The sound of things falling apart
Listening to Basinski’s Disintegration Loops on 9/11/2025
Yesterday was September 11th and I had a long drive across the state for my job. Like I do every year, I listened to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and thought about my country.
The Loops are a five-hour piece of music with a backstory that sounds like an overwrought metaphor. The story goes like this: In the summer of 2001, Basinski, the composer, was out of work and facing eviction in New York City. He decided to go into his studio and try digitizing some old recordings he’d made in the ‘80s.
One by one, he loaded short tape loops he’d recorded from an “easy listening” radio station onto the deck and hit play. But the tapes were falling apart. He could see bits of iron oxide flecking off into little piles, and he could hear the sound warping beyond recognition. He decided to let the loops play continuously and record what happened.
He did this for hours with various tapes, listening to things fall apart, and realized he had struck on something interesting. He arrived at a finished product on September 11th, 2001.
Most years on the anniversary, I only listen to the first hour or so — enough to get me through my morning correspondence, then on to something a little more lively. This year I drove for hours and let the Loops keep playing.
The most recognizable melody on the first track consisted of five notes, repeated over and over on what sounded like horns. At first the notes bled into each other under the dunk-tank of reverb that Basinski applied to the recording. Around the 18-minute mark, a gap started to open up, like someone had drawn a rest into the sheet music.
Then the melody pulled apart even more. I noticed what sounded like a new grace note that wasn’t there earlier, filling in the gaps. Assuming Basinski was honest about his methods, he didn’t add this himself. It must have been there on the tape all along, a little wrinkle I couldn’t detect at first.
I swerved around a pothole on a shot-to-shit stretch of Interstate 26, drew a breath, and tried listening closely again. Now there were new percussive sounds, irregular and distant booms, overtaking the breathy horn melody. I thought about a veteran I met once who fought in Iraq. He told me about nights in Tikrit when random volleys of mortar and rocket fire kept him awake all night, smoking cigarettes and wondering if he was about to die.
Of course Basinski didn’t mean to evoke that sound. He didn’t mean anything, really, or couldn’t have known what the piece would mean to people. He’d been futzing around with tapes for a while and this was what came out. Because of the release date, people have read all sorts of meaning into his work.
Basinski himself was the first person to associate The Disintegration Loops with the September 11th attacks. Later, in the documentary Other Music, he talked about debuting the piece to his friends:
“We saw the top of the South Tower crack off and fall from my building, and then we ran upstairs. So we turned on The Disintegration Loops really loud, just went up on the roof and just sat there looking at this new landscape.”
Or, as the story was mythologized by the music critic Michael Heumann in Stylus magazine:
He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another.
There aren’t a lot of commercial prospects for avant-garde and ambient music, but Basinski apparently did a brisk business selling CD-R copies of The Disintegration Loops in the early 2000s. The four-album set has sold out in multiple formats since then, including luxe vinyl reissues.
“It just took off and it saved my life,” Basinski told NPR.
People have their own ways of processing grief. Maybe you see me rambling about experimental music on the anniversary of a world-historical tragedy and you think of me the same way I think of people who can sing “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” without irony. To each their own.
People talk about the mournful quality of The Disintegration Loops, and it’s certainly there. Some years I find the music meditative. I practice box breathing and deep breathing while I listen, and the sound is a soothing one.
This year the music felt menacing. On the first track, “DLP 1.1,” I noticed when a new percussive noise broke in, then stretched out to a reptilian hiss that reminded me of a Penderecki piece from The Shining. A human, vocal sound was being overtaken by an inhuman sound. On “DLP 4,” a warm bath of easy-listening nostalgia was interrupted by spats of crackling static, cutting in and out until the music finally gave up and died.
Twenty-four years out, this was a particularly bleak anniversary. The disintegration that started after 9/11 has picked up speed. Mainstream politicians and pundits are cheering for secret police, forced disappearances, ethnic cleansing, genocide, wars of aggression, and military occupations of American cities. Rampant Islamophobia is as much a driving force in our politics today as it was when FBI informants got caught spying in mosques. This is who we as a country chose to be in the near quarter-century since terror returned to our shores. It is not who we have to be.
On September 12th, 2001, we began to hear stories about the rescuers. Americans performed great acts of courage, caring, and solidarity. But it was also the day when we began to dissolve our democratic institutions. Congresswoman Barbara Lee pleaded with her colleagues while casting the lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force on September 14th, 2001: “Let us just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”
We surrendered the power to declare wars to a president who launched invasions based on lies and killed millions. We embraced torture. We created whole new departments to surveil us and violate human rights in what we ominously christened the “Homeland.” We built a secret police force readymade for an even less scrupulous administration to use and abuse.
I was thinking yesterday about how Basinski’s tapes from the ‘80s are ruined beyond recognition. They’re more dust than tape now. He couldn’t restore them if he wanted to.
A lot of people and institutions and beliefs I held dear are gone now, too. They are ruined. That’s it. We can make something new, but there is no going back to whatever goodness we had in the world, or believed we had in the world.
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The Disintegration Loops are available on Bandcamp (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).
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