‘Chosen Priest and the Apostle of Infinite Space’: The riddle of the two-month long song
Maybe the first thing to know about the 2009 song/album/imaginarium/thing called ‘Chosen Priest and the Apostle of Infinite Space’ is that, despite its run time of 1,453 hours, it’s not anywhere close to being the longest recording in the catalogue of the Colorado-based avant-garde group Bull of Heaven.
That fact alone instantly raises plenty of red flags. Is this for real? Is it a joke? Even adventurous fans of long-form experimental ambient music would have to acknowledge that Bull of Heaven’s even longer 2010 piece, Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws, has to be something not-quite-classifiable as conscious art, considering its run time of 50,000 hours, or a little under six years, would be physically impossible to record in the weeks or months that it was actually created. It was also impossible to listen to straight through on any CD or streaming service, since none could contain the bandwidth of such a cartoonishly gargantuan file.
If anything, Bull of Heaven’s work boiled down to an experiment with time as much as sound, as members Clayton Counts and Neil Keener used technology to digitally stretch drones and tones, or sometimes random yelling or noise, to the nth degree, like wringing out a wet towel until it’s devoid of moisture and gradually unspun from its own textile components. It sounds pretentious and arguably pointless, but Counts and Keener weren’t necessarily trying to make a profound statement, any more than Shackleton was when he was exploring the Antarctic. It was basically about seeing how far they could go.
“Clayton became obsessed with making the longest piece of music that he possibly could,” Keener told Denver’s Westword newspaper in 2017, shortly after Clayton Counts’ untimely death from a drug overdose in 2016. “He found a way to make loops the lengths of prime numbers so the loops wouldn’t repeat again for longer than you can calculate. So we made a few pieces like that.”
Keener and Counts had met as fellow hangers-out at the Atomix Cafe in Chicago in the early 2000s. Despite being legally blind due to a pair of detached retinas, Counts had made a name for himself as a local DJ and musician, and generated some national press when his mash-up of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, titled Sgt Petsound’s Lonely Hearts Club Band went viral, earning him a cease and desist order from rock n’ roll sacred cows.
By 2008, Keener had relocated to Denver and was playing in the comparatively “normal” band Planes Mistaken for Stars. Counts eventually moved west, as well, as the duo soon formed Bull of Heaven, with Keener creating four-track lo-fi recordings of guitar-based soundscapes, and Counts taking them away to his computer lab for transformation.
“He was a genius producer,” Keener said. “He understood sound in a way I don’t. I would give him a shitty stereo mic digital recording of a jam I had with some dudes that hung out at Yellow Feather Coffee, and he would turn them into album-quality-sounding pieces. I have no fucking idea how he did that.”
Unfortunately, Keener and the other people in Clayton Counts’ inner circle weren’t completely sure what inspired his ideas, either, or what he was hoping to find at the end of each musical ultramarathon.
One listener on rateyourmusic did attempt to listen to the entire two months of ‘Chosen Priest and the Apostle of Infinite Space’ in 2021, keeping a listening diary throughout, but they humorously came away from the whole experience calling it “a mixed bag”. If there were a key to the universe hidden in there, it didn’t make itself quite clear enough. Or maybe it was too clear?
“Clayton kind of lived in another dimension,” Counts’ friend Steve Lawson said in 2017. “He had almost no social radar. He would blather on about a super-massive black hole or something, and you would have to just walk away from him.”
You can seek your own meaning by listening to a piece of ‘Chosen Priest and the Apostle of Infinite Space’, that is to say, a mere sliver of its totality, in the curated video compilation below by Tom Bombadil of Everything.
