Basinski Part VIII

Basinski is occasionally his own vague commentator, for example at his web site, which is thus: http://www.mmlxii.com/. And though he attempts to adhere, some of the time, to a doctrine of anti-auterurism  that is popular among electronic composers, such that he does not provide lengthy descriptions of his intentions or the contexts of his work, it is possible for example to see a photo of him with his mom and a plate of coldcuts at his MySpace page, and also some photos of him from his rather dazzling youth. It would be easy to efface the discussion of Basinski’s attractiveness, but it seems that the effacement thereof is to miss some of the way that this affects the artist’s desire to preserve decay in his work, and some chance operations. Basinski is now in his fifties and is not the young beauty he once was, he is now an older beauty, and an older beauty is a beautiful thing, for its wisdom, but also for how it preserves crags and regrets and griefs, for what it does not forget. Another aspect of Basinski, biographically speaking, that is of some interest, is his lost decade. It may not be obvious to Basinski himself that he does have a lost decade, but from the his early compositions, which date to the early eighties, to the official release of The Disintegration Loops, in 2002, there is a real gap, and there were, we believe, some releases in the late nineties, but that still leaves a significant span in which no work was being issued to the music-loving, repetition-loving populace, and one wonders, then, what was going on in those intervening years. Apparently, many of the early loops created by Basinski were still around the house, were being preserved in tape canisters or in little cassette boxes, or were just gathering dust, but what was Basinski doing? Was he going somewhere else, so that he could return to New York City? Was he playing the loops such that the playback of the loops was the performance, and the fickle need for a reproduceable playback, an actual need for an actual product, which seems especially vain in the iTunes universe of now, was something in which Basinski did not care to indulge? What can we know of the lost decade, and was it right for us to hope for an end to the lost decade?

And what to make of the fact that Basinski has recently moved to Los Angeles? That an artist quintessentially related to an archetypal New York moment, now lives in Los Angeles? In some fundamental way, we cannot accept that Basinski lives in Los Angeles, and on one occasion, in the course of an abbreviated conversation, we put it to him, and the answer had to do with the expense of New York City, and maybe this just supposes some kind of eternal return, in which Basinski, his peregrinations circular like his compositions, has to leave New York City in order to return to New York City, and this reminds us that we have as yet failed to describe the actual musical content of The Disintegration Loops, except to say that the musical content is in a process of decay, and it would be easy to described the musical content as highly synthetic, to say that this is electronic, but actually the build-up and the noise make it hard to identify, in the end, if the loops are synthetic, are originally recordings of music made by oscillator or analogue synthesizer, or what have you, because bouncing down of the tracks, and the sheering off of signal by decay of the tapes, all of these makes the sounds more ghostly than conventionally musical, and you may imagine, especially if you listen to the loops over and over again, as we certainly have, we have listened to them sometimes for weeks at a time, you may imagine under these circumstances that you are hearing cellos, trumpets, cymbals, an electric guitar being strummed, only to have the identification prove false, when, later, you become convinced that actually you are hearing a harp delicately plucked, and have we noted that volume IV of The Disintegration Loops actually sounds like the first composition from the first volume (called “1.1” on vol. I), as if the tape from that particular track has been subjected to disintegration, or destruction or decay, several times over, and though the disintegration on volume IV sounds nothing like the highly percussive (and reverb-drenched) decay of volume I, it is, we are correct to say, the same initial loop, the same initial composition, though whether, in this case, the composition is a composition before it is entrapped in the digital storage device, is up for grabs—to put it another way: until the decay, Basinski’s compositions are not, at least on The Disintegration Loops, really compositions. The decay finishes the piece. The decay reiterates the decay, which needs reiteration, because there is never anything but decay, and never anything but a reiteration of decay, and maybe decay has forgetting admixed with it somehow, so that people are constantly finding themselves in this condition in which they forget decay, even when there is evidence everywhere around them of decay, or maybe we, authors of these lines, have some reason especially to forget decay, even though we think about decay almost constantly, with the result that we, among all the many others, need to experience a reiteration of decay so as not to forget it with such abandon. Therefore, since “1.2” and even “1.3” on volume IV constitute “remixes” or perhaps repetitions of the massive suite of repetition that is “1.1” from volume I of The Disintegration Loops, it is correct, we believe, to assume that the entirety of The Disintegration Loops is itself a sort of a loop, or a recirculation of resources, or a myth of eternal return, but whether a return to composition or decay or a composition of decay, or a decay of decay, or a reiteration of decay, or the decay of a reiteration, or a reiteration of the decay of decay, we cannot say, since our perceptions are shifting even as they decay . . .

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