SXSW 2021 | "Disintegration Loops" Fails to Engage in the Age of Disengagement

5/12 ForReel Score | 2/5 Stars

William Basinski’s monolithic Disintegration Loops albums have been described as “the sound of someone listening.” For Basinski, this listening involves pursuing the uniquely desolated feelings that manifest themselves in the melancholic currents of unexpected audio sources. This was accomplished in The Disintegration Loops by culling recordings from what was then and is still essentially source-less – phantom shortwave radio broadcasts from decades back that were committed to tape and then committed to a digital format in specific moments of their decay.

The recordings were re-contextualized for disillusioned listeners following the 9/11 attacks on New York and thus further detached themselves from their original sources, but they also connected a massive network of souls who were being stirred by the same strange frequencies. Today, they bounce and refract around the Internet—around YouTube and around Spotify—landing in the moody playlists of music nerds isolated by the pandemic.

This is maybe part of what David Wexler is trying to convey in his SXSW-premiering documentary, the inspiration for which he found in the unexpected source of the pandemic’s early stages of paranoia. Disintegration Loops doesn’t reframe the pandemic as its gimmick, but it doesn’t try to make the best of the restrictive circumstances either. For the most part, it is merely a small collection of Zoom recordings (Wexler and Basinski have not yet met in-person) and a hastily thrown-together retrospective of Basinski’s life. In its best moments, it elaborates on how Basinski’s artistic contributions became a watershed moment for ambient music appreciation and how they reframed the devastation of the 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately, what pads out the rest of this 45-minute documentary feels like it could have come from any aspiring YouTube essayist.

For the uninitiated in Basinski and his style of brooding drone music, Disintegration Loops may serve as an appropriate introduction, but I still can’t help but feel unenlightened. I was only peripherally familiar with Basinski and some of his records going into this film, and while actually seeing the effervescent and eccentric recording artist for the first time was a treat (he is not the ornery, mild-mannered recluse you might suspect an ambient obsessive to be), I did not walk away from this film with a rejuvenated interest in his work. Wexler foregoes mention of the many modern electronic musicians who have been inspired by Basinski—Oneohtrix Point Never, Photay and Bibio among them—and the interviews he does gather from music critics often come off as half-interested sales meeting pitches. The black and white footage of the abandoned streets of New York during the early stages of the pandemic would have been more resonate if they weren’t images we have seen a million times already.  

I suppose what this documentary is most sorely missing, though, are the inspired, passionate accounts from Basinski’s everyday fans – the people who might be able to tell us with zealousness what the music really means to them and their existential predicaments. One can understand how social distancing measures must have necessitated a limited scope on Wexler’s part, but if The Disintegration Loops are “the sound of someone listening,” then this documentary should reveal how one listens. How one listens, after all, is a vital part of the communication we are desperately trying to hold on to.