Ever since coming across the concept of "ambient music" in my early high school days, I had listened to the most relevant (as curated by Allmusic.com) ambient records as background sound. William Basinski's (first) Disintegration Loops was the first album that I could also enjoy by listening to it actively. Basinski was digitizing his old magnetic tapes when he discovered that the tapes had disintegrated over time. He decided to loop over the same tapes loop over and over, the tapes deteriorating a bit more on each repetition. As if by divine guidance, the project was completed on September 11, 2001 in Brooklyn, New York City. The cover art is a photograph of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, taken by Basinski himself. He also has a time lapse video of that evening. That time lapse video is the accompanying video to today's excerpt, "dlp 1.1". The piece itself is a slowly decaying loop of a gospel choral performance.
The Disintegration Loops was my first foray into conceptual art. Basinski's tapes disintegrated along with the world as we had known it up until that day. Later music I like that touches upon conceptual art includes the South-African group Die Antwoord (although there is no aesthetic connection whatsoever between Basinski and them).
My take on William Basinski: Unfortunately, I haven't familiarized myself with his other releases. Ambient as a whole is a completely different ballpark than conventional music.
influence: ambient, conceptual art
excerpt: dlp 1.1 (YouTube)
This post was retroactively compiled on 2024-01-19 from an old Facebook post.