Tape disintegration is common when a tape has been left for 10-20 years after being recorded onto. Basinski explains what tape dropout and disintegration is in the documentary ‘Disintegration Loops’ that “It is when a piece of analogue tape is plastic and glue and basically rust. The music is on the iron oxide particles which is glued onto the plastic. When the glue loses its integrity, the dust turns back to dust and falls into the tape path and you get dropout or periods of silence, because there is no sound there anymore.”
Dropout for many people is a nightmare, as your music that was once clear and had no interference is now disappearing slowly. Basinski used this to his advantage while he is transferring his old reel-to-reel loops into a digital format.
Achieving tape disintegration unnaturally is a difficult task, ambient artist and youtuber Hainbach made a video in which he tries to make his own disintegration loops by having 3 reel to reel machines run tape loops across knives, scissors, and box cutters. The experiment was successful, as by the 120-minute mark, most of the tapes had disintegrated. I would like to try this technique in the future, but I do not own any reel-to-reel machines in which I could try this on. And when it comes to cassettes it is near impossible to do it artificially due to the tape being stuck inside a plastic container. My best bet was to use a digital tape emulator.
Aberrant DSP made a plug in called SketchCassette II, which is a plug in that emulates the sound of recording to cassette. The plug in comes with the standard 3 types of tape, Type 1 & Type 2 which were the most common and lowest fidelity, and type 4, which is a higher quality tape cased in a metal case instead of plastic. They included presets which are great for achieving a specific sound. For example, they have a preset titled ‘Hi, How Are You?’ which is supposed to emulate the tape sound of Daniel Johnston. They also have much more experimental tape presets that are great for experimentation.
With the making of my piece ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’, I used Sketch Cassette on the master track on my Ableton session.
Bibliography
www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Destruction Loops | Creating Sounds of Decay and Magnetic Distortion. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVy9ABT5-iY.