William Basinski Disintegration loops. how to replicate?

[darkmelody]

So I will assume anyone opening this thread is familiar with the work in the title, otherwise, why would you open it?

I'm interested in creating a kind of hour long, slowly degenerating loop in the style of the Disintegration loops, and am wondering about the best signal path/ flow using the various Live devices.

Obviously it will come down to experimentation, but I thought I'd tap into the community to start the brainstorming process off, since I thought it would probably reveal ideas I never would have come up with myself. (Not difficult, I'm not that smart )

I would have thought Looper would go at the end of the chain with the feedback set to about 85, but to my understanding this is more of a volume decay than anything else, and maybe it shouldn't go at the end.

I'm running Live 8 and I have the Waves 8 Platinum bundle and the Fab filter bundle. (I imagine the Timeless 2 would belong in my chain somewhere. That thing is gigantic.)

Anyway, keen to hear some thoughts folks.

[swishniak]

get a tape machine and some 30 y.o. tapes

sorry i had to..

but seriously its a beautiful piece of music. so much of that comes from the sound of the medium and the simplicity of just letting it play out..

if you really want to get technical about reproducing it; its not really complex. . eq out highs and lows.. some gates.. increasing over time.. some crashing towers..

[swishniak]

and... one way to do a disintegrating loop would be to do a clip automation on a gate, "unlinked", closing the threshold of the gate slowly over a longgggg time.

[yur2die4]

If you're going to use Looper, try it in a Return channel and send the return back into itself. Make sure the Looper only sends the wet signal. (I think it can only do that in overdub mode)

Then you can slip something in the channel like Vinyl Distortion set to 10% wet, keep the crackling off. And possibly a reverb at 2% or something.

Now you can send an audio clip into that Looper, the Looper can be set at the same amount of time. Make sure the audio clip only plays once, not looping. Once it plays through the audio will cycle through the Return channel over and over again. Slowly transforming into.... who knows.

[darkmelody]

Thanks y'all this is exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for.