In a healthy state, analog tape is pale brown, the color of the magnetic audio recording contained therein. In 2001, William Basinski, looking to digitize a collection of older tape loops he’d made out of easy listening music, found that the tape began to flake a bit as it played, like paint peeling. Playing the loops repeatedly, they began to lose their composition as the tape disintegrated. What starts as a snippet of a forlorn brass instrument eventually degraded into a pale imitation, as though he’d produced a composition and then, immediately after, performed its faded memory.

The Disintegration Loops is immensely long (the first of its four parts is over an hour), but it is made up of repeated snippets sometimes as short as five or 10 seconds. Over the course of that mammoth running time, you hear the piece fall apart, literally. “I’m recording the life and death of a melody,” Basinski said in a 2011 Radiolab interview. “It just made me think of human beings, you know, and how we die.” The mysteries of life and death are perhaps too big a question to be answered by tape drone, and Basinski doesn’t attempt to. His piece is beautiful and sad, temporal and infinite; its changes are imperceptible, yet ever-present. It sounds like wind, like a ship’s horn heard in the distance when lost at sea, on track to either rescuing you or passing you by.

Basinski made the accidental discovery of the tapes’ disintegration in 2001, shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center. From his home in Brooklyn on September 11th, he made a short film of the light just before the evening’s end. When Disintegration Loops was released, a still from that film made up its cover. The music has since been entwined with the loss of that day, and rightfully so, but it represents forward momentum, too. Hearing the sound slowly degrade, it's clear it will eventually disappear entirely. But until then, it keeps going, trying its best to play before reaching the end. –Matthew Schnipper

Release Year: 2002



Listen: William Basinski, “D|p 1.2”