During my drive back from Nürburgring Nordschleife, I was listening, after a long time, to a very beautiful, if somewhat aggressive album: Torture Garden by Naked City, one of John Zorn’s decidedly crossover projects.
This album is part of a double release (or rather a rerelease of in part previously released material by Naked City), called the Black Box: disc 2 of this box contains one track, Leng Tch’e, clocking in at 31:41 (or 1901 seconds). The first disc, Torture Garden (a compilation of tracks from the eponymous Naked City and Grand Guingnol), has a playing time of 26:15, distributed over a total of 42 tracks. Yes, the average playing time here is 37,5 seconds.
Of course, this brought back memory of similar albums and artists. Zorn was, in this case, hardly a pioneer when it comes to a large number of very short songs. There’s Napalm Death’s debut Scum from 1987 (actually often quoted by Zorn as an influence). This album also contains the record-winning shortest song of all time with You Suffer (1,316 seconds). Napalm Death’s Bullen quoted Wehrmacht’s E! as an influence, who in turn were influenced by D.R.I – as did S.O.D (with the noteworthy Ballad of Jimi Hendrix (0:05) and Diamonds and Rust – extended version (0:02)).
D.R.I (or Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) had been an early pioneer of the “lots of short songs on a short album” concept: their debut D.R.E (Dirty Rotten EP) contained 22 tracks on a playing time of 17:03 (which is with an average 46,5 per track, still much more than the Zorn example above).
At this point, I think it makes sense to put in some numbers for comparison: if we look at my CD album releases starting from 1997′s JANUS up to Akustik Kies: Transitiv Sehen, the average playing time per track is 6:41. Yes, this has decreased on the last two albums (4:09 and 4:16) respectively, but still, that’s a factor of nearly seven. In other words: the total playing time of Transitiv Sehen would contain 82 (!) tracks if the average track length was equivalent to Torture Garden.
Which brought one question forward for me: would I be able to do an album comprised of short tracks? Perhaps not as short as the examples above, but perhaps something in the 60 seconds range. Something like 25-30 tracks with a corresponding rather short playing time. I decided to find out.
As I am working right now also on Reflexiv Hören, the second part of the Akustik Kies double album, this is at the moment some kind of an unofficial parallel project. Unofficial also because I still see the chance that I will utterly fail.
The #secretalbum is born…