Absurdity, Allegory and China

I have a hard time sleeping. Always have. Living in a construction site - ten years in Tianjin - has done little to help me quietly nod off. Odd and loud sounds can break the quietest nights, and we’ve given up sitting outside on our open porch since it is hardly relaxing sharing the soundscape with front-end loaders, pneumatic tools of short-cycled destruction, flatbed trucks delivering rebar, bricks and stone at any & all hours, the drivers laying on their horns to rouse someone inside to come unlock the gate, which always leads to rounds of fierce screaming as men not happy to be awake direct the navigations through the narrow street and equally narrow site gate. And there is always someone nearby who bangs in each new milky dawn with a hammer and encrusted mortar boat or mixer. This is, as I noted above, Tianjin, where it is not uncommon for people to express themselves with firecrackers at any time of any day or night throughout the year. We’ve quit asking, “I wonder what today/tonight is?” (as in, “Which auspicious date is it that calls for such great bursts of noise”), since it happens so often anymore it hardly matters if it’s communally or individually driven. In the run-up to the Olympics security drills with amplified directions and requisite squeals of piercing feedback, mock explosions and wailing sirens are taking up more and more of each day. It’s like living on a bench in the center of a 24/7 Midway.

I have looked to music for help, and over the last couple of years have come across some things I would never have imagined getting into. One composer whose works I’ve discovered has been William Basinski and his Disintegration Loops, which now number at least 4. A review of the first collection of Disintegration Loops can be found here:

William Basinski is a New York-based composer, and sometime Anthony and the Johnson’s associate, has a long history of minimal tape loop experiments, and it is from this that Disintegration Loops derives. In late 2001, he was reviewing old tapes and came across a pastoral composition from 1982 which he had completely forgotten about. Intending to transfer it to digital format for preservation, he set the old tapes running, but time is not kind to magnetic tape and decay had fatally undermined their stability. As they played, fragments of iron oxide spalled off the tape’s surface and became dust, gradually, but progressively, breaking down the music into a ghost of its former self, becoming ever more fragmented as the recording progressed. Almost simultaneously, within view of Basinski’s apartment, the appalling events of 11 September were unfolding. In the collapsing loops, he saw their reflection, and the music became a requiem for the twin towers. And very fitting it is, too, a gently shifting cavernous drone, becoming more blurred and fragmented as the tape self-destructs in front of us, sombre and dignified, a beautiful epic of romantic decay.

It’s minimal, ambient and loopy. I also quite like the title. In light of all this botox-ed overbuild and royal contests of uglification (not to be confused with architecture run amok – most of what’s being built in this Chinese frenzy is unidentifiably forgettable), which may very well be the grand and final act of total de(con)struction, this music has a certain prescient draw to it, a soundtrack for a live feed of moths flying headlong into flames kept alive by their burning bodies. It has become my audio framework of the ubiquitous chaos, as I try to put the Apocalypse to music in order to get enough sleep to have a few wakeful hours to appreciate this latest and possibly final phase of Utter Dismantle.

Cheers!