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Ridiculously Long Songs I Like; Page One
I almost feel that one of the ground rules for this stupid endeavor should be no drum and base, and no electronica. The longest tracks on my iPod are all Orbital and the KLF, weighing in at things like 14:35 for Lush, and even 29:21 for The Rites of Mu, it seems unfair to compare pieces composed against those that are looped or copy and paste jobs. Although some of their tracks could be accused of being paste and quote jobs (I'm looking at you 93 - Don't Stop Now) Page One, cannot.
Penultimate track on their debut album lemonjelly.ky, Page One is a fabulous arrangement at 9:12 that takes you to the bleak empty wastes of the beginning of time as though you were sat in some sort of history/biology/geology/astrology class being lectured by the sort of boring old fart who has leather patches on the elbows of his sleeves and thinks that the best way to keep everyone's attention is to draw... out... his... sentences... for... emphasis!
From humble beginnings of distant echoes and a drum track being layered on you're taken to the chords and scales of someone still learning to play the piano. They've got the basics and they fit well into the beat, but its simplistic and more elements are piled on to keep the track progressing. As each cycle repeats, as is the mantra of an electronica track, the combinations and hybrids that arise through the variations define each iteration.
And then he speaks. Wherever this gent is sampled from I imagine an Open University program, with this man sitting on the edge of a desk with a blank book, open to Page One. he asks us to imagine having no possessions, and likens this to the void that presaged time. And then... and here we are tricked by the looping, instead of the big bang that we are expecting he says "nothing". We're halfway through the track and where we might have been ever so slightly interested in this attempt to teach us something, instead we are returned to square one.
After this moment of deception the layers are slowly stripped away again, until finally we are left with a dull explosion and the sombre strings of violins. Nothing to see here, its all over. Is it perhaps a statement on the futility of progress in the face of cosmic timescales? Or did they jjust need a ten minute track to pad out the end of the album? I'm guessing the latter.
May.24.2007