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Full disintegration He finished the recordings on the morning of September 11, 2001, a few hours before he was due at a job interview in the World Trade Center. In August 2001, William Basinski was digitizing some old tape loops of easy listening music he'd recorded back in the 80s. In the process, the ferrite coating on the tape started flaking off, so each pass of the loop came out a bit more degraded than the last. Instead of fixing it, he let the tape deck run and captured the whole decay live, which became The Disintegration Loops. He finished the recordings on the morning of September 11, 2001, a few hours before he was due at a job interview in the World Trade Center. That evening he sat on the roof of his apartment in Williamsburg with friends and neighbors, filmed the smoke over Manhattan as the light faded, and the loop played as an accidental soundtrack to the whole thing. Stills from that footage became the covers for the four albums, released 2002–2003.