Disintegration loops

through my research into analogue signal destruction in video, my attention has been drawn to the destruction loops, a phenomenon that has recently been revived by several ambient musicians, that involves the disruption of audio signals through the destruction of the magnetic recording surface of the tape.

this concept was originally sparked by the disintegration loops made by William Basinski. while archiving old tapes Basinski noticed that the magnetic surface material began to flake off when the tape passed the play heads creating a natural sounding degradation in sound quality with parts of the recorded music flaking off altogether to progressively create an entirely new sound.

this idea has now been purposefully recreated by musicians such as Heinbach and Simon the magpie, because of the unpredictability of the destruction prosses the outcomes produced are different every time and serve as a way of generating a unique starting point for music creation.

I am hoping to experiment with tape loops myself and use the unpredictability to illustrate the way that even completely uncontrollable randomness  can be used to create something with a sense of order with the intent of giving others a resource to do the same