"In 2001, the ambient artist William Basinski was attempting to digitize an old collection of audio tape loops he'd recorded decades earlier. During the transfer process, he saw that the magnetized tape was literally flaking off the reels-the integrity of the recording coming apart a little more each time it played. As he played them over and over again, he noticed something interesting happening with the audio itself: it was decaying, imperceptibly with each repetition, but obvious after several hundred, several thousand."
"Each track is a single melody, a few seconds long, repeated ad nihilum. If you go into it expecting to hear the melody change, you will be disappointed. The decay is so slow and subtle that each repetition is seemingly identical. But as the track goes on and on, you gradually become aware of cracks and pops where there weren't before. Voices have faded. It echoes, as if from the bottom of a pit."
In 2001 an ambient artist attempted to digitize old tape loops and discovered the magnetized tape flaking during transfer, causing progressive audio deterioration. The resulting recordings repeat short melodies for up to an hour while the tape's physical decay slowly removes elements of the sound, adding cracks, pops and fading voices. The loops maintain apparent repetition even as subtle degradation accumulates until the melody becomes a memory of itself. Digital playback makes the decay audible across a track's duration, raising questions about identity and continuity as the same melody gradually loses its original components.
Read at Defector
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