Bull of Heaven | |
|---|---|
 Clayton Counts (left) and Neil Keener (right) in 2014. | |
| Background information | |
| Origin | Denver, Colorado, U.S. |
| Genres | |
| Works | Bull of Heaven discography |
| Years active |
|
| Labels | Unsigned |
| Spinoff of | Git Some |
| Members | Neil Keener |
| Past members | Clayton Counts |
| Website | bullofheaven |
Bull of Heaven is an Americanexperimental/avant-garde group. The group originally consisted ofNeil Keener andClayton Counts with help from various contributors. Since Counts' death in 2016, Keener is the only member.
Bull of Heaven has made extremely long pieces of music led by Counts, with pieces sometimes reaching extreme lengths, varying from a few days to many millions of years long.
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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 severalpunk rock andpost-hardcore bands, includingPlanes Mistaken for Stars, Git Some, Red Cloud West, andWovenhand. 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 amash-up ofThe Beach Boys'Pet Sounds withThe Beatles'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, aptly titledSgt. Petsound's Lonely Hearts Club Band and credited to the bandThe Beachles. Variousblogs and news sites favoured it;[2][3] however, Counts was issued with acease 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. 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 by045: The Wicked Cease From Struggling which is one hundred sixty-eight hours long.
Between April and May 2009, the band intermittently released a series of one hundred new songs, all named and numbered inRoman numerals. PiecesI – 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 asAlephs. The first ten of these contained roughly 1000–1100 pieces in each sub-folder.Aleph10 andAleph11 contain one million and ten million pieces respectively.
The band gained some acknowledgement in December 2009, when they released118: The Chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space, a piece that is over two months long.
In January 2010, Clayton Counts talked toThe Fly about long players,[4] discussing the various musicians that also delved into extremely long lengths of music, such asJohn Cage,Robert Rich, and evenWagner'sDer Ring des Nibelungen. With this, the band continued creating pieces of equally extreme lengths; pieces145–152 all range from fifty to one hundred fifty hours each.
In June 2010, the band created another new set of pieces different from thenumbered,Aleph, andI – C pieces; this was a set of ten untitled folders, each containing thousands of short pieces, named as 32 digits ofhexadecimal 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 very long pieces, the third of which gained them notoriety online,[5][6] 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 916 hours long,209: Blurred with Tears and Suffering Beyond Hope is 4,723 hours long, but both are beaten by210: Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws, a piece lasting exactly 50,000 hours.
Between the end of 2010 and 2011, the band started creating pieces that were not posted on the website. These include pieces with negative lengths, puzzles that, when solved, grant access to new songs, password-protected files, pieces embedded within other formats such asPDF andEXE, and infinitely loopingSWF files.
In March 2011, the band released a series of pieces of extraordinary lengths. This series, ranging from their numerical ordering of238–260, is similar to theLongplayer 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 and287: 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 anexperimentalhip-hop track;289: CALCULOR, a calculator that doubles as a music generator; and290: Two-Legged Tigers and Crocodiles, asound collage piece. In July, the band's site had many downages and404 errors, leading to it eventually crashing completely. After a few months, however, the site returned and functionality resumed for the most part.
The band took a long hiatus until July 2013, at which time they released several hours ofpsychedelic rock. It was announced via theirFacebook page that more new music would be made available within the year. In September they released a number of drone and post-rock tracks, and in November299: Self-Traitor, I Do Bring the Spider Love, an hour-and-twenty-minute-long jazz fusion arrangement. By the end of 2013, the band had uploaded most of their music to a public domainInternet Archive collection,[7] where all of their newer works reside as they continue to rebuild a new website.
In early 2014, the band released a fan-made compilation of love songs,300: Songs for Girls, followed by301: Weed Problem II–V, and another extremely lengthy piece,302: It is Part of Space and Time, which runs for at least 86,370,000,000 years. Clayton Counts was interviewed byVice in the Netherlands,[8] discussing a range of topics related to the band and their sonic approach.
On April 24, 2014, psychedelic rock bandThe Flaming Lips included a reference to Bull of Heaven in the liner notes of the vinyl release of the condensed version of their 24 hr. long piece7 Skies H3.[9][10] The Flaming Lips mistakenly call the band "Bull in Heaven," but refer to their pieces118: The Chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space and210: Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws specifically.
On July 10, 2014, the band released305: Hostages are Human Beings. On July 12, 2014,303: n(k),304: 0(2^18x5^18) and306: It is Not a Lack of Love were released. On the very next day, they released several other tracks of various lengths. By the time,310: ΩΣPx0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k is their longest release, and lasts for 3.343quindecillion years.[11]
In May 2016, Bull of Heaven were featured in a scholastic article entitled "Unperformable Works and the Ontology of Music" in theBritish Journal of Aesthetics, published byOxford University Press.[12][13][14]
On December 4, 2016, Bull of Heaven made a post on their Facebook page announcing the death of member Clayton Counts.[15]
After Counts' death, Bull of Heaven remained inactive, however on September 12, 2018, Neil released the first new Bull of Heaven piece since Counts' death, titled "Fight Night for the Ghosts of Heaven".[16] Neil has continued to make releases under the Bull of Heaven moniker, focusing on musical styles akin toprogressive electronic andpost-rock.
Bull of Heaven is mostly known for its slow, lengthy, unchanging music. Usually the focus is arounddark ambient,minimalism, anddrone; however, the band is not limited to just these genres.237: Disordered Before the Naked Picture of Despair is anavant-gardejazz loop. Similarly,261: A Feeling for the Order Lying Behind the Appearance is a moretraditionalprogressive rock/avant-gardejazz song. There are elements ofspoken word,post-rock,harsh noise,modern classical,drone doom, and many more throughout the band's discography.
Bull of Heaven has only performed a handful of live shows, notably a party held by the Japanese bandBoris in Denver in 2010,[17] and at theLemp Neighborhood Arts Center in St. Louis in 2014.[18][19]
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Bull of Heaven have put of hundreds of releases in their discography. Before Count's death in 2016, they mainly focused on a progressively numbered series of works. In 2013, they put out the non-numbered Latin series, which consisted of drone/noise pieces mingled with numerous jam sessions with multiple musicians, notably which many were used and stitched together in the 83-minute psych rock track299: Self-Traitor, I Do Bring The Spider Love.[20] In 2018, Keener resumed the Bull of Heaven project and abandoned the conventional numbered system.
This series includes 353 releases numbered from001 to353, with numerals followed by distinct titles.
This series includes 100 releases numbered fromI toC.
This series includes 11 releases numbered fromAleph0 (א0) toAleph11 (א11).
This series includes 10 releases numbered fromUntitled1 toUntitled10.
