“In analyzing images of immensity, we would realize within ourselves the being of pure imagination. In this direction of daydreams and immensity, the actual product is the consciousness of enlargement. We feel we have been promoted to the dignity of the admiring being. … Immensity is within ourselves.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
“9 Beet Stretch beats time at its own game.”
—Mark Swed, LA Times
Leif Inge
9 Beet Stretch
Prepare for a transformative aural experience on an unprecedented scale. With 2002’s 9 Beet Stretch, Norwegian artist Leif Inge has digitally elongated Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 to a duration of 24 hours — with no distortion in pitch. As a result, the all-too-familiar is rendered thoroughly unrecognizable. Strange acoustic truths, remarkable details, and eerie ambient textures emerge; serene atmospherics surrender to rolling thunder; cacophony imperceptibly dissolves into euphoric vistas of transcendent beauty. It's a conceptual tour-de-force and an electro-acoustic masterpiece in which Inge stretches not only music, but music history. Beethoven's 9th: You've never heard anything like it.
“This is Beethoven more epic than anyone ever imagined … weirdly strange yet eerily familiar at the same time. It is powerfully visceral yet utterly ethereal. It is unbelievably beautiful … a masterpiece of a masterpiece, and maybe the closest we can ever come to experiencing what the deaf Beethoven heard, or experienced in his head. That is the magnetism of 9 Beet Stretch. You think you know what you are hearing, but you don’t, and the desire to find out what comes next and next, and next is extraordinarily powerful. The sensation is of being inside the sounds, inside the harmonies, and hence inside Beethoven’s head. ‘9 Beet Stretch’ is not so much a stopping of time as a getting beyond time. When the symphony becomes so slow that a listener can no longer identify the details but becomes immersed in the harmonies, the consonances and dissonances start to feel cosmic. Science tells us time doesn’t exist, and yet paradoxically we remain its prisoners.”
— Mark Swed, LA Times
“The piece slows symphonic time so that movement is barely perceptible. What you hear in normal time as a happy Viennese melody lasting 5 or 10 seconds becomes minutes of slowly cascading overtones; a drumroll becomes a nightmarish avalanche. Yet the symphony remains somehow recognizable in spirit if not in form, its frozen strings fraught with tense, frowning Beethoven-ness."
—Ben Sisario, New York Times
“The many quiet passages, rests, and transitions of the symphony become incredibly beautiful, trance-like, and ethereal-vast, sun-dappled meadows of gentle sound ecstatically peaking on a global dose of LSD, moving near the speed of light, and thus in extreme slow-motion ... a lush, transcendent work that undoubtedly ranks as one of the finest ambient sound pieces of recent history."
—Scott Marshall, Brooklyn Rail
“If you sit for the entire 24-hour duration of the piece, as people occasionally do, you realize that this music is not simply slower—the slowness unlocks something in the original. Maybe it was there all along, and we couldn't hear it. But play with the meter—music is mostly about the meter, after all—then the music has a different story to tell, a secret perhaps, locked up inside the routine. Change the routine, and you make new discoveries.”
—Jad Abumrad, Radiolab
“So I thought that different animals, based on their size and heart rate, might have different senses of time. Like, you see a hummingbird zipping around in this manic way, and you think we humans must seem very slow to that hummingbird. Everything we do must almost be in slow motion to something that can quickly deal with things. And to a whale or some huge animal with a heart beating once every few minutes, we must seem fast. This piece is kind of like that. Suddenly, I felt like I was moving at hummingbird speed.”
—Aaron Ximm, Idea of Ninth
“...The unrelenting “time-release” uncannines of hearing accurate musical pitches vibrating with physical impossible slowness, force the audience to reconsider its fundamental assumptions not only about sound, time, and listening but also about the limits of live performance and the hidden depths of recorded sound.”
—Joshua Dittrich, Geosonics
“What a treat! I am utterly overpowered, or should I say uplifted, elevated, blown away towards soaring skies, riding away on a ray of Beethovenesque light between the clouds of summer."
— Ingvar Nordin, Sonoloco
Leif Inge
9 Beet Stretch
2025
Table of the Elements Archive
[Radon] 86
TEA-086
Boxed set, die-cut folio, data drive
Leif Inge,
9 Beet Stretch US premiere, Madison, Wisconsin
April 17, 2004
Photo: Jeff Hunt