William Basinski’s Shadows of Impermanence

It’s the evening of September 11, 2001, and Billy Basinski is sitting on his Brooklyn rooftop, watching the world burn.

During the last hour of daylight, he sets up a static video camera to film thick columns of smoke hanging over the lower half of the island of Manhattan, while he sits in silence with a number of artist friends and neighbors and watches in shock and grief.

On the morning of that day, shortly before the planes hit the Twin Towers, the ambient composer had finished a work almost twenty years in the making, a piece he’d call Disintegration Loops. A still from the material filmed on that afternoon would land on the album cover in 2002. In the liner notes, Basinski would dedicate the piece to the victims of that devastating terrorist attack.

To this day, Disintegration Loops remains Basinski’s most famous work. In her new liner notes to the Arcadia Archive Edition, avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson likens Basinski’s most famous piece to “a kind of bardo theater” and asks: “Could this be what dying sounds like?”

On the morning after 9/11, Basinski is playing a rough mix of Disintegration Loops in his Williamsburg loft, a place called Arcadia. As an experiment, he sets the longest of his tape recordings, “dlp 1.1,” to some of the images he captured the day before. To his uncanny surprise, the music and images unite perfectly, creating a deeply haunting piece of audiovisual art.

What haunts Disintegration Loops are, according to British culture theorists Simon Reynolds and the late Mark Fisher, ghosts of the past, or “lost futures”—dreams and promises that never materialized. Their concept of “hauntology” referred to a strand of British underground music from the time, the late 1990s to late 2000s—bands like Boards of Canada or Broadcast, and producers like Burial or Leyland Kirby, alias The Caretaker. They all preferred an analog lo-fi warmth in their music, including traces of worn physical media—vinyl crackle, tape hiss, or static noise. Basinski got lumped in with the movement, even though he was American and his work bore little resemblance to his UK counterparts. But he was already used to being an outsider.

Born in 1958 into a religious household in Texas, William Basinski received piano lessons as a child and then classical training on clarinet. He’d go on to study jazz saxophone and composition at the University of North Texas; in the late 1970s, he would discover the music of minimalists like Steve Reich and the early ambient works of Brian Eno. Inspired by their ideas, he started recording five- to ten-second sound snippets, mostly from shortwave radio and easy listening Muzak, to magnetic tape, and drench these loops in reverb and delay with self-built effect units.

In 1982, the 24-year-old aspiring composer recorded the original tapes that would eventually become the foundation for Disintegration Loops two decades later—the piece that would propel his artistic career into a different sphere. His practice hadn’t changed much over the years, except that he’d started overdubbing his manipulated tape loops with live piano and synthesizers. Basinski hadn’t released an actual recording of his work until 1998, when his debut album, Shortwavemusic—originally created in 1983—was brought into the world by German avant-garde label Raster-Noton. He had just celebrated his 40th birthday.

Basinski had moved into his Arcadia loft almost ten years prior, in 1989. He was a starving artist, and this was pregentrification Williamsburg, a highly industrial working-class neighborhood in the northwest of Brooklyn. Rent was low, but the space was referred to by many visitors as magical, a baroque and gothic place where small-scale DIY concerts and performances would take place constantly among salvaged furniture and half-finished sculptures. Basinski lived there with his partner, the visual artist James Elaine; for them, Arcadia would double as a recording studio and a gallery, until the lease ran out and they got offered a renewal at a monthly rent of $10,000. That year, they moved to Los Angeles.

Back to August 2001. Basinski had finally released some of his older works to some critical acclaim but little commercial success. Looking for more tape loops that he could use and manipulate for future releases, he rediscovered a bunch of cassettes from 1982 that had hung in a tree at the loft for years—he had put them there after moving in and never bothered to take them down. When he did, Basinski learned that they had succumbed to entropy by corrosion.

Playing them back while transferring them to digital media, he noticed that with each loop, more crackle, static, and surface noise would appear. Gaps would arise, and the loops would become longer and sound more broken with each playback.

“The story of . . . Disintegration Loops—a recording of tapes that destroyed themselves in the very process of their transfer to digital—is a parable (almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analog to the infinite replicability of digital,” the late Mark Fisher wrote in his essay collection Ghosts of My Life. “What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very possibility of loss.”

But Basinski didn’t even try to restore the recording—instead, to enhance the hypnotizing effect of the deterioration, he’d apply tons of reverb to the digitized versions. “I’m recording the life and death of a melody,” Basinski has said. Toward the end of the hour, that melody is barely recognizable anymore—it’s already turned into a fading memory. A profound, beautiful sadness overcomes the listener. Over the course of an hour, we’re witnessing the music’s slow decay. How can this not make us think about impermanence, about the transience of all life?

I remember Laurie Anderson playing her late husband Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations during a concert encore and instructing the audience to perform tai chi moves. In her liner notes to the recent reissue of Disintegration Loops, she writes of Basinski’s as “music that is close to mantras, meditation, wind, the breath and tai chi. Using repetitive sounds, it outlines a liminal space, a place for one world to meet another. The sound of attention and the present. Like a blank page with just a few words on it. Turning, turning. Loops are the way I clear my mind.”

Over the course of an hour, we’re witnessing the music’s slow decay. How can this not make us think about impermanence, about the transience of all life?

While the piece itself isn’t directly inspired by Buddhist thought or teachings—though Basinski reportedly read a book on Zen at the time—its most popular reading is that of a meditation on death—and not just death but the very act of dying. “Maybe we’re always dying,” the artist Penelope Trappes once said to me in an interview, “but if we’re always dying, we’re always living.”

That, to me, feels like a Zen way of looking at the cycle of life. There’s a reason the shadow is there—it’s created by light. Disintegration Loops is not just a work about trauma but also one about overcoming it through acceptance. Billy Basinski might not be a Buddhist, but his ambient drones, drenched in reverb and static, can be interpreted as musical representations of the bardo, the hypnagogic “liminal state” that Laurie Anderson referred to in her liner notes. In Tibetan Buddhism, that state is an in-between world—between wake and sleep, between life and death, between the earth and the cosmos. 

Originally released in 2002 in a small run on the independent label that Basinski ran with his partner James Elaine, 2062, the profile of Disintegration Loops rose steadily over the years. Three more tape loop recordings were released as full albums in 2003. Praise soon came flooding in, including from prominent writers like Reynolds and Fisher, and orchestras around the world would start performing it. On September 11, 2011, for its tenth anniversary, it was played live at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fifteen years later, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, the music remains breathtakingly stunning. Relistening to it, I can literally smell the dust-filled sky that so many survivors of the attack have been telling me about. After forty minutes, the eroding brass loop has almost completely fallen apart, but it returns a good ten minutes later, only to disappear again. A stoic march toward the inevitable end. Sound disintegrating as quietly as inexorably. Sadness, grief, and trauma, encapsulated in these short snippets of just a few seconds’ duration, repeated over and over again. An ambient memento mori. 

♦

William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops (Arcadia Archive Edition) is now available via Temporary Residence Ltd.