Bull of Heaven
| Bull of Heaven | |
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| Background information | |
| Origin | Denver, CO, USA |
| Genres | Experimental Music Avant-Garde Dark Ambient Minimalism Noise Sound Art |
| Years active | 2008 – |
| Labels | Unsigned |
| Associated acts | Planes Mistaken for Stars The Beachles Git Some Red Cloud West |
| Website | www.bullofheaven.com |
| Members | Clayton Counts Neil Keener |
Bull of Heaven are an American experimental/avant-garde group. The band consists of Clayton Counts and Neil Keener, with help from various contributors.
Contents |
History [edit]
Formation: 2006-2009 [edit]
Both key members behind Bull of Heaven started with a variety of earlier projects.[1] Neil Keener was (and in some cases, still is) involved with several punk rock and post-hardcore bands, including Planes Mistaken for Stars, Git Some, and Red Cloud West. Clayton Counts was also involved in Git Some, before he and Neil moved from Chicago to Denver, where Bull of Heaven was founded. Counts also gained notoriety in September 2006 when he created a mash-up of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, aptly titled Sgt. Petsound's Lonely Hearts Club Band and credited to the band The Beachles. Various blogs and news sites favoured it,[2][3] however, Counts was issued with a cease and desist.
Bull of Heaven's first piece, 001: Weed Problem, was released on their site on January 31, 2008. The same time the following year, the band had already released more than fifty pieces, totalling nearly three-hundred hours of music. Nearly all of Bull of Heaven's song titles are sourced from (sometimes obscure) literature.[4] Even at this early stage in the band's history, they were already becoming known for their incredible song lengths; 019: Hypnosis, Drugs, and Mind Control (The Beginning: A Touch) is eight hours long, 028: Even to the Edge of Doom is twenty-four hours long, 044: A Corpse in My Arms on Awakening breaks the one day mark at thirty-seven hours long, but is surpassed by 045: The Wicked Cease From Struggling which is one-hundred and sixty-eight hours long.
2009–2010 [edit]
Between April and May 2009, the band intermittently released a series of one-hundred new songs, all named and numbered in Roman numerals. Pieces I - C were the first of several breaks from the band's standard three-digit numbering system of releasing music.
From September 2009 to January of the following year, the band also started releasing another new series, known as Alephs. The first ten of these contained roughly 1000 - 1100 pieces in each sub-folder. Aleph10 and Aleph11 contain one-million and ten-million pieces respectively.
The band gained some acknowledgement in December 2009, when they released 118: The Chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space, a piece that is over two months long. Like many of their much longer pieces, the band supplied excerpt tracks; but in the case of 118, they supplied three.
During 2010, the band became aware of several users of the music site RateYourMusic posting quite hateful reviews of many of their pieces. In retaliation, many were named and shamed on the band's official page for several days. The back and forth between the band and the members from RateYourMusic gave quite a bit of publicity to the band, it was also during this time they were picked up by various news sources. In January 2010, Clayton Counts talked to The Fly about long players,[5] discussing the various musicians that also delved into extremely long lengths of music, such as John Cage, Robert Rich, and even Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. With this, the band continued creating pieces of equally extreme lengths; pieces 145 - 152 all range from fifty to one-hundred and fifty hours each.
In June 2010, the band created another new set of pieces different from the numbered, Aleph, and I - C pieces; this was a set of ten untitled folders, each containing thousands of short pieces, named as 32-digits of hexadecimal code. These pieces were not made public, and were only posted in the band's media sub-directory of their website.
In July 2010, the band released three incredibly long pieces, the third of which gained them notoriety online, mainly in communities and discussion boards focused around finding the longest piece of music ever made. 208: As You Etch on the Inner Window of Your Eye is nine-hundred and sixteen hours long, 209: Blurred With Tears and Suffering Beyond Hope four-thousand, seven-hundred and twenty-three hours long, but both are beaten by the notable 210: Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws - a piece lasting exactly fifty-thousand hours.[6][7]
2010-2012 [edit]
Between the end of 2010 and 2011, the band started creating various music puzzles, anti-music, and even lengthier pieces of music. Examples include MP3 files that are actually RAR archives, password-encrypted files, pieces embedded within other formats, such as PDF and EXE, pieces listed with negative song lengths, and a variety of SWF files.
In March 2011, the band released a series of pieces that would eventually form their longest piece of all. This series, ranging from their numerical ordering of 238 - 260, is similar to the Longplayer idea - each sound is the length of a prime number, and each subsequent piece creates near-infinite lengths of time before they're synchronized. The final in the series, 260: lcm(2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,73,79,83) would last 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955.2362595095 years before all the pieces synchronized.
In December 2011, two more extremely long pieces of music were released by the band. 286: 0 and 287: n, the first lasting over twenty-nine million hours, and the latter lasting more than eighty-seven trillion hours.
During 2012, the band only released three pieces of music. 288: Four Years Ago? Opium. - something of an experimental hip-hop track, 289: CALCULOR - as the title suggests, a calculator that doubles as a music generator, and 290: Two-Legged Tigers and Crocodiles - a sound collage piece. In July, the band's site had many downages, and 404 errors, leading to it eventually crashing completely. After a few months, however, the site returned and functionality resumed for the most part.
Musical style [edit]
Bull of Heaven is mostly known for its slow, lengthy, unchanging music. Usually the focus is around Dark Ambient, Minimalism, and Drone; however, the band is not limited to just these genres. 237: Disordered Before the Naked Picture of Despair is an avant-garde Jazz loop. Similarly, 261: A Feeling for the Order Lying Behind the Appearance is a more traditional Progressive Rock/avant-garde Jazz song. There are elements of Spoken Word, Post-Rock, Harsh Noise, Modern Classical, Drone Doom, and many more throughout the band's discography.
Live [edit]
Bull of Heaven have only performed a handful of live shows, notably the Boris Afterparty in Denver in 2010.
Discography [edit]
See also [edit]
References [edit]
- ^ "Westword: The last days of The Treehouse: Is Denver losing another iconic piece of the underground?". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ "PopWatch: Meet the Beachles". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ "BoingBoing: Beachles - Noise mashup of Beatles and Beach Boys". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ "RateYourMusic: Shoot the Bull - hunting down Bull of Heaven's titles". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ "The Fly: Long Players". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ "Westword: Bull of Heaven works to provide enough music for several lifetimes". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ "Newcity Music: Escape From Noise - Is This Not Music?". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
External links [edit]
- Bullofheaven.com Official website
- Partial discography at Discogs
- Interview at Musique Machine
