Tracks of infinite length

fields5069

I'm not sure if there's a clever way for bands to do this with digital music, so this is more for teh vinyl. I've got Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement, great record and one track goes on "forever", if you have a proper record player which doesn't lift off when it gets too close to the centre.

Are there any more out there? There must be. Anyone?

ICBM

Sgt. Pepper, which was probably the first - although the run-out groove is technically a separate track rather than the end of A Day In The Life.

lasermonkey

There's a Sonic Youth album, either Evol or Sister, that has one. The first time I heard it I was a bit stoned and totally zoned out to it. I think it had been going on for around forty minutes before I twigged!

merlin

"I'm sorry squire, I scratched the record" at the end of Another Monty Python Record. 

Philly_Q

I'm sure I've got something which ends like that, but since I haven't played any of my vinyl LPs for about 20 years I can't remember what it is.

Not the same thing, but I'm thinking of that time in the 90s when people realised CDs could contain 79 minutes of music.  So the final track would end.... then you'd have 10 minutes of silence... then it would blast out with an extra bit of music just as you were nodding off.

Cirrus

I like stuff that subverts the medium it's being distributed on.

IIRC the Arcade Fire album before the most recent had something in the run-out groove.

That first Royksopp album had something a bit mental - Audio CDs can have tracks with negative timecode. You might have noticed some tracks start at -0m01s. This is because in the old days, when you quickly skipped through tracks not all HI-Fis were quick enough to start playing sound right away and would cut off the first half second of the track. If the sound started straight away you'd miss the first beat. So the Audio CD spec (Called "Redbook") allows for a count in to give the Hifi time to latch on to the audiostream.

Well the first track on that Royksopp album had a 45 second count in before 0m00s which had a hidden track on it. You couldn't even hear it on some stereos, others you had to press play then rewind back to -0m45s!

When it was bounced to MP3 on Windows Media Player I remember it just made the track 45 seconds longer than the CD reported it as.

ICBM

Cirrus said:

I like stuff that subverts the medium it's being distributed on.

That first Royksopp album had something a bit mental - Audio CDs can have tracks with negative timecode. You might have noticed some tracks start at -0m01s. This is because in the old days, when you quickly skipped through tracks not all HI-Fis were quick enough to start playing sound right away and would cut off the first half second of the track. If the sound started straight away you'd miss the first beat. So the Audio CD spec (Called "Redbook") allows for a count in to give the Hifi time to latch on to the audiostream.

Well the first track on that Royksopp album had a 45 second count in before 0m00s which had a hidden track on it. You couldn't even hear it on some stereos, others you had to press play then rewind back to -0m45s!

When it was bounced to MP3 on Windows Media Player I remember it just made the track 45 seconds longer than the CD reported it as.

I just find this sort of thing annoying. Queens Of The Stone Age 'Songs For The Deaf' is another one - and also has my other pet hate, a hidden track at the end. The worst ones are where there's about ten minutes of silence in the middle of a double track. At one point it seemed like just about every album had them, as if the concept was clever after it had already been done to death .

The great thing about ripping them to your computer is that you can get rid of all this crap with an mp3 editor.

fields5069

Vinyl was a great medium for odd stuff. I have a Soup Dragons double groove 12", and a We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It 12" where all the songs are on one side, played at 33rpm, and there's artwork on the other side.

I don't have much odd stuff, I guess the next oddest is a fluorescent green Fuzztones 12" and a cherry red Talking Heads album. Oh and a shaped 7" of The Cramps' Bikini Girls With Machine Guns, and I think I've still got the green square Gin Blossoms 7" Hey Jealousy. And a couple of picture dicsc.

Shark_Eyes

Godspeed you black emperor's F# A# (infinity symbol) is named after the infinity track at the end of the vinyl

TheMarlin

The Damned - Machine Gun Etiquette (one of their best albums, with some excellent guitar work from Captain Sensible)....  looping runout groove at the end of 'Smash It Up pt 2' - a sample from 'Hitchikers GTTG', 'Nibbled to death by an okapi'... 

CHRISB50

They are popular on scratch tools, commonly known as locked or sealed grooves. Like the record above.

You can also do it yourself using a sticker, if you have the time and you place it properly. You can get the sticker to bump the needle back into the previous groove(s) so that the same part of the tune plays over and over.