What is the longest album of all time?
There’s no perfect length for an album to last, and the beauty of art is the subjectivity that can sometimes engulf it. However, sometimes, a record can objectively last too long, given that it is humanly impossible to listen to from start to finish within a lifetime.
In 2008, Clayton Counts and Neil Keener came together to create the avant-garde group called Bull of Heaven. Their lengthy creations created a reputation for the band, and they now hold the record for the world’s longest album. Since their incarnation, the group prided themselves on doing things differently, working at an unbelievably prolific pace and making each album longer than most artists’ complete discography combined.
Bull Of Heaven now solely features Keener following the sad death of Counts in 2016, two years after they shared the longest album of their discography. The record that holds the title as the world’s longest is 310: ΩΣPx0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k, which astonishingly lasts for 3.343 quindecillion years — a figure which is too mind-bogglingly high to compute.
The duo also hold the record for the second-longest album of all time, which lasts six-and-a-half months. While it is physically possible to listen to the 2010 release 209: Blurred With Tears and Suffering Beyond Hope, your time is certainly better off spent elsewhere.
Despite reaching for infamy with their ambitious albums, Bull Of Heaven deliberately keep a low profile, and information about them is limited. However, in 2009, they spoke to Musique Machine and explained their unique approach to making music.
The band said of their lengthy albums: “Curiosity, absurdity, insanity. Technically, it’s a lot more work than people might realise. This project has evolved into a kind of semi-pseudonymous collective (or collection) drawing heavily from experiments in serialism and indeterminacy.”
Bull of Heaven also stated: “Individually, the length of each piece is unimportant, but these extreme lengths are one of the last remaining unexplored territories of audio experimentation. Constructing these longer pieces is often not too different from writing a song. The production is much the same. It’s either written, or improvised, and retooled until it feels right.”
They continued: “There are many ways to approach it, and for something like this it can be different each time. Sometimes that involves thinking about something you want to express beforehand, and at other times it just comes over you and gains such momentum that it’s impossible to stop it. That’s how we feel about this project. It has gained a life of its own, and to try to contain that would be a mistake.”
More well-established artists who have made incredibly long LPs include The Flaming Lips and Sigur Ros. Incidentally, both groups decided to make experimental albums which lasted 24 hours and could theoretically soundtrack a day from start to finish. However, both of their efforts are nothing compared to that of Bull of Heaven.
