The Background World

[captainbeyond]

Regarding the last 7 minutes of The Background World:

Trent discussed using a tape looping technique on the Patriot's Day soundtrack. I have a strong feeling this was how the ending loop of The Background World was created. It's possible they could have pasted together a loop taken from 52 different days or weeks to create the quicker progression of the insane deterioration.

*edit*
I am not completely stuck on the idea that it had to be done in 52 consecutive days or even 52 days total. I am totally open to the idea of loop playback being captured 52 times in however the amount of time it took to get to the noisy mess at the end. Could have been 52 different playbacks of the loop over a few days. Who knows. If it wasn't done this way, then I imagine this process could have been an inspiration for this section of the song.

While bits of piano and strings are decipherable at times, for much of the score, the instruments were deliberately distorted through a device of their own creation. “We had a friend of ours build this machine that is two tape machines hooked to a computer, where it just endlessly locks something in and copies from one to the next, each one degenerating another time,” Reznor says. “The longer you let it sit, the worse it gets. You’d go to lunch and come back and it sounds 8-track/tape-ish. Leave it overnight and it’s unrecognizable, but it does it in a way that’s interesting, that’s warm and nostalgic.”
Almost every bit of instrumentation, including live strings, went through that filter. “We pretty much used that through the whole score in different ways,” Reznor says. “Sometimes it sounded more aggressive and sounded more electronic, but [there were] real acoustic instruments played and then glued together by this process of taping it over and over again.”

On this film, we started experimenting with tape loops. We created something that had two different cassette decks. It would record something back and forth, forever, until you stopped it. You’d play a piano motif that’s maybe eight bars long and just let it go, and it starts to feel like a Xerox copy, a little bit. If you left it all night and came back the next day, it sounds strangely familiar and warm, in a way that a computer couldn’t have done, or a plug in couldn’t have done. It started to invoke the sense of memory or place. It had a real kind of homey, organic human sound. We created probably 30 of those things and would let them go for various amount of time, depending on how well they deteriorated. That provided the foundation for all of the heartfelt motifs in the picture.
It was a recording technique we discovered that we’d been thinking about, but we hadn’t really had a reason to deploy it. That become something that we then used for everything else in the whole score. We’re not imagining anyone would hear that and say, “I wonder if they used several tape decks talking to each other?” It provides a road map that, if we pay attention initially, we start to wait for those things to kind of reveal themselves. That gives us the kind of fenced-in world for that film.

What does everyone think about this?