11. William BasinskiThe Disintegration Loops

The story behind The Disintegration Loops series of albums goes something like this: In 2001 Basinski was transferring some of his earlier recordings from analogue tape to digital tape and he noticed that the tapes were so old (20 years or so) that they started to shred their coating, and the sounds began to deteriorate as he was doing the transfers. He liked the sound of this and also the metaphor. As it happened he was doing this work at his home in New York on the morning of September 11th as the horrors of that day unfolded. This music is so incredibly simple, beautiful and haunting. It was recreated and played by an orchestra at the 9/11 ten year memorial concert in New York.