Not with a bang, but a whimper. Not in fire, but in ice. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. "When the world is running down," the man sang, "you take the best of what's still around."
There are two questions there: Is the world running down? And while it's still around, what's this best stuff we should take? The answer to the first is "yes," but probably not in the way that you're thinking. For the second question, a partial answer is what this article is all about, because some of the music that's the most meaningful is so because the world is indeed running down.
Maybe these are two soundtracks to the end of the world, one fire—A Strange Loop, the debut recording from Tim Harrison's "recur" project, composed music that builds itself into clear forms through time, made with intention and given purpose by what's in Harrison's mind and heart. The other, ice—William Basinski's seminal The Disintegration Loops, now reissued by Temporary Residence in LP/CD boxed sets—conceptual compositions and, fundamentally, the revealed truth that Basinski discovered at a point in time when history flowed through him while magnetic tape recordings of music were literally de-cohering.
This is all loops music, patterns repeating back on themselves, extending through time. There are significant differences, though, the idea and possibility of loops from opposite ends. A major one is the means: loop music is nearly always a mechanical, process-type music, from Steve Reich's phasing tape decks in the mid-1960s to Music for Airports, to the way loops are now a part of commerce, sold as Lego-like music building blocks. The Disintegration Loops is in this grouping, music made with the mechanical means of tape on a loop, spooling across playheads.
Harrison's is analog, bespoke, and looped in the opposite way. He took his experiences and aesthetic imagination and created music that had not existed before. His album is not just music composed from scratch, but loop music where there's no actual loop to be found. It's all played in real time by an ensemble of woodwinds, strings, and percussion. Harrison compares this to Basinski, but it's the same only in, perhaps, the way it sounds. Put a loop into a machine and press play, the machine does what it's told. Give musicians music and ask them to repeat it, and there are the expressive variabilities of subtle inexactitude and human expression each time it comes around.
Basinski was digitizing old magnetic tapes, discovered the haunting effect of the sound disintegrating gradually, loop by loop. He was working on this task when terrorists flew two hijacked planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the loops an accidental soundtrack to real disintegration. From something, he heard and saw decline and fall into nothing. Though passages in The Disintegration Loops produce the illusion that something is being created, like the way one texture seems to rise while the main ones fall away in "dlp 2.2," what he discovered and captured for listeners was the sound of things losing shape and form. The tracks on Harrison's album, on the other hand, rise in specific directions within each and as part of a whole, like a film score or symphony made out of discrete, repeated units. Intentional process as opposed to serendipitous accident.
There are more film metaphors here, like Bill Morrison's contemplation of disintegration through found, decaying celluloid, Decasia, and Christopher Nolan's exploration of time and how multiple experiences of it can synchronize at a central point, like in Inception and Dunkirk, and especially Tenet. Now, pull back from these albums and films, and from what the world means to us in the everyday sense, the struggle against the friction of life, between forming community and civilization in the face of the rise of barbarism from people with too much money, too much leisure, and too few values. That's a battle between building things and tearing them down that, short of universal human enlightenment, will remain an enduring feature of history. Dial it out instead, like another film, Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten. Discard the human and planetary scale, and consider the universe.
Dial out further: this article is not just about music but about time. Yes, this is The Tonearm, not Scientific American or Astronomy, so if you're hoping to read about music, you're still in the right place. But this is about time exactly because it's about music: thinking about and hearing music means thinking about and hearing time. Music exists in time and only time; it has no other dimension and cannot exist outside time's flow, and because of that, music can describe and define time in a way nothing else can. Some music does nothing but, like loops, which create a unit of time within the universe's flow, then repeat that.
It cannot be overstated how important this is. We think of importance in culture as a measure of impact and influence, and that's not wrong, but this is a different kind of importance. The measure of this is that it is a way to touch the single dominating feature of the universe, the thing that makes it possible to type out these words, one after another, in one moment, and for you to read them, one after another, in another moment that itself is just a transition to the very next. This article continues, your reading continues, everything continues because of time.
All music taps into the universe; most of it does so just to the extent of fitting itself into the space that time gives it. A song is a song, a sonata a sonata, the chords and words are placed in sequence in order to communicate ideas and emotions, but they don't need to address time to work. For something like that, time is a box of duration in which the music fits. The neater the better.
Music is physics. Sound is a wave of energy with a particular frequency, and music organizes those frequencies in time. Being a wave, it literally touches the body and enters the ear. Music is touch at a distance of space and time, a musician reaching us from the stage, live, or from a recording made in the past, reaching across time. In each way, too, music brings the universe into us.
This is most powerful in music that embraces time as its substance, if not subject. Music like this is structured by time, not by building itself in it but with it, giving sound to time. Minimalist music is the most prominent example, with a pulse that marks passing time and a method that shows how music uses time to structure itself. Loop music is a very close relative of that, with a different idea of pulse (if any) and a more relaxed relationship with time. This is music that is like a pair of hands reaching into a stream of water, feeling that flow and shaping and directing it, even coloring it.
Now that's where it gets even more interesting, and where A Strange Loop and The Disintegration Loops open up depths of meaning that Basinski and Harrison likely never imagined, though maybe they felt intimations. Time is something outside us and inside us, a subjective experience and a dimension in which we exist. Time was there before each of us was born and will continue after we pass; with it we grow and age and have experiences and accumulate memories. We develop, we change. It is part of us while also indifferent to us, even as we feel it in a personal way, one different for each of us, and that changes along with contexts.
Time is an arrow, and a flat circle. We cycle inside the arrow. We're in time, moving in one direction, but also within recurring cycles. We loop: the Sun rises and sets; one day follows the next; the seasons come and go; and once a year, the calendar (meaning the Earth in space and time) returns to where it was the date we were born. We wax, like the loops on A Strange Loop that layer experiences from the opening "Oscillate," the narrative "Gnoissienne" that hat-tips Satie and also Morricone, then wane through "Lament," and to the end of the album.
The Disintegration Loops could almost explicitly take up the story from there. This is the sound of the end of things, of letting go of things, of saying goodbye to things. Basinski was neither the only nor first person to hear a recording medium fall apart as it was being played, but he had the empathy and wisdom to see that this was a kind of requiem, a way to hold onto things already lost just a little longer, as long it take for the magnetic recording strip to completely fall apart—and the reverb that keeps the vibrations, the touch of the past, going just a little longer.
Now, here's where it gets, maybe, a little unsettling. Time moves in one direction, and the physicists tell us it is from a state of lower to higher disorder, or entropy. Entropy is noise; its opposite is signal, and in a closed system, entropy can only increase, so time can only move in that direction. People and creatures are born, plants grow—all signals—because the Earth is an open system, soaking in energy from the Sun. That energy creates signals. The universe is a closed system, has all the matter and energy it will have, cannot make more, and so can only move in the direction of greater noise.
Where this all ends up, many, many billions of years from now, is unclear. One possibility is that the universe will expand so much that it will reach a heat death, with maximum entropy, stars and even galaxies evaporated, no more energetic events happening. Complete and total noise, de-coherence. Time itself may end, and it theoretically does inside black holes.
These are the mind-boggling landscapes of time that these two albums hint at, again from opposite sides. The context they open up for each other makes each one that much more powerful. It's worth thinking beyond the meaning and even considerable quality of the music on A Strange Loop. In a world that may be running down, and a universe that inevitably will, there is a poignant heroism to making music, painting, writing, creating anything that will last past one's lifespan. It is a slow burn raging against the eventual dying of the light. Even more profound is that Harrison didn't set the machines running to make his music; he made it by hand, with his hands, out of himself, and then played it with his musicians. They created a signal within the noise.
Basinski also had a direct hand in his work, though a more philosophical one. The original tapes he was working with had music on them made by others; the instrumental phrases are there at least in outline as the sound evaporates. They made a signal, but the medium that held it couldn't last. But nothing ever will, that's entropy, and The Disintegration Loops is entropy made into moving sonic art. A Strange Loop can't last forever, nothing can, and there's no pessimism in accepting that, but instead wisdom in seeing that the process of life is embedded in the life of the universe. Time flows one way, and there are ways to relish that experience.
And now we are back to music, because we can hear what that sounds like, we can feel it touch us. This isn't the signification of data or the representation of a physical fact. It is time itself. The composer Edgard Varèse described music as organized sound, which is true enough, but it starts with organized time—organized to make a signal. These two albums show how that works and what it means: that time is what we all have to work with, in whatever way we can, until it runs out, until it's all noise.
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