The loops were released a few years post-9/11, and eventually collected as a four-volume set and, for better or worse, their story/concept has made or at least helped make them a defining work of the composer's career. They're beautiful on their own, and together make up one of the more vital—and long—pieces of ambient music of the past decade, probably more. They're also very sad on their own, a sort of melancholy that hits saturation just as each loop begins to disintegrate at the very end, breaking up quickly and definitively.But also breaking up too soon. If you've listened to them at all, you'll understand. You don't particularly ever want to not have this music in your ears. But at the end, it's destroyed. Conveying this sense of destruction is something that almost certainly can only be done by way of actual destruction, and we've had a decade of proof.Listen to a live rendition of Basinski's piece as performed by the Wordless Music Orchestra on Sept. 11, 2011 at the Temple of Dendur inside the Museum of Modern ArtIn the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. With excitement I began recording the first one to cd, mixing a new piece with a subtle random arpeggiated countermelody from the Voyetra. To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording.
I had heard about this happening, and frankly was very afraid of this happening to me since so much of my early work was precariously near the end of its shelf life. Still, I had never actually seen it happen, yet here it was happening. The music was dying. I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently, gracefully, beautifully. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation.
When the disintegration was complete, the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered.
As far as Sept. 11th goes, perhaps you had to be here and see it with your own eyes and experience the horror and the ghastly smell, and smoke, sirens, no television or telephone, F-16s strafing the city at ear splitting volume, the fear, agony and deep sadness, see peoples faces in the subway, the deep longing bonded look people gave each other, the lip compression signifying compassion, to understand the magnitude of what we felt here.
This was the end of the world…and we were literally sitting up on the roof all day and into night watching without believing as NYC burned, and listening to the heartbreaking Disintegration Loops…I thought…it's the soundtrack to the end of the world…I had been assigned the job without knowing the details, it was done, and here we are…The Greatest Show on Earth, Armageddon. We were all literally losing our minds in terror, each person looping onto what holds him or her together..clinging to that which could provide some kind of release or explanation…just as each of the individual melodies in the Disintegration Loops did…at their own pace, seeming to hold onto that which made the melody unique, while letting go of the unimportant sustains or gently adding rests incrementally before the downbeat…it really blew my mind.
I hadn't really thought of trying to 'achieve' anything. But perhaps, if the music enabled listeners to contemplate the temporal nature of life in this world and come to some small inkling or understanding as I did of a redemptive spirituality that animates us and continues on, then that would be an achievement.
FYI.
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The Saddest Music In the World: William Basinski's Disintegration Loops
The composer William Basinski stood atop his Brooklyn rooftop on September, 11, 2001. The soundtrack was an in-process version of a remarkable work, made up of ambient tape loops that are falling apart as they play.
The composer William Basinski stood atop his Brooklyn rooftop on Tuesday, September, 11, 2001, watching with friends as part of his city's skyline disappeared. The soundtrack was an in-process version of a remarkable work, made up of ambient tape loops that are falling apart as they play. He called the collective work simply "The Disintegration Loops."The Disintegration Loops actually date well before 9/11, to the early-'80s even, and the story of how it came to be "9/11 music," beyond the simple fact that they are just so incredibly sad, is strange and eerily fitting. In 2007, Basinski explained the composition to WQXR: