William Basiniski Disintegration Loop 1.1
2001
Contemporary music folklore has it that composer William Basinski completed The Disintegration Loops in New York on September 11th 2001 as two aircraft collided with the two towers of the World Trade Centre.
Basinski had been working through archived audiotape recordings of his ambient compositions when he discovered that some of the tapes were ruined. As he played them the magnetic strip flaked away and what he heard was the sound of his music disintegrating away to be lost forever. Basinski cut and pasted the tape into loops which he then played until all the data was lost.
The resulting body of work totals 5 hours of music across 9 tracks varying in length between 11 and 64 minutes. This video, a static shot of the World Trade Center billowing smoke at sunset on September 11th 2001, was shot from Basinski's roof in Brooklyn.