Beginning in 1978 the young composer William Basinski, inspired by the ambient works of Steve Reich and Brain Eno, began experimenting with reel-to-reel tape, and in 1982 he crafted a series of lean, elegiac, and pastoral loops 

Almost 20 years later, in 2001, Basinski sought to transfer the original recordings from the analog reel-to-reel tapes onto a digital hard disk. This is where it all falls apart, or comes together, or more appropriately, both. Basinski pulled a tape from his old collection of loops, wrote a French horn counter-melody to work with the original melody, and began recording the two together as he went to his kitchen to make coffee. When he returned to the tape he noticed that the glue had lost its integrity and the iron oxide on the tape had turned brittle over time, sloughing from the plastic beneath, each new bare pinhole leaving a silence. The composer recalled the moment for the online magazine, FACT, in 2009, saying “I was incredibly moved by the whole redemptive quality of what I’d just experienced.” 

“d|lp 1.1” is a warm cycle of droning underwater brass and cheap, springy electronic thwacks. Over time, as the longer melodic passages decompose they become more percussive, like the distant cracking of canon fire, while an unnoticed drone of electrical hum becomes more evident as it works its way toward a final silence. Though it is built on a brief loop of ponderous melancholy, the cycle of its destruction takes over an hour. It is the sound of a mechanical heartbeat crawling to a stop, the breath slowly seeping from the speakers: “the music way dying,” Basinski wrote. It is the sound of a machine giving into its own obsolescence, removing itself from the equation. It’s long, slopping rhythms do have wide-ranging antecedents in things like whale song, recordings made inside the wombs of expecting mothers, the drone and ambient works of the 1970s and ‘80s, the cracked media experiments of artists such as Alvin Lucier (specifically his 1969 experimental piece “I Am Sitting In a Room”), Robert Fripp’s “Frippertronics,” and Yasunao Tone’s damaged turntable and CD works.

“Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently, gracefully, beautifully.” Though not overtly Americana in any way, the bucolic melancholy of the music could be the sound of distant rolling storm clouds on a dry Texas plain (Basinski was born and raised in Houston), but as Basinski—who lived in Brooklyn, New York, just minutes from lower Manhattan when he created the Disintegration Loops—was basking in the ambient glow of his serendipitous achievement and continued to transfer other eroding tapes in a similar fashion, two hi-jacked planes flew into the twin towers of The World Trade Center. Basinski saw the towers fall from his roof and the haunted longing of his new music meshed only too well with the shock and mourning that followed. Basinksi set up a neighbor’s video camera and caught the mountain of black smoke from lower Manhattan billowing slowly into the sky. He paired the film with “d|p 1.1” and created a moving and solemn tribute, his elegy to the moment. He knew he had also created a major work that Pitchfork writer Joe Tangari described as the sound of “the inevitable decay of all things, from memory to physical matter, made manifest in music,” and, less convincingly, that the disappearing loops are “the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like.”

In “d|p 1.1” there is a slow, constant extinction of the music as the tape sedately sloughs away for much of its running time, while at two key moments—at roughly 40 minutes and again towards the very end of the piece—the minute abrasions give way to larger patches of erosion and the decomposition becomes more apparent, the sound crumbling quickly on those two brief sections, almost representative of the felling of the Twin Towers. 

The subsequent deterioration of these loops, when tied to the national crisis of identity and partisan divides that have followed the events of 9/11, backstitch the Disintegration Loops into the fabric of American arts: It is the undeniable sound of a nation’s grieving and coming to terms in those first confusing days with the sense that nothing would be the same again, that the order of the world had been compromised. It also made people in the U.S. take stock of the national identity, foreign policies, and the global impact of our choices.

Joseph Fisher, writing for Pop Matters in 2010 called the Disintegration Loops perhaps “the most significant representation of the political and cultural tensions of post-9/11 America” and just as the rhythm and melody of Basinski’s original loop is lost over its running time, so too did the events of 9/11 make many question the values of American foreign policy, our devout consumerism, our TK: perhaps the U.S. was also lost. The moment marked the end of the 20th century and no musical event marks the moment as well as the Disintegration Loops.

In describing magnetic tape for his book Ambient Century, Mark Prendergast called it “the single greatest invention of the twentieth century in electronic music” and while tape manipulation as an art form may have taken a backseat to laptops and hard drives, Basinski’s Disintegration Loops shows that even with its dying breath, magnetic tape pushes modern music forward.

Interestingly, as “d|p 1.1” fades into a thrum of ambient sound, could also be seen as a grave marker for the end of analog, as Napster’s court-ordered shutdown amidst a storm of controversy occurred just weeks before the attacks of September 11, and Apple introduced the first iPod (October 23, 2001) just weeks afterward. In effect, the digital revolution cocooned the creation of the first Disintegration Loops. (The eventual release of the first Disintegration Loops material in early 2003 also coincided with the opening of Apple’s iTunes store in April of that year.)

The creation of Disintegration Loops was, like many creative breakthroughs, a matter of chance—Basinski didn’t expect his neglected loops to fall apart, but when they did, they revealed new possibilities. Without the destruction of the older tape loops the newer pieces are unimaginable, or, in the process of “saving” his music Basinski had to be willing to lose it. “Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation,” wrote Basinski in his liner notes, a belief that echoes central themes of reincarnation and rebirth from Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. Within all of the endings that the Disintegration Loops contain and complement—Basinski’s original loops, American optimism, the 20th Century, analog tape, the institutionalized recording industry, etc.—is hope.