File under:supposed truisms "proved" wrong. In 1994, I was stuck in a peculiar mindset which can be summarized thus -- techno = value for money. Oh yes, techno was and is bloody fantastic music in it's own right, but it was also nice that most rock artists were constraining themselves to 45-50 minute LP's while techno artists preferred the more bloated 2xLP format stretching over 70-75 minutes. And a 70-minute album meant LONG SONGS, which are obsessions of mine, and have been since I first lost my mind listening to the Orb's "A Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld" in 1990. But I couldn't very well buy every CD with a 10-plus minute song, so I had to establish some guidelines. My one step guideline was simple: when listening to a long song, ask yourself -- does it NEED to be this long? Suppose it's fifteen minutes long. Could it have been edited down to twelve minutes, or even ten? Would it have been better had it been extended to eighteen or twenty minutes? I was so proud of myself when I sampled a Bedoin Ascent album and applied my principle for the first time. The album's final track was twenty something minutes long -- the mere thought of that huge number was making me salivate. The track had it's moments, but it seemed to meander. A fine melody soon gave way to a wibbly, directionless coda which twiddled on and on and on. Around the fourteen minute mark they'd run out of ideas. They were just coasting over the final minutes, and I'd had enough. On the other hand, tracks like Inspiral Carpets' "Further Away" (16 minutes) and The Orb's "Blue Room" (38 minutes) were chock full of ideas. Every second mattered. Editing either track would chop parts of the music that were absolutely necessary. It would be like cutting out portions of Beethoven's 9th (often lasting 70 minutes). "Hey, let's chop out some of the repeated phrases in the second movement. We can cut it from 15 minutes to nine and a half"! No!! Sacrilege!!!

BC-05, Cyrus: Inversion/Presence was released in 1994. The two tracks total 38 minutes. The tracks don't run short on ideas -- they ONLY HAVE ONE IDEA. And it would be a stretch to say that either track has a melody. "Presence" repeats four "notes" over the entire 20 minute side. Let's see, at 128 bpm, four "notes" = two beats, so that's 1280 repetitions. Erik Satie would be hard pressed not to keel over and pass out. "Inversion" has a bassline ... beats ... 18 minutes later ...

Minimalism falls outside my principle's jurisdiction. The length of time that a track runs is immaterial. The third minute of the track could be nearly indistinguishable from the fourteenth minute, I don't care. And often it is. I often wonder why Hallucinator's "Red Angel" doesn't continue for another ten minutes. Why Monolake's "Gobi" e.p. was 36 minutes long and not 24, 48 or 381. Hell, why did Brian Eno cut off "Thursday Afternoon" at 60 minutes? He composed the piece for CD, so he surely knew that he had at least another 15 minutes of space.