Brian Eno in a 25 minute interview with BBC-Radio 3 on his new project the Clock of the Long Now -- a clock planned for the Nevada desert that will run for 10,000 years (via G3RM).

He starts talking on the differerent cultures of bell ringing. The English tend to strike single bells. One advanced technique is change ringing, i.e. to play all possible permutations (orders) of the different bells. The Germans and Russians on the other hand hit all bells at once in their churches giving a full "heavy metal" sound.

What I didn't know before was that Brian Eno is a big fan of mathematics. For his record January 7003 he was working with ten bells. The factorial of ten (10! = 3,628,800), the number of permutations of ten bells, is almost exactly the number of days in 10,000 years (last ice age). In two tracks (soft bells version 1 min. sample) on the record the 31 permutations for January 7003 according to an algorithm are played. Two more one minute samples from the album:

• 2 harmonic studies
• Large bell change improvisation

Further reading: Transcript of a talk given by Brian Eno as part of The Long Now Foundation's series of Seminars About Long Term Thinking.