The Goods: Issue 08
Gabriel Alcala
Gabriel Alcala is a Miami-based artist who has created colorful work for everyone from King Tuff to The New York Times. His style happily floats somewhere between a daydream and an acid flashback.
READING MATERIAL
SIGHTS & SOUNDS
A hypnotizing short film set to opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo.
Sadly, I somehow just discovered The Disintegration Loops, a series of four albums by avant-garde composer William Basinski. The story behind their creation is tragic, and fascinating, and leaves me full of hope.
Excerpts from the 10/10 review on Pitchfork:
“In the early part of the last decade, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops was the sort of music you passed around. Once you heard it, you wanted to tell somebody about it. There was obviously the sound itself, so hypnotic that it was immediately understood as a classic of ambient music. But there was more to it…
In the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle.
Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose.”
— Mark Richardson, Pitchfork
