William Basinski performs on September 19 at Teatar 78 in Belgrade. The American composer who made one of the century's best-known ambient works comes to the Serbian capital, and tickets are 2,900 dinars through tickets.rs. The start is at 8 pm.

His name is inseparable from The Disintegration Loops, a series of four albums released in 2002 and 2003 on his label 2062. The story of how they came about is well known and yet rarely told accurately: Basinski was digitising old analogue tapes from 1982, came upon a few pastoral pieces he had forgotten, and while one of them was looping he realised the tape itself was disintegrating with every pass across the recorder head. The iron oxide particles were turning to dust, and more and more gaps of silence were entering the music.

The result is dlp 1.1, a sixty-three-minute recording in which the material literally dies in real time. He finished the work in September 2001 in New York, and the photographs he took from his apartment that day are the covers of all four releases. That coincidence gave the work a second life, but its weight is not in the date - it is in having recorded disintegration as a process rather than a metaphor.

What he brings to the stage is not a reconstruction of the album. Basinski works with tape, low frequencies and space, and his performances resemble an installation more than a concert. Teatar 78 is a small stage, which for material that lives off silence and reverberation is a better format than any large hall.

Tickets are 2,900 dinars, on sale through tickets.rs.