The Disintegration Loops is a deeply beautiful four volume album series by avant-garde composer William Basinski. As the songs play, the audio quality degrades. According to Wikipedia, "The albums comprise tape loop recordings played for extended time, with noise and cracks increasing as the tape deteriorated. Basinski discovered the effect while attempting to transfer his earlier recordings to digital format."
In a 2012 NPR interview, Basinski recounted his moment of discovery:
"You know, when I first went into the studio that day — it was a beautiful summer day in New York — I was panicking because I didn't have any work and was about to be evicted. I picked up this little book off my shelf, The Way of Zen, and was sitting there in the sun reading it. And I just had to laugh, like, 'You've got this time, use it. Show up for work, get back in the studio. Get to work.' So I got in there and I just picked up the first next loop that was on the line to be transferred to digital. I had recently discovered this big case of all this old work back in the storage room in our loft in New York, which we called the Land of Time Forgot because everything just got put back there and piled up. I knew what could happen to tape and I didn't want my old work to be destroyed, so I was trying to digitize it.
"So I put this loop on, put it on the Revox and turned it on and it was just so grave and so beautiful and stately. I just thought, 'Oh, this is what I need right now. I want to make it. This is going to be my new piece — fantastic.' So I went and turned on my Voyager synthesizer, tweaked it and came up with this random arpeggiating French horn sound countermelody, turned on the recorder, set the levels and started recording. I went to make a cup of coffee in the kitchen, came back and was listening, and I started noticing something was changing. All of a sudden, I looked and I could see dust in the tape path. I thought, 'Oh my God, it's happening. What's going to happen?' [I] looked at the CD recorder to make sure it was on — it was — so I just sat there, listening as this gorgeous melody decayed over a period of an hour in such a beautiful way. I was just stunned, like, "Oh my God!"
Pitchfork wrote of the series, "It's the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like."
The tapes are a powerful reminder that everything on earth will decay in time, even us.
