FEBRUARY
Despite all my philosophizing last month on the clarity the open stretches of winter bring, February has done what it does best- made me start to get sick of it. The cold and the drawing in. I feel less observant, more sluggish. Even on my neighborhood walks I spend most time staring at my feet, trying not to slip. Too close for comfort.
I try to notice how my patterns change at this time of year. I visit less of the local shops. I plan for the future rather than the present. I don’t see my neighbors for long stretches. I don’t see anyone unless it’s on purpose, really. It’s jarring after experiencing how community-oriented this patch of city is in the warm weather. Just turning my big ear out the front window in summer felt so different (&so light) in comparison. Groups of friends laughing and kids skateboarding and the ice cream truck and music. This time of year most of the sound seems to be of conflict. Like everyone’s in this big fight they can’t win, or that they don’t even want to be fighting. Maybe I’m just projecting, but it’s impressive how much more solemn the same street sounds a few months apart. I’ll continue to observe as the days get longer. &hopefully I’ll make some music about it. I do feel inspired by how places change cyclically. I am still figuring out how to capture that.
My sluggishness has changed how I work on music, too. The way I see it, there’s actively writing, where you consciously decide how you want a sound to be and build up from nothing. I feel this when I write progressions and melodies on guitar. a building up. & then there’s passive creating, where you rearrange what already exists, or when the parameters you’ve set determine the content you create more than you do. You aren’t really the one inventing something new, you’re just putting things together, or even breaking them down. The more I allow my daily mindfulness practices to alter how I see the world, the more I lean toward creating in this second, passive way. Originality seems to matter less. I am simply observing the world and relaying my experience as honestly as I can. Inevitably, this pulls heavily from other artists’ work and shared human experiences. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this. (I understand the motivation behind copyright laws, but god, I would love to see what people would make if they could openly pull from other artists’ work!)
Anyways, February has made me lean into creating passively and even destructively. It’s all that really feels appropriate right now. Which brings us to this month’s lore! Maybe you know it.
William Basinski’s idea for The Disintegration Loops came as so many good ones do, by accident. After years of experimenting with tape and other analog equipment, he had set out to digitize stacks of his old work that lived on reel-to-reels. He set up an old tape loop and loved how it sounded, so he created a countermelody and let it play. After a while, he realized that the sound was changing- the tape was so old and fragile that just going around and around the machine was causing the magnetic particles that hold data to flake off of it. He was thrilled at the idea of time letting this melody decay. He kept making the loops for a few days, eventually realizing he didn’t need to add anything; he just needed to give the loops their space to unfold and decay.
Basinski finished this project on the morning of September 11, 2001. He then spent the afternoon sitting on his roof and watching the twin towers smolder.. The timing was uncanny. The ties to 9/11, of course, changed how he thought of the pieces. He used stills from that day as the album art and included a memoriam to the lives lost in its release. He also set the first loop to video footage he took on his roof while the sun set that day- it’s really something to hear the decay and see the smoke billow as the sun sets. He makes it clear, though, that these loops were as much about redemption as they were about loss.
I wanted to create an elegy. Yes, there's that tie to 9/11. But the thing that moved me so profoundly in my studio right after this music happened was the redemptive quality. The music isn't just decaying — it does, it dies — but the entire life and death of each of these unique melodies was recorded to another medium for eternity. So that blew my mind, as someone who grew up Catholic, to see that that is a possibility.
These pieces have affected me greatly through the last several years. Basinski, along with other minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, inspired me to dive deep into ambient music. I love the subjectivity this type of music leaves space for. When I learned the loops’ connection to 9/11, the way I heard them changed. And when COVID locked me inside for days and weeks and months, surrounded by loss and the effort to mitigate it, the way I listened changed again. 9/11 was my first day of preschool, and COVID ate up my last semester of college. These losses live in me and eat away at me and will doubtless continue to do so over the years. But music like this brings a new life to tragedy and encourages me to think about what can be built from the wreckage.
Throughout February, I have been experimenting with some disintegration loops of my own. I have an old broken reel-to-reel tape recorder and a few rolls of orchestra recordings from the 60’s. (Thank you, Craigslist!) I’ll put a loop on and let it do its thing while I stretch or meditate. Sometimes I add things like pumice stones or knives to help encourage the loops to fall apart. The motor of the tape machine is breaking down too, which adds another layer of destruction to the sound. It feels almost more like a sculpture than a piece of music. Observing while the loops roll on and on next to me feels incredibly moving, almost spiritual. At a time when creating feels hard and being feels hard and 2.5 million lives have been lost, these loops have provided me an incredible source of catharsis.
I’ve posted a collection of my loops, with Basinski’s permission. You can find those here. It’s a lot of content, but maybe they can bring you some catharsis too, or at least fill some space in your room while you read or do whatever it is you do. I’m grateful for Basinski’s permission to basically rip him off, but I don’t feel these loops belong to me. They belong to this February and the lives lost in it.
A friend pointed me toward another work inspired by these loops- an incredible poem, Disintegration Loop 1.1 by Heather Christle. She wrote this poem while listening to the piece and watching the footage. It’s healing to know that despite this music’s ties to loss, it continues to bring new life into the world in the form of art.
Odds & ends:
Here are some photos I got developed this past month, from the summer and a few from many summers ago.
Here are some resources to locate food banks and shelters near you, if you’re able to donate food, clothes, or time. Something I have been considering a lot is how this harsh weather affects the unhoused people around me. It’s obviously never easy for them, but the weather plus the pandemic plus the general increased walls around people this time of year must really suck. I’ve seen, out the window, strangers treating these people like dirt. I have been trying to stop and talk with them a little longer than usual, and offer them something to eat or some money when I can. I’m imploring you to treat the next homeless person you see like a Person. So many people have this idea of homeless people being dangerous or scary, but they’re literally just human people who are really struggling.
A couple years ago my partner Alex found a newspaper from 9/13/2001 in shockingly good condition on the sidewalk near my house. Someone must have dropped it. It lives in my notebook museum. I wonder why they were carrying it that day.
Here’s to spring coming soon, and to the space in the meantime. Thank you for reading! What’s something you’re looking forward to today?
***grace