Basinski retreated to his studio to record and mix the remaining loops. He emerged a few weeks later, with five hours of music, The Disintegration Loops. It was Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. 

My Grandma June had just gotten her computer fixed in lower Manhattan  —  about twenty blocks from World Trade Center Plaza  —  when the first tower fell. She walked outside and joined thousands of other New Yorkers walking north, away from whatever had just happened. Everyone was talking to each other. Many of the people she met had evacuated buildings in the financial district. They assumed she had too. “You managed to get out with your desktop,” they said, gesturing to the Macintosh in her arms (it contained idiosyncratic Photoshop collages and wine-label graphics she designed on contract; not, as they must have thought, sensitive financial information), “Smart.” 

“After the events of 9/11,” Basinski told NPR,

“everything changed. The whole world changed. The context of Disintegration Loops changed. And I felt, with my experience being in New York at that time, and what I went through and what I saw my friends go through, I wanted to create an elegy.”

The evening of 9/11, Basinski pointed a camera at the Manhattan skyline from his rooftop in Brooklyn and filmed the last hour of daylight, smoke and ash rising across half the sky. He bounced the video to his computer and paired it with d|p 1.1  —  the first, 63-minute loop. Stills from the video were used as cover images for each of the four Disintegration Loop albums, which were dedicated to the victims of the attacks. A story circulated in the press that Basinski and friends were listening to the loops, over and over, as they watched the day’s horrors unfold from his rooftop  —  a scene as haunting as it is implausible.