NONAGON INFINITY: The Never-Ending Album

5:31 · 1,034 words of transcript · watch on YouTube

1. The concept-per-album habit is the context: a spaghetti western audiobook, an album of four ten-minute-ten-second tracks, and a record made on altered instruments to play the notes between notes.
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2. The central trick is that the nine songs run into each other and the last moments connect to the opening, so on repeat the album never ends.
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3. The idea came from an earlier record whose first four tracks already played as one continuous jam rather than separate pieces.
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4. They half-abandoned it when new songs would not fit, and released two other albums in between before coming back to it.
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5. The all-acoustic album of short songs that preceded it was deliberately made that way so it would not interfere with the looping record's development.
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6. The question that unlocked it was simple: if every song links into the next, where does the sequence end.
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7. It was the hardest thing they had made, because the whole progression had to be worked out before recording so the joins would line up.
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8. The method was mechanical: record each track separately while also playing the last 30 seconds of the previous one and the first 30 of the next, to align everything in mastering.
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9. Recurring melodies, riffs and motifs across the record reinforce the illusion of one song, while shifting time signatures, a sitar, a zurna and a drum solo keep it from repeating itself.
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10. The words draw on Frank Herbert's Dune, with no strong narrative but a shared apocalyptic world, and the cover shares a mountain and castle with two other albums.
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