Twenty-five years ago today I was asleep in Vancouver, three time zones and one skeptical roommate away from the rest of the world.
He didn’t believe in TV. He got the news the old way: a phone call. His mom, in Boston, telling him his dad had missed the flight that hit the towers. That’s how I found out 9/11 happened. Not from a broadcast. From a knock on a door and a stranger’s relief.
A few weeks before, he’d told me he had a dream about a plane crashing into a building and the building coming down. We lived close enough to the seaplane harbour that you could watch them landing and lifting off sporadically, if the apartments across the street didn’t block the view. But if you watched the landings, the planes would disappear behind the buildings. I didn’t think much of the dream at the time for that reason. I told him “Oh your brain is just playing out some subconscious thing”. Then on 9/11 later in the day, he called me at work, distraught “Remember that dream I had? And my dad could have died, I’m kinda messed up”.
On 9/11 he woke me up saying someone had bombed the Pentagon. My first thought was “Wow someone finally did it”. Then he jacked into the neighbour’s internet and we watched it happen in real time, the way everyone did that morning, refreshing a page that kept getting worse. All the questions “What was it? Who’s crazy enough?”. At one point I heard myself say “Both towers are…gone?”
I walked to work that day thinking the world was ending. The building I worked in had a TV station studio. They’d put sets out on the sidewalk with a live feed, and people just stood there and watched, the way you’d watch weather. A sunny beautiful day with a sense of pure doom. People openly weeping. Terror across the faces of others.
Three years earlier I’d worked a friend’s feature in New York and had a green card that would’ve put me commuting through the WTC PATH station into Manhattan most mornings. A relative died, I came home for the funeral, and I never went back to finish the job. One of those what-ifs you carry around without doing anything with it. At the time I remember countless investigative reports in the local news about the original WTC bombings from 1993, and hypotheticals about “Not if, but when it will happen again.”
None of that is a dramatic story. It’s a small one, filtered through a stranger’s phone call and a commute I didn’t take. But I think that’s closer to how most people actually experienced that day than the footage suggests. Not at Ground Zero, just somewhere else in the world, watching something enormous happen through a doorway too small for it.
That’s why The Disintegration Loops has stuck with me more than almost anything else made about 9/11.
William Basinski spent the summer of 2001 transferring old tape loops (orchestral recordings he’d made in the early eighties) onto digital masters, mostly so he’d have them archived somewhere that wasn’t decaying magnetic tape. The tape was decaying. Badly. Every pass through the tape head stripped a little more ferrite off the backing, and the loops started coming apart as he recorded them. Not glitching but actually dying, in slow motion, one repetition at a time. He kept the tape rolling and recorded the whole process instead of stopping it.
He finished the last loop on the morning of September 11th, in his apartment in Brooklyn, less than a mile from the towers. Then he went up to the roof with some friends, because from up there you could see the smoke. He filmed it. And at some point that day, without really deciding to, he started playing the loops back. The same disintegrating orchestral swell, looping and crumbling, while the wreckage smoked across the water.
He didn’t build the connection. It just happened to line up. A five-hour piece of music about something falling apart, finished the exact morning something else did.
What makes it work isn’t the metaphor. Metaphors this on-the-nose usually collapse under their own cleverness. What makes it work is that the loop keeps going. Basinski doesn’t cut it off at the moment of maximum decay ; you sit with it as it thins out, drops notes, turns into mostly silence with a little debris still audible underneath. It’s not a eulogy. It’s a recording of something still happening, well past the point where you’d want it to stop.
That’s closer to what the day actually felt like from where I was standing. Not one clean moment of horror and then grief. A loop that kept running, degrading a little more each time it came back around, for longer than anyone wanted.
Twenty-five years on, that’s still the honest version. Not “never forget” printed on a coffee mug. A tape that’s still playing, missing more of itself every year, and you keep listening anyway because some part of it is still there. It’s absolutely haunting and feels like the moment the world changed.
In some ways it did feel like the world ended, and right now we’re just all ghosts watching what’s left.