And thanks to this combination of coincidence, marketing  —  we might say more generously, ‘presentation’  —  and the critical press’s appetite for melodrama, William Basinski’s first and only widely known composition came to be inextricably linked in the public imagination with the 2001 attacks. Every article about The Disintegration Loops invokes the 9/11 tragedy, which is treated as their subject, their setting, and that which makes them legible as art. The loops have passed into a small canon of works recognizable as “9/11 art”  —  in the way that W. G. Sebald’s novels are deemed “holocaust fiction.” In 2012, they were inducted into the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. A few Octobers ago Basinski told an interviewer, “I wish I never had to talk about 9/11 again.”

Most critics have taken for granted the connection between the Disintegration Loops and the events of September 11, 2001. After rehearsing some version of the story I’ve told above, they gesture toward an aesthetic justification for the loops’ status as 9/11 art: the disintegrating loops are about death and decline, they say, about how everything eventually “falls apart and returns to dust.” Or else, the loops dramatize a disappearance, as one review put it, the “cataclysmic editing of one of the world’s most recognizable skylines.” Like the ground zero memorial itself — two giant, rectangular pits surrounded by cascading fallsthey are a tribute to that which is no longer there. Like reviews of Shoah, the recordings elicit careful, uniform praise, insulated from reproach by the severity of their ‘subject.’

Among the only reviewers who have expressed anything approaching criticism is Pitchfork’s editor-in-chief Mark Richardson. His concerns, however, are not with the music itself — Richardson awarded The Disintegration Loops reissue the coveted 10/10 score in 2012 — but with the 63 minute video for d|p 1.1, which Basinski created from his 9/11 footage and released on DVD in 2004. In it, black smoke pours out over the