When William Basinski attempted to digitalize some of his old tape loops, notably on the 11th of September 2001, he experienced something that most of us are familiar with: tapes lose their quality over long playtime. Apparently, tapes that haven’t been touched for close to twenty years still sound as they were intended, but their process of decomposition is very rapid. Dealing with tape loops, it’s evident that with each repetition, tiny bits of iron oxide fall off and the tape and it slowly loses its data. Each of the pieces in Disintegration Loops shows the gradual process of a disintegrating short piece of music, synchronized into the perpetual nature of the digital medium.

For quite a lot of people, degeneration or corrosion has its charms. Ruins have their allure, and old buildings often show how paint that has been subjective to the elements for a longer period of time is much more interesting than anything slick and smooth. For me, there is little more beautiful than an old factory, painted into a soiled landscape from a palette of monochrome rust tints. We can see how nature takes what her belongs, and how everything from the smallest to the largest scale occurs periodically. Panta rhei: everything streams, but everything streams in circles, just like this piece of process music.

Although in process music, the process usually is predefined, it happens here as a coincidental discovery of Basinski. It’s obvious that one does not sit and listen carefully, it’s a necessity to take a short distance from it, to be able to see the bigger picture. But this shouldn’t sound outlandish for a person familiar with minimal music. There is more going on than just the concept of the beauty of decay, namely the decay of beauty. This is so, because the tape loops that are subject to the process contain an absolutely stunning beauty. Even though they last mere seconds, they immediately entrance with their tenderly waving melancholy and ethereal fragility. All melodies fall to slightly different combinations of basic systems, to surrender to glitch, to decompose into silence and to sink into an aural mud. The series of four is magnificent as a large opus, but I have to mention that Disintegration Loops II somehow surpasses the other ones. The loops of highly modified strings and other eclectic sounds, customized into glass slender yet silk soft timbres are simply most enthralling here. The coincidental connection with the 11th of September makes this an excellent soundtrack to a mute and slow-motion film about the fall of the twin towers. Essential.