![]() The Disintegration Loops sounds initially like a short track of music being played over and over again. “The sustains sort of fell away, and yet somehow the core of it stayed – the attack and the basic rhythm of the melody – hanging on desperately until the very end” (Basinski in Friedlander 2012). “I sat there watching the recorder, monitoring it as this thing over the length of a CD-R completely disintegrated in the most profoundly beautiful way,” Basinski describes. Indeed Basinski did not intend to create the effect of the distortion instead, it was created by the machine whose initial purpose was to preserve the original composition. Rather than lament the destruction of his recordings, Basinski chose to let them continue to disintegrate further, the result being an extended series of loops whose sonic structure breaks down successively with each cycle. In the summer of 2001, while converting his old, analog tapes into a digital format, composer William Basinski discovered that his compositions were literally turning to dust in the machine. The Disintegration Loops : From A Brooklyn Rooftop to a Museum Crypt (Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: les Lieux de Mémoire.”) Record as much as you can, something will remain. Traumatic Ruins and The Archeology of Sound: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops Traumatic Ruins and The Archeology of Sound: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. In this paper I will discuss the significance of Basinski’s work to aural and material memory and explore the concepts of ruins and dust to arrive at one of hospitality’s most startling and uncanny figures, a figure of autoimmunity that is powerfully raised in Basinski’s work, making it one of the most compelling pieces of art in the Museum. It initiates, I argue, a philosophy of hospitality that is, defined in this context, uniquely preoccupied with ideas of strangers, belonging, home, and homelessness and an ethics concerned with “das Unheimliche” or something odd that is not quite at home yet nonetheless present in that space. I want to suggest that, while existing as a differentiated work in its own right, it is through its in-situ role – a ruin in a place of ruins – that The Disintegration Loops recalls one of the most complex and contradictory paradigms for thinking about loss and for mourning alongside strangers. Additionally, this work also carries within itself far more: layers of meaning and spectral traces that are often missed during singular visits by museum guests and that recall aspects of memory and materiality crucial to the question of what it means to live alongside others. Located in the Museum’s Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski’s sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. Work is both fresh and decades old, mirroring the overall effect of listening, with time and space seeming to melt away into mesmerising tones.This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. Song For Joni, a brand new full-length, is a spellbinding and beautiful trip into the blissful places we rarely get to visit, ambience that surrounds, then lulls, then hones in. What's really important is that we're here now, with 222 - a return to the solo spotlight for the exalted artist in question. Maybe it's the instrumental guitar duo Gabby & Lopez with his buddy Masayuki Ishii, or improvisational concerts performed alongside Daiho Soga. Perhaps with the nu-jazz, deep house and downtempo output in the early-1990s, when labels like Nuphonic, Japanese Idyllic Records and Down 2 Earth Recordings were providing the platform. Review: Shunji Mori's name might not be immediately familiar to those who haven't been paying proper attention, but the Japanese musician has been responsible for so much incredible music over the years it's hard to know where to begin.
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