billowing over Manhattan, the first Disintegration Loop is obscene. Its plaintive, meditative sadness makes no sense because that’s not what it feels like to watch your city burn.

When I listen to the last few minutes of the first loop — when the melody persists as just a wispy impression of its earlier self — I think about my grandma June, who died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2008, whose death came in slow, predictable waves. A few months before she died, my sister recorded a series of interviews with June (somewhat anachronistically, it turns out, on tape). My grandmother talked about her life, her art, and the disease that was destroying her body. Between questions, as my sister shifts papers, the sound of my grandmother’s breathing, constrained by an excess of fibrous tissue growing in her lungs, is all we hear. Even now, it’s hard for me to listen to. But like the trembling inhale of emptied melody at the end of the first disintegration loop, her breathing is belabored, not panicked.

Death doesn’t always intrude suddenly from the outside. Often — as in the case of the aged, the terminally ill — death announces itself quietly, settles in and becomes familiar, long before it steals anyone away. The Disintegration Loops insist on this fact, that we are all already dying. We want death to be alien, exterior, exotic, unfathomable so that we might insulate ourselves from it. The Disintegration Loops make it familiar, mundane. Worse still, The Disintegration Loops attest to the potential for beauty in this inevitability: the Nietzschean lesson that we might learn to love and “see as beautiful what is necessary in things,” to cease waging war against what is ugly because everything eventually will be. The Disintegration Loops, may be the rare (and paradoxical) form of commemorative art which actively endorses forgetting. Calling on us to accept, as Nietzsche did, that “without forgetting, it is quite impossible to live at all.”

Often when I listen to the Loops, I feel this — an appreciation for the grace of what can’t be otherwise, for the pastness of the past. And yet other times, the crumbling refrain doesn’t sound tk tk tk tk tk