Album Retrospective: William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops I-IV

Album Rating For All Four: A+

It seems mad to me that music comprised of simple loops can become a mesmerising celebration of death; let alone that the music to do this would come into existence entirely by accident. The origin story of The Disintegration Loops is one that passed to legend and then to myth, and what must have started as fact now seems buried under romantic hyperbole. The story goes that in the process of converting his old magnetic tapes to digital format, Basinski noticed that his tapes had begun to literally fall apart. For some unknown and morbid reason he allowed it to happen and as he sat there on his roof in Brooklyn on September 10th, 2001, his tapes began to take on a life of their own. The painstakingly beautiful loops composed to echo the endearing qualities of nature began to die. While hard to notice at first, the loops slowly distort and decay until - under a sea of static silence - they draw their final breath.