In September 1963, John Cage charged five dollars to enter a Manhattan theater and refunded five cents for every 20 minutes an audience member stayed. The music was Vexations, a single page written by Erik Satie in Paris around 1893 with a note suggesting it be played 840 times in a row. This episode unpacks the trap Satie set on that page: enharmonic spellings that stall the reader’s brain, missing accidentals, no instrument, no dynamics, an unresolved final chord, and the sole instruction to play very slowly.

We weigh the competing theories about why Satie wrote it, from heartbreak over Suzanne Valadon to a parody of Wagner’s endless melody, his one-member Metropolitan Church of Art and its mystical numbers, and an early experiment in habituation. Then we follow the piece’s transformation into an extreme sport: Cage’s 18-hour relay with John Cale and David Tudor, Peter Evans quitting at 595 repetitions after hallucinating creatures on the score, solo records of 35 and 36 hours, a Tokyo performance in an adult diaper, a 3D printer and a robotic arm playing it, biosensors that warped the sound as the pianist fatigued, Igor Levit’s pandemic stream, and charity relays linking Krakow and Kyiv.

• Why the tritone at the heart of the piece keeps the ear trapped in unresolved tension
• How 840 breaks down as 4 times 5 times 6 times 7 and its possible esoteric meaning
• What happens neurologically when the brain’s predictive engine gets bored for 12 hours
• The 841-track streaming album that has drawn more than 10 million listens
• How an obscure joke or grief ritual became a modern mantra for crisis and solidarity