Intermédialités Histoire Et Théorie Des Arts, Des Lettres Et Des Techniques Intermediality History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies
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Document generated on 09/28/2021 9:28 a.m. Intermédialités Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques Intermediality History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies Repetition, Feedback, and Temporality in Two Compositions by William Basinski David Christopher Jackson restituer (le temps) Article abstract rendering (time) In this essay I examine how William Basinski’s loop-based recordings reveal Number 33, Spring 2019 and extend the aesthetic concurrence between technological, biological, and human duration, memory, and the perception of the industrial temporal URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1065021ar object. The examination of how looping stresses a composition’s flow in the DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1065021ar perception of a time-based media object and the exchange between memory and the machine as a performance and configuration of the mental sphere, pursues a line of thought that brings together ideas about repetition in See table of contents Basinski’s compositions as a sonic reformatting of the mental sphere and the technology of Basinski’s slow, analog, compositions contra the accelerated digitalism of twenty-first-century life. Publisher(s) Revue intermédialités ISSN 1920-3136 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Jackson, D. C. (2019). Repetition, Feedback, and Temporality in Two Compositions by William Basinski. Intermédialités / Intermediality, (33). https://doi.org/10.7202/1065021ar Tous droits réservés © Revue Intermédialités, 2019 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ magine a machine on which you could press a button and play back your memories at any time, with the possibility of a potential infinite repetition I of sustaining, expanding, delaying, and reverberating your memory in a multiplicity of ways. This hypothetical is of course already part of our contemporary everyday life where memories are stored in databases, recalled through clicking, swiping, and through algorithms—like Facebook’s “memories” that prompt you to celebrate on your timeline different milestones (some important and others hilariously banal), or Instagram’s “stories” that prompt you to record snippets of your day-to-day experiences and share the audiovisual results with your followers. With increasing frequency our memories are integrating the digitized and databased infoscape, which characterizes contemporary capitalism’s exploitation of images, sounds, and processes; furthermore, our memories have come to constitute the fragmented, overexposed, and networked self. Extending Peter Osborne’s idea that “everyday life is lived in the medium of the cultural form” and that this process is “at one with commodification”1 The loop as a cultural form constitutes a good deal of our everyday experience of contemporary capitalism’s reliance on repetition, familiarity, and virality. The same can be said for our media, which uses past cultural forms and narratives and remixes and recreates them for contemporary audiences in new packaging. I situate the analog mnemonic looped performances 1 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, London and New York, Verso, 1995, p. 197. INTERMÉDIALITÉS • N O 33 –P RINTE M P S 2019 REPETITION, FEEDBACK, AND TEMPORALITY IN TWO COMPOSITIONS BY WILLIAM BASINSKI of William Basinski within the rhythm and temporality of everyday life and as an experience through media of this everyday experience ¶2 The ability to loop and make time return using magnetic tape has an important history in the development of the avant-garde and runs through experimental music, film, and the increased commodity form of musical instrumentation. This history is part of our cultural experience. The development of recording technologies beyond the graphic score, particularly vinyl records and tape, redefined artistic practices, as evidenced by the early 1930s turntablism of John Cage and László Moholy-Nagy, the tape splice experiments of Pierre Schafer, Pierre Henry, Daphne Oram, and William S. Burroughs, the development of the recording studio through experimentation by Les Paul, and technological expansion of recording and studio techniques in the 1960s in the work of producers like Alan Kramer, George Martin, Jimmy Page, and Teo Macero. Evolving from the development of early sound and image technology, loops and looping made their presence known in the 1960s through music recordings such as Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain (1965), Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (1969), Terry Riley’s Music for the Gift (1963), and Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s 1970s collaborations.2 These early loop processes have now become the domain of digital sampling. Musicians have been impacted by looping through the development of loop pedals such as Memory Man, Ditto Looper, and Boomerang, and loop-based digital audio workstations like Fruity Loops and Ableton. Looping spills beyond the musical to film production and animation, 2 The early turntable experiments by John Cage and László Maholy-Nagy that can be thought of as proto-turntablism and sampling. As Zach Layton observes, in his 1922 essay Production-Reproduction Maholoy-Nagy “suggests that reproductive technologies, such as the gramophone record, could be reimagined as an artistically productive technology, creating sensory experiences that had never been possible previously. [Maholoy-Nagy] writes that since, ‘it is primarily productive creation that serves human [physical, psychic, and sensory] development, we must seek to expand the use of apparatuses (means) used so far only for reproductive purposes to productive purposes as well’” (Zach Layton, “Moholy-Nagy and “Optical Sound” at the Guggenheim,” Guggenheim Blogs, 18 July 2016, https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/moholy-nagy-and-optical-sound-at-the- guggenheim (accessed 21 March 2019). For more on musical repetition and consumer culture see Robert Fink. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. doi:10.1525/j.ctt1pntqm.. For more on the technological development of studio practices and its impact on musical innovation, see: Paul Théberge. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making music/consuming technology. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997 and James Burgess, The history of music production. New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. INTERMÉDIALITÉS • N O 33 –P RINTE M P S 2019 REPETITION, FEEDBACK, AND TEMPORALITY IN TWO COMPOSITIONS BY WILLIAM BASINSKI and it has a fundamental function in digital computing for running sequences of instructions to bring about specific conditions in the computing environment. Loops, then, have an important role to play in ordering the everyday flow of our consciousness and assembling our temporal and rhythmic interactions with machines, culture, and the social. ¶3 Basinski’s compositional process begins with a visit to his archive of magnetic tape recordings made since the 1970s, which he refers to as “the land that time forgot.”3 These recordings are then played on various analog machines, occasionally transferred to digital, allowed to erode and decay, and performed live in concert. Basinski’s works are generally composed from unspooling of various loops on magnetic tape, which he has accumulated and archived, and the real-time processing of these loops with delays and reverbs.4 In interviews, he has argued for an understanding of the loop and its repetition and duration as a critical component of memory and consciousness, stating that “memories are loops, our memories are made of loops. We have loops that constantly go around and around.”5 How these loops go around and around as a form of memory or consciousness and how they connect to ideas about everyday events, duration, and the instant is a more obscure aspect of Basinski’s practice that I intend to examine in this article. It does seem that a number of complex processes between the subject and technology are brought together in the relationship between the loop as a performative object and temporality, archives, and memory. 6 In Basinski’s practice, producing, storing, and playing back a loop is an important part of transmitting and transforming the consciousness embedded in the technologies that record, store, and play back memories, the passage of time, and experiences. Magnetic tape, as well as other forms of time-based media, are part 3 Ellis Jones, “The Slow Sublime and 9/11: Insecurity and Fear in William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops,” Music and Politics, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, full text available at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0008.101/--slow-sublime-and-911-insecurity- and-fear-in-william?rgn=main;view=fulltext (accessed 21 March 2019). 4 Pascal Savy, “William Basinski,” Fluid Radio-Experimental Frequencies, n.d. http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2013/05/memories-are-loops-a-conversation-with-william- basinski/ (accessed 30 June 2018). 5 Ibid. 6 Tilman Baumgärtel has analyzed loops in the context of the production of German dance music (this study is yet to be published in English); see Geert Lovink, “Dancing to the Loop: Repetition in Contemporary Music—An