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"Listen to the sounds of deterioration and decay as the sound is transformed into something else for this episode. Hear Brooklyn composer William Basinski and a portion of his mammoth work, "Disintegration Loops" - a project based on very old tape loops from the 1980's. The tape itself was disintegrating, and tape gunk would come off on the playback head, but Basinski allowed the loops to play continuously while he recorded them digitally, capturing the process of the music's demise. "

"For over 30 years, Basinski has worked with tape loops - capturing, slicing and warping the world around us on reel-to-reels. He makes field recordings from nature and shortwave radio signals, then literally cuts them up into short loops. His almost obsessively analog-focused work is often melancholic and strained, but always beautiful. But it is The Disintegration Loops, a project he finished the morning of September 11 while living in New York, for which he's best known."

"Brian Eno once said that "repetition is a form of change," but Basinski's tape loops physically revise that and bring the idea back as "repetition is change.""

"This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum's Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski's sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people."

"Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted."

"At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli's 1972 diagram."

"How to create music with simple rules and a loop pedal. A mix of music, maths, and molecular dynamics."

"Sound designer and composer Diego Stocco (warning: lots of sound) continues his ongoing project of making music from uncommon objects and places with this new video using loops recorded from a local dry cleaner. Stocco has also made music from a tree, from sand, and even a a bonsai, among others. Of all of them I really think this is his finest. Make sure you make it past the 2:10 mark."

"Ethan Rose's Hum responds specifically to the Jefferson Substation, an electrical substation that is located just outside the loop of downtown Chicago. The step down transformers at the Substation emit an audible 60 cycle hum. This rich harmonic drone permeates the surrounding city blocks. For this site-specific radio broadcast, installation, and performance, Rose assembled a small choir of vocalists who will be positioned at a near distance to the transformers. The choir hums the overtone series in harmony with the transformer's buzz."

"Sampling is a production tool that is fundamental to electronic music. A seemingly simple act - taking small bits of prerecorded sound, often from an existing composition, and incorporating them into a new piece of music - has in the past few decades proven to be a revolutionary cultural force. An essential element for the development of hip-hop in the 1980s, as well as for electronic music scenes concurrently taking shape around the world, sampling helped lower the barrier of entry for potential music makers: No longer did a producer need studio access or a group of musicians to make full and rich productions. Instead, they could dig for loops and breaks from a wealth of existing material and use the pieces they found to create new compositions. The process also allowed the artists to insert themselves into a different type of musical timeline, traversing and connecting decades of sounds in a way that would have been impossible before the dawn of sampling."

"The Manhattan Rhythm Machine is an interactive generative beat maker. Loops for each instrument are represented with cut up segments of a circle. These are moved through a two dimensional space of rhythms with axes of edginess and density which are mapped to rhythms through a beat hierarchy derived from how off-beat each position in the bar is."

"In 1948, Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a self-proclaimed mandate to record the sounds of the entire world. From the Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Folkways documented the audible nooks and crannies of existence on hundreds of LPs produced by field recordists, scientists, and experimentalists probing the margins of the human soundscape. Seventy-five years later, electronic music duo Matmos have diced, looped, stretched, and recontextualized these recordings on their new album Return to Archive, which was assembled entirely from the so-called non-musical sounds released on Folkways. On just the album's first track, dolphins, beetles, telephones, humans stretching the limits of their vocal cords, a shortwave radio, and metal balers co-mingle in a fantasia of sound both everyday and extraordinary. Each track on Return to Archive morphs its source material into something completely unexpected, honoring and expanding on Folkways' legacy of sonic exploration. Featuring Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway."

"In 1978, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn't the first ambient album by any means, it was the first album explicitly released as an 'ambient music album'. The album was essentially a continuation of Eno's experimentation with the tape machine as a compositional tool, as well as his exploration of generative music, music created by systems. In this article I'll discuss how Music for Airports was created, I'll break down and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2, and hopefully give you some ideas about how to adopt this approach yourself."