System of a Down singer Serj Tankian told Apple Music in a new interview that he has recorded a 24 minute piano song. Eat your heart out Dave Grohl, who recorded the lengthy “Play” a couple of years ago.
“I’ve finished a lot of music during lockdown. So I’ve got other music that’s in the pipeline that I want to put out. Some cinematic music, basically instrumental cinematic music, and also another EP. And I did, I got to tell you about this. I did a 24 minute… If I’ve talked to you about this, just tell me to shut up. But I’ve done a 24 minute modern piano concerto. And and it was a challenge. It was my quarantine challenge to myself, because I had no work, right now I’m scoring two different things. Two different films, one TV series, one film. But at the time, last year, there was not much work to do, everything got shut down, productions got shut down. And I had finished this even before quarantine. And I’m like, okay, you hang around the farm for a while, whatever.
And then I’m like, what am I doing? So, one night I was on my iPad, looking through my voice memos, my Apple voice memos. When I come up with an idea, either a piano, acoustic guitar, vocal, whatever. I just record it on my phone, right? And just keep it there. And it just adds up. And I had over a hundred of these ideas. So my challenge became, to coalesce all these hundred plus ideas into one piece of music, irrespective of how long it might be, but do it in a-But do it in a creative way, do it in a creative way that works, and that uses different types of instrumentation.
So that’s what I created, and it goes from traditional classical instruments, to rocking instruments, to a lot of synths, analog synths, arpeggiations, crazy stuff happening, and weird vocals too. It’s a body of music where you just sit, you put on the headphones, you lay back, and go. One of the other challenges was no repetition. I didn’t want to repeat anything throughout. So it was… There were very few parts where I had to just kind of connect the dots, but it was mostly non repetitious. So it starts with this thing, and ends with… So it’s quite interesting, but you do these things creatively and, who’s got 24 minutes to at least listen to one piece of music? I don’t know.”
