looping

repetition here and there

Everything arises from repetition. It’s the consistency of the light every day that allows the grass to grow; it’s the way water moves from the air to the earth, the earth to the air that lets life continue, regular maintenance that keeps the lights shining, blood flowing, birds singing. Seasons turn, days change, consistency continues so everything continues. Most days look the same until they don’t, and then sometimes the new day becomes the pattern. A new home is new until it’s familiar. A new job is new until it it’s familiar. A new friend is a stranger until they’re familiar.

One of the most written-about works of ambient music is William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, a series of four albums that stretch to nearly five hours. The albums consist of a series of looping tape recordings that slowly degrade over time. Even though you hear the same musical phrase over and over again, it changes over time, notes disappearing, more silence entering the composition, with a feeling of decay matching the tape crumbling to pieces. Whenever I listen to it, I often let the album fade into the background as I focus on something else, only noticing how much the loop has changed nearly an hour into it, if I even get that far. 

The Disintegration Loops is fascinating on many levels, including serving as a sort of death knell of the tape loop as a musical tool. By the time the work was finished in 2001, digital production had allowed for easier looping, so producers no longer needed to splice together magnetic tape loops to play over and over again through reel-to-reel players, and the remaining tape had all begun to degrade (as Basinski discovered). But those tape loops did so much for music! Brian Eno used tape loops to invent ambient music in Music for Airports, a drum loop was used in “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees when it came out, and the Beatles used five simultaneous tape loops in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” 

But looping existed before the tape recorder, and it will continue after it. Looping is a way to achieve what’s called ostinato patterns, or repeated motifs in music that maintain the same musical voice. This is something that’s been found in music from all over the world for centuries. Ostinati appear in European classical music from the medieval era, in sub-Saharan African music, in all sorts of modern popular genres such as rock, jazz, or funk (often known as riffs). No matter where you’re from or when you’re from, your music benefits from repeated phrases, sometimes serving as the entire foundation of a work of art.

Now, loops are no longer a physical process: digital technology lets each musical phrase repeat precisely and perfectly. There won’t be any changes between the first loop and the billionth; the sounds will repeat as they always do.

Loops are how we live, expressed in music. Our sleeping and waking are repeated motifs that never change, even as the other aspects do. We establish routines in our daily lives — what we eat for breakfast, which bus we catch, when we get to the office. Some days we listen to podcasts, some days we listen to music, some days we don’t eat anything at all. Our lives are imperfect loops in this way, open to variation, ready to be altered at any moment by external disruptions. But these are loops all the same. We are never doing any of these things for the first time, they serve the same purpose as an ostinato can in jazz — a predictable bassline (or baseline) to improvise on top of.

A friend asked me what the most consistent part of my life was, and I couldn’t give an answer immediately. Everything felt so mundane: I have a weekly habit of writing newsletters on Wednesday nights. I drink a protein shake every day, I see the same few people every day, most of my living hours are spent in my apartment. I go for long walks where I take pictures of the same scenery over and over again. I eat food from the same three or so restaurants and never want to try anything else. These are the recurring loops of my life, even if there are the variations to my days.

Some days I’m too full to have a protein shake, some days I don’t see my friends at all, some days I leave this city entirely, some weeks I don’t write a newsletter. A few weeks ago, I was living in New York for a month, a few months ago, I was in Tokyo. But in the greater song, in the greater composition, the motifs returned eventually — something consistent among the changes.

But just like Basinski’s work, they change over time, decaying and turning into something else entirely without us realizing it. I used to eat oatmeal for breakfast and now I don’t. I used to always listen to podcasts, I used to never read on my commute, I used to never talk to my coworkers in the morning. I used to write worse, I used to write something else entirely. The loops slowly shift and change as we live our lives and if we don’t notice them, we could look up and everything could be different. And maybe sometimes these loops peter out and disappear — the end of one composition and the beginning of another.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - The Disintegration Loops by William Basinksi - the first of the four

• POEM - “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee - There are days we live / as if death were nowhere / in the background;