An Integration Loop
robinsloan.com
robinsloan.com
Basinski was a struggling avant-garde musician who had been working on the Disintegration Loops and similar projects for some period of time before 9/11. None of the projects were taking off.
Basinski alleges to have performed Disintegration Loops (likely untitled at that point) for the first time on his Brooklyn rooftop with some friends the day of 9/11. The idea is that they played this somber tape music an wallowed in their collective grief.
The problem with this is that he took his amateur music (he was by no means a celebrated musician at this point) and covered it with the trauma of a national tragedy just to make it seem profound and stirring.
This isn't to say that Disintegration Loops isn't a decent tape project. But it is by no means innovative or even exemplary for the time, except for the extraordinary and painful circumstances surrounding its release. Basinski failed here for trying to take credit for the character of these circumstances as his own.
This is not my original line of thought. All credit here goes to Chris Ott [0], that evergreen of music criticism.