The Disintegration Loops is a series of pieces by the American composer William Basinski, released as four volumes in 2002 and 2003. In July 2001, in his Brooklyn loft, Basinski began transferring to digital some quarter-inch tape loops he had made around twenty years earlier, partly from snatches of radio. As the old tape passed the heads its oxide coating flaked away, so each loop slowly eroded while he kept recording: the decay is the composition.
Its link to 11 September 2001 is real but often embellished; the recordings were made weeks before the attacks, not on the day. On 11 September Basinski and friends watched from the roof of his building as smoke rose over Lower Manhattan, and footage filmed there at dusk was paired with the first loop and supplied the cover images. The elegiac reading grew from that coincidence, and on the tenth anniversary an orchestral arrangement was played at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.