There exists a slightly snobby attitude that a lengthy piece of music is a sign that a musician is serious, conciseness is considered to be the tool of lightweight pop acts or shouty punk bands. There are a few artists however, who excel in producing small, perfectly-formed pieces of music.

Gordon Anderson, currently a member of The Aliens (and formerly of the Beta Band), specializes in the small song. Under the alias Lone Pigeon he has released four solo albums that all consist of tiny musical fragments. As you listen, choruses searching for the rest of their song and hissy vocal samples run into the backs of half-finished instrumentals. A Lone Pigeon album often sounds like a compilation tape made from the best bits of the best songs in someone’s music collection?fluttering from teary eyed folk, to dour electro, to a reworking of the chorus from ?Dry the Rain? using wine glasses. This scattergun approach to music making is exemplified by ?Empty Town? from the Touched by Tomoko EP. A warm and woozy traveller’s song starts before LP gets bored before he’s even begun and decides to end the track after the intro.

While LP delights in keeping his musical promises unfulfilled, Boards of Canada are experts in creating tiny tracks that are entirely self-contained. Their three major albums alternate between longer, beat driven songs and shorter melodic exercises. The wistful synthesizers on these interludes are the reason the word “nostalgic” has been used in every BOC review since 1997. The chiming electric pianos and twinkling melody of ?Roygbiv? (from Music Has The Right To Children) is frequently heaped with praise but just as good is the preceding track, ?Bocuma.? Deceptively simple, consisting of not much more than a few repeated modal melodies on some keyboards that have seen better days, the melancholia of ?Bocuma? is proof that electronic music can be every bit as emotionally affecting as a man with a guitar singing about his girlfriend.

Hip-hop has never been as guilty of over-indulgence as guitar or electronic music. Few hip-hop or rap songs go past the five-minute mark. Madlib certainly doesn?t help things?nearly all of his records consist of 20 or so tracks often not much longer than a minute or two. Although he doesn’t genre-hop like El-P, he shares the same short attention span, the desire to move on from a track as soon as he has created something he likes. The vocal hook in ?Eye? (from the MF Doom collaboration Madvillainy) is so damn cool that you might wonder why he didn’t add an extra three minutes and a couple of guests MCs and use it as the chorus to a “proper” hip-hop track. But this is to miss the point, the vocal hook is so damn cool that the track doesn’t require anything else.

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