L o o k i n k 5 4

7/27/25 - Bull of Heaven and "Auditory Art"

What is art? This is a question that has been debated for centuries, and therefore something I could obviously never hope to definitively answer outside of saying that art is subjective. This doesn't mean I don't have opinions, though. I think my favorite definition of art comes from Patricia Taxxon, who called it "objects in deliverance of ideas, usually with the intent of conveying emotion but not always." At first, I was slightly confused by this definition. What kind of art would convey absolutely zero emotion? I left this question in the back of my mind for a few months until one day in March 2025, when I found Bull of Heaven.

Bull of Heaven was a very experimental duo largely focusing on drone and ambient works, but also doing some stoner/post-rock and other weird stuff that all somehow manages to remain recognizably Bull of Heaven. They became quite (in)famous for making some really long pieces, and I'm not just talking a few days long, no, I'm talking 3.343 quindecillion years. That's trillions upon quadrillions upon octillions times longer than the age of the universe. They've been "criticized" for making stuff that "isn't music" (whatever that's supposed to mean) for many years, with them only gaining a decent reputation pretty recently. Even still, though, there's still some pieces that even the most diehard Bull of Heaven stans struggle to see value in, perhaps the prime example of this being their 2009 release Aleph-Five. The Aleph series was a notoriously inaccessible collection of 12 albums that mostly consisted of really weird noises and really large track lists, with Aleph-Null having 1049 tracks, each of which last 61 seconds, and Aleph-Ten having one million tracks that each last less than a quarter of a second. Most of these Aleph releases at least have some weird textures or sampling going on, but that's not the case with Aleph-Five, because Aleph-Five is 1007 66-second tracks of white noise. That's it.

It's probably easy to see why people struggle to find value in this. After all, can it really even be called music? Oxford defines music as "vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion," and there isn't exactly any vocals here, nor instruments, nor form or harmony or expression of emotion. So maybe it's not music, but it's definitely something. Earlier, I mentioned a definition of art given by Patricia Taxxon. "Objects in deliverance of ideas, usually with the intent of conveying emotion but not always." Even under this quite liberal definition, does Aleph-Five qualify as art? Does this 18.5-hour-long recording of white noise deliver any ideas?

What is art? This is a question that has been debated for centuries, and therefore something I could obviously never hope to definitively answer outside of saying that art is subjective. It's pieces like Aleph-Five that are the reason why this question has been debated for so long, though. Jackson Pollock's work has sparked a lot of controversy over what can be considered art, yet even his work is more akin to that of, say, Aleph-Null. Aleph-Five is probably the final frontier for the pretentious "what is art?"" pieces in the music scene, maybe barring complete silence (which isn't allowed on rateyourmusic). It's quite possibly the edgiest album that I know of, and I think that alone deserves it some credit. It doesn't care about what you think of it. It doesn't care if you think it's "lazy" or "low-effort" or "uncreative," because that's never what art was about. That's a bunch of elitist bullshit. Aleph-Five has a message, and it doesn't need to be Self-Traitor or Superstring Theory Verified or even Aleph-Null to convey it. It just needs to be Aleph-Five.

To me, Aleph-Five isn't meant to be listened to. It's meant to impose. It's meant to provoke. It's meant to get you to think about it. About art. Maybe it's not music, but it is art. Auditory art, if you will. To me, Aleph-Five is, always has been, and always will be art.