The four installments, taken as a whole, form a fairly remarkable and cohesive work, one of the most detailed and direct portraits of the mechanical and (if you must reach for further meaning) conceptual end of a recording medium you can find, a haunting elegy for the analog era, and, more famously, for something else. Occasionally intruded by Basinski’s Moog Voyager, the recording process is extraordinarily gradual, with the shortest of the numbered loops lasting 20 minutes and the longest (excerpted into three parts cut from the same recording, released on volumes I and IV of the series) running over 90 minutes. The process behind the work is transparent: each individual loop is a real-time documentary record of a portion of the slow, reverberated erosion of the information on a single piece of tape. William Basinski’s THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS series fits Reich’s definition, perhaps process music’s closest brush with the popular mainstream (as opposed to the more academic, perhaps slightly ivory tower context these ideas are typically found in). I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” In this essay, he works to define the notion of process music, which “ not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes.” In legendary minimalist composer Steve Reich’s 1968 manifesto Music As A Gradual Process, he says the following: “I am interested in perceptible processes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |