William Basinski’s archival recording project gained a life of its own when the tapes began to deteriorate, and then took on a new significance in the wake of the September 11th attacks.
Photo: Sean StoutOne of the most celebrated tracks in ambient music, William Basinski’s ‘dlp 1.1’, the epic, slow‑moving opener of his four‑volume 2002–3 album series, The Disintegration Loops, is a 63‑minute‑long recording of a 12‑inch piece of tape sonically degrading in real time.
Back in July 2001, when it was created, ‘dlp 1.1’ was in fact the result of an accident. That summer, Basinski was in his Brooklyn loft attempting to digitise some of his old quarter‑inch tape loops he’d made in the ’80s when he noticed the deteriorating effect and kept his CD burner running. The recording later took on a greater resonance when it soundtracked Basinski’s single‑take video footage, shot from his roof, of the Manhattan skyline in the wake of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center.
The combination of the visual and sonic elements — smoke billowing across the damaged city, as slowed brass notes from a random snippet of radio‑broadcast muzak gradually decayed — became an unexpectedly powerful one. What had started life as an artful experiment became a poignant audio‑visual tribute to 9/11.
“Yeah, this is where it was like, ‘Oh God, the music has changed’,” Basinski tells SOS today of the moment he realised that he’d created a monument to a tragedy. “The whole world had changed. It was like, ‘This is... well, it’s an elegy now.’”
In its video installation form, ‘dlp 1.1’ is now a permanent exhibit at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum opened in 2014 on the original site of the World Trade Center. Basinski admits that he hasn’t visited the museum, believing he would find the experience too emotionally overwhelming.
“I’m never gonna go see that,” he stresses. “I can’t deal with that.”
Nonetheless, it’s further proof that ‘dlp 1.1’ has only grown in stature in the two‑and‑a‑half decades since its creation. Now Basinski has overseen a new, four‑vinyl box‑set remaster of The Disintegration Loops that reveals all of its strange and fascinating details anew.
“Well, y’know, people discover it when they’re ready for it,” Basinski says of the enduring appeal of The Disintegration Loops, before adding with a laugh, “and then they can’t get enough.”
Beginnings
William Basinski, born in 1958 in Houston, Texas, took a circuitous route into ambient music. His father was a scientist for NASA, working on the lunar module, and so he grew up in Clear Lake City, a planned community populated by many space program workers, including astronauts. When his dad was relocated to Florida, the family went with him.
“I spent a lot of time practising my clarinet because I was quite a sissy,” Basinski says, “and it kept me somewhat out of trouble from the bullies in Florida. Then in ’72 when they cancelled the moon program, we ended up moving to Dallas.
“My parents put us in this very fine school district with a super fun, rigorous music program. In high school I played in the jazz band. I changed from clarinet to tenor saxophone.”
Basinski went on to study saxophone at the University of North Texas in Denton. “I totally screwed my auditions, so I switched to composition,” he says. There, one contemporary music teacher opened up the future avant‑garde composer’s mind. “This was my favourite class,” he remembers, “because he taught us how to listen. He took us out into the fields and made us stretch our ears with deep listening. Then we learned about Cage and all the other possibilities that were available with radio, silence, noise, prepared piano.”
At the same time, Basinski’s fellow students were introducing him to the work of other experimental composers who were to prove inspirational, such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. “I got to hear everything that was new and cool and far out. Y’know, Steve Reich’s tape loop studies. And then when Music For 18 Musicians came out [in 1978], where he transitioned that merging and phase‑shifting into the ensemble, that was just so beautiful, I thought.”
It was at university that Basinski first conducted his own tape experiments, ingeniously sellotaping over the erase head of a casette‑recording Sony Walkman so that he could create long, improvised and live‑overdubbed electric piano compositions.
“The first piece was probably around eight to 15 minutes,” he recalls. “We always had a piano in our house growing up, so I could play the piano to compose. I was sort of working on this thing for some time, for some years. I would just, y’know, smoke some weed and fuck around and then try things, and just randomly roll back and intuitively do this other part and see what happened.”
San Francisco
It was through these initial tape experiments that Basinski first met his long‑term partner, visual artist James Elaine. “I was in this very snooty art group of kids the second year after I moved away from the dorm,” Basinski remembers. “Jamie was like the king of this group. He wanted to hear about my music, and so I played it for him, and he said, ‘You’re a genius.’
“So that’s so attractive to hear when you’re 19 years old,” he chuckles. “Very encouraging. So, he fell in love, and I fell in love, and I ended up leaving and moving with him to San Francisco on Halloween, ’78.” The pair ended up living in a six‑roomed apartment on Haight Street where Elaine proceeded to fill every spare room with art installations.
“He would collect these old ’50s TVs off the street and bring them home,” Basinski explains, “and we’d turn them on and see what they would do.” Rather than their visual content, he was more interested in capturing the sounds these decrepit TVs produced. At the same time he’d become a collector of old reel‑to‑reel tape machines.
“So I started just recording everything,” he says. “I got some junk tape decks, these big old Philips or Norelco Continental 40lb portables. You could slow the Norelco way down — seven‑and‑a‑half IPS, three and three‑quarters and then one and seven‑eighths. I just started experimenting with changing speeds and seeing what kind of frequencies I could pull out of these drones I recorded, from the TVs to the refrigerator to everything.
Tape recording and manipulation has fascinated Basinski throughout his long career.Photo: James Elaine
“The sounds in San Francisco were just such a rich ambient environment with the clickety electric buses and then the cable cars creaking, and then you’d have the fog horns. Just really, really rich.”
Another highly influential album for Basinski was Brian Eno’s proto‑ambient classic Music For Airports, released in 1978. “It was sort of like... the melancholy, the delicateness of it, so beautiful. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ And then hearing Fripp and Eno, and then hearing all this drone music from Germany...”
Basinski subsequently built his own version of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s Frippertronics tape‑delay looping system. “I started getting some newer quarter‑inch tape decks. I had the two flatbeds to loop with, mixing into one of the Sonys or something. I did a lot of that, and then short‑wave radio experiments with loops.
“I wanted a Mellotron, so I was trying to make one with these little string snippets. Slowing them down and stuff, you would find this huge well of melancholy. And it was like, Oh, OK, here we go.”
New York
Basinski and Elaine then moved once again, in 1980, to New York. “Jamie was a very talented painter, and he’d had some shows,” says Basinski. “We’d both actually done some shows together, in some very cool galleries in San Francisco, but it was a very provincial scene. We worked and saved as much as we could, and then moved to New York because he wanted to ‘make it’, y’know.
“Starting first day there, there was a transit strike, April Fool’s Day, 1980. We had to walk all around town looking for a loft. We took off our brand‑new cowboy boots that night and got some band aids and tennis shoes for the next two weeks to walk around [laughs].
“We did eventually find this big, 5000‑square‑foot loft on the sixth floor in downtown Brooklyn, right across from a big subway station, and near to Brooklyn Heights. It was fairly safe, not too scary, if you didn’t go the wrong way. My friend Roger [Justice] eventually came and moved in with us, because we needed three people to afford the rent. They would be painting, and I would be painting with sound and experimenting with my tape loops and delay systems.”
During Basinski’s early years in New York, he produced the music that was to feature on his debut album, Shortwavemusic, made in 1981 and 1982, but not in fact released until 1998.
“Nobody wanted it,” he says in regard to the zero record label interest he attracted at the time. “They weren’t buying what I was doing. It was all punk rock and no wave. We dug all that shit. We went to CBGB, we went to shows and stuff, and I played in a lot of bands too, keyboards and sax and stuff. I just kept doing my work and then played with other people. It took forever, because no‑one was interested.”
The short‑wave radio sounds that Basinski captured on the album came from various remote sources. “I made a huge antenna on the fire escape, so that you could really get the signals from all over the world. Just taking the wire around and around and around. You could hear Russia and the Middle East and everywhere. In‑between stations was what I liked the best, the particle showers and all that stuff. I became fascinated with those sounds and the way the station might shift on you when you were recording. I just had a field day with that for a year or so.”
Aside from a recording studio and art space, between 1989 and 1997, Basinski and Elaine also used their loft as a club venue they named Arcadia, where many of their musician friends, including Anohni and Diamanda Galás, would regularly perform. “It was really something,” says Basinski. “It only really lasted for a few years because it was exhausting. It was in our home, and eventually it started to get to be too much.
“Diamanda did a fabulous Halloween show [in 1991], which I have an amazing recording of. I had to rent her a Steinway, and so we lost money on that show. But y’know, you can’t have a party like that for $600, I’ll tell you that. There were already a lot of artists and people that moved into Williamsburg at the same time we did. So it was sort of like a company. We featured the people that we liked over and over again.”
Disintegration
Nonetheless, by 2001, William Basinski found himself broke and on the verge of giving up on his music career. “I was in debt and about to be evicted,” he remembers. “On this beautiful day in July, I was miserable about what I was going to do.” Basinski was sat around idly reading British‑American philosophical author Alan Watt’s 1957 book The Way Of Zen when he suddenly felt inspired. “I read it,” he says, “and thought, OK, use this time to do your work. Get back in the studio.
“By then, I had bought a CD burner on the credit card, and so I decided to get these loops transferred to digital. Because, y’know, the tapes were from the ’70s, and the loops were from the ’80s. I had recording engineer friends. I knew what dropout was, and I knew what could happen.”
At the time, Basinski’s old tape loops had almost become decorative, having been left hanging for some years on a dead tree branch he’d found in a parking lot. “I would group the ones I wanted together with little safety pins on another side.” He picked off six of these loops, each roughly between 12 and 16 inches in length, suspended them from a boom stand, and then randomly selected one.
“That was what became ‘dlp 1.1’,” he says. “I was like, Oh my God. This is so grave. This is such an amazing melody.” All of the tapes contained chance snatches of audio from a CBS radio station broadcasting from the top of the Empire State Building, slowed to three and three quarter IPS. At this point, Basinski’s main tape recorder was a Revox G36 that he’d picked up in a nearby house clearance in Brooklyn in the late ’90s.
“It was this townhouse in the Hasidic section of Brooklyn about a mile from my house. And the man was a very interesting guy. He had worked for Bell Telephone since, like, the ’30s. He had all of these old headsets and microphones. I got a portable cutting lathe and this Revox, which looked kind of ratty.”
With the Revox, Basinski’s technique involved using D‑sized batteries to spool the tapes around and maintain tension. “They’re heavy,” he says, “and you’ve gotta keep the tapes tight, or they’ll get chewed up in the machine.”
Basinski used D‑cell batteries to tension the loops on his Revox G36 tape recorder.Photo: Sean Stout
Listening to the woozy sample repeating in the first loop, he decided to create a counter‑melody to it using the in‑built arpeggiator in his Octave Plateau Voyetra 8 synthesizer, leaving it to play live and unsynchronised along with the main theme.
“I got a cool, randomly arpeggiating sort of French horn sound dialled in,” he recalls, “and it was going really nice. I didn’t know what was going to happen, so I started recording. And then, I went to make a coffee, and came back and started realising, something’s changing, what’s going on? And then I started to see what was going on and hear what was going on.”
Basinski looked at the moving tape and could see that it was shedding the iron‑oxide coating from its plastic backing. “I thought, Check the levels... check the levels. Gotta make sure, y’know. Let’s just see what happens, because this is a one‑time thing.”
Adding to the haunting effect was the outboard Lexicon reverb that Basinski had used to treat the sounds. As the notes cracked and slowly disappeared, the Lexicon eerily filled in the gaps. “You can hear it more because the dropouts seemed to happen at the end, where the decay on the notes was. The strongest notes seem to hold on the longest. Kind of like people’s memories and in dementia and things like that. So fascinating.”
After recording the first loop for just over an hour, Basinski moved on to the second one, creating ‘dlp 2.1’ and so on. Over two days he produced the six pieces that were to make up the four albums of The Disintegration Loops.
For ‘dlp 2.1’, Basinski had similarly added a sequence on the Voyetra 8, although he chose not to add any overdubs on the later loops. “The second one started to flake out faster,” he says, “and I realised, Listen, don’t do counter melodies here.
Some of them were so perfect and eternal that I knew they didn’t need anything. After that, it was just the loops by themselves. I realised, Stay out of the way. This is not your business. You just do your work as an engineer here.
“Some of them were so perfect and eternal that I knew they didn’t need anything. After that, it was just the loops by themselves. I realised, Stay out of the way. This is not your business. You just do your work as an engineer here.”
Over the Summer and into the Autumn of 2001, Basinski and his friends visiting the loft often listened to these disintegration recordings, purely for pleasure. Initially he had his doubts about releasing them. “I didn’t really know if I could just put this on for an hour and call it my work,” he says. “But we would listen to them.
“Anohni came over. Steve Roden was in town. My wonderful artist friend Howard Schwartzberg, with his amazing Coney Island accent. We got stoned, flopped around the loft and listened to the whole thing, and he’s like, ‘Billy, you’ve done it.’ He was right.”
But then came the day in history that would be forever linked to ‘dlp 1.1’ and The Disintegration Loops. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, William Basinski woke up planning to travel into Manhattan for a job interview as administrator at an arts organisation whose offices were located on one of the upper floors of the World Trade Center.
“Thank God it was at 11 o’clock in the morning,” he says. “The towers were gone by then. I mean, it was horrible. We saw everything from the roof and from my window, and it was just... I mean, you just... you never get over that.” One of Basinski’s friends had set up her camcorder on the roof, video’ing the city and clouds of smoke. He asked her if he could use his own tape to record the last hour of daylight before night fell. “I had her help me frame it up,” he says. “And I said, ‘OK, just leave it and I’ll pick it up in the morning’.”
Still in shock, the next day Basinski used iMovie to layer the footage with ‘dlp 1.1’ . The result was what he was to later describe as “the life and death of a melody” soundtracking the aftermath of a world historical disaster. “It was profoundly moving,” he says.
Sequels
The first volume of The Disintegration Loops, featuring ‘dlp 1.1’ and ‘dlp 2.1’ (and a still from the video on its cover), was self‑released on CD in 2002 and became an instant critical and underground hit. “It just blew up from there,” Basinski says. “My inbox was just suddenly flooded with orders from my website. I was going to the post office twice a day.”
Three subsequent volumes followed in 2003 and from here Basinski built a catalogue as a prolific composer, in addition to becoming in‑demand as a live performer. Then, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, an orchestral arrangement by Maxim Moston of the first two pieces from The Disintegration Loops was performed by the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York.
Moston’s approach was to slowly ‘chip away’ the parts that the musicians played. Additional sounds of decay were provided by the players scrunching pieces of cling film. One written direction on the charts read “popcorn on side of drum skin”. At the end of the performance, the audience listened for a few minutes to complete silence.
Basinski was watching from the audience and remembers, “It was as if everyone had been turned to stone. There were children there, there were old people there. But there wasn’t a sound, until this plane flew over, picking up the F note or something, and then everyone just went nuts. It was really something.”
In 2012 came the first vinyl box‑set version of The Disintegration Loops, released on Brooklyn label Temporary Residence Ltd, whose founder Jeremy DeVine approached a doubting Basinski, and then flew out to the composer’s new home in Los Angeles to convince him.
“When Jeremy came to see me in California, wanting to do the LP box set,” he says, “I was like, Well, y’know, [the tracks] are so long. He’s like, ‘Well, classical records... Hello.’ I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, OK, why not? Go ahead and do it.’”
Since then, the orchestrated version of the album has been performed live internationally. “It jumped to pencil and paper and live, lifetime‑dedicated and trained musicians, playing what seems like this very simple thing,” Basinski marvels. “But it’s actually quite difficult to pull off, because you have to count a lot.
“I heard from a wonderful violinist, when we did this incredible outdoor concert Anohni invited us to do in Amsterdam a couple of years ago, that actually they’re sitting there with their arm [stiffly positioned] right here the whole time, and it’s very tiring. They’re not, like, flying around and getting through everything they usually do, so it’s quite difficult.
“But every time we’ve done it, it’s just been incredible. And I always cry and thank everyone. This is something I get to go and listen to and take a bow at the end. So it’s kind of nice.”
Afterwards
Since The Disintegration Loops, William Basinski has continued to work with unusual source material. On 2019’s Time Out Of Time, for instance, he created two electronic pieces using the sound of gravitational waves from outer space recorded in 2015 by the two LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational‑wave Observatory) research facilities in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana.
“They were picked up on the Earth in these installations they spent years developing to see if they could detect them,” he says. “These scientists had been trying to prove the existence of these things, and they finally caught it. This was a rift in space time caused by two massive black holes colliding in space, something like three billion light years away, sending out the most powerful shockwave anyone’s ever discovered.”
Basinski became involved after meeting LIGO’s Jamie Rollins at a party. “Jamie was a huge fan, and he said, ‘Hey, we have these weird recordings. Would you like to do something with them?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, send them over. I’ll see what I can do.’
“I started with some of the sounds of just like clicks, but then also these very low‑frequency things. I mean, they had to bring the frequencies up, I don’t know how many times, just to be able to hear them.
“I just imagined these waves travelling throughout space time and changing and morphing and moving throughout the galaxies. Then at the end, when they come to Earth, I get very romantic, and it sort of resolves. To me it was like a Gothic love story of two black holes.”
A year later, on 2020’s Lamentations, made and released during the pandemic, Basinski returned to his old ’80s tape loops. “A lot of the loops that I used were sort of rejects,” he says. “They weren’t pretty, and they got set aside in a little takeout container. Then everything had gotten so weird and everything, I thought, Well, let me see what’s in here. Then I ended up coming up with the titles.”
The tape loops after the recordings.Photo: Jeremy DeVine
In addition, he also — as a result of the success of The Disintegration Loops — used old reel‑to‑reels that had been sent to him by fans. Often, these tapes featured compiled ‘playlists’ of unidentified music recorded by their previous owners.
“People always send me these giant reel‑to‑reels,” he says. “People’s sometimes labelled or usually not labelled playlists. So that’s my tape stock [laughs].
“When I make these loops, I’ll record something on one side of a used tape. You don’t know what’s on it. You just cut a piece, tape it together, and record what you want on it and then I’ll turn it over and see what’s on the other side. And sometimes you get a great surprise. Like those soprano opera snippets and stuff were just like, Wow.”
Of course, these days, tape‑styled sound‑corrupting digital plug‑ins are very popular. Basinski isn’t a fan. “I’m an old dog,” he points out. “I don’t learn new tricks. They are what they are, but it’s all fake. I don’t try them, I don’t use them. I can get it the hard way, honey. Through time... a lot of time.”
Incredibly, all these years after realising that his tapes were crumbling during the making of The Disintegration Loops, William Basinski has yet to clean out their accumulated dust from the compartment behind the transport on his Revox.
“Yeah,” he laughs, “it’s still in there.”
The Disintegration Loops – Arcadia Archive Edition is released on 7th November by Temporary Residence Ltd.