It’s been a long time since I’ve really thought about 9/11, but it still doesn’t feel like it was twenty years ago. That’s a very strange feeling — not only because it makes me feel old but also because 9/11 wasn’t a day but a decade (or maybe longer).
I initially had no desire, as the anniversary approached, to watch any of the dozen new documentaries that seem to have been produced to commemorate it. For a day remembered so vividly by all — even as a nine-year-old, as I was at the time, it left a massive impact on my teens and I remember consuming almost all media about that day over the years that followed — it felt like it was finally starting to fade from view. Those images have become less ubiquitous. Though the impact is still felt, it is more sublated than searing on the surface.
But on September 8th, I gave in. I put on the Netflix documentary series Turning Point. The first 15 minutes or so gather together the clearest footage to emerge of both planes hitting the towers over the two decades since. This footage had become just unfamiliar enough that it shocked me again, and I suddenly remembered that feeling of seeing it for the first time, on the TV on a Tuesday afternoon after school in 2002. It’s made this 20-year anniversary feel oddly profound. I’m really thinking a lot about that day again, in a way I haven’t for many, many years.
Anyway, as a result, I’ve also been thinking about that event’s implicit impact on music again — underdeveloped thesis I’ve mentioned a few times: 00s freak folk and the resurgent popularity of musical “naivety” was indie America’s traumatised return to innocence / adolescence.
For a long time, William Basinski felt like the artist of the 9/11 era. The strange mythology surrounding the Disintegration Tapes was known by friends who weren’t even into music. But today the Caretaker feels much more well-known for his deteriorating sound than Basinski does.
Though a certain style of music is hardly a stable point of connection between these two artists who seem to have very different theoretical conceptions of their practices, I do wonder if one naturally follows from the other.
The pre-9/11 world Basinski seems to mourn is measurable in material ways, just like his tape loops themselves. But the “forgetting” or normalising of 9/11 — its gradual fading from view at the rear mirror of our collective consciousness — is much harder to quantify. But such is the feeling of listening to a Caretaker album.
There’s more to say on this, but maybe another time. Since today is the anniversary, I’ll just leave this here:
Basinski: disintegration of the actual
Caretaker: disintegration of the virtualOriginally tweeted by Matt Colquhoun (@xenogothic) on August 30, 2021.