Listeners may convince themselves that consuming the piece in its entirety isn’t a necessity, at least not this time around. The idea is understood, and that should surely be enough. No one will know if a listener only played half of “dlp 1.1” before calling it quits. The uncertainty of whether or not The Disintegration Loops is “worth it” to listen to creeps in. Early into the first listen, a decision has to be made: How far is the listener willing to go? It’s easy enough to sit through five or six minutes of repetition, but an hour? Five? The listener has to decide if the story behind Basinski’s music is more important than the music itself. Five hours long, if you’re listening to it all the way through. But that’s not all the project has to offer. Its base subject matter, on mortality and inevitability, is tied to a moment that served as a turning point in American culture and politics. The sheer coincidence of its production has tied it permanently to Sept. The history of The Disintegration Loops is legendary. As the World Trade Center smoldered across the city, he played the music for his friends and recorded the wreckage as it burned. He finished this digitization process on Sept.
When digitizing these tapes, they would slowly corrode after being scanned over too many times, creating the haunting, fading loops for which the project is named.
In the late summer of 2001, Basinski began digitizing a collection of audio snippets he had recorded onto cassette tapes in the ’80s. For some, just knowing the story of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops is enough.
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