Listening to The Disintegration Loops during wildfire season -- a review of William Basinski’s seminal album as a meditation on looping thoughts, physical disintegration, and fire.
All we talk about is the smoke.
Where I live it has replaced the weather; both conversationally and to some degree physically. Fire has become its own season.
I have not had a conversation in over a month that didn’t at least touch on the smoke.
But really, that’s only if we’re lucky. Because if we aren’t talking about the smoke, it’s because a fire has come close enough to talk about that instead. Close enough to our houses or friends houses or favorite places in the mountains that we watch slowly be eaten by a red line as the Facebook group updates the fire perimeter.
(INTRO TONE -
"The Wind with Fil Corbitt")
The Disintegration Loops is a composition by William Basinski. It’s a seminal album in the world of ambient music, and it runs in total 4 hours and 56 minutes. In the 20 years since Baskinski made The Disintegration Loops, they’ve been released in a few different formats — but the version I’m listening to is broken into 4 discs.
I listen to disc 1 on top of an unnamed mountain. I guess it’s more of a knob — a small peak with some prominence, but dwarfed by the surrounding Sierra Nevada. I choose this spot because it’s a short walk, and in the thick summer smoke it seems unwise to climb something that will get my lungs going too hard.
It’s just before dusk and I can’t make out the city below, shrouded in brown haze.
This smoke is from the Caldor Fire, a wildfire south of Lake Tahoe that in the coming weeks will burn over two hundred thousand acres. It comes just a few clear days after the Tamarack Fire poured smoke into the valleys, burning a sacred place of mine and devouring ridge after ridge of dry pine forest, not stopping as it ran over valleys of aspen and sagebrush.
My throat catches as I climb the hill, and I sit down at the very top, hitting play on Disc 1 of The Disintegration Loops.
All we talk about is the smoke. Where I live it has replaced the weather. Both conversationally and to some degree physically. Fire has become its own season, largely ousting summer apart from a few weeks after the solstice.
I have not had a conversation in over a month that didn’t at least touch on the smoke.
But really that’s only if you’re lucky. Because if you aren’t talking about the smoke, it’s because a fire has come close enough to talk about that instead. Close enough to your house or friends house or favorite places in the mountains that we watch slowly be eaten by a red line as the Facebook group updates the fire perimeter.
This year is bad for fire.
This year I gave in and learned the Air Quality Index numbers. That was last year for my dad; he’d call and say it was 400 AQI at this place in Oregon and 320 at home... only 160 down near Bridgeport. And I’d say “I don’t know what that means”. But now I do, and it’s in the high 200s from my perch above Reno, a cold wind battering me from the west.
This year feels different. Like the temporary discomfort we all knew in small spats has finally announced it’s staying for good. It is hotter than it used to be, it is smokier than it used to be, and it’s likely never going back. At least not in our lifetimes
I breathe the music in and all I taste is smoke.
——
The story of The Disintegration Loops has been told many times, so pardon the repetition if you’re familiar.
In 2001, William Basinski began digitizing his collection of analog tape loops. They were loops of muzak and errant radio signals that he intended to turn into his own music eventually: interesting tones that he plucked out of the sky and put onto tape, and then the tape into storage. Eventually, living in Brooklyn, he set up a tape machine, hooked it to a digital recorder and began recording these short loops, knowing that the tape would eventually deteriorate.
But what he didn’t expect is that these short repetitive melodies and fragments of music would begin to deteriorate right then and there.
The loops would start out fully-formed but as it ran through the machine over and over and over, bits of tape peeled off and the sound morphed in real time.
He immediately realized that he was recording the life and death of a melody, as it devolved, and distorted, and disappeared.
The day Basinski finished The Disintegration Loops was a Tuesday — September 11th 2001.
Basinski: "We saw the top of the south tower crack off and fall from my building, and then we ran upstairs. So we turned on the disintegration loops really loud. Just went up on the roof and sat there looking at this new landscape."
That’s Basinski speaking in a 2019 interview for a documentary called Other Music. He and his friends stood on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, and watched the columns of smoke pour upward from ground zero. He set up a camcorder and filmed the final hour or so of daylight.
Basinski: "You know, On 9/11 everything changed. The meaning of everything changed."
And this is him in an interview with Cinemacy.
Basinski: "We had just sat there the day before and watched the whole disaster. Unbelievable, mind boggling thing. We were all in shock... I managed to get a cassette, a video tape - my friend had a camera and she let me put it in on her rooftop ...I managed to capture the last hour of daylight. As you know day turned to night that day, the world changed."
"I picked up the tape that next morning and imported it into iMovie and I put the first DLP 1.1 on there and I just knew..like oh my god this is an elegy. This is like woah, you know."
I descend the mountain through the smoke shelf,
the hypnotic loop running in my head long after I’ve packed away my headphones.
-- --
What strikes me about The Disintegration Loops is that you If you skip from the beginning of a loop to the end, you can hear the difference after the physical tape has disintegrated.
But listening in real time, the change is usually too slow to notice. Like a frog in a pot. However, on occasion there IS a big change in sound. A missing note, or crunches and pops where there weren’t any before. Even then, I get use to them and they seem to rewrite my memory of the original melody.
I listen to disc 2 in a Sauna.
It starts at 130°f, but it’s rising quickly and this loop is very uncomfortable. My roommates bought air purifiers this year. They own the house. It’s off the highway, about 7500 feet elevation, and deep in the mountainous woods. There are about 15 houses up here and this winter the abandoned house next door burned to the ground. Not a wildfire but instead the neighborhood rumor mill says arson.
I was home when it went up. I heard clacking on the roof and went to the kitchen where I found that the light across the brick floor was blood red. Out the sink window was a wall of flames. The entire 3.5 story, bizarrely cobbled together house was aflame; its closest part about 20 feet from ours.
I evacuated the dogs, some documents, and the cars. Then, I ran back down into the house to cart out armfuls of audio gear and instruments.
The fire department held it to the abandoned house, and we were lucky to have a metal roof covered in snow. If it was summer, our place would likely have gone up in minutes, along with much of the neighborhood. By the end of the whole ordeal, holes riddled my clothing from the raining embers. My throat hurt as I squatted in the snow and recorded the final hour or so of the house’s existence.
It is now 160° F. Halfway through the disc, I take a break. The air outside the sauna is cool but dense. I refill my cup of water and return to the box where it’s too hot to tell if the air is smoky or not. The music is triumphant, or at least intense in a way I can’t totally describe: a song to play from the top of a ridge.
I more than drip sweat. It actually pours off my face and onto the floor. During this pandemic/fire season, interacting with the world through social media showed a different type of mounting heat. Misinformation, anger, blame, and denial.
But I notice especially on instagram a new format of post. A frustrated lament of the loss of a season people used to love: a desperate anger at the clarity and scale of the problem. And in some cases, a poetic eulogy for a version of home that no longer exists.
One strikes me in particular, written and read here by my friend Summer Ester Orr.
Summer Ester Orr: "Hello The Wind. This is Summer Ester Orr recording from Paonia, CO. When I got here in early August it was smoky and unbearably hot. And today it is brisk, and clear and all the aspen trees are changing colors up in the mountains. I am here for an artist residency through Elsewhere Studios and I've been trying to draw or paint or write every single day. My work during these months of residency has mostly been a deciphering of reoccurring thoughts, premonitions and fears from the past 3 years or so. In June of 2021 I drove from Reno to Asheville, NC and back about 5228 miles in total. This would be my first cross-country road trip alone. After driving 10-12 hours by day, I would sleep in tents at free campgrounds or BLM land or couches or floors or spare bedrooms of my internet friends. I ate pretzels and Gatorade for dinner most nights. I drove through 105° heatwaves with no air conditioning, past dried up reservoirs, through dust devils and wind storms, through hail, through flash-flooding that I was sure would kill me. I was re-directed 8 extra hours on I-70 heading to Denver because it has become impassable from mudslides. I saw smoke from the west coast as I stood on land in the east coast. I swam in Lake Michigan on a clear day as 52 large fires burned upwards of 750,000 acres of land in the western United States. I stopped only once to clean the windshield of my car from bug splatters on the journey back home.
"I have lived in Northern Nevada for most of my life. For me it has always been a land of clairty. Of rolling sagebrush and blue alpine lakes, lizards, jack rabbits, and endless space. I'm coming to the realization that I cannot live there anymore. Not from choice, but out of necessity. They say the west is burning. That every August you will not be able to go outside. Every season the sun comes back will be more unbearable than the last. So here in Colorado I've been drawing butterflys and flowers, like the ones I used to see when hiking around Battle Mountain with my dad in the spring. I keep wondering what happens to a butterfly when it's caught in a wildfire. Do you think it just flies away? Or does it shrivel up in the smoke unaware of its own demise? I'm avoiding all other work, all other deadlines. I've been quitting everything. I am distracting myself with flowers or stamans or the intricate pollination process, or seeds or the colors that Marigolds produce. Or the patterns on petals, on wings, on leaves I have been seeing everywhere. I'm imagining what kinds of butterflies or birds will be decimated by a 2 degree change in the weather and what will survive.
"On Saturday July 10th at 7:22pm my mom texts me. (Translated from Spanish to English:) The world is crazy. 2 days ago there was an earthquake. It is so hot and the mountains are burning. I don't respond. I'm in the middle of creating another species of butterfly that only exists in my head."
When I get out of the Sauna my roommates have returned. They’re drinking in the kitchen and they tell me they’re thinking of selling the house and moving to Michigan. They say, “if this is what it’s gonna be like for 3 months a year…not sure it’s worth staying.”
-- -- --
I’ve always had a dream of living in a beautiful place. I listen to disc 3 in one of them.
I lay my plaid on a bed of pine needles, back up against their former owner: a huge Ponderosa. To my left is a young tightly clustered aspen grove, I presume a creeping extension of the older grove it fades into upstream. The older grove is adorned with carvings of sheepherders I’ve come to know, entirely from their arborglyphs scratched into the bark on the banks of the creek near my house, and my desk. Frugoli and Eugenio Sarretea, marked in the 1960s. This is a plot of land a few creeks away from my rented room. A plot of land I very much want to live on.
I daydream about it. Building a cabin, and driving up the barely passable road after a night in town, or taking the bone rattling creek crossings on the way to the airport before dawn. Building a porch and then sitting on the porch and playing music to the quaking yellow leaves. Inviting friends to stay for weeks at a time. Writing by the creek...
Which is what I’m doing now
but also
trespassing.
This daydream is illegal
This Disintegration Loop is heavy on disintegration. It falls apart quickly, and the song becomes punctuated by rough gaps and crunchy silences, and then it more or less becomes rough gaps and crunchy silences punctuated by what used to be the loop.
After what feels like a month of heavy smoke, today is a clear day. Blue skies, a breeze. Warm shafts of light puncture the cool evening air, splashing the vibrant green sagebrush, content and glowing from a heavy rain yesterday.
Though I can vividly imagine my life in this place, I can’t begin to imagine the path there. I’d have to be a millionaire. Or have half a million dollars or 3 million dollars or whatever number that doesn’t even register as a possible amount of money to obtain.
The dream seems to disintegrate in front of my eyes, dropping details until it’s just one core idea.
•
I don’t even want to own it, really. I don’t care to amass the wealth. I don’t want an investment. Especially one at such high risk of burning. I just want to live here freely. Nobody in charge, just a bed and a wood stove and free rein to walk in any direction I’d like.
But that’s not how it works. That daydream is illegal too.
• •
It’s 9/11 today, 2021
20 years after that 9/11
I can imagine this music looping on a roof In New York City as the rubble smoldered. As smoke billowed and ash fell into the night.
I think Basinski knew that the world had just changed. And I wonder if standing on that side of it he could even think of how.
Ours could be the last generation that holds a decaying hope of living in a lush valley in this part of the world. Or maybe it could be the gateway to a new one where land is not an investment commodity. A world I can't really imagine.
•••
I keep accidentally
thinking of money.
-- -- -- --
The burning of a sacred valley.
I have 3 sacred valleys. One of them so important to me that I don’t use its given name.
I call it secret valley and though I don’t remember, it’s apparently the first place I ever fished. I have a connection to this place that can maybe only be explained by that kind of history.
Since I’ve known it, its main meadow has been a seasonal cow pasture, deep with thick grass in the center, and completely ringed with imposing walls of pine and aspen. It’s skirted on one side by a crystal clear creek and granite faces erupt above the tree line, jagged and stark. Yellow then white then brown then green then grey then blue.
In July it all burnt.
•
My pants are covered in soot.
Hiking in, it’s only vaguely recognizable. My feet follow what they remember as a trail, now ash only partially distinguishable from the ash on either side.
It’s another smokey day, now well into October and the flat grey light renders my shadow translucent. The pallid ghost crests the ridge and follows me in.
Across the creek and meadow I find myself in a familiar aspen grove. The white bark no longer white. Black then black then black then black then grey then blue.
••
This loop suspends me in a warm breeze. We glide together over the scorched soil, weaving through brittle grey toothpicks, hovering and pausing, and flowing farther in.
I’m delivered to a meadow and lay my plaid on a bed of soot under a burnt giant. Beams of smoky light glint the crystallized sap at its feet: a final attempt at life, now windswept and shiny in the smoke of burning sequoias hundreds of miles away.
The forest floor though is surprisingly green. Grass and willows especially, green. Springs of something beneath every aspen, manzanita saplings. Green, an algae bloom in the creek. My backpack…
I set it on its side
And lay down in the black sand
I exhale into the grey light.
And the wind carries it away
through the burnt valley
that will never look
the way I remember.
-- • -- • -- • -- • --
The Wind is produced by me, Fil Corbitt.
The music in this episode was entirely The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski, the album reviewed in this piece. I will post a link to the album, along with Basinski’s interviews on the documentary Other Music and Cinemacy.
(THEWIND.ORG)
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