"Okay, so... for this one, you'll want to change the .mp3's extension to .rar, then extract the new .mp3, change its extension to .rar, and so forth. You'll have to extract and rename something like 50 files altogether. Possibly more. I stopped counting. They're kinda big, too, so it'll take a while. Make some cocoa. Eventually, you'll come across a password protected .exe, whose extension you'll need to change to .mp3, once you guess the password."
— Clayton Counts, on some newly released material
Bull of Heaven
is what might loosely be called a noise band, a duo consisting of Neil Keener and Clayton Counts, the latter of whom maintains the band's Facebook page. The band is notable for producing songs of epic length as well as for the varied output they produce (up to and including releases minus music).
Sadly, around late November of 2016, Neil broke the news on the group's Facebook page that Clayton tragically passed away, and the project went on hiatus for a few years, before being revived with just Neil in 2019.
Bull of Heaven provides examples of:
- Blatant Lies: The genre listing of all of their releases is "Top 40".
- Conspiracy Theorist: Some pieces contain spoken word samples of such people, most frequently one person referred to by fans as "The Indian guy." One such example (not from the Indian guy) is The Marchers WIth Left Leg Extended with someone talking about UFOs
- Deadpan Snarker: Clayton was one, if his Facebook postings are any indication. The fans join in, too.
- Epic Rocking: There really is no other way to say it when pieces of over an hour constitute their shorter material. It's probably safe to say these guys hold the record for longest released song.
- "n" (song 287), runs for 87,708,958,333,333 hours, 53 minutes, 20 seconds. That song's filesize is 1.3 zetabytes.
- "It is Part of Space and Time" (song 302)…well, take it from the band's Facebook page:
This piece is 8.637×10^10 average Gregorian years long, which WolframAlpha assures me is approximately 19 times the age of the Sun, and 6.3 times the age of the Universe.- The longest piece in their library is the 310th entry in the main series: "ΩΣPx0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k" which is roughly 3.343 quindecillion (short scale) years long.
- Genre Roulette: Drone, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Noise, Harsh Noise, Harsh Noise Wall, Noise Rock, Post-Rock, Stoner Rock, Drone Metal, Space Rock, Sound Collage, Glitch, Spoken Word, Jazz, Free Improvisation, Field Recordings, Progressive Electronic, IDM, Experimental Hip-hop...
- Hidden Track: In spades. In the directory for downloading files, there are several folders listed as untitled# where # is a number. Inside these are tracks not listed on the main site player. There may be more unlisted material than there is "released".
- Indecipherable Lyrics: When there are lyrics at all, they're usually this.
- Leave the Camera Running: Sometimes to an absurd degree.
- Literary Allusion Title: Most of their titles are references to outside sources - literature included. Here's a list of some of them
- Only Smart People May Pass: Several of their later works are as much puzzles to figure out how to get the songs from as they are actual songs.
- Spoken Word in Music: On occasion, the band employs this, with varying focus on the speech itself relative to the music. A few examples include:
- "A Beautiful Dog"
- "Become Smaller and Smaller"
- "For Idle Dreams of Things Which Cannot Be"
- "The End of the World Must Be Coming"
- Textless Album Cover: Usually averted, but played straight starting with "And the Bones and the Sinews Were Polished by the Wear".
- Three Chords and the Truth: Well, more like just three chords and some variation, with "Return of Ghost Sheriff (Werewolves Are Chasing Me)". However, it doesn't quite fit, as it's still 43 minutes long.
- Un-Installment: A few of their releases, such as "The Meaning of Hysterical Symptoms" and "With Muffled Sound Obliterating Everything" contain no music whatsoever; they have a cover and a title, but nothing else.
- As if that wasn't enough, some of these releases have impossible or incomprehensible durations. "Studying the Building From the Changing Angle" claims to run for negative four hours (along with an excerpt lasting negative 50 minutes), and both "The Insistence on Small Miracles" and "From the Garden of the Sun" list their duration as "ø / ∞".
- Voice of the Legion: This effect was used at least once, namely in "Be Not Daunted Thereby, Nor Terrified, Nor Awed".
