“And This Is How New Music Is Made”: Stefan Paul Goetschs Hate Loops im Rahmen der Neuen Musik

Abstract

In August 2019, German experimental electronic musician Stefan Goetsch released “Hate Loops,” a minimal, yet complex multi-tape loop collage conceived in part, as the work’s title suggests, as a creative response to destructive online comments about new music on social media. As a creation of “archived destruction” Goetsch’s work is clearly inspired by William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, but it reflects rich and complex connections beyond Basinki and this musician’s own influences to the foundations of what Robert Fink calls “maximally repetitive music.” In this essay, I trace the musical and conceptual provenance of Basinki’s work, back through the works and ideas of the “holy trinity” of minimal music, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, and John Cage, to early examples of repetitive music before the turn of the twentieth century. Such a contextualization necessarily involves a discussion that includes common ideas of repetition and difference; as well as the subtractive and additive processes of disintegration. I argue that despite the obvious influence of Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, Goetsch has created a deliberate palimpsest of creation and destruction that recalls Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, but more readily reflects the auto-destructive impulse and social engagement of German-born artist and activist Gustav Metzger.