Frank Ocean Endless: There's a 140 hour version of the visual album out there, says artist Tom Sachs

'The 40-minute version is edited, but there's something like a 140-hour version. That’s the whole thing. That exists, that’s the art piece'

After four years of radio silence, Frank Ocean decided to unleash his follow-up to 2012’s Channel Orange in extravagant style, announcing Blonde with the note “f*ck, sorry… I took a nap, but it’s playing on Apple Radio [right now]” on his Tumblr page.

However, fans of the ex-Odd Future member not only got two versions of Blonde - the physical release features a 12-track version with two completely different tracks - but also the visual album Endless.

The 45-minute video/artwork, by Tom Sachs, was uploaded on Friday and features Ocean making a wooden spiral staircase. However, the uploaded version isn’t the real ‘piece of art’, as Sacks explains in an interview with Pitchfork.

“You see him building a stairway to heaven in real time. The 40-minute version is edited, but there's something like a 140-hour version. That’s the whole thing. That exists, that’s the art piece.

“The thing that we’re all seeing is the short, is the edited version. This version where there are three of them is kind of a compressed experience, where you see three Frank Oceans making the same thing.

“It’s not unlike the song on Blond called “Skyline To.” You hear what sound like a couple of Frank Oceans singing over each other. I think that’s his voice—I know a bunch of other people sing on it—but you hear him unapologetically laying two vocal tracks over each other, the chorus and the refrain.

“And they overlap in the same way you've got a couple of Frank Oceans building the staircase and a couple of times in the video they cross through each other, impossibly, without colliding.”

Whether the 140-hour version would feature 140-hours of Ocean music is highly unlikely - but, then again, he did spend four years on the project, so who knows.

Meanwhile, the magazine, Boys Don’t Cry, which was given away at pop-up shops across the globe for the album’s release, features a McDonald's poem by Kanye West. Read it in full, here.