dlp 1.1

Basinski was digitizing quarter-inch tape loops of radio snippets from the 1980s in July and August 2001 at Arcadia when he noticed the tape deteriorating and left the CD burner running. Sound on Sound says the source was a CBS station atop the Empire State Building, slowed to 3 3/4 ips; Wikipedia says a 1982 CBS Radio Muzak broadcast. He used a Revox G36 with D-cell batteries holding the tape down, an Octave Plateau Voyetra 8 arpeggiator playing a French horn sound as an unsynchronized counter-melody on the first loop (The Fader says a Minimoog Voyager) and a Lexicon reverb, while iron oxide shed from the backing as it played. Six loops hung from a boom stand were recorded over two days. After the second loop he dropped overdubs: stay out of the way, he said, this is not your business.

On September 11, 2001 he watched the attacks from the roof of his Brooklyn building with friends and neighbors, and filmed the last hour of daylight; sources differ on whether he or a friend held the camera. The next day he played dlp 1.1 over the footage. He told The Quietus in 2012 that he decided to release the records as an elegy, and the North Texan in 2021 that he felt he had been commissioned to soundtrack the end of the world. A neighbor asked him to turn the loops off when Loop Four began. A one-hour excerpt of the film set to the music was acquired by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The piece has been played by orchestras: the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Met on September 11, 2011, conducted by Ryan McAdams in an arrangement by Maxim Moston before about 800 people; the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2018; and the Chicago Philharmonic under Emanuele Andrizzi in March 2019. Setlist.fm lists it as his most played song at 9 plays, tied with On Time Out of Time. We hold two uploads and cannot tell whether either is his own recording or an orchestral version.