The Disintegration Loops

Here’s a snapshot this morning: it’s early September 2001 and William Basinski has just finished his album The Disintegration Loops. The recordings finished up a few days before the attacks, and Basinski spent most of 9/11 itself filming the events from his rooftop Brooklyn apartment. A still from that video would end up as the album artwork, and an hour long video compilation complete with sound would be released on DVD. Eventually, the album was performed live with an orchestra at the MOMA on 9/11/2011 to mark the 10 year anniversary.

This is a strange and emblematic coincidence. The album itself came about when Basinski was transferring found sound recordings of his from the 80s from magnetic tape to digital. As one of the tapes played, he noticed it began to disintegrate, creating an effect similar to the one Brian Eno used for Discreet Music albeit from a different sort of mechanical cause (crumbling vs stretching/extending). He repeated the process with others of his tapes and then added reverb during the editing and post-production work, leaving us with a final product that feels a bit like standing just inside the entrance of a cathedral while someone plays the same short phrase on the organ at slightly ever-increasing intervals while pressing the pedal down and never releasing. This is either haunting or horrifying depending on your level of interest in looping music, but the structural theme of the work serves two unintentional and more abstract purposes as well: a prophecy of what the future held for the post 9/11, Patriot Act-riddled nation, and a dirge for a version of the city that would never be true again.

Mark Richardson wrote an excellent piece on both the album and its legacy for Pitchfork back in 2012, and I suggest you give it a read today if you get the chance. You can find The Disintegration Loops on any streaming platform here, and I hope you have a great Monday.