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Celtic Frost tuning down a fourth and slowing “Procreation (Of the Wicked)” waaay down; Moss turning Discharge’s “Maimed and Slaughtered” into a crawling doom snake; the thread is time, stretched the fuuuggout. Precedents exist elsewhere. DJ’s have played vinyl at wrong speeds for ages. In the early ’90s, drum ‘n’ bass timestretched audio, both destructively (DJ Rap’s “Hardstep”) and non-destructively (Goldie’s Timeless). In the late ’90s, DJ Screw pioneered chopping & screwing. In the ’00s, dubstep conflated drum ‘n’ bass (double time), garage (normal time), and dub (half time). Toe-tapping to tunes ain’t what it used to be.
Since chopping & screwing is more a technique (slowing down music and adding effects) than a genre, people have unsurprisingly applied it to metal. Just as unsurprisingly, the results are usually awful. YouTube is littered with pitched-down takes on Metallica, Deicide, Dimmu Borgir, and Dark Funeral, among others. None of these are worth the time. They merely sound like records at wrong speeds, with little insight into their originals. Korn put out a chopped & screwed version of one of their albums, but I can’t bring myself to hear it, even for research purposes. One person did chop & screw Sleep, a cute idea: slowing down an already slow band. The result wasn’t bad — see original, chopped & screwed version.
Nile – Black Seeds of Vengeance (original)Nile – Black Seeds of Vengeance (screwed, not chopped)
Just for yucks, I pitched Nile’s “Black Seeds of Vengeance” down a fourth and found that it sounded exactly like Incantation (murky, lo-fi). Who would have thought?
Chopping & screwing & timestretching have nothing on John Cage, though. He has a piece called “As Slow As Possible” (natch), which is currently being performed on organ in a German church. The performance will last 639 years (around 5.6 million hours), ending in 2640. I can already imagine the recording (biggest, most boring box set ever; NO FREE SHIPPING) and Aquarius Records‘ description of it: dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. Maybe when aliens find the wreckage of our civilization, it’ll be our last audio vestige. With our luck, though, it’ll be Brokencyde instead.
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A friend of mine and I once tried out his new record player via slowing down the speeds of things. We slowed down Burnt by the Sun's first EP, which made it sound like grouchy doom, and the first Daughters album, which just sounded like regular chaotic hardcore.
I mean, I found it amusing.
On youtube I stumbled across an attempt to speed up Sunn O))). I think they expected a rock song to emerge. It was still slow as hell, but the pitch was a bit higher.
I actually tried the same thing with Khanate, with the same result.
Haha, Piece of Time…stretched, I get it.
I am terrified at what Brokencyde would sound like at 33 RPM. Remember that scene from Trick or Treat when Eddie Weinbauer plays Sammi Curr backwards? I could just imagine the tormented souls flying out of the speakers to enact their revenge on Brokencyde.
Obviously, in the year 2640, CDs will be a distant memory. So the box set containing the entirety of ASAP would have to be on vinyl. Whad'ya wanna bet that vinyl will still be the preferred audio medium for audiophiles?
All this talk about Brokencyde made me curious enough to check them out. I was so shocked by how awful the song and video were that I had to keep watching it. I actually had some extremely violent thoughts while watching that screaming motherfucker. I didn't know I could hate like this. Anyway, now I've got that smbichin' song stuck in my head…
If you slow down Judas Priest's "Painkiller", it sounds like Rammstein. Fact.
You all NEED to check out this slowed down version of The Osmonds' "Crazy Horses." Sounds like the Melvins!
"Crazy Horses"
Yer right about that sounding like the Melvins. That totally kicks ass!
I wonder what the Melvins sound like when you speed them up.
Miska – by 2640, the petroleum reserves needed to make CD's and vinyl wll be long gone. I wonder at what point music will stop being manufactured on physical media. It will probably come sooner than we think.
B – I'm not surprised, actually. It kind of makes sense.
devon – That is awesome. I could see that being on Meteor City. Suddenly I have newfound respect for The Osmonds, even if not by their doing.
Let's slow down some grindcore and see if it sounds just like punk rock.
Writing on metal in general reminds me of this post:
http://www.examiner.com/x-16069-Houston-Movie-Examiner~y2009m7d26-Harry-Potter-and-The-Half-Blood-Prince-Fan-appeal-but-others-may-wonder
If Brokencyde becomes our last audio vestige then (to quote Noothgrush) "it so plain to see the human is primitive".