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After that, the ambient melody fades and the tapes have broken down to the point that they are largely supplying a wavering sequence of beats. By the two-thirds mark, the patterns are clearly staggered. I remember enjoying it quite a bit, finding myself intrigued not only by its origin story but also the material itself.Īs noted, the nature of each recording changes at a glacial pace. The sheer length of the set was (and still is) intimidating. I initially listened to all four Disintegration Loops in the mid-2000s, shortly after their release. He dedicated The Disintegration Loops to the victims of the attack. The slow and inevitable fading of the music matched that of Ground Zero in an unintentional and frightful manner. On his rooftop, he filmed the giant clouds of smoke billowing from lower Manhattan and listened to his recordings while watching the horror. From his home in Brooklyn, he was able to watch the aftereffects of that day’s terrorist attacks.

Thus, at first blush, these recordings seem highly repetitive but they are not – variations are constantly forming and falling apart.īasinski was putting the final touches to these recordings on the morning of September 11, 2001. The first piece, Dlp 1.1, is over an hour of music made from just a few seconds of tape. These wind up forming new patterns and rhythms. Each piece is a short ambient melody that continuously repeats as it slowly falls apart into crackling and static with breaks of silence. Stored on magnetic tape for years, Basinski later found that this tape had physically decayed and would continue to do so when played. He recorded hours of this playout, documenting the slow deterioration, and then processed the result with reverb.Īpproximately five hours of music was made in this fashion, spanning four CDs. As Basinski himself states, it is actually capturing the life and death of music as it is being played again and again.William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops is one of the most well-known and critically acclaimed ambient works of all time. In the vein of Brian Eno, Basinski made a number of ambient recordings from unconventional sources, such as shortwave radio and delay loops. These “loops” of tape would begin to deteriorate as they passed through the tape head, causing the iron oxide to fall off its plastic backing. The melancholic melodies within Disintegration Loops, as Basinski thoroughly describes and Wexler recreates with animation, was a unique process that he stumbled across while transmitting tape-recorded music to a more reliable digital format. Many critics heralded it as a masterpiece, including the influential Pitchfork, which gave it a perfect 10 and listed it as one of the best albums of the year and decade and the third-best ambient music album of all time. His most acclaimed creation would be the eponymous tracks, a four-album collective of haunting, ethereal, repetitive sounds spanning over five hours. We witness his archive-based approach to the origins of his sound as Basinski burrows into his recordings (both his and found pre-recorded sounds), giving them an entirely new life.

He takes us through his struggles and successes, from his religious Texas roots to his bon vivant days in the 1980s underground music scene of the Big Apple to musical elder statesman of the city’s healing. He shares photos and videos documenting the earliest days of his artistic journey to ambient musical messiah during one of the most turbulent times in New York City’s history.

While the interviews for this 45-minute documentary are limited to Zoom meetings and the technical complications therein (of which we are all familiar), Disintegration Loops provides a wide berth of personal footage from Basinski himself. Though, it would be paralyzed from yet another tragedy, the global pandemic. The musician is on the cusp of his latest release, which was to be marked with a worldwide tour. Director David Wexler revisits the impact of the definitive musical elegy with its father. SXSW FILM FESTIVAL 2021 REVIEW! On the cusp of the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, ambient music frontiersman William Basinski guides us through a comprehensive look at his seminal album, Disintegration Loops.