What makes Disintegration Loop 1.1 (2001) so affecting is its mundane perspective. It is a record of how millions of New Yorkers experienced 9/11 in real time, as seen from the avant-garde composer William Basinski’s rooftop in Williamsburg. During the summer of 2001, Basinski was struggling financially and facing eviction. At the same time, he was excavating the archive of analog tapes he had created two decades earlier. Inspired by experimental titans like John Cage and Steve Reich, these early recordings were a mix of radio broadcasts and found sounds. When Basinski played back a selection of his old tapes, the magnetic material containing the recordings began to flake off. He documented this degradation of fidelity in real time by digitizing it, playing loop after loop until the ferric oxide coating was completely gone and there was no physical sound left.
Basinski began his project in August and finished it on the morning of September 11, not long before the World Trade Center was attacked. He was supposed to interview for a job there with Creative Time later that day, after the towers had collapsed. That evening, during the final hour of sunlight, Basinski and some of his friends sat on his roof and he filmed the thick black plumes of smoke that continued to rise from the site of the destruction. The next morning, he added “dlp 1.1” (the opening track to his experimental ambient album The Disintegration Loops) as soundtrack to his footage. The somber brass fanfare he had originally sourced from a muzak short wave radio broadcast in the 1980s is reminiscent of a funeral dirge reaching from beyond the grave as it deteriorates, an expression of grief slowly retreating into the distance.
As the sun sets and smoke continues to pour into the sky seemingly without end, Basinski’s sounds decay along with the fading light. The growing gaps between each loop mirror the silence left by the thousands of innocent people who lost their lives, transforming a simple, static shot of the marred Manhattan skyline into something that captured a feeling countless New Yorkers felt deep in their bones that day. It nudges the viewer into a meditative state as the music gradually dissolves and the smoke is subsumed by the deep night sky. Disintegration Loop 1.1 does not offer closure, only the haunting sensation of survival and bearing witness to a profound loss.
Disintegration Loop 1.1 screens this evening, September 11, and throughout the month, at Spectacle. It will be preceded by Ken Jacobs’s Reichstag 9/11.
