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Ongoing History Daily: Silent Records, part 2

One of the weirdest music genres I’ve ever encountered doesn’t involve music at all. These are “silent” records, which are exactly that: periods of silence that are given a title but don’t actually feature any audio at all.

Brian Eno has a track called Silence on a 2011 album entitled Drums Between the Bells. John Denver scored some political points with his silent song The Ballad of Richard Nixon. Here’s a good one: If you go back to the 1999 album by The Bloodhound Gang called Hooray for Boobies, you’ll find a track labeled The Ten Coolest Things About New Jersey. It runs for exactly ten seconds and is totally silent.

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And get this: There’s even a compilation of tracks like this. It’s a 2013 album entitled Sounds of Silence: The Most Intriguing Silences in Recorded History. It features 30 tracks featuring absolutely nothing.

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