Leave The Camera Running / Music

• On the vinyl version of the Godspeed You! Black Emperor album F♯ A♯ ∞, at the end of Side B, the music continues onto the inner groove, resulting in a small loop playing forever until the needle was lifted.
• "I Can Help," a country and pop No. 1 hit from the fall of 1974 by singer-songwriter Billy Swan. The album version fits the trope – where applause can be heard as the final note is held for approximately 15-20 seconds. The song ends with a reprise of the final musical bridge and more applause. However, it still does not end there; Swan plays still another reprise of the final musical bridge as the song fades out. Stories abound about the applause being due to Billy completing the take, despite his dog tugging his pant leg.
  • The single version fades immediately after the applause at the original end of the song begins.
• Any of the wilder Minimalist works would have to epitomize this trope - La Monte Young's breathtaking The Well-Tuned Piano is a largely-improvised work played in just intonation. It spans over five hours. Morton Feldman's later works were renowned for their extreme length and spareness (String Quartet II runs for a whopping six hours).
  • Then there's Erik Satie's Vexations: a single page of music with the instruction to repeat the piece 840 times in succession. This was actually performed in its entirety in New York by a tag-team of pianists (including the likes of John Cage, John Cale and David Tudor) on September 9, 1963, and clocked in at almost 19 hours.
  • John Cage - never failing to push the envelope - planned his composition As Slow As Possible to last 639 years. He just marked that tempo and neglected to say exactly what he meant, leaving "performers" free to make their own interpretation. It's an inversion of the more common "as fast as possible," which just means as fast as you can play it while getting all the notes. Amazingly enough, the piece is currently being performed at the Church of St. Burchard in Germany.
  • John Cage's '4:33.' The purpose of the piece is to make you realize that there's no such thing as silence and to hear the things that are always going on all around you, a typical performance actually includes a great many sounds and distinct events. And the best performance is not the one you find on YouTube, nor the purpose-made recording made from a microphone in an empty room, but the one you perform yourself in a place you love, such as a forest or beach.
  • Any sort of "systems music," like that of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno's ambient work (Discreet Music and Thursday Afternoon''
  • Ambient music, particularly drone and dark ambient, does this frequently.
• Flaming Lips have a song on the album Hit To Death in the Future Head, called simply "Bonus Track", that is the same annoying sound over and over again for thirty minutes.
• The end of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band features one of the first "hidden tracks", a collection of backward studio chatter. Although the CD version simply repeats the chatter a few times before fading out, the original LP placed the chatter in the record's run-out groove, meaning it could hypothetically repeat forever, or until the listener got up and manually turned the stereo off.
• John Lennon's first three albums Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions and Wedding Album are all basically candid recordings of Lennon and Yoko experimenting with noises. Some of it almost inaccessible Sensory Abuse, others more durable fly-on-the-wall recordings, but too many it all boils down to genuine Album Filler.
• A hidden track repeat happens at the end of David Bowie's album Diamond Dogs, where one second of the song "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" keeps looping, leaving it with No Ending; this was the result of a Throw It In! moment (the tape got stuck).
• The final track on the album The Beginning Stages of The Polyphonic Spree is called A Long Day. It lasts about 40 minutes. It mostly sounds like the CD got stuck, but the chords change occasionally. Strangely hypnotic.
• Lou Reed's album Metal Machine Music. 64 minutes of feedback. Released on vinyl with a locked groove at the end of side four, and now available the same way on vinyl, DVD, and Blu-ray.
• Neutral Milk Hotel's debut, On Avery Island, features the closing song Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey's Eye, which is basically just 13 minutes and 50 seconds of noise. Not even interesting noise.
  • The opening of The King of Carrot Flowers, Parts Two and Three from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea counts too, surely. The song lasts just over three minutes, but it takes vocalist Jeff Mangum a minute to finish bellow/wailing "IIIIIIIII LOVE YOU JEEEEEEEESUUUUUUS CHRIIIIIIIIIIST, JEEESUS CHRIST I LOOOOOVE YOOU, YES I DOOOOOOOO" twice.
• Used to disturbingly great effect in Korn's "Daddy": The song itself is about singer Jonathan Davis' childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a childhood adult friend and the titular parent not believing his story. Over the course of the song, Jon becomes increasingly agitated until he begins screaming incoherently and finally, crying as the band continues to play on. The door of the vocal booth is then heard opening and Jon is coaxed out by someone present at the time of recording.
• Liars' "This Dust Makes That Mud" is 30 minutes long, over twenty minutes of this is a single bar of music being looped over and over at the end of the song.
• "Nevada", the closer of John Linnell's album State Songs. The song would be about 35 seconds long were it not for the ending, which is seven minutes of a marching band passing by.
• Neko Case's Middle Cyclone ends with "Marais la Nuit" - that's Gratuitous French for "marsh at night", and appropriately enough, the track consists of half an hour of frogs croaking, as recorded outside of the farm she owns. On the vinyl version, it's edited down to half that length, but still takes up the entirety of side four of a double album. At least it's kind of relaxing.
• Jimmy Eat World's "Goodbye Sky Harbor" is a 3-minute song stretched out to 16 minutes thanks to playing the same bit over again, with only a few changes until the ending. Good song, though.
• The Mars Volta, being a Progressive Rock band, has a song of over half an hour, Cassandra Gemini. It's got vocals for a good couple of minutes, then it turns into a wibbly wobbly warping screeching warpy bit for a while, while echoing a bit of the chorus, until a buildup for like the last 4 minutes, and then it goes back to its vocals before finishing off. FINALLY. Worst part is that it's got catchy vocals.
  • They also have a song that has 4 minutes of coqui croaks. It's kind of peaceful until you realize you would like to hear some actual music now.
• Wilco's album A Ghost Is Born contains a fifteen-minute track at the end called "Less Than You Think". It starts off as a gentle ballad but eventually degenerates into droning audio two minutes in. Jeff Tweedy was suffering from debilitating migraines while recording the album, and he's said that section of the song was supposed to "express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music". The worst part is that it's not even the last song on the album - that's "The Late Greats", the catchiest, most relaxed song there.
• Hank Williams III's album Straight to Hell includes a bonus disc which contains a 42-minute track that includes random noises, covers, and miscellany all rolled into one.
• Overseer has a bonus track called Heligoland that ends with twenty minutes of the sound of a phone ringing.
• At the end of Grandaddy's song Lawn and So On, there's a good five minutes of silence, followed by about two minutes of cricket noises.
• Regina Spektor has a song called Man of a Thousand Faces which has about 10 minutes of silence tacked on to the end. This is semi-common practice if the cd has a bonus track after the long silence, but in this case, the song is three songs away from the end of the cd.
• Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, which goes on for 17 minutes, only about 5 is actually the song. The massive middle section sounds pretty much like random instrumentals. A common theory about the song is that the band members were all stoned when they recorded it and didn't know when to stop playing.
• Nick Cave's Babe, I'm On Fire from Nocturama is a fairly decent two-minute song. Unfortunately, it runs for fifteen.
• The last track on Voodoo Child's album The End of Everything is an 18:27 track called "Reject," and is a repeating series of slow synth washes.
• Massive Attack's 100th Window ends with the hidden track "LP4," an 11-minute instrumental consisting of a repeated ten-second cycle of synths. Here's a slightly shortened version.
• Electronic music duo Autechre released a download-only track called Perlence Subrange 6-36 which runs for 58 minutes and 35 seconds. It repeats a 4-second sequence alternating between three different samples, with a few changes in the sequence over the course of the song, and a faint background of dark ambiance which shifts and changes very gradually throughout. You can listen to it here.
  • Also their album Chiastic Slide, which ends in a two-minute long low-pitched buzz.
• The second disc of Covenant's Skyshaper: Deluxe Edition album features "Subterfugue for 3 Absynths", a 42-minute track consisting of three industrial synth loops slowly phasing in and out with each other. "Flux" from Sequencer, in addition to being a total of nearly 11 minutes long, ends with three minutes of the atonal background sounds heard throughout the song.
• Bull of Heaven's longer works can invoke this. Their longest piece, "lcm(2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,73,79,83) " has a length of 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955 years (the LCM of the tape loop lengths).
• The Fantômas album Delirium Còrdia is a single track clocking in at an hour and 15 minutes, and is intended to be the soundtrack to a surgery. To that end, the last 19 minutes are nothing but the steady sound of a respirator and heart monitor, until the last couple of seconds when you hear a quick "One, two, three, four!" and the sound of a needle scratching on a record (which by that point is so startling it may well give you a heart attack and send you in for a surgery of your own).
• The Neurosis song "Cleanse," which closes off their Enemy of the Sun album, ends with a loop of a short distorted vocal clip which jumps from speaker to speaker. On the reissue it lasts about a minute and a half... on the original it goes on for over 12 minutes.
• This is rather common in drone metal, which seeks to create a hypnotic feel through slow repetitive sounds.
• Lindsey Buckingham's song "Play in the Rain" is the last track on side A of the Go Insane LP. When the stylus reaches the center ring, the outro solo just keeps going... and going... and going... as the tempo of the music etched into the center ring is perfectly timed with the rotation of the record. The song then continues on side B.
• Burzum's ambient piece "Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte" consists of twenty-five minutes of mostly the same three-note melody repeated over and over, with a brief one- or two-minute respite in the middle. It works better than it sounds like it should, though it's not the sort of thing you'll likely want to listen to every day.
• Jars of Clay's self-titled debut album has two Hidden Tracks. The first is "Four Seven", a brief acoustic song. It's followed by about 30 minutes' worth of random studio chatter interspersed with snippets of string quartet rehearsal.
• Korpiklaani's "Korven Kuningas", the final track on the album of the same name, ends with 15 minutes of distant, repetitive drumming.
• Red House Painters have a song off of Ocean Beach titled "Over My Head". The beginning of the track has about 45 seconds worth of the band just talking in the recording studio about random stuff as if someone accidentally left the tape rolling. The ending 15 seconds has the same thing.
• The Brian Jonestown Massacre's Thank God For Mental Illness ends with a 33-minute track called "Sound Of Confusion". Most of it actually consists of five different songs indexed together on one track, but the first six minutes or so are just the sounds of traffic going by. The traffic part does get a little more entertaining once Anton Newcombe starts yelling at passing cars. And to be fair, it's probably meant as a way to separate these songs from the rest of the album because they're sort of different stylistically: most of the songs that come before are based around acoustic guitar, while the songs in the "Sound Of Confusion" section more prominently use electric guitars.
• Many albums with hidden tracks will have a minute or more of silence or blank tracks between the last listed track and the hidden one, or sometimes it is incorporated into the last track after the silence.
• The US version of OK Go's Oh No ends in the hidden track "9027 KM", which is 35 minutes of distorted ambient noise - it's a recording of Damian Kulash's girlfriend sleeping, and 9,027 kilometers is apparently the distance between the two of them when they're in their respective home cities of Los Angeles, California and Malmö, Sweden. The band had convinced their label this was purely an artistic gesture, but later admitted it was a ruse to take up data that could have been used to hide DRM software.
• Jaga Jazzist's "Out of Reach (or Switched Off)" — from their Old Shame album Jævla Jazzist Grete Stitz — has about six minutes of actual song, followed by 22 minutes of what sounds like a Norwegian TV host talking about the album. Presumably, it's more interesting if you can understand Norwegian.
• The beginning of Tori Amos's Not the Red Baron, which sounds like two pilots talking, is actually the sound engineers talking in their native Dutch while Tori fiddled with the piano. Because it fit so well it was left in. In fact, a lot of the stuff that came out of the Boys for Pele sessions, especially the b-sides, can be attributed to this trope.
• Denis Leary's comedy/music/performance album Lock 'n Load features a track called "Deaf Mute Cocktail Party," which clocks in at just above two minutes.
• Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth had a solo album, From Here To Infinity, where every track ended in a lock groove (which again, means the last few seconds loop over and over until you manually switch to the next track). The later CD version usually slowly faded the songs out at this point.
• Pulp's 'This Is Hardcore' contained a weird ending on the UK edition. After the song 'The Day After The Revolution' ends, all that is left is a harmonious drone lasting 10 minutes. However, 9 minutes into that silence, Jarvis whispers 'Bye-bye!' in a low, monotone voice. At least the US edition shortens that to a minute...
• The Tractors, a Country Music band, have a lot of interstitial chatter between each song on their debut album.
• Frank Zappa also enjoyed leaving snippets of Studio Chatter and random recordings sprinkled out on his albums. Examples are Jimmy Carl Black complaining about the low pay during "If We'd All Be Living In California" on Uncle Meat, a heckler during a concert on Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Zappa receiving a note from someone from the audience halfway a live performance of "Titties & Beer" on Zappa in New York,... He even did it on Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart ^note  which Zappa produced where some recordings of conversations with band members can be heard. The best example can be heard after "Hair Pie Bake 1" ends and we hear Beefheart talking to two teenagers in the street, who wanted to ask him if his drummer could play in their garage band, assuming Beefheart and his musicians are just amateurs. When they hear him mention his band name and the fact they are actually making a recording the boys realize that they are dealing with professional musicians, prompting one of them to say to his friend: "I'll guess you won't get the drummer then."
• "Lost in Autumn" by The Sea and Cake has about 3 minutes of silence tacked on at the end.
• "Oahu" by The 6ths is a three-minute song followed by 25 minutes of a seven-second synthesizer part being looped over and over.
• The ending Outro on Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavor Water album has a cameo appearance by Ben Stiller who Fred Durst was a big fan of and even made a song dedicated to him on the album. However, the Outro has Stiller mocking the band members and making fun of the group as a whole while seemingly high. While doing so he gives a goofy laugh that then gets looped for 4 straight minutes before another part of the Outro is played, which has Durst talking on the phone with someone while touring.
• In contrast with the fairly brief, grunge/Noise Rock influenced songs on the rest of the EP, Magic Dirt's Signs Of Satanic Youth ends with an untitled 36 minute instrumental track of ambient backwards guitar loops. A later reissue has the track fade after about 9 and a half minutes.
• For the first three and a half minutes, The Fall (Band)'s "Nine Out Of Ten" consists of electric guitar and vocals. It seems to end at that point, but then there's a brief pause and another five minutes of just guitar. It sounds as though there was an alternate take of the guitar part tacked on to the end of the recording and they just left it in.
• Escalator Over the Hill, the ambitious triple album conceived by jazz composer/keyboardist Carla Bley and lyricist Paul Haines, ends with a drone that continues into the locked groove at the center of the disc. The CD reissue fills out the balance of the last disc with the drone.
• Heaven 17's vinyl version of Penthouse and Pavement invokes this in the closing track "We're Going To Live For A Very Long Time", where the lyric "For a very long time!" is recorded in a locked groove set before the auto-return point of most turntables, causing it to loop indefinitely until the listener manually raises and returns the tonearm. The cassette version repeats the line until the end of the tape, while the CD/digital version fades out after about eight repetitions.
• Sonata Arctica:
  • The song "Draw Me" (the final track on the Winterheart's Guild album, excluding bonus tracks) ends with brief silence, followed by a short snippet of conversation (in Finnish) among the band members. Following this is four minutes of dead silence, followed by someone saying something else in Finnish, and then the song ends.
  • "The Power of One" (the final track of the album Silence, again excluding bonus tracks) ends with about a minute of silence, followed by a sound engineer saying (in English) "And I fuckin' touched the mic, hold on."
• Stratovarius: The song "I'm Still Alive" (from the Elements Part 2 album) ends with two of the band members briefly talking about the song, presumably a conversation that happened after they finished recording the song that was left in.
• Dream Theater:
  • The end of "Panic Attack" off the Octavarium album features a few minutes of random... noises. This part is omitted from the iTunes release of the song.
  • "Finally Free", the final track of the album Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory, ends with the hypnotist, who may or may not be a reincarnated Edward saying "Open your eyes, Nicholas", followed by Nicholas yelling in surprise, a record scratch, and then about a minute of white noise. "The Glass Prison", the first track on the next album, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, begins with the same white noise.
• Ayreon: "Another Time, Another Space", the final track on the album Into the Electric Castle, consists of about a minute of "Remember... Forever -rever -rever -rever" repeating over and over again, in the manner of a CD skipping. The iTunes release shortens it significantly.
• Some editions of Imogen Heap's Elipse include a bonus CD of instrumental versions of the songs. However, "The Fire" was an instrumental to begin with, being a short piano piece with crackling fire sounds in the background for ambience... So the "instrumental" version takes it a step further by removing the piano track, leaving two minutes of nothing but the crackling fire.

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