frame, blowing south from ground zero. The camera never moves. Plumes of smoke seem to pulse with the lilt of the music. The north half of the sky turns from blue-yellow to blue-pink to grey-black. As night falls, the loop fizzles out and lights turn on in Manhattan. “It was certainly ‘powerful’ to hear Basinski's tragic and painfully sad music soundtracking these images,” Richardson wrote in 2011 essay, “but I had a hard time connecting this ‘art experience’ with actual documentation of what happened.” In his review of the reissue, Richardson reiterated, “It’s still difficult for me to watch footage of burning Manhattan in an ‘art’ context.”

Richardson objects to the way the video “transforms real-life misery into something controlled and replay-able, an emotion-in-a-box that can be pulled off the shelf.” He faults Basinski for making beautiful what is fundamentally horrific — and thereby eliding the raw horribleness of the tragedy itself, which must somehow be preserved. And indeed, something is definitely off. But lots of art aestheticizes tragedy, some of it very gracefully. The problem with Basinski’s visual elegy is not that it’s art, but that it’s bad art. The video, by attempting to reify the connection between the music and its supposed subject, instead reveals a disjuncture.

The Disintegration Loops perform a certain kind of death, the turning of something vital into nothing. But not the sort of spectacular, aberrant, catastrophic death we associate with a terrorist attack, violence intruding from the outside, which we never see coming and leaves everything different, which makes people say, “Suddenly, everything changed.” Instead, the death played out over the course of the Disintegration Loops is slow, inevitable, quiet, and no less moving for being totally predictable. The iterative dwindling, the silence, which grows by increments, prepares us, moment by moment, for the kind of death we know is coming from the first note. It is completely sad but reliably so. Paired with video footage of smoke billowing over Manhattan, the first Disintegration Loop