Every once in a while, I'll discover a work of art that seems too strange to be real—outside of a dream or a Borges story, at least—and which makes the entire world seem weirder and more wonderful by its very existence. Rising Up and Rising Down and the Codex Seraphinianus are two notorious examples. My latest "discovery" is a four-disc album cycle called The Disintegration Loops, which I haven't even bought yet, but which seems too amazing to ignore. Here's what the critics are saying:

It's impossible: no one could create a script this contrived. Yet, apparently, it happened. William Basinski's four-disk epic, The Disintegration Loops, was created out of tape loops Basinski made back in the early 1980s. These loops held some personal significance to Basinski, a significance he only touches on in the liner notes and we can only guess at. Originally, he just wanted to transfer the loops from analog reel-to-reel tape to digital hard disk. However, once he started the transfer, he discovered something: the tapes were old and they were disintegrating as they played and as he recorded. As he notes in the liner notes, "The music was dying." But he kept recording, documenting the death of these loops. [...]

As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. "DP 3," for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise. By contrast, the longest piece, "DP 1," because it is split into three distinct parts ("1.1" on disk one; "1.2" and "1.3" on disk four), actually dies three separate deaths. Each one begins as soft, warm halos of sound, which then slowly mutates into muddled fragments. And then there's "DP 4," the smallest work. It begins as a full-fledged melody but slowly devolves into chaos: silences slowly spreading across huge gaps in the loop, while the muddled melody struggles on, barely perceptible, until it, too, is silenced into oblivion.

The concept reminds me a bit of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, one of the most amazing albums ever made. There's also a troubling 9/11 connection that I won't bother to discuss. Anyway, The Disintegration Loops aren't available on Amazon, so it may take me a while to track them down, but I'll definitely have them cued up in time for our next big party.