Here I am, sitting on a dirty sticky stair in front of a huge building waiting for my friend to pick me up, but the traffic is so chaotic that I'm starting to see the highway as a waterless river full of fish. The sky is grey, the air is grey, the raindrops are grey, only the billboards and the cars are displaying color in this graveyard of living people. Finally I see his car and I run towards it since the other cars aren't even moving.
I jump into his car waiting for the traffic to begin moving. I'm looking at the raindrops dancing with each other on the windscreen and the thoughts that come in my mind make me doubt whether I'm drifting away from reality or literally stepping into a new one. We are heading in a direction I can't define. I can't tell if we are going ahead, backwards, to the left or to the right. We are not talking to each other or making eye contact. The present seems to be a memory since I am missing bits of it and the overall atmosphere of the situation is above the actual things happening. Time is stretched back and forth while the car windows open and the cold rain starts floating around. From now on everything is an endless déjà vu...
We are slowly becoming conscious of the present again and infinity is coming to an end. We are now laying on the wet asphalt in a large square and there's no one around. The sun went down, the street lights are flickering and the only sound I can hear is the rain blown by the wind, hitting the ground.
The Disintegration Loops III is part of William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops volume, which he created with 20 year old tapes of his own music. The tapes were deteriorated and, while trying to transfer them to digital format, they started decaying even more, adding an unique sound to the original content. The project was finished in the morning 9/11 attacks took place. Basinski recorded the last hour of daylight with a video camera, focused on the smoke where the towers were from a neighbor's roof. He then used the footage for the first loop of the series and various stills from it for the artworks.
Tracklist:
1. d|p 42. d|p 5