Longplayer - Longest song ever written?

Have you ever wondered what is the longest song ever written? If you guess Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4, recent Ricardo Villalobos' creations or something like that, you are wrong. Very wrong.

Get this: Longplayer is a 1000 year long piece of music which started to play on January 1st of 2000 and will continue to play, without repetition, until December 31st 2999, when it will come back to the point at which it began - and begin again.

Crazy? Probably.

Longplayer takes an existing recorded piece of music and uses this as source material, which is processed by computer using a simple algorithm. The software then simultaneously plays 6 loops taken from it, each at a different position a different pitch.

It's exactly the same principle as taking six copies of a record and playing them on six turntables, each one rotating at a different speed.

Every two minutes this procedure is repeated and in this way each two-minute section gradually moves through the entire duration of the source music. And by the way.. the increments are carefully worked out so that no combination of the six loops will ever be repeated until exactly 1000 years has elapsed.

The source music is primarily Tibetan singing bowls (also known as Tibetan Prayer Bowls, 'Himalayan bowls' or 'rin gongs' in Japan) of various sizes, and gongs.

You can listen to the "song" globally via a live online stream.