Inversion

Sure, 20-minute songs had been done before — Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby," Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" — but never had so little progression occurred within such an epic context of time. On "Presence," the length of a traditional techno track passes before the song's percussion even starts. Similarly, besides the entry of percussion and the song's "Lyot"-like riff, nothing really changes. There are the few occasional static bursts and some muted percussion sprinkles, but the song isn't much more than a gigantic cycling maelstrom of throbbing bass frequencies, a steady 4/4 pound, and some syncopated high-hat snare taps. The record's other song, "Inversion," strips away all of this — percussion, synth, bass, 4/4 rhythm, addition, subtraction — resulting in a 20-minute exercise in sound modulation meets echoing reverb with a strange mechanical tone as the subject. In the end, this record takes the mesmerizing repetition of Cyrus' Enforcement to new lengths, resulting in a stunning record that requires more patience than only a small minority of music listeners cares to likely exercise.