William Basinski

makes some of the saddest music ever. I use it to lull myself to sleep. Is that sad? I'd genre-file it under 'experimental ambient drone.' Right next to all my other experimental ambient drone music. Ha.

Try the Disintegration Loops I-IV. There's a whole story behind this that i'll probably get somewhat wrong, but as legend has it: Basinski, possibly unbeknownst to him, stored some tapes-loops for years in a not-so-safe place, possibly forgot about them, and then a few years back, he recorded them as they looped on a reel and they proceeded to disintegrate over an hours time, their sound getting more ghostly and broken over the course of each tape loops' recording. The collection is 4 discs long.

Here is the story according to its review from Pitchforkmedia:

During the summer of 2001, Basinski set about transferring a series of 20-year-old tape loops he'd had in storage to a digital file format, and was startled when this act of preservation began to devour the tapes he was saving. As they played, flakes of magnetic material were scraped away by the reader head, wiping out portions of the music and changing the character and sound of the loops as they progressed, the recording process playing an inadvertent witness to the destruction of Basinski's old music.

You can't make that stuff up...or can you?? Either way, i want to, nay, have to believe its the truth.

Not to get too deep on ya, but the music itself is kind of like an aural metaphor for a life (and death) of something (not necessarily a human): full of color and intensity during its beginning stages, but gradually becoming more soft and broken, until nothing is left but a ghostly shell of what once was.



At the 1:17 mark of this video is Disintegration Loop Disc 2, Track 2. One of my favorites. That's William Basinski sitting in front of his laptop, watching the playback in front of a live audience. Talk about minimalist performance. His hair is awesome.

Kinda like this guy in that movie...