The Greatest Band Of All Time.

Repeat. Repeat. Replete.

Seamlessly sequenced to ease atop itself over and over again forever. Again and again and again. That which was once bridged in relief with a contemplative rewind or lift of the arm is now a standard automation on any respectable digital media device. And for no practical purpose outside that of self-pity and modern dance rehearsal. Same song on repeat. For weeks. Relief made obsolete.

In darker days I discovered a way of listening to music in a way that is sort of akin to turning a portrait upside down to finish its features. In an experiment of patience and despair, a very teenaged manifestation of myself rode the repeat button for an evening, a night, a morning. At roughly 4:09, “Asleep” cycled somewhere around 132 times in those nine hours, and upon waking, I didn’t recognize the words anymore. The piano was gone. All that remained was the ghostly canned wind stretching from either end of the song, and the music box that so affectedly ends it. A song I had listened to so endlessly for so many years, a song about sleep, made anew by sleeping inside of it. The experiment was escalated roughly two years later (at an age where such things had long since grown indefensible) in an evening of deep decadence: bathing, reading to, sleeping with, and waking against “Christmas Song.” Now, using the same conservative estimates (9 hours), this leaves roughly 166 (and a two-thirds) listens of a song composed entirely around a five second refrain—or, 64.8 loops per song, or 10,799 total listens. Sleeping inside of it. Bathing in it. A song inverted on itself, becoming two separate, symbiotic halves—one of watery piano, guitar plucks, ambient chords, and glockenspiel accents, another of rise and decay, of impact (percussive pedal clicks, metal scraps and clanks) and resolve (washing reverberation).

It’s mostly about using obsessive compulsion to your fiscal and emotional advantage: two for one.

Caution: this is not a recommendation.

(Later on the Smiths as The Greatest Band of All Time™, to be sure.)

Posted by zac at May 5, 2004 04:24 PM