What song are you listening to right now?
- Thread starter Trill
- Start date
despair and i
End of the Family Line
Half a Person (on The World Won't Listen, to be precise)
Codreanu
Ohimè.
Dave, I'm not sure if you're familiar w/ Basinski and his disintegrating loops but this is more of the same, only maybe a little prettier, more accessible, with a backward piano -- bled through from the reverse side of the tape -- providing an interesting counterpoint.
Here's a short digest on 'The Disintegration Loops' to bring you up to speed. I may upload one of the discs on Sloppy Seconds later.
William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops I-IV
MMLXII/2062
Released: 2001-2003
It's impossible: no one could create a script this contrived. Yet, apparently, it happened. William Basinski's four-disk epic, The Disintegration Loops, was created out of tape loops Basinski made back in the early 1980s. These loops held some personal significance to Basinski, a significance he only touches on in the liner notes and we can only guess at. Originally, he just wanted to transfer the loops from analog reel-to-reel tape to digital hard disk. However, once he started the transfer, he discovered something: the tapes were old and they were disintegrating as they played and as he recorded. As he notes in the liner notes, "The music was dying." But he kept recording, documenting the death of these loops.
These recordings were made in August and September of 2001. Now, this is where the story gets impossible. William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate. He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another. As I said, it's impossible. The music, however, is beautiful, subtle, sad, frightening, confusing, and ultimately uplifting. What's he created here is a living document: a field recording of orchestrated decay. It sounds like nothing else I've heard, yet, at its core, it's the simplest and most familiar music I can imagine.
The four disks comprise six unique works. There is some overlap on the different disks; in fact, the first work (which Basinski calls "D|P 1") begins on disk one and ends on disk four. Some of the works are very long ("D|P 1" is over 90 minutes), while some are relatively short ("D|P 4" is only 20 minutes). However, each of the six works employs a different, repeating loop that slowly deteriorates into oblivion. The loops are very simple: a lush string or synth melody backed by atmospheric arpeggio countermelodies. The melodies are, as Basinski notes, pastoral: lush, simple works intended as idealized representations of nature and beauty. In theory, then, this is ambient music: music designed to set a mood, evoke a feeling (like a cinematic score), but one that is not designed for deep listening. That, I'm sure, was Basinski's initial design when he first created these loops in 1982.
But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What's more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been.
As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. "D|P 3," for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise. By contrast, the longest piece, "D|P 1," because it is split into three distinct parts ("1.1" on disk one; "1.2" and "1.3" on disk four), actually dies three separate deaths. Each one begins as soft, warm halos of sound, which then slowly mutates into muddled fragments. And then there's "D|P 4," the smallest work. It begins as a full-fledged melody but slowly devolves into chaos: silences slowly spreading across huge gaps in the loop, while the muddled melody struggles on, barely perceptible, until it, too, is silenced into oblivion.
This is not ambient music; this is not one melody played over and over to fill the background space of a Japanese restaurant. This is natural music: music created from the elemental forces of life and as a testament to those forces. This is the sound of entropy, the sound of life as it decays and dies before our ears. And like all living things, these sounds struggle and claw for life with their last, dying breaths. Their deaths are a memorial to Basinski's past. That he dedicates these works to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is fitting. I can think of no better tribute, no better response to a tragedy of that magnitude than a work as beautiful and as fragile as this one.
Oh my god. it's Robby!
spontaneously luminescent
Chew the pill that tastes like hell
but gives you strength
Embrace the drug that makes you mad
cause still it turns you into Something else
Feel the need for love grows stronger!
Swap your mind for a mirror-search, and shake until the break of day
One day you'll realize that you were wrong
And you'll regret that all this happened
Did it (all) happen?
Some day you'll realize that you were wrong
(You'll be) Left with paranoia, (as your only friend)
Your mind is full of enemies, the room is full of energies
That want to take control
They're all around you
and you're all alone
Your mind is full of enemies
the room is full of energies
Haunting your soul
They're all around you, and you're on your own
One day you'll realize that you were wrong
You'll regret that all this happened
Some day you'll realize that you were wrong
To be left with Paranoia
Busy Clippers
New Member
The Handome Family: The Snow White Diner
(I love story songs.)
(I love story songs.)
D
Dave
Guest
I really like the part about the Disintegration Tapes becoming something else, and that this was seen as part of a process, and not something to be "fixed".
I'm listening to
Angie Baby - Helen Reddy
why someone like Sonic Youth has not redone this song I do not understand. It's a perfect song about music, the radio, and insanity. It was a pop hit but it's pretty dark. I liked it when I was little and have the single still and just got the mp3.
You live your life in the songs you hear
on the rock and roll radio.
And when a young girl doesn't have any friends
that's a really nice place to go.
Folks hoping you'd turn out cool
but they had to take you outta school.
You're a little touched you know, Angie Baby.
Lovers appear in your room each night
and they whirl you across the floor.
But they always seem to fade away
when your daddy taps on your door.
Angie girl, are you all right?
Tell the radio good-night.
All alone once more, Angie Baby.
Angie Baby, you're a special lady.
Living in a world of make-believe.
Well, maybe.
Stopping at her house is a neighbor boy
with evil on his mind.
'Cause he's been peeking in Angie's room
at night through the window blind.
I see your folks have gone away.
Would you dance with me today?
I'll show you how to have a good time, Angie Baby.
When he walks in the room, he feels confused
like he's walked into a play.
And the music's so loud it spins him around
'til his soul has lost it's way.
And as she turns the volume down
he's getting smaller with the sound.
It seems to pull him off the ground.
Toward the radio he's bound never to be found.
The headlines read that a boy disappeared
and everyone thinks he died.
'Cept a crazy girl with a secret lover who
keeps her satisfied.
It's so nice to be insane.
No one asks you to explain.
Radio by your side, Angie Baby.
Angie Baby, you're a special lady
living in a world of make-believe.
Well, maybe. Well, maybe.
I'm listening to
Angie Baby - Helen Reddy
why someone like Sonic Youth has not redone this song I do not understand. It's a perfect song about music, the radio, and insanity. It was a pop hit but it's pretty dark. I liked it when I was little and have the single still and just got the mp3.
You live your life in the songs you hear
on the rock and roll radio.
And when a young girl doesn't have any friends
that's a really nice place to go.
Folks hoping you'd turn out cool
but they had to take you outta school.
You're a little touched you know, Angie Baby.
Lovers appear in your room each night
and they whirl you across the floor.
But they always seem to fade away
when your daddy taps on your door.
Angie girl, are you all right?
Tell the radio good-night.
All alone once more, Angie Baby.
Angie Baby, you're a special lady.
Living in a world of make-believe.
Well, maybe.
Stopping at her house is a neighbor boy
with evil on his mind.
'Cause he's been peeking in Angie's room
at night through the window blind.
I see your folks have gone away.
Would you dance with me today?
I'll show you how to have a good time, Angie Baby.
When he walks in the room, he feels confused
like he's walked into a play.
And the music's so loud it spins him around
'til his soul has lost it's way.
And as she turns the volume down
he's getting smaller with the sound.
It seems to pull him off the ground.
Toward the radio he's bound never to be found.
The headlines read that a boy disappeared
and everyone thinks he died.
'Cept a crazy girl with a secret lover who
keeps her satisfied.
It's so nice to be insane.
No one asks you to explain.
Radio by your side, Angie Baby.
Angie Baby, you're a special lady
living in a world of make-believe.
Well, maybe. Well, maybe.
Poco Innocente
A ring a ding ding
I Want the One I Can't Have - (you know who)
perfection!
perfection!
D
Dave
Guest
God's Gonna Cut You Down - Johnny Cash
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