This constant reiteration of a method provides a snug refuge, the world falls away, you stop thinking and somehow become involved in the methodology. It can happen with all sorts of processes, watching twigs burn up on a fire and then replacing them with more twigs becomes something I find hard to tear myself away from as I stare into the fire, watching it's flames lick and shimmy around the wood. I can understand why arsonists get such a kick from setting things alight. Derrick May's 'Strings of Life' is a track that's minor variations on it's overriding and simple theme allows it to continue eternally, if it wanted to. It follows the basic Techno structure of a four to the floor beat, interlaced with a stunningly warm piano melody and various synth and drum machine interjections which, throughout the course of the song, drop out, come back in, change, but always fall back on that winning piano sound. Of course millions of songs do this, it's a basic tenet of music, particularly dance music: establish a theme and variate around it, but few songs really achieve the perpetual sensation of 'Strings of Life'; it seems to have no beginning or end, just a few elements which it constantly plays around with like a child playing with building blocks. For that reason, and the power and sound of it's main melody, the song (which is around six minutes long) could go on for twenty minutes or twenty-four hours, either would be perfectly appropriate.
There are more such pieces of music: Tricky's 'Black Steel' is a song which continually threatens to finish but never does (obviously actually it does), always finding another way of returning to it's crashingly funky rock re-fix of Public Enemy's 'Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos'. The driving rhythm of the song is so strong that whenever it kicks back up, it motors the song along again to full speed, entering with a splash of drum roll that never fails to ignite excitement. This allows the song to reach a sort of plateau of bliss, where the listener can sit back and bathe in its never-ending qualities.
It's when pop songs reach these moments of complete nirvana that things get really exciting. There's all sorts of more 'long form' music out there which uses repetition as an established technique, but to achieve this in a much shorter space of time is a thrill. Koto's Italo classic 'Visitors' is another example, a winning tune with synth and drum machine trills playing out over the top of it, that relies so much on it's irresistible, almost jocular melody, that I can sit back and forget about whereabouts in the song I am, whether it has been playing for two or five minutes.
Aphex Twin (because, let's face it, at heart he is a pop musician) has created euphoric, mind-bending music for his whole career that does away with notions of beginnings and ends, intros and outros; the hyper-complex, high speed 'drill n' bass' tracks on Drukqs ricochet along with no end in sight, perpetuating an arresting arbitrariness, an eternal strip of pings, whizzes and distortion that I could listen to all day. Take 'Cock/Ver.10': it starts with a sound that makes me think of a machine powering down, like we've just come in as something reaches it's end. Then when the frantic beats enter, it feels as if they are returning from a break, we have a sense that the track parameters are just a window onto something much larger, longer and expansive.
I suppose this all about getting lost, just as I am slightly lost now and don't know how to finish this piece of writing. Whether watching a tree trunk being made into wood chipping, listening to an Aphex Twin track or watching your handiwork as a local municipal building burns to the ground, it's nice to be overcome by complete distraction sometimes, taken away on a ride where traditional starts and stops don't matter, where things can run their course without worry, where five minute pop songs are a doorway to transcendance.
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