In The Disintegration Loops Stephen Cramer attempts to uncover the music within the world's dissolution and fragmentation, from Italian masters painting over the work of previous artists, to the innocence of childhood giving way to scars, to the description of badly stored tapes being looped and played over and over again until they begin to flake. In the last of the three, silence eats the music from the inside so that by the final loop, the listener hears not the soaring themes of the beginning, but an homage to loss and stillness. The book insists that music, and maybe even life itself, is made more dazzling and precious because it "falters/ & staggers/ forward. The broken/ melody limps & surges on."