William Basinski

After a tragedy of universal scale, every word takes on a different weight, and none of them proves capable of filling the void of silence that forms all around it. The second and third millennia after Christ were split, almost precisely severed from one another, by an event so disruptive that it dragged behind it an endless stream of social, political and economic analyses, investigations and conspiracy theories – in short, an ocean of deafening words, mounds of white noise that smothered, and nearly bleached out, the fact itself. Among these, one statement by the maestro Karlheinz Stockhausen still weighs heavy after all these years, unanimously deemed reprehensible, in which he claimed that the September 11, 2001 massacre was “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos […] I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing.” [1]

On a human level, if not an artistic one, we all must have felt annihilated, quite literally nullified, by what was not merely a direct attack on America – understood as the bulwark of the Western economic empire, embodied by synecdoche in the “monument” that symbolized all its contradictory complexity – but which, in a sense, as noted by Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek, amounted to the “symbolic destruction of an entire construct of reality.” [2]

Yet from the ashes and the pall of smoke over Ground Zero, a humbly extraordinary work truly did emerge – one whose original source has nothing to do with the sounds and images of September 11, but which, in the wake of the Twin Towers' collapse, took on its deepest meaning, as if through a kind of serendipity that suddenly casts new light on reality, however dramatic the circumstances of its genesis may be.

It is with “The Disintegration Loops”, in fact, that the artistic fortune of William Basinski begins – an artist variously active on the New York experimental scene since the 1980s, a period in which he started recording audio tracks onto magnetic tape, building up an archive of found sounds captured from radio broadcasts and short instrumental fragments he himself performed on saxophone or clarinet.

Sealed away for more than two decades in the silence of a box labelled “The Land That Time Forgot”, an unpredictable twist of fate meant that those recordings would only find their ultimate purpose in 2001, just weeks before the two jets slammed into the World Trade Center. Around that time, Basinski decided to convert his analog archive into digital format, aware that the tapes would, sooner or later, inevitably deteriorate.

So I put this loop on the Revox and turned it on, and it was just so austere, so beautiful and majestic. […] I went and turned on my Voyager synthesizer, tweaked it, and came up with this countermelody from a random arpeggio, with a sound similar to a French horn, turned on the recorder, set the levels and started recording. I went to make a cup of coffee in the kitchen, came back to listen, and started to notice that something was changing. All of a sudden, I looked and you could see the dust along the tape path. […] I sat there, listening to this wonderful melody, decaying over the course of an hour in such a fascinating way. [3]

Like an unforeseen revelation, Basinski thus finds himself a first-hand witness to a piece of music that is falling apart, crumbling at its very foundations, dying. A simple melody, barely six and a half seconds long, hushed and comforting, weaves ad infinitum with a second, variable line made up of tonal cells whose timbre evokes the brass section of an orchestra. Once the individual tracks are layered and set in motion, the artist deliberately steps aside so that the music can become an autonomous entity, capable of taking on an intense melancholic charge as it degrades gradually and randomly, regenerating and disintegrating at once through repetition. Its hushed, self-contained refrain “is merely a fragment from unknown radio broadcasts, so obscure that even Basinski himself cannot recall their exact origin” [4], a fact that only reaffirms how utterly unrelated the audio material was to the events with which it was later associated.

The result of this sonic objectification marks the birth of a work – understood both in the specificity of the "The Disintegration Loops" tetralogy and in the broader musical corpus that has flowed from it up to the present day – whose technical simplicity is directly proportional to the weight of conceptual and emotional implications tied to it. Although certain affinities are indeed recognizable with the phasing of early Steve Reich ("It's Gonna Rain", "Come Out") and with Brian Eno's "Discreet Music" (Brian Eno), in Basinski's loops a process unfolds that is at once additive and subtractive: on one hand, the dust that has settled over time runs across the tape heads producing surface sounds – hiss, crackle and "overtones" – which, together with the reverb effect, noticeably alter the main melodic line; on the other, the wearing away of the tape creates irreparable and ever-widening acoustic gaps, so that "only the strongest and timbrally clearest elements of the voices are retained, resulting in a transition from legato lines to more percussive 'clumps' of tonal matter, and finally bursts of noise toward the end of the piece." [5]

It was only much later that I personally realized how certain psychoacoustic effects, born of the progressive analog decay, had shaped my listening experience: in the solemn unfolding of the piece, amid harmonic layers slowly decomposing, I always thought I could make out a voice repeating a few simple words like a mantra – "It's over now". All the more so, then, in my perception "d|p 1.1" was meant as a comforting lament for the benefit of anyone in the grip of suffering, whatever its cause.

We can only imagine the dismay of the people of New York, in broad daylight, faced with a scene that looked every bit like an apocalypse unfolding live, shared from afar by the entire world, glued to televisions tuned to breaking news bulletins. That day the metropolis ground to a halt, horror and a sense of powerlessness took over, and William Basinski too felt the need to bear witness with his own camera: toward evening, having climbed onto the roof of his home in Brooklyn, the artist pointed his lens toward the scene of destruction, from an elevated vantage point and on a horizontal plane, replicating – perhaps unconsciously – the long static shot Andy Warhol took of the Empire State Building in 1964 ("Empire"), in perfect continuity with what was "[his] favorite subject in filmmaking – simply watching something happen for about two hours." [6]

In Basinski's video, the screen – or rather the tableau – appears from the outset split into two halves blurred along a diagonal line: the dense pall rising from the ashes of the World Trade Center interrupts the placid chromatic scale of an otherwise clear sky. With an estranging effect reminiscent of René Magritte's "The Empire of Light", a shadow spreads from below and swallows half the skyline in a premature, suffocating night, where even the usual artificial lights look like empty, weary eyes, powerless before fate. Here too, clearly, a visual objectification takes place, in that "despite the gravity of what is unfolding before it, the lens records the luminous tones of the sky as they fade into sunset." [7]

If up to this point fate had played a decisive role in the birth of "Disintegration Loops", it is in the immediate aftermath of the massacre that the work reaches completion through Basinski's human and artistic sensibility: joined in a single audiovisual stream, the music and the images on which he had intervened only marginally take on new life, each amplified by the other, becoming a work of heartrending poetry, a chorus of death and resurrection that transfigures the aftermath of the colossal collapse.

The morning after, when I looked at it, I put on "Disintegration Loop 1.1", sat down and synced it up, and it was simply moving; I realized it was an elegy. It reminded me of Jacqueline Kennedy, who wore that Chanel suit stained with her husband's blood for an entire day, and everyone desperately tried to get her to change it, and she said: "No... I want them to see what they did to Jack". [8]

The project's first album, released in 2002, is rounded out by the section "d|p 2.1", which paves the way for a series of variations on that revelation, of varying success: a piece of just ten minutes which, unlike the preceding impressionist fresco, conveys uncertainty and suspension, an intangible sense of waiting; this could well be the soundtrack to the days following the catastrophe, amid the last rescue efforts of firefighters and the Red Cross, the dizzying death toll, the ordeal of survivors in hospital, the prelude to a declared war. As if closing a circle, the fourth and final record, released in May 2003, is partly devoted to two possible reprises of the founding theme, a lasting echo of a work that today is part of the permanent collection of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, alongside artifacts recovered from the rubble of Ground Zero – fragments of thousands of lives that cannot fail to move us deeply.

The same theme has on occasion been transcribed and performed as a classical-style piece. In October 2008, at the 54th Venice Biennale Musica, a slower, late-Romantic-flavored version was presented, in some ways reminiscent of the sinking of the Titanic set to music by Gavin Bryars (The Sinking Of The Titanic, 1969-1972). Later, on the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the premiere of an orchestral arrangement by Maxim Moston, a collaborator of Antony Hegarty: the Wordless Music Orchestra gives shape to a moving funeral fanfare in which brass and martial percussion are the primary elements, while strings and vibraphones trace subtler shades in the background.

Both versions were included as bonus tracks on Temporary Residence Ltd.'s 2013 box set: but while they undoubtedly retain the solemn spirit of the original, they are unable to suggest the same aleatory effect of gradual decay that constitutes its essence, the very thing that made it an icon and paradigm of Basinski's tape music.

Even more than musical practice, it was intuition and human compassion that mattered: although he had not set out expressly to create an epitaph, "in the stumbling and contingencies of raising up and destroying the old, Basinski had created a necessarily empty mirror of the new, a soundtrack strangely proleptic for the first great loss of the twenty-first century". [9]

"The Disintegration Loops" is not merely a requiem for the victims of 9/11 and, symbolically, for Western civilization, but also and above all a monument to the sense of loss and to the loss of meaning, a tender consolation for the moment when everything will be over, just as the suffering that weighed on us for what seemed like an endless time will be over too.

Bibliographical notes

[1] Excerpt from a radio interview held in Hamburg on September 17, 2001, on the occasion of a four-day festival devoted to Stockhausen's music. Following the broadcast, the concerts were immediately cancelled and the composer left the city without offering further comment. ↑

[2] Paul Benzon, Archival Time, Absent Time. On William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops”, in Media-N, Spring 2015, v.11 n.01, ‘The Aesthetics of Erasure’ ↑

[3] Interview by Lars Gotrich with William Basinski, Divinity From Dust: The Healing Power Of 'The Disintegration Loops', NPR, November 15, 2012 ↑

[4] Gareth Leaman, Memorials without mimesis: Abstraction and intertextuality in William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, 2015 ↑

[5] Eli Stine, Memory, Decay and Activism. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, 2015 ↑

[6] Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, Da Capo Press, 2004, 186 ↑

[7] Yusef Sayed, Of Mourning and Evening: William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loop 1.1”, 2016 ↑

[8] Emilie Friedlander, interview with William Basinski, The Fader, 11 settembre 2012 ↑

[9] Benzon, op. cit. ↑

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09/09/2018