on Bull of Heaven's "045: The Wicked Cease From Struggling"

it's hard to seriously recommend a 168 hour drone album that sees essentially no progression with only minimal variation along its runtime and not come off exceedingly annoying. unfortunately, 045 is just that, and i think it's great.

the album had been on my radar for a while, but i only got around to it in August of 2025, just before leaving for college in Chicago. i realized if i wanted to give it a listen in full without significantly compromising on the experience, a shared dorm and busy schedule were not ideal. i decided to condemn the laptop i write this on to sit plugged in playing the album through its speakers for an entire week.

some caveats: while i did let the album ring out uninterrupted in its entirety, i was not present and conscious for its full runtime. i felt it was against the spirit of the thing to pause it while away, preferring to let it hum away even unnattended. i did, however, make a conscious decision not to listen to any other music for leisure during the week. if i wanted to listen to something, 045 was my only choice.

the hum that makes up the album is hard to accurately describe. it's one of the best sounds i've ever heard. it's this thick, rich, intricately layered noise. it starts with a bed of soft, rolling waves of lower frequencies that delicate, ghostly moments ring out above. it's dense, but never noisy or abrasive.

it's like being wrapped, gently held aloft, in the gray clouds of a rainstorm. its layers ebb and flow, pulling forward into and receding from the foreground of your perception. this perception changes as your week with the hum progresses. your ears pick out things you never noticed before, suddenly rectontextualizing the whole thing. it fills the room, seeps into your dreams, and, eventually, fades into the background. the immense noise soundtracking existence before, inevitably, fading out just as it began.

-12/24/25