Lately, I’ve been thinking about time. It’s 2001, I’m 11 years old—the World Trade Center in New York City has been attacked. The country is grieving, and soon we’ll be off to war with Iraq. Right now, however, it’s 2026—I’m 35 years old, and the U.S. has declared war on Iran. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Time feels like it’s in a loop.
When he began work on The Disintegration Loops, William Basinski didn’t know he was creating a elegy. Totaling five hours across four volumes, The Disintegration Loops is a grand work of emotion and time. A project heavily associated with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, The Disintegration Loops are also an experience about time, memory, and death.
Basinski began his musical journey studying jazz, but in the 1980s found himself drawn to ambient music and experimented with tape loops, shortwave radio static, reel-to-reel tape decks, and found sounds. Basinski released his first record, Shortwavemusic in 1998, but by then, he had accumulated a collection of other
recordings. In 2001, Basinski began the process of transferring older recordings he’d made on magnetic tape into digital format, arriving upon a fascinating discovery.
In transferring these decades-old magnetic tape recordings, Basinski found that they were deteriorating in front of him. Whereas warped technology might ruin a recording in other circumstances, Basinski saw opportunity in the decay. He continued the project, playing the tapes as they further disintegrated. The tapes themselves feature simple melodies that loop repeatedly. Basinski adds minimal layering throughout the work, such as a simple horn effect in one loop, but for the most part, they’re left untouched. As these melodies drone, the sound begins to alter. Cracks emerge, the melody fades and becomes warped, the dreamy soundscape turns haunting. Eventually, each loop is overcome by decay. Basinski would name this endeavor The Disintegration Loops.
By the time he finished the project, it was the morning of the 9/11 attacks. In the distance from his rooftop, Basinski filmed the tragedy: his recordings show a sky, from morning to night, engulfed in smoke. In light of this horror, Basinski found new meaning in this project. With the four volumes released in 2002 and 2003, he dedicated The Disintegration Loops to the victims of the attack.
The series of releases garnered widespread acclaim. In 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held a special live performance of The Disintegration Loops, celebrating the project’s 10th anniversary. In a 2012 review of a box set, Pitchfork gave the project a rare but well-deserved 10. The Disintegration Loops elevated awareness of Basinski’s work, establishing him as one of the most revered names in avant-garde music.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking about time. Each day I wake up and I stare outside my bedroom window. An American flag is positioned near the window; its ends torn apart, snagged on a nearby tree; when there’s wind, the flag limps. The imagery is not lost on me.
The Disintegration Loops have become one of the most meaningful works of art in my own life. As much as the work is associated with a very specific time and place, I find that its meaning goes beyond that tragedy, representing a profound and universal existential weight. Whenever I listen to The Disintegration Loops, I’m consumed by thoughts of mortality: my mortality, that of my loved ones, that for this country, for existence. The older I get the more I become aware of time—what’s gone, what’s ahead, the now.
The irony of this thinking is that the “ahead” and “now” will eventually become the “gone.” We cannot control time; we all age and eventually die. It isn’t the dying part that strikes me as much—it’s the decay. As we get older and become more reflective, it’s natural for people to grasp onto memories, yet even these we don’t have full control over. For all the power of the human mind, it cannot contain the entirety of one’s existence. Memories are replaced for there to be room for new ones.
In 2024, something happened to me. Perhaps it was experiencing multiple traumas or getting COVID, but I noticed a change in my thinking. Not a change in being able to think, it’s that my processing became slower, more abstract at times. I find this abstract thinking complemented by The Disintegration Loops. The abstract ambient nature of the music allows for no concrete form; the flow of music is deceptively simple, because in its length and deterioration, it becomes an experience that isn’t easily digestible. Through evocative textures and atmosphere—lovely and eroding—The Disintegration Loops floods the listener with feeling.
For me, obsession and reflection often engage in this blur between mental illness and healthy introspection. Listening to The Disintegration Loops doesn’t so much steady this imbalance but offers a space to feel safe when needing to process events and memories. Where there are occasions where I feel shame in my scattered thinking, the ambiance of The Disintegration Loops offers no judgement.
I know I’m not alone in any of this; as we age, we think of the decisions we’ve made in life and the path we’re on. The relationships we have, the relationships no longer in our lives, the what-ifs and what could’ve been. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time living in the past; doing this, I’ve lost the time of the present and tomorrow.
This train of thinking hasn’t entirely disappeared, but I’ve come to embrace practices that allow me to be much more present in life. I feel that, if we’re lucky, a good life is one of gratitude. This doesn’t take away the pain of aging—of losing loved ones and memories, of having to face our own mortality—but it makes the experience of living fuller. We can hold on and fight for our memories, obsess over what was, but ultimately, we only have the now. Loss is inevitable, and that is the point of The Disintegration Loops.
William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops aren’t just a elegy for a specific tragedy, they’re an elegy for time lost, a confrontation of our limited window of time here. In a 2012 interview with NPR, Basinski spoke about the project capturing these themes: “I felt, with my experience being in New York at that time, and what I went through and what I saw my friends go through, I wanted to create an elegy. Yes, there’s that tie to 9/11. But the thing that moved me so profoundly in my studio right after this music happened was the redemptive quality. The music isn’t just decaying—it does, it dies—but the entire life and death of each of these unique melodies was recorded to another medium for eternity. So that blew my mind, as someone who grew up Catholic, to see that that is a possibility.”
How each listener experiences these loops is a subjective experience, yet they have the potential to offer each of us a chance for reflection. It’s a work that engages many questions without explicit prompt. What happens when memories we cherish become warped and we can only recall some details? In situations where many people experience a major tragedy, how do we relate to one another through memory? Whether there’s an afterlife or oblivion, what does it mean to make the “best” of our time?
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Lately, I’ve been thinking about time. I rise from bed, thoughts of those no longer in my life come to mind, but I’m also thankful to be here. I give my spouse a kiss and tell them I love them. I kiss my cat and tell her I love her. I walk out the door and into the sun, music on and ready for what the day brings. As I walk, I listen to The Disintegration Loops. I’m present in each step as memories come back to me. I feel the weight of my life: the melancholy, the adventure, the heartache, and all the love.
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