The Disintegration Loops

"You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a year, but you are aging, and your body is degrading. As your cells synthesize the very proteins that allow you to live, they also release free radicals, oxidants that literally perforate your tissue and cause you to grow progressively less able to perform as you did at your peak. By the time you reach 80, you will literally be full of holes, and though you'll never notice a single one of them, you will inevitably feel their collective effect. Aging and degradation are forces of nature, functions of living, and understanding them can be as terrifying as it is gratifying.

It's not the kind of thing you can say often, but I think William Basinski's Disintegration Loops are a step toward that understanding-- the music itself is not so much composed as it is this force of nature, this inevitable decay of all things, from memory to physical matter, made manifest in music. 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." - Pitchfork

Apesar de não conseguir recomendar o trabalho de William Basinski, gostava que pelo menos ficassem com uma amostra. Aquilo que me entristece ou que não consigo perceber é o tamanho exorbitante de cada música (uma tem mais de 60 minutos). Aliás, eu percebo o porquê, só acho que faz com que não seja tão acessível. No entanto, não deixam de ser músicas terrivelmente bonitas, daquelas que nos afectam sem que tenhamos tempo de perceber e que lentamente ocupam o espaço à nossa volta. Deixo-vos com 10 minutos da primeira música do "The Disintegration Loops I" e espero que gostem. Este tipo de músicas às vezes faz mais que umas quantas músicas cantadas.