Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and it's Saturday. So once more we have
Speaker 1: a vault episode for you. This is going to be
Speaker 1: part two of Play the Record Backwards. This is a
Speaker 1: couple of episodes that I did with former producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson, all about, as you know, all the various
Speaker 1: hidden things that might be going on in the grooves
Speaker 1: of old records or in even files, CDs and so forth.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed the
Speaker 1: original episode, published the first of December twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: Let's dive right.
Speaker 2: In Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: Joe. As of this record still out on parental leave.
Speaker 1: We'll be back soon. But in this episode, Seth and
Speaker 1: I are continuing our exploration of hidden messages and allegations
Speaker 1: of hidden messages, secrets and easter eggs in music. In
Speaker 1: the last episode we talked a lot about backmasking, about
Speaker 1: reversed audio. We mentioned some other examples of the way
Speaker 1: that things can and we're hidden in music. But in
Speaker 1: this episode we are going to venture into the groove,
Speaker 1: into the record groove, and discuss physical media and even
Speaker 1: more detail. We did touch on it a bit in
Speaker 1: the last one. So if you if you basically know
Speaker 1: nothing about vinyl records and how you play a record,
Speaker 1: go back and listen to that first episode, because we
Speaker 1: do talk about some of that. Because I mean, part
Speaker 1: of the background here for this discussion is as much
Speaker 1: as I admire certain vinyl records that come out and
Speaker 1: I see them on a website or in a store,
Speaker 1: I've never purchased one. And since a child, I've been
Speaker 1: told to avoid touching vinyl records. Let the adults use that.
Speaker 1: You don't want to break the needle or scratch the record, etc.
Speaker 1: And so I've left them alone. Seth, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you have a very different relationship with records.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I've manufactured vinyl, I've processed vinyl coming from like
Speaker 3: full blown pressing plants. I've been buying it most of
Speaker 3: my life. For me, when I was younger, I reached
Speaker 3: a certain point where I inherited a few records from
Speaker 3: like my parents, but they didn't have a very sizeable
Speaker 3: collection but when I started going to record stores in
Speaker 3: my youth to buy CDs, there was a point when
Speaker 3: I realized, oh, wow, these other things are so much
Speaker 3: cheaper than the CDs. This would have been in like
Speaker 3: the nineties, and that was all there was to it was.
Speaker 3: I was just greedy for music, and I was just like,
Speaker 3: all right, how am I going to get as much
Speaker 3: music as possible. I'm going to buy these used records
Speaker 3: as much as I can. And in fact, at that stage,
Speaker 3: I can give some deliberate examples, like, for example, let's
Speaker 3: say Radiohead, I might be wrong the live recordings that record.
Speaker 3: I remember holding a CD in one hand and a
Speaker 3: vinyl record in the other, and the record was cheaper,
Speaker 3: so I went, oh, all right, I guess I'm going
Speaker 3: with the record. Same thing with a Widow City by
Speaker 3: the Fiery Furnaces. Just like that era the late nineties
Speaker 3: early two thousands where it was like, oh, new vinyl
Speaker 3: is cheaper than new CDs. Now that is completely the opposite,
Speaker 3: so be prepared if you're going into a record store.
Speaker 3: But at the time it was not a very popular format.
Speaker 3: So that's why I got into vinyl was just because
Speaker 3: it was the less expensive option so I could buy
Speaker 3: more music. And so yeah, that's that's kind of why
Speaker 3: it started for me.
Speaker 1: Now in looking at a record and in playing a record,
Speaker 1: this is this is where I really had no idea
Speaker 1: about any of this. I kind of had this idea
Speaker 1: that if you, if you place a record on the turntable,
Speaker 1: you place a needle in the grooves, there's just one
Speaker 1: path that it is. Essentially, I guess it's kind of
Speaker 1: like the distinction between a labyrinth and a maze. If
Speaker 1: you if you, if you have if you make that distinction,
Speaker 1: Like a labyrinth, there's only one way through. It twists
Speaker 1: and turns, but you can't get lost because there there
Speaker 1: are no dead ends. It is a journey through complexity
Speaker 1: from point A to point B. A maze, however, can
Speaker 1: be different. A maze can have different paths through the complexity.
Speaker 1: A maze can have dead ends, it can have traps,
Speaker 1: it can have dragons and trolls and so forth, if you,
Speaker 1: if you want, and based on a lot of what
Speaker 1: I ended up reading here, and based on what I
Speaker 1: think we're gonna be discussing here, it does seem to
Speaker 1: me like actually vinyl records are more like this maze.
Speaker 1: There there's more. There is sometimes more than one path
Speaker 1: through the record, the.
Speaker 3: Good ones, I would say, the average record. I think
Speaker 3: you're correct, there is a very deliberate path. Always starts
Speaker 3: in the same place out at the edge of the record,
Speaker 3: always ends at the same place, which is the inside
Speaker 3: of the record. I think that's that's the most common route.
Speaker 3: But there there are many examples of people trying new things,
Speaker 3: people going different routes with that.
Speaker 1: And this is this is so just counter to like
Speaker 1: the tape culture, the DVD culture, and then the subsequent
Speaker 1: digital media culture that that that I most have most
Speaker 1: of my experience with. Like there there was there. We'll
Speaker 1: get into some examples. Yeah, you have things like hidden
Speaker 1: tracks with with CDs and so forth, But this is
Speaker 1: a whole different scenario. This is like the it's like
Speaker 1: the record as puzzle box, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And it's fun where you can hide these things.
Speaker 3: Like I said, I've I've manufactured a lot of records
Speaker 3: on my own. In particular, I I do what's called
Speaker 3: lay the embossed records. And so here's here's a fascinating
Speaker 3: thing I have personally done, which I think is really cool.
Speaker 3: So on a compact disc. Okay, Uh, the data is
Speaker 3: written from the inside, you know, toward towards the center
Speaker 3: to the outside. Vinyl is the opposite that the information
Speaker 3: is on the outside going inside. So usually on a
Speaker 3: CD there will be some blank space because there's like
Speaker 3: eighty something minutes of space on a compact disc. If
Speaker 3: you're whatever you're doing doesn't use up that much space,
Speaker 3: you have this extra room on the end. So what
Speaker 3: I've done, I have flipped a compact disc upside down
Speaker 3: and put a song from a vinyl you know, embossing
Speaker 3: needle onto the underside of the CD. And now not
Speaker 3: only is that a CD that can be played in
Speaker 3: a CD player, but if you flip it upside down
Speaker 3: and put on a record player, you can play a
Speaker 3: song on the underside of the CD itself. So like fun,
Speaker 3: things like that you can do with vinyl, and it's
Speaker 3: just not it's you know that fun isn't there in
Speaker 3: most of the other mediums.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's get into some specific examples here,
Speaker 1: and for this I'm going to go back to an
Speaker 1: article that I referenced in the first episode that we did.
Speaker 1: This is by Jonathan Vinyl. Darryl Griffin Stuart Cunningham in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen's Easter eggs Hidden tracks and Messages in Musical Mediums,
Speaker 1: and they write that there are three primary ways that
Speaker 1: records allow for hidden information. The first is something called
Speaker 1: locked grooves. So these are grooves which cause the turntable
Speaker 1: to play an endless loop. And I guess I get
Speaker 1: you'll have to maybe help me make sense of this.
Speaker 1: But is it like if the needle enters this particular groove,
Speaker 1: it will just go on forever in a circle.
Speaker 3: I have a record here next to me. Coincidentally, I'll
Speaker 3: just show you literally on it. Sorry, I won't be
Speaker 3: able to show you because this is a audio medium,
Speaker 3: but I'm pointing it out to Robert. All right, So Robert,
Speaker 3: you see this record in front of you. The song
Speaker 3: plays starting here at the outside, and then it moves
Speaker 3: to the inside. Like I was saying, now, when the
Speaker 3: needle gets past the songs, the record needs to stop it.
Speaker 3: He needs to stop the needle from just running into
Speaker 3: the paper label or anything like that. So right here,
Speaker 3: right next to the label, like basically a big circle
Speaker 3: going around the paper label center of a record, that
Speaker 3: is where the traditional locked groove is. There's no sound
Speaker 3: on it. It's just instead of a spiral, because that's
Speaker 3: basically what a groove is. It's a very elaborate, very
Speaker 3: dense spiral, you know, containing different grooves and therefore vibrations
Speaker 3: and sound. The very very bottom of that spiral, it
Speaker 3: doesn't still end as a spiral. It ends as a
Speaker 3: solid circle. That way, the needle when it's finished will
Speaker 3: more or less stay still. It'll just stay at that
Speaker 3: central point and it won't cut into the label or whatever.
Speaker 1: So if I'm, for instance, if I'm watching a film
Speaker 1: in which a record has finish, this is my main
Speaker 1: experience of this. In a movie, if a record is
Speaker 1: finished playing, sometimes it'll just be that chunk kind of
Speaker 1: sound that's the locked groove at the end of the record.
Speaker 3: Yes, although most locked grooves wouldn't make any sound at all,
Speaker 3: but yes, correct, that kind of like stereotypical loop down
Speaker 3: there at the end.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, well, the authors of this paper, they point out, quote,
Speaker 1: most records will only contain a silent locked groove to
Speaker 1: prevent damage to the needle when it reaches the end
Speaker 1: of a side. Like you explained, the presence of a
Speaker 1: locked groove that contains music would be difficult to detect
Speaker 1: without prior knowledge or careful visual inspection of the grooves. Therefore,
Speaker 1: a music containing locked groove has a good chance of
Speaker 1: surprising the listener during the performance of the recording.
Speaker 3: That's true. If you're looking at it from the outside,
Speaker 3: it doesn't look any different, just just like for the
Speaker 3: most part, if you're looking at grooves on a record,
Speaker 3: you can't determine what's on them. Actually you can if
Speaker 3: you have very very talented eyes. Eventually you can tell
Speaker 3: what the silence looks like. But that's that's that's just
Speaker 3: experts only. That's not the average person at all.
Speaker 1: The prime example that they mentioned in the paper of
Speaker 1: this is of having music in the locked groove. Bring
Speaker 1: back to the Beatles a Day in the Life from
Speaker 1: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Hearts called Band. This song enters
Speaker 1: a locked groove at the end of the song, a
Speaker 1: locked groove that contains music. And I mean, thinking back
Speaker 1: on the on the song, I mean I know where
Speaker 1: this is occurring, but I only have experience with like
Speaker 1: the CD version of this, right, I had this album
Speaker 1: on CD when I was I think in high school.
Speaker 1: But if you were playing the record, that final tone
Speaker 1: of the song potentially goes on forever, is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, as long as you don't lift it, because yeah,
Speaker 3: like I was saying, that central locked groove, it's there's
Speaker 3: no data there. It's silent, there's no sound. It's just
Speaker 3: like you're saying, like, chunk chunk, chunk chunk, it's just
Speaker 3: moving in a circle. But there's no rule that says
Speaker 3: you can't put some noise on those grooves. Why not?
Speaker 3: You know? Why not have that circle be a loop
Speaker 3: of audio? Why not?
Speaker 1: And have you experimented with this in creating records?
Speaker 3: I have many times. It's fun like why wouldn't you?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: So, most importantly, something to keep in mind when you're
Speaker 3: doing this is that it's actually a pretty small window
Speaker 3: to create that loop. So a typical record rotates at
Speaker 3: thirty three and a third revolutions per minute Summer forty five,
Speaker 3: but that's a that's usually for singles. So yeah, thirty
Speaker 3: three and a third revolutions per minute, which means that
Speaker 3: a single rotation of the record, one needle going all
Speaker 3: the way around is one point eight seconds. So that's
Speaker 3: how long your loop has to be. One point eight seconds,
Speaker 3: no more, no less. So, so here's an example of
Speaker 3: one I've done. I did one where it was called
Speaker 3: it was a series called skip records, where what I
Speaker 3: did was oh, that's actually another good, great example. If
Speaker 3: you ever are listening to a record that's damaged and
Speaker 3: the record starts skipping, it's always the same duration. It's
Speaker 3: always one point eight seconds, because that same fragment is
Speaker 3: going to be playing again and again and again. That's
Speaker 3: why you can actually tell if someone is faking a
Speaker 3: skipping record, because it'll be longer or shorter than that
Speaker 3: quick just like zip it, dip it deep up, zip it,
Speaker 3: dip it deep up. It's that is that one point
Speaker 3: eight second loop. And in fact, when when I am
Speaker 3: manufacturing records, that's the final step before I finish a record.
Speaker 3: Is so, if you can picture it in your mind,
Speaker 3: there is basically an arm that has a cutting needle.
Speaker 3: Usually it's a sapphire or a ruby, and it's pressing
Speaker 3: into the the I use use polycarbonate. It's pressing into
Speaker 3: the polycarbonate and it's moving from left to right on
Speaker 3: like a spiral arm. Basically, what you do is when
Speaker 3: you're done recording, is you stop that arm for moving
Speaker 3: left or right then you go one one thousand, two
Speaker 3: one thousand, and then you lift it up. And what
Speaker 3: you're doing by by stopping the movement is you're ending
Speaker 3: that spiral in a single place and you wait one
Speaker 3: one thousand and two one thousand for it to complete
Speaker 3: that circle and end that loop. But if you are
Speaker 3: still playing audio when you do that one one thousand
Speaker 3: and two one thousand, what you're doing is still putting data,
Speaker 3: putting information, putting sound into that loop, and you can
Speaker 3: make a go forever. So, like I was saying, I
Speaker 3: had a series called Skip Records where my whole point
Speaker 3: was I wanted it to sound like a record was
Speaker 3: just skipping for five minutes straight. Don't ask me why
Speaker 3: it's art, you know it's fun. And uh so I
Speaker 3: did this multiple times. And the fun part is is
Speaker 3: that I on these records, I always ensured that the
Speaker 3: final groove was always a locked groove. Therefore potentially that
Speaker 3: these records loop forever, that there is no end to
Speaker 3: this record and it can just play until your record
Speaker 3: player breaks or until til there's a power outage. It's
Speaker 3: just it's a it's a it's a forever equation.
Speaker 1: Wow, And you have favorite examples of this from from
Speaker 1: from other records, from from bands and so forth.
Speaker 3: There's a lot, And actually it's it's fun to me because,
Speaker 3: like you said, you usually don't know when it's going
Speaker 3: to happen. So for me, if I put on a
Speaker 3: record and it's playing and it ends up in a
Speaker 3: locked groove and you've never heard this record before, you
Speaker 3: might be off on the other side, reading or playing
Speaker 3: a video game or doing the dishes, who knows, and
Speaker 3: you notice that, like, wow, it's been doing this one
Speaker 3: tone for like forty five minutes. That's not even possible
Speaker 3: on a record, Like there's not that much room. What
Speaker 3: is happening? And you walk over and you're like, ah,
Speaker 3: this record's got a locked groove. This happened to me
Speaker 3: once on one of my favorite records, And this is
Speaker 3: my favorite example of this. The nineteen ninety seven Godspeed
Speaker 3: You Black Emperor album F Sharp A sharp Infinity. The
Speaker 3: final track Bleak Uncertain Beautiful, It ends on a locked
Speaker 3: groove playing the final two notes of the song, and
Speaker 3: those last two notes are F sharp and A sharp,
Speaker 3: and by being un a locked groove, they play for infinity,
Speaker 3: And yeah, I still remember the first time I played
Speaker 3: that record and when that needle hit that final moment,
Speaker 3: it just kept going and going and going, and I
Speaker 3: was like, this is wonder like it took me. You know,
Speaker 3: I had to be active. I had I had to
Speaker 3: realize that something was not right, investigate and realize what
Speaker 3: they had done to me and my time. It's it's
Speaker 3: it's a fun practice, you know.
Speaker 1: Do you maybe this doesn't occur, but do you. Are
Speaker 1: you ever in a position where someone comes up to
Speaker 1: you and says like, I don't know anything about records,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to get into records now. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: start buying vinyl, And then do you have to warn them? Like, look,
Speaker 1: people have laid traps for you.
Speaker 3: The main one which I actually will warn people about
Speaker 3: because these things were discussing a lucked groove doesn't happen
Speaker 3: that often, So some other techniques were about to discuss
Speaker 3: don't happen that often. It's it's it's it's pretty rare,
Speaker 3: and they're and they're extra cool because of it. One
Speaker 3: that is extremely common that actually happens all the time,
Speaker 3: not just to others but to me as well, is
Speaker 3: the difference between a thirty three and a third record
Speaker 3: and a forty five record, because forty five rpm records,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you everyone would understand this. A forty five
Speaker 3: rpm it's spinning faster, so therefore the data that's put
Speaker 3: onto it, the vibrations, the grooves are at a different speed,
Speaker 3: you know. So if you put on a forty five
Speaker 3: rpm record at thirty three and a third, it's extremely
Speaker 3: slowed down. So you might have a completely incorrect view
Speaker 3: of a song if you don't pay attention to what
Speaker 3: the speed is. And there's audio file pressings of records
Speaker 3: where they'll have full twelve inch records that are printed
Speaker 3: at forty five rpm because there's more room for the
Speaker 3: grooves so they can sound better, blah blah blah, and
Speaker 3: so you just have to know. You have to hopefully
Speaker 3: the artist has labeled the record this is a forty
Speaker 3: five rpm, or you just have to listen to and go,
Speaker 3: that's not right. Try it at thirty three and a third,
Speaker 3: Try it at forty five and go, okay, that's right.
Speaker 3: But sometimes you won't know. Sometimes they won't label it
Speaker 3: and they won't tell you, so you just have to
Speaker 3: make your best guess. Like like Ram for example, used
Speaker 3: to never label the sides of their records, Like there
Speaker 3: was no side A side B. It was just, hey,
Speaker 3: you listen to one and they listen to the other.
Speaker 3: I'm not telling you which is which. And not until
Speaker 3: CDs came around did they have to eventually decide and
Speaker 3: put an actual track order for you. And there were
Speaker 3: a couple that I learned I had the wrong order, like,
Speaker 3: for example, I always listened to murmur by Ram side
Speaker 3: B first, then side A, but I had no way
Speaker 3: of knowing that until I bought a CD of it.
Speaker 1: Wow, all right, we'll get back to track ordering in
Speaker 1: a bit. There's gonna be more on that. But getting
Speaker 1: back to the three main methods of hiding stuff in
Speaker 1: the grooves here from that twenty fourteen paper, the next
Speaker 1: one they mentioned is inverse grooves. So this, if I'm
Speaker 1: understanding this correctly, it is a record that it's meant
Speaker 1: to be played backwards. If you play it forwards, you
Speaker 1: are playing it backwards. Is that correct?
Speaker 3: Yes, they think about it this way, as we were discussing.
Speaker 3: When you're playing a record, you start the needle at
Speaker 3: the rim and you press play and it continues until
Speaker 3: it hits the label. That's the traditional way record plays.
Speaker 3: The grooves are set up that way, the spiral leading
Speaker 3: down to the drain, you know, that's the way it goes.
Speaker 3: These are the other way around. You are supposed to
Speaker 3: start the needle in the middle and then it plays
Speaker 3: out to the edge, almost like manga style. It's like,
Speaker 3: oh mm, start at the other end, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So they mentioned a couple of examples of this.
Speaker 1: One is a this one. I don't know, were you
Speaker 1: familiar with this particular group. This is a Nomes track
Speaker 1: Goarf Beat, one from the Praxis USAEP and it includes
Speaker 1: the instructions to play it. One must place the needle
Speaker 1: at the point where you would expect the track to end.
Speaker 1: And then they also mentioned Megadeth's single for Sweating Bullets,
Speaker 1: which was an inverse groove pressing and it had a
Speaker 1: warning on the packaging that said quote paranoid pressing on
Speaker 1: blue vinyl. Warning, do not attempt to play this record
Speaker 1: in the conventional manner. Both sides reverse play from the
Speaker 1: inside groove outwards.
Speaker 3: It makes sense because I bet the average person they
Speaker 3: would just assume their record was broken, you know, because
Speaker 3: if you did put it the correct place and pressed forward.
Speaker 3: Best case scenario you're getting it to play backwards. More
Speaker 3: probable is that because that is starting with the locked groove,
Speaker 3: it won't be able to enter into that spiral. So
Speaker 3: it'll just sit there and you'll just hear nothing or
Speaker 3: maybe a little little skipping or some static. But another
Speaker 3: great example of this this is found on Jack White's
Speaker 3: twenty fourteen solo album Lazaretto. Jack White and his record
Speaker 3: label Third Man Records are known for doing all kinds
Speaker 3: of fun gimmicky things, like they have like liquid core records.
Speaker 3: They have records where like there'll be a forty five
Speaker 3: inch record hidden inside of a twelve inch you have
Speaker 3: to like cut open the record to pull out another record. Like,
Speaker 3: He's done a lot of really fun, interesting things. He
Speaker 3: is the Willy Wonka of record manufacturers, and I really
Speaker 3: admire him for that. For his twenty fourteen album Lazaretto,
Speaker 3: he just wanted to put it all in one record.
Speaker 3: He wanted to be all the gimmicks all at once.
Speaker 3: So he called this version of Lazaretto the Ultra LP
Speaker 3: And it's got so many fun gimmicks and innovations that
Speaker 3: we would need literally an entire episode just to break
Speaker 3: them down. But you could. You can find copies of
Speaker 3: it to see online. I believe there's also a YouTube
Speaker 3: video which I sent you, Robert, which has Jack White
Speaker 3: just pointing out every single wacky gimmick of this one
Speaker 3: single record. But on side one of this record, it
Speaker 3: does play backwards like you're saying you have to start
Speaker 3: the new needle by the label, and it plays out
Speaker 3: to the rim. And I wonder how many people just
Speaker 3: couldn't figure that out, because, you know, I mean, it's
Speaker 3: I know a lot of people who just in life,
Speaker 3: they aren't reading instructions. Kind of people, you know, like
Speaker 3: if they get a piece of furniture from Ikia, they're
Speaker 3: not going to read the instructions, They're just going to
Speaker 3: put it together. And I'm sure buying a record, you
Speaker 3: don't even assume that there will be instructions, you know,
Speaker 3: whether it was Megadeth with Sweating Bullets or whether it's
Speaker 3: Jack White with Lazaretto, why would there be instructions? So
Speaker 3: you just play it and you're confused why it's not working.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this Lazaretto album, when you initially mentioned it to
Speaker 1: me and our chat, you listed all the gimmicks it had,
Speaker 1: and I didn't even understand all of them. It seems
Speaker 1: like it makes me think of the book House of Leaves.
Speaker 1: This feels like it it's like the House of Leaves
Speaker 1: of vinyl records.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and it was very popular, I believe. I
Speaker 3: know it was the best selling record at the time,
Speaker 3: but I think it like for the year. It was
Speaker 3: like the best selling vinyl record for that year.
Speaker 1: All right, moving on to the next example that they
Speaker 1: give in this paper, double grooves or parallel grooves quote
Speaker 1: records where two grooves run simultaneously through a record, causing
Speaker 1: the needle to play different material depending where it is
Speaker 1: initially placed. This is apparently sometimes referred to as a
Speaker 1: third side.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I've also heard these called three sided records. And yeah,
Speaker 3: there are a few names for this, but these are
Speaker 3: these are much more rare. These are fascinating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're gonna have to keep explaining this one to me.
Speaker 1: The couple of examples that they mention, there's the Monty
Speaker 1: Python matching tie and handkerchief from nineteen seventy three, which
Speaker 1: the packaging is pretty neat on this because the album
Speaker 1: is packaged to look like you're buying a matching tie
Speaker 1: and handkerchief, which is fun. But side too has two
Speaker 1: different grooves, so depending on where you place the needle,
Speaker 1: you'll get different material.
Speaker 3: Now I have firsthand experience because I own this record,
Speaker 3: and it's amazing. Here's the best part I can say
Speaker 3: about this. This one entirely worked on me because I
Speaker 3: didn't even know that there was a hidden third side
Speaker 3: until I read about it later and had to investigate
Speaker 3: for myself. That's not printed on the record anywhere that
Speaker 3: there's hidden music or I guess hidden comedy on this record.
Speaker 3: So here's here's I think their goal, which was so
Speaker 3: all records sideday, side B, the side with two parallel grooves.
Speaker 3: What's happening is, yeah, I guess picture that spiral again,
Speaker 3: But there are two completely different lines to that spiral
Speaker 3: right next to each other, going all the way down
Speaker 3: to that center. So therefore, when you're putting that needle
Speaker 3: in that groove, you have basically a fifty to fifty
Speaker 3: chance are you going to be in the one groove
Speaker 3: or the groove right next to it? That never match up.
Speaker 3: So here's the fun. The fun part is that you
Speaker 3: you listen to Side AY, everything suns normal. You turn
Speaker 3: it over, you put on side B, you listen to it,
Speaker 3: everything's normal, and then you put put away your record.
Speaker 3: Next month, you want to listen to it again. Sideay,
Speaker 3: everything's normal, put it on side B. Wait, this isn't
Speaker 3: the side B I've heard before. What's happening? And so
Speaker 3: you listen to it. You're like, I swear I heard
Speaker 3: this differently before. But okay, whatever, whatever, whatever, you put
Speaker 3: it aside, pull it out, put it on again. Sometimes
Speaker 3: sidday's normal. Side B. It's that first side again. You're like, wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 3: I swear last time this joke was on there, or
Speaker 3: maybe you're like talking to your friends, You're like, hey,
Speaker 3: what about that one part?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: Did you love track three? Like that's not track three?
Speaker 3: It's like no, no, it definitely is. Come over to
Speaker 3: my house, I'll play it for you. You put it on
Speaker 3: and it plays the wrong side like no, no, no,
Speaker 3: I swear like it's like a fun It seems like
Speaker 3: it's almost gaslighting you. You know, it's it's a very
Speaker 3: fun gimmick.
Speaker 1: Now is this? I'm reminded of a trophy encounter in
Speaker 1: a lot of like carror and mystery TV shows and
Speaker 1: short stories where someone realizes that there's a hidden compartment
Speaker 1: in a room based on the fact that this room
Speaker 1: is smaller than the adjoining room.
Speaker 3: Yes, is that?
Speaker 1: Would that be something? With this scenario, like if you
Speaker 1: were really on the lookout for this sort of trick,
Speaker 1: would you notice that, like one side of the record
Speaker 1: seem shorter than the other.
Speaker 3: You would have to be really on your toes, because
Speaker 3: the side of of a typical twelve inch record can
Speaker 3: be anywhere from like ten minutes to thirty minutes, depending
Speaker 3: upon how closely you put those grooves together. But yes,
Speaker 3: you would be able to notice if you paid very
Speaker 3: close attention to how much space was being taken up
Speaker 3: by the grooves, because it's only playing half of those
Speaker 3: grooves when it's going going down the line playing all
Speaker 3: the audio.
Speaker 1: So like a physical investigation would be needed. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: just be like, well, that side felt this long and
Speaker 1: this one feels different or something.
Speaker 3: It'd be possible, but yeah, yeah, you would have to
Speaker 3: be paying a lot of attention. And for me, I
Speaker 3: needed someone to tell me. I needed someone to tell
Speaker 3: me that a record in my collection had three sides
Speaker 3: before I realized it.
Speaker 1: The other example that they bring up in the paper
Speaker 1: is mister Bungle's disco Volante from nineteen ninety five, in
Speaker 1: which hidden grooves contain the song's secret song and songs
Speaker 1: by quote the Secret Chief's Trio. And then they also
Speaker 1: mentioned that secret song is said to be notoriously difficult
Speaker 1: to find with the needle.
Speaker 3: That's another part that you can do on purpose. So,
Speaker 3: for example, I believe on the matching the Monty Python record,
Speaker 3: it's more or less a fifty to fifty because just
Speaker 3: when you're creating those grooves, you just make the openings,
Speaker 3: you know, the same size. But let's say, for example,
Speaker 3: you want that second song to really be a secret well,
Speaker 3: then you don't create an opening for it. You have
Speaker 3: it exist entirely cut off from that primary groove and
Speaker 3: it can just live there and no one will ever
Speaker 3: find out unless they deliberately not start the record at
Speaker 3: the beginning, but just trial and error, just kind of
Speaker 3: drop it in the middle of the record, hoping that
Speaker 3: it lands on the correct groove that they want to find.
Speaker 1: Wow. So technically you could have situations where there could
Speaker 1: be albums out there with secret grooves with secret information
Speaker 1: in them that have never been discovered. That Nicholas Cage
Speaker 1: has not his character in a film or Tom Hanks's
Speaker 1: character in a film has not put on the record
Speaker 1: to discover yet.
Speaker 3: Very possible, now, I would say, in all likelihood, depending
Speaker 3: upon the many ways people start records. I'm sure there's
Speaker 3: a large percentage of the world that doesn't carefully place
Speaker 3: the needle at the beginning of each record before they start.
Speaker 3: They do just PLoP it on wherever, So I bet
Speaker 3: it would be found pretty quickly, I would assume, just
Speaker 3: based on people's sloppy handling of their record needles.
Speaker 1: So do you have any other fun examples of double grooves,
Speaker 1: parallel grooves, and third sides.
Speaker 3: There's a couple I've heard of, but I've never seen this.
Speaker 3: This is a great one that I would love to
Speaker 3: see this in person someday, but I've only read about it.
Speaker 3: It's a horse racing board game. So what you do
Speaker 3: is everyone picks their horses, you know, standard like typical
Speaker 3: you know betting forms, and you read a little description
Speaker 3: about which horse is what and blah blah blah, and
Speaker 3: then you start the record, which contains all the sound
Speaker 3: effects of you know, being at the downs and all that,
Speaker 3: and there's an announcer calling the horse race However, the
Speaker 3: record has multiple parallel grooves, each with a different result,
Speaker 3: so you never know which horse is actually going to
Speaker 3: be the winner when you put that groove on. So
Speaker 3: it's almost like a choose your own adventure, except you
Speaker 3: don't get a choice, you know.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, Yeah, and yeah. I'd love to hear from
Speaker 1: anyone out there who knows of other examples of this,
Speaker 1: because it seems like it's the sort of sort of
Speaker 1: gimmick that that people you would have had a lot
Speaker 1: of fun with, like I don't know, some sort of
Speaker 1: narrative use of it, with with with some sort of
Speaker 1: a storytelling technique.
Speaker 3: You know, kind of like Clue the movie where you
Speaker 3: watch it and it's got like the multiple endings kind
Speaker 3: of like that, and that'd be fun. Here's one more example,
Speaker 3: because we've already mentioned it, going back again to the
Speaker 3: Ultra LP version of Jack Whites Lazaretto. Like I said,
Speaker 3: he's got a million gimmicks on this one, he has
Speaker 3: a version of parallel grooves that I've never seen before.
Speaker 3: Track one on side B, it's a song called just
Speaker 3: One Drink. It has two completely different intros to the
Speaker 3: song that are parallel grooves, but they both feed in
Speaker 3: to the to the primary groove again, so the rest
Speaker 3: of the record plays completely normal. So it's it's it
Speaker 3: starts off as two spirals and then they both funnel
Speaker 3: into the one standard spiral. So it's wow. And once again,
Speaker 3: it's just luck. When you put on that needle for
Speaker 3: the first time, it's just a chance of am I
Speaker 3: going to play the Like the harder version of the
Speaker 3: intro or the softer, more acoustic version of the intro
Speaker 3: is just fifty to fifty who knows what you're gonna get?
Speaker 3: And man, that's fun. Like you can't get that with
Speaker 3: other mediums.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the CD type culture we never had
Speaker 1: anything like that. We'll get into some examples of what
Speaker 1: we did have, but they didn't create this kind of
Speaker 1: level of almost quantum uncertainty, like what will happen when
Speaker 1: I start playing this song? I mean, to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: that mystery is there when you play a new album
Speaker 1: for the first time, but the idea that subsequent returns
Speaker 1: to that album that there could be not just things
Speaker 1: that were subjectively different, but objectively different things about the
Speaker 1: listening experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, all.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, let's get into the CD age A little bit,
Speaker 1: and let's eventually get into the digital realm as well.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about so called hidden tracks,
Speaker 1: secret tracks. Uh, this is this is an area that
Speaker 1: I have more familiarity with because again I was I
Speaker 1: was more of a CD guy than certainly than than
Speaker 1: than anything like the CDs were. This was the right
Speaker 1: period where I really got into like choosing my own
Speaker 1: musical interest, choosing the bands that I wanted to devote
Speaker 1: time to. And then also I guess at the time too,
Speaker 1: it's like CDs were starting to get a little pricey,
Speaker 1: so whatever you bought like this was a deliberate choice.
Speaker 1: Not only is this an album you wanted to listen to,
Speaker 1: you would you would make sure you liked it, or
Speaker 1: you would really give it a chance, because this was
Speaker 1: going to be your album for the you know, for
Speaker 1: a week or two maybe more, until you could conceivably
Speaker 1: buy another album. So, you know, we get into this
Speaker 1: realm of secret tracks, and I guess the thing about
Speaker 1: secret and hidden tracks is they ultimately really weren't that
Speaker 1: well hidden. I mean, certainly nothing compared to vinyl examples
Speaker 1: we've discussed, right right.
Speaker 3: I mean I did enjoy sometimes and I think This
Speaker 3: is pretty rare when there was literally a hidden disc
Speaker 3: inside the CD packaging. That was fun when that would
Speaker 3: happen on occasion, but for the most part it was yeah,
Speaker 3: you'll explain. For the most part, it was pretty straightforward
Speaker 3: to have some hidden songs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the main examples that come to my mind
Speaker 1: are like Tools Undertow and the Nine Inch Nails EP Broken.
Speaker 1: The versions that I had just had a bunch of
Speaker 1: like extra blank tracks and then eventually the tracks containing
Speaker 1: the extra songs. And I didn't know about this tool.
Speaker 1: I was just researching it again for this episode. But
Speaker 1: apparently with Nine Inch Nails, the original CD pressing and
Speaker 1: the vinyl pressing of Broken had an extra smaller disc
Speaker 1: that had the bonus tracks on them.
Speaker 3: That was a very brief window when Yeah, there were
Speaker 3: like these little mini CDs that in theory could play
Speaker 3: in any CD player, Like in fact, if you happen
Speaker 3: to have a CD player at home, especially when the
Speaker 3: kind of with like a tray, you pop it open
Speaker 3: and you'll notice that there's actually a smaller imprint inside
Speaker 3: where the bigger imprint is. That's for these smaller CDs,
Speaker 3: but that medium lasted like a blink of an Eye.
Speaker 3: I think they were more popular in somewhere in Asia.
Speaker 3: I want to say Japan, that they lasted longer, but yeah, no,
Speaker 3: they didn't last here very long at all.
Speaker 1: I remember, though, thinking that this was clever and cool,
Speaker 1: and there was this kind of idea that it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: nine inch nails, they're kind of they're sticking it to
Speaker 1: the man. They have these and they're they're then they're
Speaker 1: delivering bonus content to us the fans that the clear
Speaker 1: the record labels didn't want this on here, but they said, no,
Speaker 1: we insist. We're going to hide it at the end
Speaker 1: where the inspectors won't find it first.
Speaker 3: Right, Hey, hey, why not? I like that narrative. I
Speaker 3: like picturing, you know, a Trent Reznor with these little
Speaker 3: mini CDs hiding at the factory, just slipping them into
Speaker 3: each and every package.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it wouldn't be entirely out of carre.
Speaker 1: There were the later story I figure what album this was,
Speaker 1: but the idea that, like some of the tracks were
Speaker 1: leaked to the media by leaving a USB in a
Speaker 1: bathroom at a concert or something.
Speaker 3: Right, right, Yeah, that's all fun stuff.
Speaker 1: Now, another example for the secret track. Another way the
Speaker 1: secret track or hidden track was often utilized would be
Speaker 1: just have a big long gap after the final listed
Speaker 1: track on the album, and then eventually a hidden track
Speaker 1: starts playing. And of course the reverse of that is,
Speaker 1: once you know it's there, if you want to listen
Speaker 1: to the hidden track, you just fast forward through the
Speaker 1: final track to get to that content.
Speaker 3: It's funny too, because all of these examples, they're all
Speaker 3: so tied to the CD itself. In fact, do you
Speaker 3: remember negative time on a CD player?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm trying to remember what. I had one album
Speaker 1: in particular that did this, but I can't recall what.
Speaker 3: It was a big thing that would happen. This is
Speaker 3: like not during the early days of CDs, but more
Speaker 3: towards the later days, when basically a CD was really
Speaker 3: kind of being pushed to its limits of like what
Speaker 3: it could contain and maybe getting a bit more secretive,
Speaker 3: getting a bit weirder with it. If there was like
Speaker 3: a bit of audio that existed kind of between tracks,
Speaker 3: whether it be like maybe a bit of a skit
Speaker 3: or an intro, or just sort of like an in
Speaker 3: the studio outtake or something when it was playing, and
Speaker 3: you could watch the time on the little the digital readout,
Speaker 3: it would be like, you know, five seconds, six seconds,
Speaker 3: seven seconds, negative six seconds, negative five seconds, negative four seconds,
Speaker 3: and in that negative space would be this additional noise,
Speaker 3: little skit, little outtake, whatever, little intro. So that way,
Speaker 3: when you skipped to the final to like the real song,
Speaker 3: it would start where the song starts. But if you
Speaker 3: listen to the album all the way through, this negative
Speaker 3: space would just give a bit more context, a bit
Speaker 3: more padding, a bit more like continuity, you know. And
Speaker 3: I thought that was pretty fun. But also when we
Speaker 3: reached the age of digitizing our CDs and putting them
Speaker 3: onto to you know, our MP three players and whatever, oh,
Speaker 3: that became a headache.
Speaker 1: Now I don't even know how to classify this one.
Speaker 1: This one's not an example that was brought up in
Speaker 1: the paper, but an album that I had. And this
Speaker 1: is a great album that the Kaias album from nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, Welcome to Sky Valley comes to mind. This
Speaker 1: one had this weird structure where it does have a
Speaker 1: hidden track at the end, which is real dumb. But
Speaker 1: it also has ten tracks overall. The first that the
Speaker 1: I mean ten songs overall. The first three songs are
Speaker 1: all one track, the next three songs are all one track,
Speaker 1: and the last four songs are all one track. And
Speaker 1: I'm not really clear on why they did this, but
Speaker 1: I remember being more annoyed by it than anything, because
Speaker 1: sometimes you want to listen to an album all the
Speaker 1: way through, but sometimes you just want to hear Demon Cleaner,
Speaker 1: which is a really great track off of that album,
Speaker 1: a really great song off of that album, but it's
Speaker 1: the third song in track number two. It's a little
Speaker 1: hard to get to if you just want that.
Speaker 3: I can't speak to this specific example, but I can
Speaker 3: give this example. Just recently. I had Joe on my podcast,
Speaker 3: Rusty Needle's Record Club, and we did the self titled
Speaker 3: Black Sabbath album, and on it, the American version combined
Speaker 3: a bunch of the tracks into fewer tracks. So like
Speaker 3: the original European version, let's say, had ten tracks, the
Speaker 3: American version had like six tracks. The albums were more
Speaker 3: or less identical. They swapped out one song, but that's
Speaker 3: beside the point. More or less identical, just far fewer tracks.
Speaker 3: And when you look it up, like why did this happen?
Speaker 3: It was just a record label thing, They're like, oh,
Speaker 3: we were paying them by the track, so if we
Speaker 3: give them fewer tracks, we don't have to pay them
Speaker 3: as many residuals, you know. And what's funny is like
Speaker 3: now the opposite is true. Like, for example, let's go
Speaker 3: back to the idea of like a hidden track inside
Speaker 3: of a CD where it used to be. Let's say
Speaker 3: let's say there are ten tracks on the album and
Speaker 3: one hidden bonus track, so that tenth track would be
Speaker 3: a song, long long gap, and then another song, So
Speaker 3: eleven songs, ten physical tracks. In today's modern streaming age, basically,
Speaker 3: they've gotten they've they've more or less gotten rid of that.
Speaker 3: Now whenever I see something that used to have a
Speaker 3: hidden track, it's just chopped off and turned into a
Speaker 3: bonus track, because the opposite is true now. Now the
Speaker 3: record label gets paid by these streaming services for every
Speaker 3: single individual track, so they want as many tracks as possible.
Speaker 3: If they can, they'll cut up into a hundred tracks.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: And it's just interesting, like the opposite is true of
Speaker 3: the record label wanting more money. They used to force
Speaker 3: you to put it in as few tracks as possible,
Speaker 3: and now they're forcing you to cut it into as
Speaker 3: many tracks as possible, and it's just you know, it's
Speaker 3: going to keep flip flopping forever until I don't know,
Speaker 3: until business people don't want money, so beats me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there are plenty of examples that you can
Speaker 1: point to where if nothing else they do the whole
Speaker 1: just throw an extra hidden song there at the end,
Speaker 1: after some blank, blank space, you know, a little quiet
Speaker 1: and and something else pops up. And sometimes it was
Speaker 1: clearly they were trying to be cheeky, and maybe it
Speaker 1: was some sort of a track that was a little
Speaker 1: cruider or a little little dumber or supposed to be cryptic.
Speaker 1: And other times it was like, I think I had
Speaker 1: a Natalie Merchant album that just had a really neat
Speaker 1: folk song at the very end of things, and there's
Speaker 1: not really a neat I don't know if there's any
Speaker 1: logical reason to have this be a hidden track, but
Speaker 1: it was. It was there hidden. But yeah, nowadays you
Speaker 1: pull up these same albums and I guess sometimes they're
Speaker 1: still going to keep that together, but a lot of
Speaker 1: times the hidden track is just going to be listed there. Right.
Speaker 3: Look, I'm not working for Jack Whites. I'm not getting
Speaker 3: paid for every time I mentioned the Lazaretto Ultra LP.
Speaker 3: But I'm gonna bring it up one more time because
Speaker 3: get this. These are a couple of examples of hidden
Speaker 3: tracks that blow my mind. He hid tracks underneath the
Speaker 3: paper labels on the record itself, and also he put
Speaker 3: them with two different speeds revolutions per minute than the
Speaker 3: record itself. The record itself is thirty three and a third.
Speaker 3: Underneath one paper label, it's seventy eight RPM, and then
Speaker 3: underneath the other one is forty five. So on this
Speaker 3: one record it has three different RPMs. It's wild and
Speaker 3: the way it works basically is that he did imprint
Speaker 3: a song on traditional grooves under in that center space
Speaker 3: that's reserved for the label, and then when you do
Speaker 3: the actual pressing pressing, what happens is that the label
Speaker 3: itself just kind of gets sucked into it a little bit,
Speaker 3: so the sound quality is not that great. And I
Speaker 3: guess if you really wanted to, you could like remove
Speaker 3: the label, you could like tear it off, but you
Speaker 3: can it's possible just to play it directly through the label.
Speaker 3: You just place your needle directly on top of that
Speaker 3: paper label and it will play the song that's underneath.
Speaker 1: Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 3: Once again, not an ad for Jack White. I like him,
Speaker 3: but he's not paying me.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, there may be some more examples of
Speaker 1: hidden songs and tracks from well, perhaps from vinyl, but
Speaker 1: it certainly maybe some more examples from the CD folks
Speaker 1: can mention, I guess without even getting into it much.
Speaker 1: There also is that late CD period. I guess it's
Speaker 1: kind of late CD period where you also have CDs
Speaker 1: that can be placed inside in your computer's disk drive
Speaker 1: so you can go to some sort of crappy website
Speaker 1: or some sort of like a visual thing that lines
Speaker 1: up with the album. But I don't know if that
Speaker 1: has Jack White come back around to that now.
Speaker 3: I think he's mostly an analog guy. I don't think
Speaker 3: he is hiding, you know, PC wallpapers on any of
Speaker 3: his records yet.
Speaker 1: Now there is another really interesting area that some of
Speaker 1: you may be thinking of already, and this gets into
Speaker 1: the idea of having images hidden, not as a PC wallpaper,
Speaker 1: not as something that's in the liner notes for the
Speaker 1: album or anything like that, but actually in the sound
Speaker 1: data itself. Uh. And the idea here is that, yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll have something in the sound data that if you
Speaker 1: run it through a spectrogram editor and synthesizer, you can
Speaker 1: produce an image the image that was encoded as music
Speaker 1: or encoded is sound anyway inside of a musical piece
Speaker 1: or inside of an album.
Speaker 3: These are absolutely stunning to me. I I I do
Speaker 3: this stuff every day. And in fact, because you know
Speaker 3: the programs that you use to look at these images,
Speaker 3: they're the programs I used to edit these shows.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: That's that's that's that's just part of my repertoire. And
Speaker 3: I have actually looked into creating these myself, and I'm
Speaker 3: still in awe even though I know how they do it.
Speaker 3: It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: If the most famous example of this I think, or well,
Speaker 1: it's one of the most famous examples, and in some circles,
Speaker 1: the most famous example, and this is the one that's
Speaker 1: mentioned in that paper from from Wineld, Griffiths and Cunningham,
Speaker 1: the nineteen ninety nine song Window Liquor by Aphex Twin.
Speaker 1: If you run this one particular part of the song
Speaker 1: the sound through this system, you of course get to
Speaker 1: see Richard James, that's Aphex Twin. You get to see
Speaker 1: his grinning face.
Speaker 3: It's amazing because first of all, it looks even spookier
Speaker 3: than it always looks. You know, Richard D. James is
Speaker 3: always doing some kind of spooky thing with his face,
Speaker 3: whether it's turning it into a mask and putting on
Speaker 3: a child or whatever. But man, oh man, it's so
Speaker 3: fascinating it too, because, like you know, if you think
Speaker 3: about these programs, what they're doing is they're showing you,
Speaker 3: you know, the visualization of the audio waves. So the
Speaker 3: way you put these images in there is you reverse
Speaker 3: engineer it. You create the image first, and then you
Speaker 3: basically determine what those sounds would need to be to
Speaker 3: create that image, and then you can just basically put
Speaker 3: it in your song and boom, you've got it. But
Speaker 3: it's so funny because every example of this I've seen,
Speaker 3: it's very obvious that something strange is going on in
Speaker 3: the audio because this is not a typical wave. It's
Speaker 3: a picture of Richard James face.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not just a case where oh yeah, that's
Speaker 1: if you play this backward satanic message, like, it's clear
Speaker 1: that something is there, and then when you when you
Speaker 1: run it through, you can see the artist's face or
Speaker 1: in the case of a particular track from Venetian Snares
Speaker 1: that's the moniker of Aaron Funk. There's a picture of
Speaker 1: his cat that one I found very very sweet, of course,
Speaker 1: in part because I wasn't familiar with it. I was
Speaker 1: familiar with the aphex twin example, and when I heard
Speaker 1: there was a Venetian snares when I was like, I
Speaker 1: don't know what this image is going to be, but
Speaker 1: it's it's just a cat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's nice. It's a fun way to do this,
Speaker 3: and I think I particularly like these two. It reminds
Speaker 3: me of I've seen people in the olden days when
Speaker 3: they were computer programmers in the deep past, not in
Speaker 3: the contemporary sense, but the way that you're actually fooling
Speaker 3: around with like micro chips, Like that old style of
Speaker 3: computer programmer. The computer programers would write little messages to
Speaker 3: one another onside the chips when they put them in computers.
Speaker 1: That way.
Speaker 3: Years later, you come across something and it has something
Speaker 3: written on it that no one would read except another
Speaker 3: programmer who is fiddling around with this machine. And from
Speaker 3: what I understand, people who write code these days often
Speaker 3: do a similar thing. So I think this kind of
Speaker 3: hidden message in a song very much is like one
Speaker 3: audio producer talking to another audio producer going like, hey,
Speaker 3: look in this funny and it's like, yeah, it is.
Speaker 3: Good job.
Speaker 1: There's at least one more really good example of this,
Speaker 1: and this might be in some sort of This might
Speaker 1: be the most famous example, depending on where you're coming from.
Speaker 1: But the two thousand and seven Nine Inch Nails album
Speaker 1: Year Zero, which which I think is a great album.
Speaker 1: Occasionally play this one agreed today. It has I think
Speaker 1: two different spectrograms. I was only familiar with the first
Speaker 1: one by the spectrogram at the end of the track
Speaker 1: My Violent Heart and it's of like a hand reaching
Speaker 1: down from the sky, which is also a theme of
Speaker 1: the cover for the album.
Speaker 3: I mean, I can't imagine how many of these are
Speaker 3: unseen in the world, because I think even more so
Speaker 3: than oh a hidden song on a record or a
Speaker 3: hidden song on a CD, the vast majority of people
Speaker 3: will never run their audio through a spectrogram. It's never
Speaker 3: going to happen. So unless you are a person you
Speaker 3: know who has that background and you think you hear
Speaker 3: something and you happen to upload it in and look
Speaker 3: at it, I bet there's a lot of hidden stuff
Speaker 3: that's never been seen before.
Speaker 1: Now there's one more example that's brought up, and that
Speaker 1: is this idea of black midies, which is not something
Speaker 1: I was familiar with, but it's brought up in this
Speaker 1: paper about Easter eggs and music. And these are apparently
Speaker 1: midi files that contain an absurd amount of data that,
Speaker 1: when played back in a program, can produce patterns when
Speaker 1: they cause the program to fail. And I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I completely understand this one, but it's still interesting. There's
Speaker 1: still some thing about it. Almost sounds like let's take
Speaker 1: the music and like crash it, and in doing so,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll create these visuals.
Speaker 3: So the idea of the black midi is pretty interesting
Speaker 3: too because it ties into a much older idea, which
Speaker 3: is we as human beings, are limited by what we
Speaker 3: can do with our hands. It's difficult for us to
Speaker 3: go beyond what is physically possible. We have two hands
Speaker 3: for the most part, ten fingers for the most part.
Speaker 3: This is what we can do. Let's say, on a piano.
Speaker 3: A piano can only do what the human being can do.
Speaker 3: Maybe you can add another person, but other than that,
Speaker 3: we're just human beings. So back in the days when
Speaker 3: people first started mechanizing musical instruments, folks started experimenting with this.
Speaker 3: One of my favorites. I'm gonna get his name wrong
Speaker 3: because I don't think I've ever pronounced it correctly because
Speaker 3: I've heard it too many ways. A guy named Conlin
Speaker 3: Noncarro con l O n n A n c A
Speaker 3: R R O W. He's an experimental musician. And now
Speaker 3: one of the things he did, which many call him
Speaker 3: the first electronic musician because of this, is he would
Speaker 3: create roles for player pianos, you know, those kind of
Speaker 3: pianos that play themselves. And he was like, oh, wait
Speaker 3: a minute, this isn't a human being, this is a machine.
Speaker 3: I can make this thing do whatever I want. So
Speaker 3: he would do things that he would program for these
Speaker 3: player pianos that were impossible. You know, too many hands, notes,
Speaker 3: playing too quickly in succession, you know all these things.
Speaker 3: A lot of it was really really fast, and it
Speaker 3: was just it was such like a fascinating idea of like, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm going to create music that was meant to replicate
Speaker 3: human hands, but I'm going to make it for nobody.
Speaker 3: This is completely imaginary music that nobody could ever play.
Speaker 3: And so his music's really fascinating. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 3: Look it up. But that's the same idea behind a
Speaker 3: black midi which is, if folks don't know, a MIDI
Speaker 3: file is more or less the zeros and ones behind
Speaker 3: a digital instrument playing music. It's a kind of music
Speaker 3: that's played in most video games, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: And so if you are playing a piano that turns
Speaker 3: it into midi data, it's documenting it and you know,
Speaker 3: putting all those little pieces in place, so when you
Speaker 3: play it back, it plays it back the exact same way.
Speaker 3: Same thing. Just like with that idea that Canlin Nakaro
Speaker 3: was doing. You just start putting an extra data, things
Speaker 3: that are completely impossible, things that your hands could never do,
Speaker 3: things that there there aren't there isn't enough time, there
Speaker 3: is there aren't enough fingers in the world to ever
Speaker 3: actually play this. And it gets to such an enormous
Speaker 3: degree that it's that it's impossible and it breaks. So
Speaker 3: there's an example of this. I don't know if you
Speaker 3: if you've ever heard about this, but do you know
Speaker 3: the song rush E I don't Oh, I'm gonna show
Speaker 3: this to you audience will be right back.
Speaker 1: Whoo. That that was something it's it started off rather
Speaker 1: subtle and kind of pleasant, and then it got really intense.
Speaker 1: I guess to describe this to anyone who hasn't watched
Speaker 1: the video of presentation of this is you have a
Speaker 1: keyboard at the bottom, and you have little blocks falling
Speaker 1: and it's kind of like tetris. I guess you have blocks.
Speaker 1: When they reach the bottom, they just play the keys
Speaker 1: that they land on.
Speaker 3: A bit like a Guitar Hero too.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, like Guitar Hero. And I guess the
Speaker 1: idea is that early on we're seeing things that are
Speaker 1: very possible with human hands, with a human piano player,
Speaker 1: but then it gets increasingly complex to the level where
Speaker 1: no human with even like four arms to play this thing.
Speaker 3: No, I mean, and I honestly commend the creator of this.
Speaker 3: I believe this one is created by someone named sheet
Speaker 3: music Boss. You can find this video online. It's very popular.
Speaker 3: It's been memed to death. It's gosh, got many many
Speaker 3: millions of views, so check it out if you haven't.
Speaker 3: It is something to see. I really to commend them
Speaker 3: on like the build of this, because it starts off
Speaker 3: just like mildly impossible, and then like, wow, this is
Speaker 3: really impossible, and by the time you each the end,
Speaker 3: it's ludicrously impossible, like like like like like it's crisscrossing,
Speaker 3: it's spelling images, it's like it's it's every key being
Speaker 3: played simultaneously, and yet it still sounds pretty good, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, just like orders of magnitude though, and complexity
Speaker 1: begin to drop on you. I mean in a way,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like, yeah, if Tetris suddenly got like
Speaker 1: like huge leap and difficulty and just now overwhelming, that feels.
Speaker 1: I mean it was a little anxious watching and listening
Speaker 1: to it.
Speaker 3: So yeah, So this song is called rush E. It's
Speaker 3: a it's very much a meme song. There's a long
Speaker 3: backstory to how this came to be. It has to
Speaker 3: do with market Plier, the YouTube gamer Like, it's a
Speaker 3: long history that I can't go into right now. But
Speaker 3: ultimately it's just a song that's so complex that not
Speaker 3: only is it impossible for humans to play, but it's
Speaker 3: even too complex for some computers to handle. And thus
Speaker 3: its title of being a black Midi, uh that it's
Speaker 3: basically it's gonna brick your computer. Uh So that's more
Speaker 3: or less what a black METI is and Rushy is
Speaker 3: perhaps the most famous example of a black Mity. Now.
Speaker 3: I've said the words black Mite several times, so I
Speaker 3: would be completely remiss if I didn't mention one of
Speaker 3: my favorite contemporary bands, Black Mity. They've released three albums
Speaker 3: so far. Their twenty twenty two album, hell Fire, is
Speaker 3: in contention for one of my favorite albums of the year.
Speaker 3: And I assume they picked their band name because their
Speaker 3: sound is very maximalist. It's very busy, it's very complex,
Speaker 3: and it's very intricate, so I'm sure they picked their
Speaker 3: band name for that purpose. But a wonderful group. I
Speaker 3: highly recommend people check out hell Fire, one of the
Speaker 3: best albums twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: I promise you, Oh Neat, let's check that out. Now.
Speaker 1: Going in the entirely opposite direction from PC crashing complexity,
Speaker 1: there is another, just one last topic to touch on here,
Speaker 1: and this this is by no means an exhaustive list
Speaker 1: of the way that stuff can be hidden in music.
Speaker 1: There may be other examples, and feel free to write
Speaker 1: in about them. But another thing you can do is
Speaker 1: simply take a sound, take a song, and either speed
Speaker 1: it up or stretch it out so time stretching is
Speaker 1: one worth mentioning here. It's a matter of taking sonic
Speaker 1: information and stretching it out so that it's unrecognizable, but
Speaker 1: in doing so perhaps making it interesting, more interesting, certainly
Speaker 1: more ambient, or in the reverse, you know, you can
Speaker 1: you can certainly speed things up. In all of this,
Speaker 1: it reminded me a bit of various videos that'll do
Speaker 1: this online, where they'll take Alvin and the Chipmunk songs
Speaker 1: in which, of course you have human voices sped up
Speaker 1: to be the voices of chipmunks, and then if you
Speaker 1: slow it down enough, the chipmunks sound like normal adult
Speaker 1: human beings, and it's everything else that sounds like it's
Speaker 1: from the Twilight Zone in a realm of monsters.
Speaker 3: It's very sludgy, very slow, very lethargic. And it's very
Speaker 3: fun to listen to a whole album of these slowed
Speaker 3: down Chipmunk songs. But it's also amazing how much slower
Speaker 3: and longer these songs are, like, you know, because imagine,
Speaker 3: if you're listening to it at its regular speed, it's
Speaker 3: what you know, half hour something like that. You slow
Speaker 3: it down and man, you've got like an hour and
Speaker 3: a half Alvin and the Chipmunks album. Maybe you don't
Speaker 3: want to be listening to it that long, but it's
Speaker 3: it's fun. It's always fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it listening to too much audio sped up or
Speaker 1: slowed down. I find it kind of sorts messing with
Speaker 1: me after a while. Like if I'm qing an episode
Speaker 1: and I have sped up too much, I feel like
Speaker 1: I have to walk outside a little bit afterwards.
Speaker 3: Now, when I'm editing these episodes, a little peak behind
Speaker 3: the curtain for our listeners. Quite often I'll do it
Speaker 3: at either plus twenty five percent, plus fifty percent, and
Speaker 3: on rare occasions up to plus one hundred percent. So
Speaker 3: I'm listening to two x speed, and usually it doesn't
Speaker 3: last too long because I'll have to stop to make
Speaker 3: edits and stuff. But man, oh man, I am very
Speaker 3: familiar with the chip conversion of Roberts and the Chipmunk
Speaker 3: version of Joe Wow.
Speaker 1: Point two five is pretty comfortable for me, and I actually,
Speaker 1: since I don't really like listening to my own voice,
Speaker 1: I find that if I listened to it at point
Speaker 1: two five, I feel like I sound better, and maybe
Speaker 1: I sound like enough like a different person that I
Speaker 1: can kind of listen to myself more and not judge myself.
Speaker 1: But when I'm at point five, yeah, it's already a
Speaker 1: little maddening. And I just can't do double time. It's
Speaker 1: just too much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And at a certain point for me as an editor,
Speaker 3: you know, obviously I'm looking for things that I need
Speaker 3: to you know, sinch up or remove or whatever. At
Speaker 3: a certain point, I can't tell what people are saying anymore,
Speaker 3: so I have to stop. I have to slow it
Speaker 3: down again.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you can also, of course stretch out sounds
Speaker 1: and so forth in order to make music and create
Speaker 1: novel sounds. A Pierre Schaeffer made use of time stretching,
Speaker 1: not so much to include easter eggs or hidden information,
Speaker 1: but just as a part of the experimentation and music making.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure offhand if there are notable examples of this,
Speaker 1: but I feel like I've run across some examples in
Speaker 1: the past where some drone and ambient music creators have
Speaker 1: used this authect like take something really, slow it down,
Speaker 1: and even if the source material is not ambient and drone,
Speaker 1: you can create an ambient and drone experience from it.
Speaker 3: Potentially, There's been a couple of very again, we're getting
Speaker 3: into like kind of like meme music at this point again,
Speaker 3: but a very popular example of this was bouncing around
Speaker 3: the internet. A while ago. Someone took the very popular
Speaker 3: Justin Bieber song Baby and they slowed it down by
Speaker 3: eight hundred percent and the result was beautiful. It was
Speaker 3: very ambient. Many people compared it to like a Sigurro song,
Speaker 3: and it's fun to listen to. And then the cool
Speaker 3: part is is that that kicked off the idea of like, oh,
Speaker 3: I can do this to anything, you know, and so
Speaker 3: people just started applying this slow it down by eight
Speaker 3: hundred percent philosophy to nearly any song and it always
Speaker 3: has basically the same ethereal floaty sugur ROAs like Vibe,
Speaker 3: which makes me really want to speed up sugar Roast
Speaker 3: by eight hundred percent just to see what that'll sound like.
Speaker 3: But I haven't done that yet. I'm sure someone has
Speaker 3: on the internet, so I'll have to check that out.
Speaker 3: But it's fun. In fact, I came across a it
Speaker 3: was a website where there the website's entire purpose was
Speaker 3: just a slow down audio that you fed into it.
Speaker 3: That you would feed in something and it would slow
Speaker 3: it down by eight hundred percent for you. It's it's
Speaker 3: a fun little trick. I mean, I think, just like
Speaker 3: all gimmicks, it can be overplayed and kind of loses
Speaker 3: its creativity. But it's fun. It's fun stuff.
Speaker 1: It reminds me a bit too. All this of the
Speaker 1: the science fiction and satirical ideas that on one hand,
Speaker 1: Frank Herbert explored a little bit in the Doune books
Speaker 1: with the Simuta music, which is a type of music
Speaker 1: that we would listen to while so doing the drug Simmuda,
Speaker 1: and it's like you could only appreciate the music while
Speaker 1: your brain was altered by the drug because of potentially
Speaker 1: because of the way it slowed down or sped things up.
Speaker 1: And then also the British satire series Brass Eye from
Speaker 1: Chris Morris, they had an episode on drugs that was
Speaker 1: a parody of the anti drug Hysteria in the UK,
Speaker 1: and they had a whole bit about this made up
Speaker 1: drug called cake, and there was a whole bit in
Speaker 1: there about like this is the music that they listened
Speaker 1: to while they're on cake, and this is how it
Speaker 1: sounds to us. But if you're on cake, it sounds
Speaker 1: like this, and so it's yeah, I can't help but
Speaker 1: bring that up.
Speaker 3: I literally just read a book about the Pink Floyd
Speaker 3: debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I just
Speaker 3: finished it, like maybe a day ago, and there's actually
Speaker 3: a big chunk in there about that too, really really
Speaker 3: leaning into the idea of like, there's an audience here
Speaker 3: that is willing to put up with a fifteen minute song.
Speaker 3: Most of them are on acid, but there is an
Speaker 3: audience for this. Can we Pink Floyd pivot from being
Speaker 3: a single based band into an album based band where
Speaker 3: we can have those fifteen minute songs and this kind
Speaker 3: of like internal debate about that, and of course then
Speaker 3: you get into like all the Sid Barrett stuff and
Speaker 3: Roger Waters and it goes onto a whole other world.
Speaker 3: But hey, if you enjoy this kind of talk, you
Speaker 3: should tune into Rusty Needles Record Club.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, tell everybody where they can find Rusty
Speaker 1: Needles Record Club. Seth.
Speaker 3: It's a podcast that I host weekly, new episode every Friday.
Speaker 3: I'm a big old music nerd and I just need
Speaker 3: an outlet for talking about music, and thankfully Robert and
Speaker 3: Joe are nice enough to have me on here to
Speaker 3: do it every once in a while, but if you
Speaker 3: need it all the time, you look up any place
Speaker 3: where you find your podcasts Rusty Needles Record Club, and
Speaker 3: you'll find me, my friends, my co hosts, and we
Speaker 3: talk about music. It's like a book club, but for
Speaker 3: music instead, and each episode is a different album, and
Speaker 3: it's a great way to, you know, have a surrogate
Speaker 3: music friend. It's a great way to be introduced to
Speaker 3: new music, and it's a great way just to like
Speaker 3: kind of get some good recommendation. It's fun because, in particular,
Speaker 3: a lot of the episodes we do are chosen by
Speaker 3: our listeners. People will write in say hey, you got
Speaker 3: to listen to this, and then that becomes the album
Speaker 3: of that week. So it's fun. It's just a great
Speaker 3: way to open yourself up to the wide spectrum of
Speaker 3: music in the world.
Speaker 1: Awesome, All right, Well we're going to go and close
Speaker 1: it out here these two episodes on Hidden Material and music,
Speaker 1: Easter Eggs and music and so forth. But yeah, we'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from everyone out there. If you have
Speaker 1: thoughts on the techniques that we discussed in these episodes,
Speaker 1: if you have thoughts on the specific examples that we discussed,
Speaker 1: and if you have new examples or new techniques that
Speaker 1: come to mind, let us know. We'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. A reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: is a science podcast and our core episodes published on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, on
Speaker 1: Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster Effect,
Speaker 1: and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our
Speaker 1: time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk
Speaker 1: about a weird Thanks as always to Seth for not
Speaker 1: only co hosting these two episodes, but also producing Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind in Weirdhouse Cinema in general, and
Speaker 1: if you want to reach out to us, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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