Here is a library of my destruction loops, little fragments of music that slowly decay into nothingness as they repeat. The process that leads to these is very simple and at the same time quite magical, difficult for me to properly explain.

Sounds get recorded onto analog tape and between the reels, tape guides and tape heads gets inevitably altered from the source. Multple cycles of recording and playback through machines that are old and not perfectly maintained produces an ageing effect that adds artifacts and errors, building generation upon generation, slowly but surely.

In their “Oblique Strategies” Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt said that “Repetition is a form of Change” and I think that’s a perfect way to sum up the process happening here in one single sentence.

Sasha Frere-Jones describes Basinski’s work as such: “It wasn’t until the summer of 2001 that Basinski stumbled into the work that brought him out of obscurity. He had decided to start transferring the loops he’d made in the early eighties to CDs, for posterity. Some of the tapes were in terrible shape, and as Basinski let the loops play they fell apart. Magnetic tape stores information on bits of metal affixed to a ribbon. That metal is the music, and the music was crumbling. Basinski copied as many loops as he could, capitalizing on the changes happening to the sounds as the tapes turned into dust.”

I always found this description very poetic and the music transcendental, so when the pandemic lockdown started in 2020 I started spending a lot of time worrying about the future and reminiscing about the past, going through old pictures and unfinished recordings and then coming up with the idea of trying to recreate my own version of the loops.

I collected them all here, on this website that changes slightly everytime you reload it, and I hope these sounds help you meditate, focus and relax like they helped me through a difficult time.

Here is a small collection of links and resources

• William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops on Wikipedia
• "Looped In" by Sasha Frere Jones on the New Yorker
• Giovanni Lami's "Solo" live performance, recorded in Venezia in 2017
• personal website for Giovanni Lami
• Corruption Loops a generative website by Alex Bainter
• Medium Post by Alex Bainter on corruption loops