Disintegration Loops (2021 | USA | 45 minutes | David Wexler)

As a music fan, and a general appreciator but not a particular aficionado of the ambient genre, “Disintegration Loops” is a phrase I’d been vaguely aware of for much of the last 20 years, but I hadn’t done the necessary investigation to really understand what was going on there. Luckily, this documentary, part of SXSW’s “24 Beats Per Second” music-doc section, was made for people exactly like me. It’s a primer on this massively influential experimental music piece – its inception and its legacy – as well as a brief biography highlighting who its creator, William Basinski, was and is.

Basinski, an experimental composer based in New York City, released his piece “The Disintegration Loops” as an “elegy” to the September 11, 2001 attacks, which he witnessed out his apartment window. The piece is a few seconds of nameless found music, recorded off the radio airwaves and onto a decaying tape that lost its fidelity as Basinski repeated it on a loop, which he further recorded in repetition for a little over an hour as it warped and faded. Set to video footage of the Twin Towers collapsing, it became an indelible snapshot of the time which hit home for many, including connecting in a deeply personal way with some giants of the ambient/experimental music genre, several of whom are interviewed or quoted here.

At just 45 minutes, David Wexler’s doc is just about the minimum length a film must be to still be considered a feature – and even at that length, some elements felt like unnecessary padding. Did we really need to spend so much time being patient with the awkward mechanics of connecting via Zoom in this pandemic era, in order to hit home the symmetry of the strangeness of this moment on the piece’s 20-year anniversary? Numbered chapter titles also felt like an unnecessary attempt to lend heft and shape to the material which could have flowed more naturally without them. This subject matter may have been even more effective if it were delivered in the form of a tighter short film, rather than trying to stretch to a full-length feature – or possibly fleshed out even further with more details about Basinski’s life and his more recent work. Even so, it’s interesting information and a worthwhile spotlight on a hauntingly unique musical piece, its charismatic creator, and the evolving legacy that both are still actively in the process of creating today.