11th goes, perhaps you had to be here and see it with your own eyes and experience the horror and the ghastly smell, and smoke, sirens, no television or telephone, F-16s strafing the city at ear splitting volume, the fear, agony and deep sadness, see peoples faces in the subway, the deep longing bonded look people gave each other, the lip compression signifying compassion, to understand the magnitude of what we felt here. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered.Īs far as Sept. When the disintegration was complete, the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently, gracefully, beautifully. It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well.
I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. Still, I had never actually seen it happen, yet here it was happening. I had heard about this happening, and frankly was very afraid of this happening to me since so much of my early work was precariously near the end of its shelf life. To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording. With excitement I began recording the first one to cd, mixing a new piece with a subtle random arpeggiated countermelody from the Voyetra. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about.
In 2007, Basinski explained the composition to WQXR: The Disintegration Loops actually date well before 9/11, to the early-'80s even, and the story of how it came to be "9/11 music," beyond the simple fact that they are just so incredibly sad, is strange and eerily fitting. He called the collective work simply "The Disintegration Loops." The soundtrack was an in-process version of a remarkable work, made up of ambient tape loops that are falling apart as they play. The composer William Basinski stood atop his Brooklyn rooftop on Tuesday, September, 11, 2001, watching with friends as part of his city's skyline disappeared.
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