![]() The tracks call attention to themselves twice once at the beginning, when you’re first stunned by its tragic yearning, and then at the end, when the crumbling sounds give way to a more disruptive degradation. It’s an ambient album, and almost fits Brian Eno’s original definition of ambient music - “as interesting as it is ignorable.” It’s certainly interesting, but only slightly ignorable. These edited and processed loops would become “The Disintegration Loops.” Each track on the album consists of a repeated loop in slow decay, until the tapes’ lungs tire, take rest, then vanish completely. But the process of taking the tape and running it through the tapehead damaged the tapes, creating cracks and gaps that Basinski found interesting. While revisiting these recordings in the late 90’s he sought to preserve them by converting the analog tape into a digital format. Before establishing himself as one of the leading ambient composers of the 21st century, he used these tapes to make experimental soundscape compositions influenced by Steve Reich. In the 80’s and 90’s Basinski would tape recordings he found from places like FM radio and treat them with delay and reverb. The album’s creative narrative mirrors this complete process. This liminality allows the album to speak to any epochal event, always of the time, always primordial, always changing. There is indeed a distinct feeling that “something has happened” which is embedded into these tracks, but just as equally, a feeling that “something will happen.” “The Disintegration Loops” creates a liminal space, throwing every molecule its sound can reach into an interstitial realm. Every track on this album feels not like an homage to death, but an homage to living with the knowledge of what will be. The album speaks more to the entirety of temporality than a single endpoint - death here is just as important as birth and the life between, where it can be difficult to see decay even as it’s happening to us. The work’s poetic destruction exists not as the centerpiece of this work, but as its conclusion, the final part of a process. But now, 20 years after its initial release, it continues to breathe and break beyond its tragic context. Not only as a memorial to those who died, but by literally performing the decay that all things must eventually meet. Which brings forth the other oft-talked about point of this album - this work is about death. The loops themselves, which deteriorate over the course of their runtime, seem to mirror the towers’ destruction. Allegedly, he finished the work the day of the tragedy, on his rooftop in Brooklyn. Basinski himself, in the liner notes, dedicates the work to the victims of 9/11. It’s nearly impossible to avoid - the cover of each of its four volumes depicts New York in the hours after the collision. ![]() William Basinski’s 2002 ambient album, “The Disintegration Loops,” is most often talked about in relation to the September 11 attacks. Photo by Danilo Pellegrini, courtesy of William Basinski. ![]()
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