The Slow Sublime and 9/11: Insecurity and Fear in William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops

Abstract

I came across these big cases back in the storage room—The Land That Time Forgot, we used to call it—and I found all my old tape loops. By then I had a CD burner, and knowing what happens to old tapes, I started to archive the loops to digital. In the summer of 2001, in late July or August, I pulled this one loop out that I didn’t remember at all, and put it on the machine [...] and I turned on the recorder and started recording. After about 15 minutes, I realized something was changing—and I looked, and I could see dust in the tape path on the ReVox that was playing the tape loop. I sat there watching the recorder, monitoring it as this thing over the length of a CD-R completely disintegrated in the most profoundly beautiful way. The sustains sort of fell away, and yet somehow the core of it stayed—the attack and the basic rhythm of the melody—hanging on desperately until the very end. I put the next one on, and it started doing it too. And that’s when I realized I didn’t need any countermelodies there; I just need to concentrate on what’s happening and stay out of the way and make sure the recorder is on. So over a period of two long days, these six loops did their thing in their own way and in their own time, and just moved me so profoundly that I was just on the phone calling everybody: Get over here, you won’t believe what happened!1