Experimental composer
William Basinski's
Disintegration Loops series is an astonishing work of minimal, process-based tape music, achieving moving and evocative states through relatively simplistic means. In the process of transferring aging reel-to-reel tape loops to a digital medium,
Basinski found the reels (originally recorded in 1982) were so old and decrepit that the tape would shed slightly with each pass of the loop. This gradually affected the sound coming through, blurring the short, pastoral phrase of sound into an increasingly ghostly and unintelligible ambient landscape.
Basinski discovered this process in the final months of the summer of 2001 and was listening back to the loops on the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment on the fateful morning of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, adding a haunting subtext to the entire project. The second volume of the series finds a darker passage of menacing, indistinguishable music slowly crumbling into a dark ambient wash, with only stuttering pieces audible by the end of the recording.