Blanck Mass’s latest consists of just two tracks, each about 20 minutes long.
Every time I listen to this album (which is pretty often), I think of “Nevada” from John Linnell’s State Songs album. The styles could not be more different, but both have music that eventually gives way to random street noises.
I looked up Popul Vuh after watching Aguirre, the Wrath of God years ago. Several of their tracks are around 20 minutes long, and they build a good atmosphere.
Nothing but Noise is a project by members of Front 242. Most of their songs exceed ten minutes. (Their latest album is over two hours long.) One of their best also happens to be their longest, hitting 25 minutes.
There’s a very good arrangement of this Tetris theme by Marcel Donné in Project Sidologie that’s slightly longer than the original, even. I don’t think it’s posted anywhere public that I can link to, unfortunately. The MP3 file is 63 MB, which is great.
So there’s certain artists where songs going over 10 minutes is Just What They Do, the Boredoms are a good call here and while there are so many good examples, I’m going to limit myself to just one Nurse With Wound track:
The band Lard was basically Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys plus Ministry. Their first EP has the following song on it. It’s really fucking long and mostly noise. One night me and one of my good friends were sitting around listening to KALX and the song came on. We were blown away! Blown away enough that we called the station afterwards to chat with the DJ about it. He said “oh, I just played it because it’s in the song section for if you need to take a shit or run and grab some food”.
On Washing Machine, Diamond Sea clocks in at 19 minutes, but there’s a 26 minute version that showed up on a later b-side comp.
Dan Deacon has a couple long songs, but this is one of his earlier ones. The back-up vocals are provided by a who’s who of Baltimore musicians.
Two of the four pieces on Music for Airports clock in at over ten minutes.
Back in college, during my commutes on the bus I’d listen to a CD player that could play MP3s off of CD-Rs, and this song used to glitch out the time display after a certain point, making the whole thing feel that much more unearthly.
