‘The Disintegration Loops’ Are Music’s Loveliest Death

It is hard to say what mood I need to be in to have the urge to put on The Disintegration Loops, because it is hard to say what mood they express. The same five- or 10-second loop, so obviously mournful and defeated, can sound at another another time—10 minutes later, or 10 years later—just as obviously inspiring or triumphant. They say that what you get from a piece of art depends on what you bring to it. There's maybe no better example.

The Loops are as much an experiment as a composition. In 2001, the ambient artist William Basinski was attempting to digitize an old collection of audio tape loops he'd recorded decades earlier. During the transfer process, he saw that the magnetized tape was literally flaking off the reels—the integrity of the recording coming apart a little more each time it played. As he played them over and over again, he noticed something interesting happening with the audio itself: it was decaying, imperceptibly with each repetition, but obvious after several hundred, several thousand.

The Disintegration Loops, four albums with individual tracks running as long as an hour, are no more than they promise. Each track is a single melody, a few seconds long, repeated ad nihilum. If you go into it expecting to hear the melody change, you will be disappointed. The decay is so slow and subtle that each repetition is seemingly identical. But as the track goes on and on, you gradually become aware of cracks and pops where there weren't before. Voices have faded. It echoes, as if from the bottom of a pit. The loop has become less a snatch of music than a memory of one. "I’m recording the life and death of a melody,” Basinski said.