![]() ![]() On August 27th, 2001 (sixteen days before the collapse) the second album by American post-rock band Explosions In The Sky was released, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever. After the attack on the Twin Towers the song changed its meaning, according to the Marxian theory of history repeating itself – although one might wonder about which of the two events takes on the role of tragedy and which one of farce.Ī further example in this direction. It is important that several decades later Anderson felt a connection between the events of 9/11 and the lyrics in “O Superman:” both are linked to the same ideological war between East and West fought for more than thirty years now. The song was released in 1982 with the record Big Science and was inspired by the US Army’s Operation Eagle Claw (1980), when eight helicopters crashed during the rescue of hostages in Tehran. She is talking about a specific live performance of her most successful piece, “O Superman (for Massenet),” which occurred shortly after the collapse. The person speaking is singer, composer and multimedia artist Laurie Anderson. The show was one week after 9/11, and as I sang “Here come the planes / They're American planes” I suddenly realized I was singing about the present. In September 2001 I was on tour and played O Superman at Town Hall in New York City. Clearly, this music was chosen collectively as the soundtrack for the tragedy, although in terms of compositional choices we cannot say that Basinski was inspired by it: therefore, its elegiac meaning (unintelligible in the mere musical fact) appears as the result of a cultural construction. For the tenth anniversary of the collapse, an orchestral version of “Disintegration Loop 1.1” was performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: this marked the apex in the canonization of Basinski’s work. The cultural impact generated by the work led it to be exhibited (in its video version) in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, where the story of the collapse is told through images, firsthand testimonies, archival videos and art objects. ![]() Within a few years, the Loops imposed themselves in the underground and experimental scene, reaching a cult status thanks to the enthusiastic reviews of the most important magazines ( Pitchfork, The Wire). He wrote in the linear notes: “This music is dedicated to the memory of those who perished as a result of the atrocities of September 11th, 2001, and to my dear Uncle Shelley”. The album became an elegy for of the victims, a mournful song thanks to which those moments would remain forever crystallized in memory.īetween 20, Basinski released four records of the six loops, using as covers screenshots showing the transformation of the scene filmed from day to night. Combined with the terrible images of the collapse, those abstract sounds took on a profound and existential meaning. He was shocked but chose to contribute as an artist to the collective reaction to the tragedy: he filmed the smoke surrounding the World Trade Center in the last daily light of 9/11, matching the video afterwards to the music from the first tape loop. Just a few weeks later, Basinski witnessed the Twin Towers disaster from his New York loft. Nevertheless, the most important part of this music is not what it sounds like but what it represents. What happens is the complete transfiguration of the original material, with sweet melodies transformed – within long temporal arcs – into rustling, crackling and irreparable acoustic voids, through a gradual and organic process. The tapes were deteriorated and so, while trying to digitize them, Basinski found out that with each repetition, they would disintegrate and deconstruct their original melody thus, he decided to record the whole disintegration process and compose a new musical work based on it. ![]() In this record William Basinski creates dreamy music manipulating small tape loops recorded during the Eighties but rediscovered just in July 2001 – inside one room in his flat he called “the land that time forgot”. The Disintegration Loops is a monumental ambient work, consisting of six tracks for a total length of almost five hours. Twenty years later, listening back to The Disintegration Loops means coming to terms with existence, memory and cultural trauma. It has achieved a cultural status that goes beyond its aesthetic values: this album talks about the United States, presenting its history following the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops is by now one of the most important electronic works of the 21st century. ![]()
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