accent: ‘Billy! You’ve done it! This is it!’
What did he mean?
He meant deconstruction – all this stuff that people in the art world have been dealing with for 30 years, stuff that he studied and knew about and which I didn’t really at the time, because I didn’t have that kind of education – he meant, ‘You’ve done it, the critics are really going to jump all over this.’
And they did.
And they did!
Have you been aware of your influence on younger musicians?
Oh it’s really amazing, it kind of blows my mind. It’s like a whole generation of people who are about the age of my early works – they’re all about 25 to 30 years old, so I had to wait for them to be old enough to have ears for it, in a way.
You’ve talked about how you wrote Vivian and Ondine as a sort of spell to induce your niece’s birth (and how it worked). There’s a wonderful uncanniness to that, and of course, a much more sombre uncanniness to the timing of The Disintegration Loops in terms of them seeming so fittingly elegiac. Are you susceptible to the notion of music having some kind of greater, mysterious power?
Well I think music does. It resonates, you know? – it just goes on forever, and I think certain kinds of music can change the resonant frequencies. It’s the only way I can battle all the horror and chaos and sickness in the world, so I just try to do what I’m told.
And who’s telling you?
[laughs] It just comes in through the antennae, the tin hats.
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