Pitchfork

OK, overweight hipsters. Time to turn off our computers and hit the pavement. We've got some pounds to sweat off, and the DFA's James Murphy is our personal trainer.

Nike commissioned Murphy in his LCD Soundsystem guise to write a piece of music to accompany a workout; the result, titled 45:33, will be available for iTunes download tomorrow via the Nike+ store. Yes, it's one 45-minute, 33-second-long track, and it's going to cost $9.99.

This isn't Nike's first foray into workout-music patronage, as the Crystal Method created a mix for Nike+ this past summer. Nor is it LCD's first foray into corporate sponsorship, having hawked videogame consoles on the PlayStation DualPlay tour last fall.

Murphy explained the reasoning behind creating 45:33 in a press release:

"The idea, to make a long piece of music built around an arc designed for running, appealed to me because it was so anathematic to what you're typically asked to do as an artist: make easily digestible lumps of music for albums, or the radio, or whatever. I'd been thinking of the records I love in which people made one 'song' that took up the entire LP, and realizing that releasing something like this would otherwise be a virtual impossibility for me, I became excited when the Nike+ project came along.

"Our band, LCD, when on tour tends to do a lot of running--mainly to keep sane and resist the inevitability of turning into a bus-bound potato, filled with all that makes one sick. When I was approached to make this 'run,' two different members of the band told me that they ran to two remixes I'd done as DFA-- the UNKLE ['In a State'] and Gorillaz ['Dare'] mixes-- which both were long, sprawling, organic dance songs that eased from section to section for 10+ minutes each. So, the gauntlet had been thrown down to make something longer that was well designed to reward and push at good intervals of a run.

"I train fighting and Jiu-Jitsu three or four times a week, and a big part of that training is treadmill running, so I saw this also as a way to create a run on the treadmill that worked for me (programming changes to speed and incline throughout) and then make sure the music I was making worked along with it. When I was done adjusting things, much to my surprise, the time the run took was 45 minutes and 33 seconds-- the RPMs of records. It was obviously going the right way."

So what does the thing sound like? In the interest of delivering only the finest in hard-hitting interweb indie rock reporting, I loaded the track onto my iPod yesterday and went for my regular run.

First of all, the track actually registers as being 45 minutes and 55 seconds long on my iPod. Second of all, I can't run for longer than 20 minutes without collapsing, so I can't tell you how effective the piece is in its entirety as a workout soundtrack. But I can tell you that it quite satisfactorily induces the trance-like headspace necessary for jogging for any significant length of time. Or the first 20 minutes do, anyway.

It's throbbing space disco broken up into several movements. During the first one, Murphy chants "shame on you" over and over again under his breath. This is not what I want to hear while I'm exercising. I want to hear "You rule! You are awesome! You are being healthy! I am so proud of you!" There are also horns, somebody crooning about having a broken heart or something, and a trip to outer space.

There are a few awkward breakdowns in the latter half of the track, during which the steady beat drops out. I imagine these would be jarring to the average workout-er, but by that point I was power-walking slowly and trying not to die. It ends with eight minutes of ambient echoing. I guess that's for the cool-down.

This is what Murphy had to say about the composition of the track:

"In testing, I found that 'hard, fast, propulsive' music was NOT the best running music for me-- this was maybe why my bandmates had gravitated to the more sprawling tracks in our catalog. The fast tracks were too close to the running pace and could be distracting in a bad way. These other tracks that inverted themselves more had moments and bits that kept the mind occupied (distracting in a good way) and settled into gentle bits more often, giving the runner a sense of push as well as rest. Sometimes the best way to keep running is to find that parts of the run are actually rests--that while you're still running, you're viewing some of the run as soothing and recuperative, rather than constantly feeling like you're running for your life."

Apparently, you can synch up 45:33 with some sort of special Nike+ workout program for your iPod nano and it will calculate how far you ran and how many calories you burned and stuff like that. But I don't have a nano, and I think I'd be depressed by the results anyway.

In other news, Murphy is currently working on a new LCD Soundsystem album, to be released in March 2007. He's also working on a Justin Timberlake remix. UPDATE: It's for "My Love". Hot.