Dirty Knobs release 8-hour-long ambient album

​At first glance, the Dirty Knobs album Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell seems ordinary enough -- there are 13 tracks, and the record is set up on a Bandcamp page where it is available for download at a pay-what-you-can rate. But upon closer inspection, Field Recordings is something quite extraordinary. The tracks range from 20 minutes up to an hour in length, and stretch endlessly into a sprawling symphony of drones and waves.

The eight-hour album was created by Duluth native Zac Bentz, who records under the Dirty Knobs moniker, using a program called Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch to slow down his music into an almost motionless sea of sound.

The result is a bit like swimming under water, with noises subtly swelling and fading away, rubbing up against each other like beams of light. It's trance-inducing and oddly relaxing; haunting at points and shimmeringly beautiful at others. It sort of makes me want to listen to it forever.

Stream the album below, or purchase it at a name-your-own-price that starts at a mere dollar. The download is a whopping 1 gig in size, so Bentz advises to, "Please clear your hard drive (and your calendar) before downloading."