After The Noise

Everything Is Equal

Wednesday 01 April 2026

William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops (Arcadia Archive Edition) (2025)

My attention was turned to William Basinski by my friend’s teenage son. Such is the nature of music now — it finds you from places you’d never expect.

The first time I listened, snippets unnerved me. Something about it kept pulling me back in.

This re-released collection runs just shy of five hours.

I started mid-afternoon on the way to work. The first piece had already lodged itself in my mind from that earlier listen.

Yesterday was the day I wanted more.

Back home, I put it on at low volume on my phone while doing my usual late-day pottering.

If pottering around the house was an Olympic sport, I’d win gold.

It took a couple of hours before it really got to me. Never has music made me feel quite like that.

The recordings literally disintegrate. And the more they fall apart, the more uneasy I felt.

Lights dimmed, everything else out of the way. It was approaching midnight.

I only made it about halfway through, but I didn’t want to turn it off. That strange pull where nothing much seems to be happening, yet you’re completely inside it.

The sound was low. Barely there, really. But felt loud in the room. Not in volume, just in presence. Like it was sitting with me rather than playing at me.

Mesmerising. Fragments drifting, slipping, slowly coming apart in real time. No rush. No urgency. Just this quiet unravelling.

Time stretched. Or maybe I just stopped paying attention to it. I could easily have carried on.

I had to force myself to press pause.

When I finally turned it off, the silence felt wrong. Too clean. Too sudden. Like something had been removed rather than finished.

It lingered longer than it played.

This morning, I still had the loops in my head. I put some on in the car and promptly went through a red light on a pelican crossing.

Something I never normally do.

I figured this music is too dangerous for driving and switched to The Rest Is Football podcast to regain a bit of sanity.

I’ll go back to it. Probably in one sitting. Maybe on the flight to Brazil next month, notebook in hand and a whisky within reach.

END OF LISTENING LOG

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