Music

Bass music #

From the beginning of 2024 I've been involved with the bass music scene in Berlin through organizing parties, frequenting open decks events, and being a part of Berlin Bass Spectrum collective.

Collabs #

I took part in a project by Robin Sloan that was dedicated to William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops.

In case you have never heard the original, I'd encourage you to listen to it while reading Robin's piece about this beautiful piece of music:

Monitoring a radio station in New York City, the composer William Basinski hears the melody, records it. He intends to use a fragment as a loop in an avant-garde music project. The tape goes into a box. It is the 1980s.

It is decades later: the summer of 2001. Digitizing a room full of forgotten material, Basinski finds this loop again. But the tape is old; as it moves through the player, it starts to come apart, the magnetic medium peeling off its plastic backing, more and more with each repetition. Enthralled, Basinski keeps recording as the melody disintegrates before his eyes, his ears.

Standing on his rooftop in Brooklyn, Basinski watches the World Trade Center collapse. It is September 11, 2001. Suddenly, the summer’s recordings have a meaning, a purpose. He titles them The Disintegration Loops and offers them as an elegy for the dead. They are heartbreaking and, before long, beloved.

It's a rather simple sequence of notes but it is so melancholic and powerful that it manages to come through the noise no matter what happens to the record. Robin asked a few strangers to play the sequence any way they'd like, and that's how An integration loop came to be. I used Mutable Instruments Plaits and X1l3 Underwurlde to play my part.