William Basinski's Crushing 'Melancholia,' the Sound of Technology's Afterlife

In truth, I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that title. I've seen the composer Basinski perform his music live and it's kind of a reflection of that, just seeing his loops of magnetic tape lined up on a card table on a stage. The tapes rotate around and around through the player, freed from any encasement, almost as if they're suspended in the air like ferromagnetic ghosts. Which is what the sound actually is, ferromagnetic hereafter.

If you're unfamiliar with William Basinski—known best for his 9/11 pondering Disintegration Loops collection—he's a composer of archly minimal modern classical sounds, like the music of Erik Satie only trapped or suspended in space and time. Imagine ethereal, slowly looping melodies that would be called "dreamy," except that no one actually has dreams like this ("dreams within dreams," maybe).

In the early-2000s, Basinski stumbled upon a new medium of sorts: time. He'd discovered a series of old recordings he'd made decades earlier, recorded onto the current medium of magnetic tape. Basinski's recordings had over the years slowly disintegrated, and the effect of running them across a tape head was the ferrite magnetic material (which holds the audio information) slowly peeling away from the plastic backing. The peeling is not so much a sound in itself, but an effect, one that exists only once and is only a product of time, entropy.

So, by looping the tapes through a tape recorder, he was essentially capturing the sound of the tapes disintegrating, which was in fact the sound of his music disintegrating. And it's perfect. The first series of these recordings became the nine LP Disintegration Loops set, and Basinski recorded Melancholia not long after using the same method. It was finally rereleased on vinyl last month by Temporary Residence. It's different: the pieces are shorter and more spare (more discrete); songlike, and then not. The record has actual tracks, but the ending is the same. A sampling is above.