Hainbach and the Sound of Destruction

Abstract

Hainbach is the stage name of the Berlin-based composer, lyricist, and live musician, Stefan Paul Goetsch, who is perhaps best known from his YouTube channel of the same name. Descriptions and classifications of Hainbach’s music invariably include references to the musician’s innovative and ‘experimental’ approach to music production and highlight his use of magnetic tape and obsolete tone generators, such as those used by the early proponents of electronic-based music. This article examines three of Hainbach’s recent electronic works: Tagwerk (2022), Landfill Totems (2019), and Destruction Loops (2019–2021), framing them as palimpsests of archived destruction that recall such wide-ranging works as the magnetic tape experiments of Alvin Lucier, the auto-destructive impulse and social engagement of German-born artist and activist Gustav Metzger, or even the ‘erasures’ of Robert Rauschenberg. In this article, I reveal the complex, seemingly contradictory, palimpsestuous structure of Hainbach’s works, where creation meets destruction, collage and décollage are co-planar, and the gestures of ‘play’—that creative act with destruction at its horizon—are ever present. Through play, Hainbach explores the creative potential of both sound and instrument, surveys their affordances, and courts creativity at the unpredictable intersection of serendipity and failure.

The sound of destruction has been a phenomenon of music production for almost as long as sound itself has been amplified electrically. It manifests as observable, audible processes that include failure, malfunction, damage, and disintegration. Its techniques are manifold, ranging from the familiar effects of distortion, overdrive, and feedback that are now commonplace across a range of genres, to the overloaded circuits in the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet (1956) or the extremes of glitching, ‘wounded’ media in the works of Yasunao Tone or Oval, and back to the elegiac beauty of accidental decay in William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2019–2021). In this article, I examine the complex, creative role of destruction in three electronic works by the popular German musician Hainbach: Tagwerk (2022), Landfill Totems (2019), and Destruction Loops (2019–2021), framing them as playful palimpsests of archived destruction that recall such wide-ranging works as the magnetic tape experiments of Alvin Lucier, the auto-destructive impulse and social engagement of German-born artist and activist Gustav Metzger, or even the ‘erasures’ of Robert Rauschenberg. In Hainbach’s works, creation and destruction are manifestly co-planar. As competing, yet complementary processes in an indistinct chronological framework, they exist in the experimental ‘cycle of constitution and dissolution’ that typifies all play (Levinovitz 2017, 281–82). Indeed, key characteristics of Hainbach’s musical process are, as I argue in the following, readily identifiable as gestures of ‘play’: they reveal a creative impulse to innovate and experiment, and involve those unpredictable, repetitive actions designed to both test and exploit the material limits of the medium and machinery of music, and facilitate moments of ‘benevolent catastrophe’ (Collins 1991, 44).

Introducing Hainbach

As a composer, lyricist, and live musician, Stefan Paul Goetsch has collaborated on more than seventy theatre and film soundtrack projects, but the Berlin-based musician is arguably best known under the stage name Hainbach from his popular YouTube channel of the same name. With more than 170,000 subscribers on the platform, a schedule of live performances on national and international stages, and a strong demand for his analogue recordings and VST plugins, Hainbach is currently among the more influential electronic musicians in Germany.¹ His musical style, musical processes, and own influences can perhaps best be summarized by means of a relatively random cross-sectional survey of the musician’s video titles spanning the more than five years that he has been active on his YouTube channel:

• ‘Guitar Pedals for Ambient/Experimental Music: Part 1’ (Hainbach 2018a).

• ‘Playable Sound Sculptures from Obsolete Test Equipment’ (Hainbach 2019f).

• ‘Processing Piano with Tape Loop Techniques’ (Hainbach 2019g).

• ‘Destruction Loops | Creating Sounds of Decay and Magnetic Distortion’ (Hainbach 2019a).

• ‘The Earth-Shaking Instrument Stockhausen Used | Rohde & Schwarz UBM’ (Hainbach 2019b).

Descriptions and classifications of Hainbach’s music invariably include the epithets ‘experimental,’ ‘ambient,’ and ‘atmospheric’ and reference the musician’s use of tape and obsolete tone generators, such as those used by Karlheinz Stockhausen. In her interview with the musician for Pitchfork magazine, for example, Madison Bloom opens with the observation that ‘Stefan Goetsch has spent years conducting madcap noise experiments’ (Bloom 2021). Hainbach’s own YouTube channel description consists solely of the laconic statement ‘I create videos on the composition of experimental electronic music,’ and on his Patreon page he positions his music ‘on the borders between ambient, experimental and beat-driven’ (Hainbach n.d.a, n.d.c).²

As a self-professed ‘electroacoustic’ musician, Hainbach presses a wide range of instruments into musical service.³ As well as playing predominantly acoustic instruments such as piano, gamelan strips, or kalimba, Hainbach incorporates an extensive compendium of electronic instruments into his experimental workflow. Although he frequently showcases contemporary instruments and modules, such as Teenage Engineering’s popular groove box, the OP-1, stand-alone Eurorack-compatible units like the Make Noise Strega, or the quirky handmade Ciat-Lonbarde Cocoquantus, as well as numerous individual Eurorack modules and effect pedals, the mainstay of both his musical style and his ongoing popularity is the innovative reprisal of obsolete analogue test equipment that was originally ‘designed to test telegraph wires and nuclear reactors’ and never intended to make music (Warren n.d.; Turner 2021). Having studied musicology at the University of Hamburg, Goetsch was inspired by early electronic musicians like Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, and the founding members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: ‘They didn’t have synthesizers. They had all this test equipment, measurement equipment, electronic filters, and sound generators meant for telecommunications and broadcast’ (Bloom 2021).

Arguably the most characteristic component in Hainbach’s music-making arsenal, alongside the musician’s stockpile of test equipment, is his use of electromagnetic tape to record, loop, and manipulate sound, often slowing the transport speed to half-speed—the ‘best speed’ as Hainbach frequently professes—to explore the hidden content of sounds in ways that recall the methods of early proponents of the new tape medium in the immediate post-war years of the last century (Hainbach 2019e).⁴ The once innovative experimental techniques of sampling and manipulating tape loops—sound on sound, tape delay, and tape echo—are now common practices in the musician’s studio and performances. Here, too, traces of the founding exponents of musique concrète are evident in Hainbach’s work, as well as the influence of John Cage, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno, and clear parallels to the techniques of ‘accidental’ tape-loop musician William Basinski.

Whether manipulating tape or exploring the sonic and material possibilities of test equipment, Hainbach frequently creates music, performances, and installations that play and experiment with the tension between production and destruction. While the making of music is traditionally associated with the creative processes of composition, assembly, and production, Hainbach simultaneously exploits the seemingly antithetical techniques of decomposition, disassembly, and destruction in his musical processes. ‘My goal,’ as the musician explains in an interview with Music Radar, ‘is to always make my own sounds and [to] try to break the machines’ (Turner 2021). He freely admits to ‘abusing this stuff,’ allowing the sound, and sometimes the instrument itself, to break down ‘beautifully’ (Warren n.d.).⁵

The Aesthetics of Destruction

In the context of this discussion, destruction rarely occurs without an equal but opposite creative process or outcome. As an aesthetic phenomenon, the sound of destruction encompasses and arises from a wide range of production techniques and creative processes; from the deliberate and overtly destructive to the less extreme—but no less radical—sounds of glitching imperfection, malfunction, and failure.⁶ Even in relatively mainstream music, we can readily identify deliberate attempts to undermine the fidelity of sound for creative effect. While audio engineers frequently strive to eliminate and avoid effects, noise, and artefacts, such as feedback, clipping, and distortion—all phenomena that degrade the clean, faithful hi-fi sound—musicians, in particular guitarists, have exploited the effects for almost as long as sound itself has been amplified electrically.⁷ One of the earliest examples was the guitarist Willie Kizart, who used an amplifier that had been damaged in transport on the 1951 recording of Ike Turner’s song ‘Rocket 88.’⁸ Link Wray achieved a similar sound on his 1958 recording of ‘Rumble’ by poking holes in the speaker cone of his amplifier with a pencil. Dave Davies of the Kinks did much the same with a razorblade to achieve the signature sound on the band’s 1964 recording of ‘You Really Got Me’ (Waksman 2003, 109).

More recently, some musicians and engineers have embraced a lo-fi aesthetic that valorizes the degraded sound associated with previous decades; in particular, the noise, hiss, crackle, interference, and environmental sounds associated with some analogue and low sample-rate and bit-rate digital sound recording and production (Dolan 2010, 464).⁹ Hip-Hop producers routinely incorporate the unmistakable hiss and crackle of a needle on vinyl or lo-fi samples as markers of ‘unconcealed intertextuality’ and historical authenticity (Williams 2014, 193). In an interview in 2005, Eminem described, for example, his use of ‘production’ techniques that involved the deliberate objective of degrading sound: ‘Now the key for me is to make the beat … so that it sounds like it came from a sample. Even if we got to put static on it and thin it out’ (Matthews 2005, 76).¹⁰ More extreme methods can be identified in the works of musicians such as John Cage, Milan Knížák, Yasunao Tone, and Oval.¹¹ In his piece Cartridge Music (1960), Cage engaged in ‘destructive sound-expansion’ practices, by replacing the stylus of a phonograph with a variety of objects such as pipe-cleaners, wires, and toothpicks (Stuart 2003, 47). Five years later, Knížák began production of a series with the programmatic title Destroyed Music:

I started to destroy records: scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them over and over again (which destroyed the needle and often the record player too) an entirely new music was created—unexpected, nerve-racking and aggressive. Compositions lasting one second or almost infinitely long (as when the needle got stuck in a deep groove and played the same phrase over and over). I developed this system further. I began sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing different parts of records back together, etc. to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds. (Ferenc 2013, 10)¹²

Digital media have also provided fruitful material for experimentation with the sound of destruction, as Yasunao Tone’s intentional use of digital glitching in his 1997 release Solo for Wounded CD ably illustrates (Sangild 2004, 261–62).

In each example already cited, the production of music is underpinned to some extent by an aesthetic of destruction. Arguably, most contemporary music incorporates some elements of sound degradation (distortion, overdrive, lo-fi effects, etc.) into the final production mix. Other creative works rely entirely on auto-destructive methods. In the art world, we are reminded, for example of Robert Rauschenberg’s well-known work Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Using some forty rubber erasers, Rauschenberg spent a month erasing a drawing the artist had been given by de Kooning for the specific purpose of its erasure (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2010). Now, framed and hanging in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rauschenberg’s drawing is a creative end product of destruction, whereas other works represent the valorization of an intentional auto-destructive process. First coined in 1959 by the committed activist and artist Gustav Metzger, ‘auto-destructive art’ was conceived as a process that could span a ‘life time varying from a few moments to twenty years’ (Metzger 1996, 470).¹³ Metzger recognized that art, with its conventional means and techniques, was powerless in the face of the destructive tendencies of capitalism, and specifically the apocalyptic potential of nuclear weapons. Through a series of revolutionary performance works, Metzger presented a creative alternative, one literally born out of destruction: it not only literally destroys itself, but also stages the symbolic destruction of destructive social systems. Metzger worked with a variety of materials and techniques, but perhaps the most famous is his use of acid and nylon. On 3 July 1961, he demonstrated his concept for an Acid Action Painting on London’s South Bank:

Three large nylon sheets in the colors white, black and red fluttered in a metal frame … Protected by a gas mask, he stepped forward, raised a spray gun and covered the surfaces with hydrochloric acid. Seconds later they began to dissolve and after twenty minutes their shredded remains were also gone. (Cork 1998, 33)

In his manifesto of 1959, Metzger recognized that auto-destructive art had potential not only as a visual spectacle, but also as a sound installation in which the disintegrative process could be isolated and amplified (Metzger 2023).

In a section of Yoko Ono’s volume of ‘event scores,’ entitled ‘Music,’ the influential artist provides a concise description of a gradual process that involves creation and destruction in equal measure, at once distinct elements while remaining paradoxically indistinguishable. Ono’s ‘Line Pieces’ from Spring 1964 provide the performance instructions:

LINE PIECE I

Draw a line

Erase it

LINE PIECE II

Erase lines

LINE PIECE III

Draw a line with yourself.

Go on drawing until you disappear. (Ono 2000)

Ono’s ‘Line Pieces’ are further reminiscent of Alvin Lucier’s tape loop composition, I am Sitting in a Room, that was first performed in the Guggenheim Museum in 1970. Lucier records himself reading a text that is both ‘libretto’ and project description, then re-records the playback in the same room before repeating the process iteratively. In the course of successive re-recordings, Lucier’s ‘speaking voice’ is gradually ‘smoothed out’ and ‘destroyed’; each looping repetition is different from the last, until ultimately the original words ‘disappear.’ At the end of the piece, they have been overwhelmed and seemingly replaced by the ‘natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech.’ Yet while they have been stripped of their semantic content, the ‘speech melody’ and rhythmic patterns of speech are largely retained in the acoustic response of the room (Strickland 1993, 199).¹⁴ As Sabine Sanio points out, Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room reflects Steve Reich’s understanding of ‘music as a gradual process’ (Sanio 2018, 87). In particular, Reich is ‘interested in perceptible processes,’ in that he wants to be able to ‘hear the process happening throughout the sounding music’ (Reich [2004] 2017, 431). This is only possible, Reich explains, if the process is sufficiently gradual. Clear parallels are evident, for example, in Hainbach’s Destruction Loops in which the creative process of destruction is both gradual and perceptible. Each looping repetition is similar to, but not an exact copy of, the previous one. Both works are underpinned by a cumulative process that culminates when the subtle changes of each iteration overwhelm the original; in their recorded forms, both works consist of complex involuted creations of destruction.

***

Hainbach’s music can be interpreted against a long historical backdrop of purposeful, repurposed imperfection. It embodies and valorizes those elements that some musicians and sound technicians have sought to eliminate from the products of their craft and incorporates auto-destructive processes reminiscent of the work of Metzger and Lucier. Hainbach embraces and amplifies the glitches and sounds associated with malfunctioning music media, coaxing them into rhythmical arrangements. He invites feedback by overdriving inputs with the output, using primarily analogue equipment. Rather than prioritizing a reduction of noise—a recognized affordance of much digital music—he explores that frequently unwanted by-product of sound recording. using granular synthesis, he deconstructs sound into its constituent particles and recombines them to explore the hidden textures of sound in all of its forms, or sound-on-sound techniques and band-pass filters to magnify, single out, and celebrate unruly frequencies (Hainbach 2018b). Hainbach explores the transience of recording media, embracing the inherent weaknesses of tape as an archival medium while accelerating and recording the process of deterioration. He resurrects obsolete technology, unreliable relics from experimental laboratories, and equipment destined for the scrapheap, allowing them to speak again, like the voice of a ‘ghost of the past caught in a metal cage’ (Bloom 2021), or capturing the ‘howls and whispers’ of their swan song (Greenwald 1986). Three recent projects illustrate Hainbach’s process: Tagwerk, Landfill Totems, and the aptly titled Destruction Loops series.

Tagwerk

The first and most recent project under consideration is an album released in October 2022 on Industrial Complex records bearing the programmatic title Tagwerk (A Day’s Work). Completed in little more than a day on a Crumar DS-2 synthesizer, Tagwerk was inspired by the Italian-made synth that simply lived up to its reputation as ‘notoriously unreliable’ (Hainbach 2022a).¹⁵ Purchased used, the DS-2 arrived in Hainbach’s studio already ‘broken’ and ‘malfunctioning,’ but it was this ‘error in the machine’ that forced the musician to abandon conventional keyboard playing techniques and adapt and innovate in response to the quirks and limitations of the machine (Hainbach 2022a). According to the album’s liner notes, this album is about ‘embracing the broken.’ As the title of the album suggests, the condensed recording session was predicated on the ‘fear … that it would break completely’ (Industrial Complex n.d.). The resulting music consists of fragile noise-tinged melodies delicately suspended above a robust foundation of pulsating, modulated chords. Keenly aware of the inspirational role ‘broken gear’ has played across the broad history of music, Hainbach cites the influential German musician Stefan Betke, who produces under the pseudonym Pole, in his YouTube video premiering the album. According to an origin story that recalls the guitarist Willie Kizart’s own happy accident, Betke accidentally dropped a Waldorf 4-Pole filter that subsequently malfunctioned, creating the clicks, cracks, and pops that have since become the musician’s signature sound (Willim 2013b, 126; see also Ashline 2002, 88–9):

Structurally, the music of Pole is based on abstract, irregular rhythms created by a defect, analogue sound filter Betke uses, namely the ‘Waldorf 4-Pole’ filter. These rhythms principally are defect frequencies full of interference (in audio terms commonly referred to as ‘noise’), not unlike the crackling sounds of vintage vinyl, except for a harder, purely digital quality, which makes them very immediate. (Pole 2000)

Like Pole, Hainbach turns accident into opportunity (Willim 2013b, 126). He embraces the ‘randomness’ of a broken DS-2, allowing it to frame, inspire, and define his compositions (Noguera 2022, 65). Material unreliability introduces welcome elements of the unpredictable. As Lisa Le Feuvre writes, through ‘failure one has the potential to stumble on the unexpected’ (2010, 12).¹⁶ Where exactly in Tagwerk design ends and the serendipitous sound of destruction begins is difficult to determine, but with this most recent release Hainbach leverages the chance discoveries between intention and the threat of failure that characterize much of his output.

Landfill Totems

Framed by a similar set of limitations and the familiar unpredictable potential for and of mechanical and sonic failure, the Landfill Totems project was inspired by Hainbach’s seemingly improbable interest in re-purposing discarded equipment from a variety of medical laboratories, nuclear test facilities, and telecommunications research centres: ‘These things were meant to look at photons or launch satellites into space and to check airplane vibrations but they’re completely obsolete with today’s technology’ (Warren n.d.). Whereas many electronic musicians would be familiar with even the most esoteric of synthesizers and modules in Hainbach’s studio, few could even guess at the musical potential of bulky instruments such as the Marconi TF2019B Noise Generator, the HP3781A Pattern Generator, the HP3782A Error Detector, or a Brüel & Kjaer Printer (Hainbach 2019f). Yet, as Hainbach points out in a video from early 2019, the use of such equipment harks back to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and other proponents of electronic music, who used ‘sine generators, pulse generators, [and] broadcast filters’ in the days before synthesizers (Hainbach 2019d; see also O’Brien 2021). When offered the opportunity for a three-month residency in the PNDT Gallery in Berlin Mitte, Hainbach installed his burgeoning collection in the gallery, assembling the pieces into three human-sized towers of obsolete test equipment that would otherwise have been destined for ‘landfill.’ Resurrected and reinvigorated, each piece serves as a ‘totem’—a future-facing reminder of its ancestral roots in both scientific research and music history, as well as:

a commentary on the environmental cost of progress; what was once the pinnacle of technology quickly becomes unviable and destined for the scrapheap, if not for the intervention of Hainbach—creating beauty from that which is thought to be obsolete. (Spitfire Audio n.d.a)¹⁷

Landfill Totems were, of course, more than a static installation, and much more than simply salvaged obsolescence: at 8:30pm on 26 October 2019, Hainbach brought the installations to life in a dynamic public performance. During the 35-minute-long vernissage, Hainbach created an immersive, multi-dimensional sonic landscape, one that is heavily textured and ever-changing, even unstable like the physical towers themselves. Grainy, contoured drones undulate and mutate in pitch and timbre, while resonant frequencies howl and reverberate. Sparse sequences of slewed sine tones and pulses, band-passed feedback, and pinged filters echo briefly across the dystopian-tinged landscape and dissipate. There are halting, yet insistent bass-heavy industrial rhythms, possibly emanating from the Brüel & Kjaer 1615 Bandpass Filter, that pulsate beneath an interchange of moody, glitching percussion. Some are eerily familiar, recalling the rhythms of communication technology from decades past: Morse code-like patterns from a Data Products PG303, originally designed to send out sequenced impulses for telephone/radio testing, are interspersed with sporadic percussive bursts reminiscent of a dot-matrix printer (Middleton 2021). Others tick more ominously, as if portending their own imminent demise, reminding us of the transience of technology and the knowledge that, after the performance, the totems will just become ‘a bunch of dead gear again’ (Turner 2021).

After the final performance in December 2019, Hainbach was reluctant to allow the instruments simply to ‘lose their purpose and just like rot away in [his] cellar or something’ (Warren n.d.). Instead, he archived the audio from the performances, making it available on his Patreon site, and in April 2021 he released a seven-track album and a comprehensive sample library and plugin, both bearing the title Landfill Totems, in collaboration with London-based Spitfire Audio (Warren n.d.). Yet as well as recording and immortalizing the sounds produced by his vintage test equipment, he also unwittingly recorded and archived the sound of their destruction, blurring the boundaries between creation and destruction:

There was a lot of dying on me right while I was playing it. The first track features one of the most precise, beautifully made bio-tektronix function generators. I started it, but instead of doing the normal thing, which is to go ‘beeeeep’ it did, ‘da dang dang dang da dang dang dang,’ kind of a Latin rhythm. So I quickly composed the whole track, recorded it, and I was really happy. I went out for a coffee, and when I came back 10 minutes later, it started to smell of burned electronics. So that was its swan song. It basically died while playing this piece. That happened a bunch of times. Many of the sounds I can’t reproduce anymore because it’s basically the circuitry dying. And some of the stuff is not fixable at all because the operational amplifiers don’t exist anymore. (Bloom 2021)

Hainbach’s experience recalls the words of Bebe Barron, who together with husband Louis Barron produced the seminal all-electronic soundtrack for the 1956 feature film Forbidden Planet. Featuring circuits taken from Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) that were—like Hainbach’s own test equipment—never designed or intended for music production, elements of the Barrons’ soundtrack emerged from the unique sounds of an overloaded circuit:

the dying of Morbius was actually taken from one of our circuits … we recorded it as it actually happened. It started making sounds, it reached a kind of a climax, and then it died. And the whole dying process of that particular circuit … we used for Morbius’ dying. And it was the actual dying of the circuit … You never could get them to start making sounds again once that happened. They sort of burnt themselves out. (Barron 2000)¹⁸

The sounds of destruction are unplanned and unpredictable, but also an outcome inherent to the project design.¹⁹ While key plot lines in Forbidden Planet are underpinned by the unpredictable nature of Louis Barron’s re-purposed circuits, Landfill Totems are similarly characterized by the fickle ‘built-in uncertainty’ of ‘long-forgotten test equipment … given a new lease of life … in an unforeseen capacity as instruments’ (Greenwald 1986; Spitfire Audio n.d.b). Hainbach views his totems much as Louis Barron viewed the circuits, not as ‘mere machines, designed to produce some predictable sonic pattern on command’ (Greenwald 1986). Rather, the unpredictable behaviour, response, and breaking-point of the circuits was an ‘essential aspect of their design’ (Spitfire Audio n.d.b), one that allowed for what Nicolas Collins (1991, 44) has called the ‘benevolent catastrophe.’ As Collins writes, the ‘analog circuitry of older electronic equipment usually sounded best and did the most interesting things when it was being “misused” or was on the verge of breakdown’ (1991, 44). Hainbach’s Landfill Totems plugins reproduce the beauty of breakage in a controlled setting, by allowing users to ‘discover a world of unpredictable, complex sounds’ through the manipulation of presets with such programmatic names as ‘Malfunctions’ and ‘Broken Oscillator Keys’ (Spitfire Audio n.d.a).

Destruction Loops

The underlying creative processes of Tagwerk or Landfill Totems are unintentionally destructive, yet Hainbach, like Bebe and Louis Barron before him, deliberately pushes the boundaries of the equipment, exploiting the fortuitous chance events caused by circuits and valves working at or beyond their limits. Further destructive gestures abound in Hainbach’s compositions. Whereas Landfill Totems are frequently characterized by the ‘crackle and hum of … dying machinery,’ the deliberate sonic décollage of decaying sound is a key figure in Hainbach’s five-part Destruction Loops series (Boomkat 2021). The impetus and proposed methodology for the first iteration of Destruction Loops came from the eccentric Swedish musician ‘Simon the Magpie,’ who challenged Goetsch in an Instagram post at the beginning of 2019 to undertake a destructive looping project: ‘you’re going to do a tape loop like you do where it goes around something, but it’s gonna be fucking destructive and I want you to do it so it goes around and slowly depletes into something completely broken’ (Hainbach 2019a). Hainbach was immediately reminded of a process that the American composer William Basinski had accidentally stumbled on almost two decades earlier: ‘Now, I don’t know if Simon was inspired by Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, but I certainly am’ (Hainbach 2019a).

The genesis of Disintegration Loops is well documented: taking his own inspiration from the earliest proponents of experimental tape-loop music, in the late 1970s Basinski began ‘recording the detritus of his day: errant traffic, random radio broadcasts, freezer buzz. He would then loop and manipulate such recordings, and they became the backbone of his work’ (Savy 2013). Almost two decades later, Basinski discovered the old, forgotten tapes in a cardboard box in his Williamsburg apartment (Beaumont-Thomas 2019). Confronted—like Hainbach some two decades later—with a technology that had become almost obsolete, he decided to rescue the tape loops, and with the help of a CD burner, Basinski began to digitize and archive the analogue recordings in the summer of 2001. While monitoring the digital encoding of the old analogue loops, he began to perceive subtle changes in the otherwise regular repetition of the decades-old ostinatos (Bogalheiro 2018, 294). Gradually, the audible changes were accompanied by visible markers of disintegration: a fine dust collected on the playback head of the tape player and flecks of the metallic oxide coating detached themselves from the plastic substrate backing. In the next hour, Basinski listened spellbound to the gradually changing, evolving (and devolving) loop, that ‘disintegrated in the most profoundly beautiful way. The sustains sort of fell away, and yet somehow the core of it stayed—the attack and the basic rhythm of the melody—hanging on desperately until the very end’ (Basinski 2012).

Basinski’s innovation involved the recognition and harnessing of the ‘organic change … at the heart of early audio machinery … defined by the fact that machines are always in the process of failing’ (Frere-Jones 2014). The natural degradation of magnetic audio tape, so fundamental to the signature sound of Disintegration Loops, is also the inherent weakness of the medium that Hainbach exploits, through largely mechanical means, in his own Destruction Loops project.²⁰ To this end, he employed three tape machines, and recorded three simple loops. The first comprised sparse chord sequences played on an acoustic piano; for the second, Hainbach employed his Roland Juno 6—a polyphonic synth from the 1980s—to produce a lightly modulated chordal drone in a higher register; and for the third loop, he returned to acoustic instruments. Using a Uher Report Monitor 4000, Hainbach recorded a short, repetitive, percussive melody using three Morfbeats Gamelan Strips while simultaneously monitoring the recording and allowing the playback to be re-recorded as an echo. Excerpts of each of the three recordings yielded tape loops that varied in length from 3 to 4 metres, allowing for a morphing melodic structure of elements subtly moving in and out of phase.

Slowed down to half-speed or even further, the tapes looped around the individual spindles of the supply reels, passed over the playback heads, and then stretched out across the room, before wrapping around a microphone stand and returning to each machine in an endless loop. Along the way, Hainbach incorporated various ‘oppositional’ elements intended to hasten the degradation of the tape and mimic the natural decay and disintegration so fundamental to Basinski’s work.²¹ With each pass, the tape arched over various abrasive objects and surfaces, such as knives, serrated blades, and sandpaper. The full 3.5-hour performance begins with the halting gamelan loop, reminiscent of the ship’s bell in Gavin Bryar’s Sinking of the Titanic (1975) and fluctuating in speed as it responds to the various abrasive and friction-inducing features of the physical loop. This is no closed loop in a stable equilibrium, independent of outside forces and conditions. The manual nature of the tape transport controls is immediately evident: mechanical clicks of the playback button are audible in the final edit and when Hainbach sets the third and final element, the drone tape, in motion; and the pitch slews as the tape gathers speed and settles into its own quarter-speed loop. The mechanical sounds, subtle tape wow and flutter, and occasional granular distortion of the first hour become more pronounced until two loops break at the splice point, and of the original three loops only the halting Juno drone can be heard.

Production and Destruction

Whereas it would be easy to discount the increasing rumble, distortion, and hiss of tape noise as undesirable side effects external to the process, they become—much as the ambient environmental sounds in performances of John Cage’s 4′33″ do—constituent creative elements, each integral to the performance. The sounds of destruction do not ‘interrupt’ the playback of the original loops, but are, as Cage argues, ‘fluent with it’ and make their production process perceptible (Kostelanetz and Cage 1987, 105). As Hainbach’s musical loops are abraded and subtracted from, the sounds of destruction evolve and assert themselves additively, weaving in, through, over, and beneath the original, creating, filling, and punctuating not silences, but almost-erasures. Hainbach’s creative work ‘becomes a self-destructing sound sculpture’ (Hainbach 2019a), in which creation and destruction are co-present and indistinguishable; interdependent and entwined.

Conceptually, therefore, Destruction Loops reveal a resemblance to the complex surface structure of the palimpsest. The literal palimpsests of antiquity were created ‘by a process of layering whereby the existing text was erased, using various chemical methods, and the new text was written over the old one’ (Dillon 2005, 244). Here, too, creation and destruction exist in an indistinct chronological and hierarchical relationship to one another. The first creative step in the production of the new text is the destructive act of abrasion and the second is a re-inscription designed to overwhelm and replace the original. Yet where the erasure of the original was incomplete, both texts continued in an indistinct concurrence of the destroyed and the created. Thus, although the palimpsestic process appears to involve a sequence of layers, one buried, as it were, beneath the other, depth is an illusion: the palimpsestuous end product is, as Thomas De Quincey writes in Suspiria de Profundis, ‘not … a succession, but … parts of a coexistence’ (1871, 19–20).²² As Shari Benstock explains, the palimpsest has ‘an entwined and encoded structure, not a layered one’ (1994, 350), reminiscent of a Möbius ribbon on whose ‘involuted’ surface we are unable to distinguish between above and below, inside and out (Maniquis 2011, 311; Hainbach 2019c).

Hainbach’s Destruction Loops exhibit the same complex, palimpsestuous interplay of repeated abrasions and re-inscriptions, of destruction and production.²³ We can, like Hainbach himself, view them as a collage, and indeed also a décollage: they reveal the ‘paradoxical tension’ between the ‘meeting’ and ‘dissection’ of juxtaposed elements—later iterations include layered encounters of music and spoken word recordings—typical of the collage form (Copeland 2002, 14–15). Yet there are also the chance encounters between constructed sound and the sonic evidence of their destruction that recall the practice of décollage. Essentially ‘reverse collages,’ décollages are produced through the ‘unraveling of a ready-made or previously made collage’ (Kjellman-Chapin 2006, 87). Hainbach’s destructive intervention by means of the conscious application of friction, abrasion, and—in later iterations of the Destruction Loops series—fire, introduces continual oscillations between collage and décollage. From the outset, the looping layers of Destruction Loops are exposed to the actions of a décollagist: ‘the material is willfully and consciously manipulated by a person who becomes “maker” by virtue of that activity’ (Kjellman-Chapin 2006, 91). Hainbach abrades and ‘lacerate[s] the outer layers of found materials to reveal other strata beneath,’ yet simultaneously a new collage is allowed to evolve. The compositional process involves the layering of the collage and the unravelling of the décollage, but the result is, nevertheless, the contradictory surface structure of the palimpsest (Dillon 2005, 244; McDonagh 1987, 211). Audible artefacts of the destructive process are continually inscribed, and begin to assert and amplify themselves, while the original materials are transformed, subdued, yet somehow eerily retained. Here, Basinski’s insight is equally valid for Hainbach’s Destruction Loops: ‘the core of it stayed—the attack and the basic rhythm of the melody—hanging on desperately until the very end’ (Basinski 2012; Hainbach 2020b).

Destruction Loops involves, as Steve Reich ([2004] 2017, 431) might describe it, an extremely gradual process. The first iteration of Destruction Loops lasted 03:23:24. The second, entitled Hate Loops, 05:17:15; the third, subtitled Regret, lasted 06:29:39; the fourth, achieved digitally through bit-rate and sample-rate reduction techniques, lasted 01:05:37; and the fifth iteration, presented in 2021 at the Impuls-Festival in Halle, was live-streamed for 17 hours before the live-stream failed (Hainbach 2020a).²⁴ With each iteration, the tapes do not loop as part of a closed system that is immune from external interference or internal irregularity. Each looping repetition becomes a force for difference and creation in an open system that invites instability, uncertainty, and unpredictability on an entropic trajectory to completion (Bogalheiro 2018, 299). It is only through repetition that this change can occur (Tamm 1995, 23; Deleuze 1994, 2).²⁵ The tape loops and their sounds tenaciously withstand destructive abrasion, succumbing only gradually, incrementally, much like the example Reich provides of the gradual music process: ‘pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it coming to rest’ ([2004] 2017, 431). Both resilient and compliant, the magnetic tapes of Destruction Loops and their sonic contents are therefore also manifestations of Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the ‘ideal object,’ which is one that ‘resists me, while yet also yielding; yields, while never simply giving way before me. It is capable of being deformed beyond recognition while yet persisting in itself’ (Connor 2011, 5; Bachelard 1947, 59). Yet, like the swing that comes to rest, Hainbach’s loops are ultimately also of finite duration; the end only coming when the tapes break or are ‘played out.’

Finally, therefore, the characteristic activity of play provides a useful and accurate template for the defining compositional gestures of Destruction Loops. Besides the often posited role of ‘play’ as the ‘cradle of creativity’ (Winnicott 2005, 135; see also Huizinga 1944, ix and Perroni 2013, 28–32), and therefore the frequently acknowledged close ‘affinity between music and play’ (Huizinga 1944, 158), play is also the expression of ‘our capacity to experiment, to rearrange and select existing materials [and] to imagine unprecedented combinations’ (Sommer 2009, 89). In his study of play, Hans Mogel notes that playing goes ‘hand in hand with curiosity, it is based on the novelty of things, seeks surprises’ (2008, 4).²⁶ Hainbach’s Destruction Loops is similarly born of an urge to combine and innovate and an ‘openness to experimentation’ that invites and embraces the unpredictable (Boomkat 2021). It is composed of combinations of layers that are constantly shifting in palimpsestuous relation to each other; they vie with each other for attention, yet no one voice dominates or completely silences the other (Alarcón 1988–1990, 35–36). The process is intentional, but the outcome indeterminate and governed by unforeseeable chance factors. This is, according to Robert Willim, the characteristically unruly behaviour of innovative artistic endeavour:

Playing with the wild and that which is out of control has often occurred in artistic boundary-bending. The making of art is, to some extent, based on combinations of controlled methodological work and the utilization of chance and serendipity. (Willim 2013b, 125; see also Willim 2013a, 84).

It is also the nature of both experimental and electroacoustic music. In his lecture on ‘indeterminacy,’ John Cage defines the experimental action as ‘the one the outcome of which is not foreseen’ (1979, 39). Similarly, electroacoustic music is, as the American composer Kim Cascone notes, created ‘by processing and layering electronic and concrete sounds in such a way that new and interesting relationships are formed’ (2011, 143).

The objective of play, or ‘putting things into play,’ is therefore also to enter into an exploration of the creative potential of the object, to survey its affordances (Connor 2011, 5; see also Levinovitz 2017, 282). If the plaything is that perfect synthesis of resistance and compliance, of ‘acceptance and refusal,’ then it withstands much before its potential is exhausted (Bachelard 1947, 59). The gesture of play, with its ‘crafty struggle for mastery,’ is a creative act with destruction at its horizon (Bachelard 1947, 27), while the ‘plaything’ itself, as Alan Levinovitz writes, must be ‘something the player is willing and able to destroy’ (Levinovitz 2017, 278). The purpose of play is not necessarily:

to build something lasting … falling apart is an equally viable form of activity. A toy becomes something then falls apart so as to become something else. The cycle of constitution and dissolution is an integral motif, for the player must be willing to make and unmake an object in order for it to be a toy. (Levinovitz 2017, 282)

Both creative and destructive impulses are readily identified in manifestations of play in all stages of creative life: as Baudelaire pointed out in his essay ‘A Philosophy of Toys,’ there are the children who create towering stacks of wooden building blocks, testing the limits of their teetering creations before revelling in the destructive act that causes them to fall;²⁷ or we might reflect on the willingness of the extreme alpinist to explore the narrowing asymptote between risk and reward, life and death, in the mountains (Mogel 2008, 5). Indeed, play is the means by which we test not only the creative potential of our environment, but also its limits. Here, in theorizing Hainbach’s creative process, Stephen Connor’s teleology of play is particularly relevant. According to Connor, we play with playthings:

for an entirely circular reason—namely, to find out how much play (in the sense of give, stretch or variability), they may be found to possess. Sometimes, the action of taking an object to its limits will result in its being tested to destruction. Eventually, the paper-clip snaps. Perhaps all play has at its horizon the death of the plaything. When we put something to work, we use it for a particular purpose. In play, we seek not so much to use them as to use them up. The point of putting things into play may be to play them out, to see how far they go, how far we can go with the open totality of their affordances. And, at the same time, we put ourselves into play, we use these objects to play with ourselves, even to play with our own play, seeking its possibilities and limits. (2011, 5)

Characterized by an experimental drive to interrogate boundaries, play is a creative act that revels in directionless uncertainty, but it also reveals a tendency to brush against the extremities of possibility where creation and destruction are co-planar, resembling the convolutions of the palimpsest and its oscillations between collage and décollage.

Conclusion

If the history of music media shows us anything, it is, at least in part, that improvements and advances have been motivated by the pursuit of sound fidelity and a desire to overcome the perceived limitations and inadequacies of current technology (Cascone [2004] 2017). Perceptions of fidelity have evolved in the course of the last century, but from the outset, the goal has often been ‘realistic’ or ‘authentic’ sound reproduction such that the machine and the medium are rendered inaudible (Perlman 2004, 784). In 1915, the Edison Phonograph was marketed as having ‘no tone’ of its own; it was as if the ‘singer or the musician was in the room, not in the box’ (Johnson 1877, 304; 1913, 247). More recently, Bose QuietComfort noise-cancelling headphones are advertised with a similar focus on ‘lifelike authenticity’ of sound reproduction (Hainge 2007, 28). At the same time, each new stage in the evolution has been accompanied by its own signature aesthetic of failure that has inspired musicians and been exploited ever since Pierre Schaeffer stumbled on the musical potential of a skipping record in the early 1940s (Sangild 2004, 259). Indeed, innovative new techniques are frequently discovered by accident or the serendipitous malfunction or failure: a chance scratch of a record needle on vinyl led Grandmaster Flash to discover ‘scratching,’ the signature sound of hip-hop (Bates 2004, 284–85); and the commercial failure of Roland’s TB-303 has facilitated its appropriation by techno musicians since the early 1980s (Reynolds 1999, 31–34).

While digital technology glitches in its own unique stuttering way, the inherent unpredictability of analogue instruments and media has been the inspiration for much of Hainbach’s musical output. In each of the three works discussed, Hainbach experiments or plays with the materials and media of music, salvaging discarded or obsolete equipment, surveying its affordances and embracing its serendipitous unpredictability. Always oriented towards an exploration of the possibilities and limits of his materials, Hainbach welcomes the sound of destruction. In Tagwerk, he exploits the limitations placed on technique and sound production by broken technology and allows its unpredictable behaviour and impending failure to guide composition and sound design. With Landfill Totems, Hainbach more explicitly incorporates the sound of malfunction. Using salvaged obsolete test equipment, he addresses the environmental cost of progress, arguing that ‘progress doesn’t always have to cause destruction,’ while simultaneously exploring the potential of machines to output sounds they were never designed to make and using the sound of their inevitable destruction in the final mix (Boomkat 2021). In Destruction Loops, destruction and creation are perhaps even more clearly inseparable and indistinguishable. At each point in the archived work, we encounter a moment of destruction and an equivalent moment of creation. As the metal oxide is abraded, new timbres, rhythms, and artefacts are created; as the process of destruction advances a creative work emerges.

As an aesthetic category, destruction spans a broad gamut of sounds and techniques that stem from a desire to expand the repertoire of the possible. Experimenting with the elasticity of sound and the material bounds of sound production equipment, musicians like Hainbach celebrate the transparent audibility of the medium and machinery of music; they test and toy with limits, court malfunction, exploit the unpredictable, and archive successful failure and the occasional ‘benevolent catastrophe.’ Artefacts of destruction are subtractive and additive. Entwined on an intricate, roiling surface where creation involves destruction in its many forms, and destruction is a creative act, we encounter an overloaded circuit that orchestrates its own swansong; a temperamental oscillator that surprises with unpredictable beauty; and a deteriorating magnetic tape that sheds its sonic content like a progressive décollage while still retaining a ghostly, rhythmic semblance of itself, and rebuilding itself with artful artefacts of destruction.

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Billy Badger

Billy Badger is currently a Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Tasmania. He has published widely in the fields of contemporary German poetry, music and art.

Notes

1 Subscriber count as of March 2023. Live performances listed for September–October 2022: 9 September, Hertogenbosch; 10 September, Utrecht; 17 September, Munich; 30 September, Bochum Modus Festival; 6 October, Izmir digitZmir; 8 October, Berlin Vintage Computer Festival; 20 October, Halle Impuls; 27 October, Frankfurt (Hainbach 2022b). Hainbach has recorded on the following labels: Opal Tapes, Seil Records, Spring Break Tapes, Limited Interest, and Marionette (Hainbach n.d.a); Fundamental in collaboration with SonicLab; Landfill Totems with Spitfire Audio; Motors, Wires, Gong Amp, Dials, and Noises with AudioThing.

2 See also Turner (2021).

3 For a definition of electroacoustic music, see for example Holmes (2002, 7).

4 Hainbach’s ‘merch’ even includes a ‘Half-Speed’ cap (Hainbach n.d.b).

5 ‘Some units break so beautifully that their swan song is just amazing because it unlocks hidden layers of distortion that sing with overtones’ (McKinnon 2019).

6 It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive overview of the history of the aesthetic of failure and destruction. See for example Stuart (2003) and Cascone (2017). See also Fisher (1974).

7 Feedback was initially ‘a nuisance in sound reinforcement and recording, but the sonic possibilities began to reveal themselves to musicians’ (Warner 2019, 84).

8 Credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, the band was actually Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm (Waksman 2003, 109).

9 For a commentary on the distinction between hi-fi and lo-fi aesthetic, see for example Newton (2016). In particular, the lo-fi aesthetic renders medium audible: ‘The history of the development of different audio formats from wax to vinyl to tape to CD, indeed, seems itself to be driven by a single-minded, stubborn desire to render the communications system or medium entirely transparent (or inaudible, rather) and to eradicate entirely any interference coming from the system or the medium itself we can instead focus solely on the pure audio content of our choice’ (Hainge 2007, 28).

10 Similarly, ‘Madonna’s 2003 release “American Life”, produced by Mirwais Ahmadzai, contains backing tracks of 78rpm record noise’ (Bates 2004, 289).

11 ‘Oval made a name for itself by its use of damaged technologies, namely, the use of deliberately marked and disfigured CDs that when played created percussive clips and pops’ (Ashline 2002, 88–89).

12 Christian Marclay used similar methods: ‘To create a rhythm I would […] break things. … Then I would use skipping records to record loops on the cassette recorder and those became the rhythms for the band’ (Marclay and Kahn 2003, 20).

13 Metzger’s own influences can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the surrealist, Dadaist and futurist movements. In 1922, Man Ray assembled his artwork Object to be Destroyed (see Mileaf 2004, 5).

14 ‘I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear then are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as the demonstration of a physical fact but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have’ (A Channel 2017).

15 According to vintagesynth.com, ‘This is possibly one of the most unreliable synths when found on the used market! Models almost always have failed components in either the monosynth or polysynth stages. Most frequently encountered are failures of one or both DCOs, or the entire polysynth stage in of itself. Purchase of a DS-2 can be a VERY risky proposition!’ (Vintage Synth Explorer n.d.).

16 Failure can be approached in numerous ways, but here failure is viewed broadly as an irrevocable disruption of intention: ‘that moment of breakage between the reality of the present and the anticipated future’ (Jeevendrampillai et al. 2017, 2).

17 Gustav Metzger had similar objectives with his own auto-destructive art. According to Lucy Watling, ‘the artist sought to emphasise how even mechanically-produced objects—in which he believed society was placing a dangerous level of faith—would ultimately degrade, a process over which humans would have no control’ (Watling 2012).

18 ‘Morbius’ is the sole monster on the planet Altair IV. See Eichenberger (2019, 38); see also Wierzbicki (2005, 40): ‘we use the actual dying of that circuit; you can hear it going through the agonies of death and winding down.’

19 ‘[Y]ou think they’ll do one thing, and usually they do something even more interesting that you hadn’t expected’ (Greenwald 1986; Spitfire Audio n.d.b).

20 ‘Tape that self-destruct are nothing new [sic]—Basinski famously used the accidental process of his old loops disintegrating to create the beautiful Disintegration Loops album. But to do it on purpose is something I have not heard so far. Because I don't have twenty years to wait until my tapes have gone bad, I use mechanical tools … to surprising results’ (Hainbach 2019a).

21 Here, employing André Leroi-Gourhan’s typology of percussion, we can classify the oppositional tools as ‘percussion of contact’ (Bachelard 1947, 33).

22 Sarah Dillon differentiates between ‘palimpsestic’ production of reinscribed texts and the complex ‘palimpsestuous’ surface structure of the palimpsest (Dillon 2005, 245).

23 ‘[I]t is a manuscript whose creation paradoxically involves repeated erasures or destructions’ (see de Groote 2005, 245).

24 Durations taken from edited Bandcamp recordings.

25 As John Cage argues, ‘If we think that things are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay enough attention to all of the details’ (See Kostelanetz and Cage 1987, 115).

26 My translation.

27 ‘The overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys … When this desire has implanted itself in the child’s cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary agility and strength. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against walls, throws it on the ground. From time to time he makes it re-start its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvellous life comes to a stop’ (Baudelaire 1964, 202).