William Basinski - The Distintegration Loops I-IV

An Inadvertent 9/11 Elegy

In William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, time isn’t measured by the sweep of a hand on the clock, but by the collapse of sound itself. What begins as a fragile loop — a brief exchange of tubas and percussion — erodes with each pass through the tape. It’s a physical decay, the reel-to-reel degrading in real time, shedding its skin, as if history itself is crumbling at the edges. Recorded in 1982, the loops sit for decades, waiting for their moment. That moment arrives in the final months of 2001.

On a Brooklyn rooftop, Basinski watches as the city across the river disintegrates in plumes of dust. He plays back the loops, now burdened with the weight of a new, unspeakable history. The music disintegrates, just like the buildings, just like the skyline. And with every repetition, the sound — once pastoral, almost serene — becomes more distant, more ghostly, an echo of what was, fading into what will never be again. By the end, the music is a blur, a distant hum lost to the mechanics of memory and loss.