It’s the evening of September 11, 2001, and Billy Basinski is sitting on his Brooklyn rooftop watching the world burn.
In the last hour of the day, he sets up a static video camera to film the thick plumes of smoke hovering over the lower half of Manhattan Island as he sits silently with his many artist friends and neighbors, watching in shock and grief.
That morning, shortly before the planes hit the Twin Towers, the ambient composer finished a work he had been working on for almost twenty years, a piece he called. Disintegration loops. In 2002, the still image made from the material shot that afternoon was included on the album cover. In the liner notes, Basinski dedicates the piece to the victims of the devastating terrorist attack.
To this day Disintegration loops remains Basinski’s most famous work. In his new liner notes a Arcadia Archive Editionavant-garde icon Laurie Anderson compares Basinski’s most famous play to “a kind of bardo theater” and asks, “Could this be what dying sounds like?”
On the morning after 9/11, Basinski plays a rough mix Disintegration loops In a loft in Williamsburg, in a place called Arcadia. As an experiment, he sets the longest of his tape recordings, “dlp 1.1”, to some pictures taken the previous day. To his utter surprise, the music and images merge perfectly to create a deeply haunting audio-visual creation.
We are haunted Disintegration loops According to the British cultural theorists Simon Reynolds and the late Mark Fisher, they are ghosts of the past, or “lost futures”—dreams and promises that were never realized. Their “Hauntology” concept referred to a strand of British underground music from the late 1990s to the late 2000s – bands like Boards of Canada or Broadcast, and producers like Burial or Leyland Kirby, aka The Caretaker. They all favored an analog lo-fi warmth in their music, including traces of worn physical media – vinyl crackling, tape hiss or static. Basinski became entangled in the movement despite being American and his work bearing little resemblance to his British peers. But he was used to being an outsider.
William Basinski was born in 1958 in a religious family in Texas. He took piano lessons as a child and later studied the clarinet. He continued his studies in jazz saxophone and composition at the University of North Texas; in the late 1970s he discovered the music of such minimalists as the early ambient works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno. Inspired by their ideas, he began recording 5-10 second audio clips, mostly from shortwave radio and easy-listening Muzak to magnetic tape, and imbued these loops with reverb and delay using self-made effects units.
In 1982, the 24-year-old composer recorded the original tapes that eventually served as the foundation. Disintegration loops two decades later – the piece that took his artistic career into another realm. His practice hasn’t changed much over the years, except that he’s started overdubbing his manipulated tape loops with live piano and synthesizers. Basinski did not release an actual recording of his work until 1998, when his debut album, Shortwave music– originally created in 1983 – was brought to the world by the German avant-garde publisher Raster-Noton. He just celebrated his 40th birthday.
Basinski moved into Arcadia’s loft almost ten years earlier, in 1989. He was a starving artist and it was pre-gentrification Williamsburg, a heavily industrial working-class neighborhood in northwest Brooklyn. The rent was low, but many visitors described the space as magical, a baroque and gothic place where small do-it-yourself concerts and performances are constantly taking place among the salvaged furniture and half-finished sculptures. Basinski lived there with his partner, the visual artist James Elaine; for them, Arcadia served as both a recording studio and a gallery until their lease expired and they were renewed at $10,000 a month. They moved to Los Angeles that year.
Back to August 2001. Basinski finally released some of his older work to some critical acclaim but little commercial success. Looking for more tape loops to use and manipulate for future releases, he rediscovered a bunch of tapes from 1982 that had been hanging on a tree in the attic for years – he put them there after moving in and never bothered to take them down. When he did so, Basinski learned that they had succumbed to entropy caused by corrosion.
When he played them while transferring them to digital media, he noticed more crackles, static, and surface noise with each loop. There would be gaps and the loops would become longer and more disjointed with each playback.
“His story is… Disintegration loops– recording tapes that destroyed themselves in the process of being transferred to digital – a parable (almost too perfect) for the transition from the fragility of analogue to the infinite reproducibility of digital,” wrote the late Mark Fisher in a collection of essays. Spirits of my life. “What we have lost can often seem like the possibility of loss.”
But Basinski didn’t even attempt to restore the recording—instead, to enhance the hypnotic effect of the decay, he applied plenty of reverb to the digitized versions. “I record the life and death of a melody,” Basinski said. Towards the end of the hour, this melody is barely recognizable – it has already turned into a fading memory. A deep, beautiful sadness overwhelms the listener. Over the course of an hour, we can witness the slow decline of the music. How can this not make us think of impermanence, the impermanence of life?
i remember Laurie Anderson plays her late husband Lou Reed Hudson River Wind Meditations during a concert encore and instructs the audience to perform tai chi movements. In his notes for the latest reissue Disintegration loopswrites of Basinski: “music close to mantras, meditation, wind, breath and tai chi. Using repetitive sounds, it outlines a border, a place where one world meets another. The sound of attention and the present. Like a blank page with only a few words on it. Spin, spin. I use the loops to clear my mind.
Over the course of an hour, we can witness the slow decline of the music. How can this not make us think of impermanence, the impermanence of life?
While the play itself is not directly inspired by Buddhist thought or teachings—although Basinski is said to have been reading a book on Zen at the time—his most popular reading is a meditation on death—and not just death, but dying itself. “We may always be dying,” artist Penelope Trappes once told me in an interview, “but if we’re always dying, we’re always living.”
To me, this is a Zen approach to the cycle of life. The shadow is there for a reason – it’s created by the light. Disintegration loops not only a work about trauma, but also about overcoming it through acceptance. Billy Basinski may not be Buddhist, but his reverberating and static ambient drones can be interpreted as a the bardothe hypnagogic “liminal state” that Laurie Anderson referred to in her notes. In Tibetan Buddhism, this state is an in-between world—between waking and sleeping, life and death, earth and the cosmos.
Originally published in 2002 as a miniseries on the independent label Basinski ran with partner James Elaine, 2062, the profile Disintegration loops has steadily increased over the years. In 2003, three more tape loop recordings were released as a full album. Praise soon poured in, including from prominent writers such as Reynolds and Fisher, and it was being performed by orchestras around the world. It was played live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on September 11, 2011, its tenth anniversary.
Fifteen years later, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, the music is still breathtakingly impressive. Listening again, I can literally feel the dusty sky that so many survivors of the attack told me about. After forty minutes, the eroding brass loop has almost completely disintegrated, but after a good ten minutes it returns, only to disappear again. A stoic march towards the inevitable end. The sound is as quiet as it disintegrates inexorably. Sadness, grief, and trauma packed into these short snippets of just a few seconds, over and over again. An environment memento mori.
♦
By William Basinski The disintegration loops (Arcadia Archive Edition) is now available through Temporary Residence Ltd.
