The Disintegration Loops is based on Basinski's attempts to salvage earlier recordings made on magnetic tape, by transferring them into digital format; however, the tape had deteriorated to the point that, as it passed by the Tape Head, the ferrite detached from the plastic backing and fell off. Basinski has said that he finished the project the morning of the September eleventh attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, and sat on the roof of his apartment building in Brooklyn with friends listening to the project as the W.T.C. towers collapsed.[2] In 2011, Basinski corrected earlier reports where he described recording the last hour of daylight of 9/11 in N.Y.C. with a video camera focused on the smoke where the towers were from a neighbor's roof, then set the first loop as the sound-track to that footage. Stills from the video were used as the covers for the set of four C.D.s.
