More Loops

Patrick Gibson Esq. lent me a copy of the piece played on Resonance FM by The Loop Orchestra. It's quite a dark slice of repitition, even taking into account the slightly scary nature of most of their music. I suppose the feeling of doom and dread is something I'm reading into their work as they all seem to be reasonably well adjusted people. I mean, they're not all dressed in black, waiting for armageddon or death's icy stare and creating music to suit that desultory mood. Most of their stuff has a sense of fun at it's heart, a playfull irony and so on. But this piece certainly makes me feel all sepulchral.

Doom is supposedly the the feeling at the heart of William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops too. But I'm not too convinced. The loops themselves are quite lovely with a set of instrumentation that's hard to pinpoint - keyboards, some drums, some guitar, bass - and could exist as terrific hooks on which to embed other loops. These are played over and over as the 20 year old iron oxide slowly falls off the tape resulting in music that disolves fractionally each time. Created as the World Trade Centre towers fell, the project picked up a sense of melancholy and loss to accompany the shower of physical material outside and around the tape machine. The problem is that I can't really hear this in the music itself except for the minor keys that the samples are set in. It's really just systems music of a very simple sort: play the tapes until they die and see what happens. There's hardly any intervention in what is being heard unlike This Heat's magnificent 24 Track Loop where a song is fashioned from discreet available elements or from any of The Loop Orchestra's pieces where people decide on when their own loops will be overlayed. If Basinski hadn't discussed his feelings about the pieces then I wouldn't know that this lies at their heart.