The Disintegration Loops I

about this album

The Disintegration Loops I is the first recording from a series of four records released by 2062, cataloging William Basinski's pieces of process music, The Disintegration Loops. It was released in 2003, and has ever since been somewhat mythic and well-known, for avant-garde music especially, due to its association with the 9/11 attacks. Contained within its liner notes, Basinski's words describing the recording process for The Loops recount the genesis of the sounds against the backdrop of his eyewitness relationship to the aftermath of 9/11 and how those sounds, as will soon become clear, held a metaphoric relationship to the incident. Mr. Basinski wanted to create audio backup and store old music he had recorded to tape in the eighties. He acquired the hardware to accomplish that task and set it into motion; however, along the way, he noticed that the recording head in contact with sections of magnetic tape was destroying the composition of the material on the tape itself. He feared this would ruin his goal entirely, but instead noticed that the process was still generating a backup of the sound on the tape as it decayed. Perhaps the tapes were old, or perhaps the hardware malfunctioned - either way, he was delighted to find that he essentially heard the erasing process, and he recorded the slow decay of the piece for many hours. The result on this album is usually in this form: the theme is introduced for a loop, it presents itself softly and without any changes at firs

tracks

more from William Basinski

Melancholia

The Disintegration Loops (Remastered)

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Selva Oscura

Lamentations

The Disintegration Loops IV (Remastered)