Stuff To Blow Your MindFrom the Vault: Play the Record Backwards, Part 2
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert is joined by Rusty Needle’s Record Club host Seth Nicholas Johnson for a discussion of various means of secreting information into audio, from backmasking and locked grooves to examples from the digital age of music. (originally published 12/01/2022)
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is Robert Lamb and it's Saturday. So once more we have a vault episode for you. This is going to be part two of Play the Record Backwards. This is a couple of episodes that I did with former producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, all about, as you know, all the various hidden things that might be going on in the grooves of old records or in even files, CDs and so forth. It's a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed the original episode, published the first of December twenty twenty two. Let's dive right.
In Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Joe. As of this record still out on parental leave. We'll be back soon. But in this episode, Seth and I are continuing our exploration of hidden messages and allegations of hidden messages, secrets and easter eggs in music. In the last episode we talked a lot about backmasking, about reversed audio. We mentioned some other examples of the way that things can and we're hidden in music. But in this episode we are going to venture into the groove, into the record groove, and discuss physical media and even more detail. We did touch on it a bit in the last one. So if you if you basically know nothing about vinyl records and how you play a record, go back and listen to that first episode, because we do talk about some of that. Because I mean, part of the background here for this discussion is as much as I admire certain vinyl records that come out and I see them on a website or in a store, I've never purchased one. And since a child, I've been told to avoid touching vinyl records. Let the adults use that. You don't want to break the needle or scratch the record, etc. And so I've left them alone. Seth, on the other hand, you have a very different relationship with records.
Absolutely, I've manufactured vinyl, I've processed vinyl coming from like full blown pressing plants. I've been buying it most of my life. For me, when I was younger, I reached a certain point where I inherited a few records from like my parents, but they didn't have a very sizeable collection but when I started going to record stores in my youth to buy CDs, there was a point when I realized, oh, wow, these other things are so much cheaper than the CDs. This would have been in like the nineties, and that was all there was to it was. I was just greedy for music, and I was just like, all right, how am I going to get as much music as possible. I'm going to buy these used records as much as I can. And in fact, at that stage, I can give some deliberate examples, like, for example, let's say Radiohead, I might be wrong the live recordings that record. I remember holding a CD in one hand and a vinyl record in the other, and the record was cheaper, so I went, oh, all right, I guess I'm going with the record. Same thing with a Widow City by the Fiery Furnaces. Just like that era the late nineties early two thousands where it was like, oh, new vinyl is cheaper than new CDs. Now that is completely the opposite, so be prepared if you're going into a record store. But at the time it was not a very popular format. So that's why I got into vinyl was just because it was the less expensive option so I could buy more music. And so yeah, that's that's kind of why it started for me.
Now in looking at a record and in playing a record, this is this is where I really had no idea about any of this. I kind of had this idea that if you, if you place a record on the turntable, you place a needle in the grooves, there's just one path that it is. Essentially, I guess it's kind of like the distinction between a labyrinth and a maze. If you if you, if you have if you make that distinction, Like a labyrinth, there's only one way through. It twists and turns, but you can't get lost because there there are no dead ends. It is a journey through complexity from point A to point B. A maze, however, can be different. A maze can have different paths through the complexity. A maze can have dead ends, it can have traps, it can have dragons and trolls and so forth, if you, if you want, and based on a lot of what I ended up reading here, and based on what I think we're gonna be discussing here, it does seem to me like actually vinyl records are more like this maze. There there's more. There is sometimes more than one path through the record, the.
Good ones, I would say, the average record. I think you're correct, there is a very deliberate path. Always starts in the same place out at the edge of the record, always ends at the same place, which is the inside of the record. I think that's that's the most common route. But there there are many examples of people trying new things, people going different routes with that.
And this is this is so just counter to like the tape culture, the DVD culture, and then the subsequent digital media culture that that that I most have most of my experience with. Like there there was there. We'll get into some examples. Yeah, you have things like hidden tracks with with CDs and so forth, But this is a whole different scenario. This is like the it's like the record as puzzle box, you know.
Yeah, yeah, And it's fun where you can hide these things. Like I said, I've I've manufactured a lot of records on my own. In particular, I I do what's called lay the embossed records. And so here's here's a fascinating thing I have personally done, which I think is really cool. So on a compact disc. Okay, Uh, the data is written from the inside, you know, toward towards the center to the outside. Vinyl is the opposite that the information is on the outside going inside. So usually on a CD there will be some blank space because there's like eighty something minutes of space on a compact disc. If you're whatever you're doing doesn't use up that much space, you have this extra room on the end. So what I've done, I have flipped a compact disc upside down and put a song from a vinyl you know, embossing needle onto the underside of the CD. And now not only is that a CD that can be played in a CD player, but if you flip it upside down and put on a record player, you can play a song on the underside of the CD itself. So like fun, things like that you can do with vinyl, and it's just not it's you know that fun isn't there in most of the other mediums.
All right, Well, let's get into some specific examples here, and for this I'm going to go back to an article that I referenced in the first episode that we did. This is by Jonathan Vinyl. Darryl Griffin Stuart Cunningham in twenty fourteen's Easter eggs Hidden tracks and Messages in Musical Mediums, and they write that there are three primary ways that records allow for hidden information. The first is something called locked grooves. So these are grooves which cause the turntable to play an endless loop. And I guess I get you'll have to maybe help me make sense of this. But is it like if the needle enters this particular groove, it will just go on forever in a circle.
I have a record here next to me. Coincidentally, I'll just show you literally on it. Sorry, I won't be able to show you because this is a audio medium, but I'm pointing it out to Robert. All right, So Robert, you see this record in front of you. The song plays starting here at the outside, and then it moves to the inside. Like I was saying, now, when the needle gets past the songs, the record needs to stop it. He needs to stop the needle from just running into the paper label or anything like that. So right here, right next to the label, like basically a big circle going around the paper label center of a record, that is where the traditional locked groove is. There's no sound on it. It's just instead of a spiral, because that's basically what a groove is. It's a very elaborate, very dense spiral, you know, containing different grooves and therefore vibrations and sound. The very very bottom of that spiral, it doesn't still end as a spiral. It ends as a solid circle. That way, the needle when it's finished will more or less stay still. It'll just stay at that central point and it won't cut into the label or whatever.
So if I'm, for instance, if I'm watching a film in which a record has finish, this is my main experience of this. In a movie, if a record is finished playing, sometimes it'll just be that chunk kind of sound that's the locked groove at the end of the record.
Yes, although most locked grooves wouldn't make any sound at all, but yes, correct, that kind of like stereotypical loop down there at the end.
Yes, yes, well, the authors of this paper, they point out, quote, most records will only contain a silent locked groove to prevent damage to the needle when it reaches the end of a side. Like you explained, the presence of a locked groove that contains music would be difficult to detect without prior knowledge or careful visual inspection of the grooves. Therefore, a music containing locked groove has a good chance of surprising the listener during the performance of the recording.
That's true. If you're looking at it from the outside, it doesn't look any different, just just like for the most part, if you're looking at grooves on a record, you can't determine what's on them. Actually you can if you have very very talented eyes. Eventually you can tell what the silence looks like. But that's that's that's just experts only. That's not the average person at all.
The prime example that they mentioned in the paper of this is of having music in the locked groove. Bring back to the Beatles a Day in the Life from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Hearts called Band. This song enters a locked groove at the end of the song, a locked groove that contains music. And I mean, thinking back on the on the song, I mean I know where this is occurring, but I only have experience with like the CD version of this, right, I had this album on CD when I was I think in high school. But if you were playing the record, that final tone of the song potentially goes on forever, is that right?
Yeah, yeah, as long as you don't lift it, because yeah, like I was saying, that central locked groove, it's there's no data there. It's silent, there's no sound. It's just like you're saying, like, chunk chunk, chunk chunk, it's just moving in a circle. But there's no rule that says you can't put some noise on those grooves. Why not? You know? Why not have that circle be a loop of audio? Why not?
And have you experimented with this in creating records?
I have many times. It's fun like why wouldn't you?
You know.
So, most importantly, something to keep in mind when you're doing this is that it's actually a pretty small window to create that loop. So a typical record rotates at thirty three and a third revolutions per minute Summer forty five, but that's a that's usually for singles. So yeah, thirty three and a third revolutions per minute, which means that a single rotation of the record, one needle going all the way around is one point eight seconds. So that's how long your loop has to be. One point eight seconds, no more, no less. So, so here's an example of one I've done. I did one where it was called it was a series called skip records, where what I did was oh, that's actually another good, great example. If you ever are listening to a record that's damaged and the record starts skipping, it's always the same duration. It's always one point eight seconds, because that same fragment is going to be playing again and again and again. That's why you can actually tell if someone is faking a skipping record, because it'll be longer or shorter than that quick just like zip it, dip it deep up, zip it, dip it deep up. It's that is that one point eight second loop. And in fact, when when I am manufacturing records, that's the final step before I finish a record. Is so, if you can picture it in your mind, there is basically an arm that has a cutting needle. Usually it's a sapphire or a ruby, and it's pressing into the the I use use polycarbonate. It's pressing into the polycarbonate and it's moving from left to right on like a spiral arm. Basically, what you do is when you're done recording, is you stop that arm for moving left or right then you go one one thousand, two one thousand, and then you lift it up. And what you're doing by by stopping the movement is you're ending that spiral in a single place and you wait one one thousand and two one thousand for it to complete that circle and end that loop. But if you are still playing audio when you do that one one thousand and two one thousand, what you're doing is still putting data, putting information, putting sound into that loop, and you can make a go forever. So, like I was saying, I had a series called Skip Records where my whole point was I wanted it to sound like a record was just skipping for five minutes straight. Don't ask me why it's art, you know it's fun. And uh so I did this multiple times. And the fun part is is that I on these records, I always ensured that the final groove was always a locked groove. Therefore potentially that these records loop forever, that there is no end to this record and it can just play until your record player breaks or until til there's a power outage. It's just it's a it's a it's a forever equation.
Wow, And you have favorite examples of this from from from other records, from from bands and so forth.
There's a lot, And actually it's it's fun to me because, like you said, you usually don't know when it's going to happen. So for me, if I put on a record and it's playing and it ends up in a locked groove and you've never heard this record before, you might be off on the other side, reading or playing a video game or doing the dishes, who knows, and you notice that, like, wow, it's been doing this one tone for like forty five minutes. That's not even possible on a record, Like there's not that much room. What is happening? And you walk over and you're like, ah, this record's got a locked groove. This happened to me once on one of my favorite records, And this is my favorite example of this. The nineteen ninety seven Godspeed You Black Emperor album F Sharp A sharp Infinity. The final track Bleak Uncertain Beautiful, It ends on a locked groove playing the final two notes of the song, and those last two notes are F sharp and A sharp, and by being un a locked groove, they play for infinity, And yeah, I still remember the first time I played that record and when that needle hit that final moment, it just kept going and going and going, and I was like, this is wonder like it took me. You know, I had to be active. I had I had to realize that something was not right, investigate and realize what they had done to me and my time. It's it's it's a fun practice, you know.
Do you maybe this doesn't occur, but do you. Are you ever in a position where someone comes up to you and says like, I don't know anything about records, but I'm going to get into records now. I'm gonna start buying vinyl, And then do you have to warn them? Like, look, people have laid traps for you.
The main one which I actually will warn people about because these things were discussing a lucked groove doesn't happen that often, So some other techniques were about to discuss don't happen that often. It's it's it's it's pretty rare, and they're and they're extra cool because of it. One that is extremely common that actually happens all the time, not just to others but to me as well, is the difference between a thirty three and a third record and a forty five record, because forty five rpm records, I'm sure you everyone would understand this. A forty five rpm it's spinning faster, so therefore the data that's put onto it, the vibrations, the grooves are at a different speed, you know. So if you put on a forty five rpm record at thirty three and a third, it's extremely slowed down. So you might have a completely incorrect view of a song if you don't pay attention to what the speed is. And there's audio file pressings of records where they'll have full twelve inch records that are printed at forty five rpm because there's more room for the grooves so they can sound better, blah blah blah, and so you just have to know. You have to hopefully the artist has labeled the record this is a forty five rpm, or you just have to listen to and go, that's not right. Try it at thirty three and a third, Try it at forty five and go, okay, that's right. But sometimes you won't know. Sometimes they won't label it and they won't tell you, so you just have to make your best guess. Like like Ram for example, used to never label the sides of their records, Like there was no side A side B. It was just, hey, you listen to one and they listen to the other. I'm not telling you which is which. And not until CDs came around did they have to eventually decide and put an actual track order for you. And there were a couple that I learned I had the wrong order, like, for example, I always listened to murmur by Ram side B first, then side A, but I had no way of knowing that until I bought a CD of it.
Wow, all right, we'll get back to track ordering in a bit. There's gonna be more on that. But getting back to the three main methods of hiding stuff in the grooves here from that twenty fourteen paper, the next one they mentioned is inverse grooves. So this, if I'm understanding this correctly, it is a record that it's meant to be played backwards. If you play it forwards, you are playing it backwards. Is that correct?
Yes, they think about it this way, as we were discussing. When you're playing a record, you start the needle at the rim and you press play and it continues until it hits the label. That's the traditional way record plays. The grooves are set up that way, the spiral leading down to the drain, you know, that's the way it goes. These are the other way around. You are supposed to start the needle in the middle and then it plays out to the edge, almost like manga style. It's like, oh mm, start at the other end, you know.
Yeah. So they mentioned a couple of examples of this. One is a this one. I don't know, were you familiar with this particular group. This is a Nomes track Goarf Beat, one from the Praxis USAEP and it includes the instructions to play it. One must place the needle at the point where you would expect the track to end. And then they also mentioned Megadeth's single for Sweating Bullets, which was an inverse groove pressing and it had a warning on the packaging that said quote paranoid pressing on blue vinyl. Warning, do not attempt to play this record in the conventional manner. Both sides reverse play from the inside groove outwards.
It makes sense because I bet the average person they would just assume their record was broken, you know, because if you did put it the correct place and pressed forward. Best case scenario you're getting it to play backwards. More probable is that because that is starting with the locked groove, it won't be able to enter into that spiral. So it'll just sit there and you'll just hear nothing or maybe a little little skipping or some static. But another great example of this this is found on Jack White's twenty fourteen solo album Lazaretto. Jack White and his record label Third Man Records are known for doing all kinds of fun gimmicky things, like they have like liquid core records. They have records where like there'll be a forty five inch record hidden inside of a twelve inch you have to like cut open the record to pull out another record. Like, He's done a lot of really fun, interesting things. He is the Willy Wonka of record manufacturers, and I really admire him for that. For his twenty fourteen album Lazaretto, he just wanted to put it all in one record. He wanted to be all the gimmicks all at once. So he called this version of Lazaretto the Ultra LP And it's got so many fun gimmicks and innovations that we would need literally an entire episode just to break them down. But you could. You can find copies of it to see online. I believe there's also a YouTube video which I sent you, Robert, which has Jack White just pointing out every single wacky gimmick of this one single record. But on side one of this record, it does play backwards like you're saying you have to start the new needle by the label, and it plays out to the rim. And I wonder how many people just couldn't figure that out, because, you know, I mean, it's I know a lot of people who just in life, they aren't reading instructions. Kind of people, you know, like if they get a piece of furniture from Ikia, they're not going to read the instructions, They're just going to put it together. And I'm sure buying a record, you don't even assume that there will be instructions, you know, whether it was Megadeth with Sweating Bullets or whether it's Jack White with Lazaretto, why would there be instructions? So you just play it and you're confused why it's not working.
Yeah, this Lazaretto album, when you initially mentioned it to me and our chat, you listed all the gimmicks it had, and I didn't even understand all of them. It seems like it makes me think of the book House of Leaves. This feels like it it's like the House of Leaves of vinyl records.
Yeah, yeah, and it was very popular, I believe. I know it was the best selling record at the time, but I think it like for the year. It was like the best selling vinyl record for that year.
All right, moving on to the next example that they give in this paper, double grooves or parallel grooves quote records where two grooves run simultaneously through a record, causing the needle to play different material depending where it is initially placed. This is apparently sometimes referred to as a third side.
Yeah. I've also heard these called three sided records. And yeah, there are a few names for this, but these are these are much more rare. These are fascinating.
Yeah, you're gonna have to keep explaining this one to me. The couple of examples that they mention, there's the Monty Python matching tie and handkerchief from nineteen seventy three, which the packaging is pretty neat on this because the album is packaged to look like you're buying a matching tie and handkerchief, which is fun. But side too has two different grooves, so depending on where you place the needle, you'll get different material.
Now I have firsthand experience because I own this record, and it's amazing. Here's the best part I can say about this. This one entirely worked on me because I didn't even know that there was a hidden third side until I read about it later and had to investigate for myself. That's not printed on the record anywhere that there's hidden music or I guess hidden comedy on this record. So here's here's I think their goal, which was so all records sideday, side B, the side with two parallel grooves. What's happening is, yeah, I guess picture that spiral again, But there are two completely different lines to that spiral right next to each other, going all the way down to that center. So therefore, when you're putting that needle in that groove, you have basically a fifty to fifty chance are you going to be in the one groove or the groove right next to it? That never match up. So here's the fun. The fun part is that you you listen to Side AY, everything suns normal. You turn it over, you put on side B, you listen to it, everything's normal, and then you put put away your record. Next month, you want to listen to it again. Sideay, everything's normal, put it on side B. Wait, this isn't the side B I've heard before. What's happening? And so you listen to it. You're like, I swear I heard this differently before. But okay, whatever, whatever, whatever, you put it aside, pull it out, put it on again. Sometimes sidday's normal. Side B. It's that first side again. You're like, wait, wait, wait, I swear last time this joke was on there, or maybe you're like talking to your friends, You're like, hey, what about that one part?
You know?
Did you love track three? Like that's not track three? It's like no, no, it definitely is. Come over to my house, I'll play it for you. You put it on and it plays the wrong side like no, no, no, I swear like it's like a fun It seems like it's almost gaslighting you. You know, it's it's a very fun gimmick.
Now is this? I'm reminded of a trophy encounter in a lot of like carror and mystery TV shows and short stories where someone realizes that there's a hidden compartment in a room based on the fact that this room is smaller than the adjoining room.
Yes, is that?
Would that be something? With this scenario, like if you were really on the lookout for this sort of trick, would you notice that, like one side of the record seem shorter than the other.
You would have to be really on your toes, because the side of of a typical twelve inch record can be anywhere from like ten minutes to thirty minutes, depending upon how closely you put those grooves together. But yes, you would be able to notice if you paid very close attention to how much space was being taken up by the grooves, because it's only playing half of those grooves when it's going going down the line playing all the audio.
So like a physical investigation would be needed. It wouldn't just be like, well, that side felt this long and this one feels different or something.
It'd be possible, but yeah, yeah, you would have to be paying a lot of attention. And for me, I needed someone to tell me. I needed someone to tell me that a record in my collection had three sides before I realized it.
The other example that they bring up in the paper is mister Bungle's disco Volante from nineteen ninety five, in which hidden grooves contain the song's secret song and songs by quote the Secret Chief's Trio. And then they also mentioned that secret song is said to be notoriously difficult to find with the needle.
That's another part that you can do on purpose. So, for example, I believe on the matching the Monty Python record, it's more or less a fifty to fifty because just when you're creating those grooves, you just make the openings, you know, the same size. But let's say, for example, you want that second song to really be a secret well, then you don't create an opening for it. You have it exist entirely cut off from that primary groove and it can just live there and no one will ever find out unless they deliberately not start the record at the beginning, but just trial and error, just kind of drop it in the middle of the record, hoping that it lands on the correct groove that they want to find.
Wow. So technically you could have situations where there could be albums out there with secret grooves with secret information in them that have never been discovered. That Nicholas Cage has not his character in a film or Tom Hanks's character in a film has not put on the record to discover yet.
Very possible, now, I would say, in all likelihood, depending upon the many ways people start records. I'm sure there's a large percentage of the world that doesn't carefully place the needle at the beginning of each record before they start. They do just PLoP it on wherever, So I bet it would be found pretty quickly, I would assume, just based on people's sloppy handling of their record needles.
So do you have any other fun examples of double grooves, parallel grooves, and third sides.
There's a couple I've heard of, but I've never seen this. This is a great one that I would love to see this in person someday, but I've only read about it. It's a horse racing board game. So what you do is everyone picks their horses, you know, standard like typical you know betting forms, and you read a little description about which horse is what and blah blah blah, and then you start the record, which contains all the sound effects of you know, being at the downs and all that, and there's an announcer calling the horse race However, the record has multiple parallel grooves, each with a different result, so you never know which horse is actually going to be the winner when you put that groove on. So it's almost like a choose your own adventure, except you don't get a choice, you know.
Oh wow, Yeah, and yeah. I'd love to hear from anyone out there who knows of other examples of this, because it seems like it's the sort of sort of gimmick that that people you would have had a lot of fun with, like I don't know, some sort of narrative use of it, with with with some sort of a storytelling technique.
You know, kind of like Clue the movie where you watch it and it's got like the multiple endings kind of like that, and that'd be fun. Here's one more example, because we've already mentioned it, going back again to the Ultra LP version of Jack Whites Lazaretto. Like I said, he's got a million gimmicks on this one, he has a version of parallel grooves that I've never seen before. Track one on side B, it's a song called just One Drink. It has two completely different intros to the song that are parallel grooves, but they both feed in to the to the primary groove again, so the rest of the record plays completely normal. So it's it's it starts off as two spirals and then they both funnel into the one standard spiral. So it's wow. And once again, it's just luck. When you put on that needle for the first time, it's just a chance of am I going to play the Like the harder version of the intro or the softer, more acoustic version of the intro is just fifty to fifty who knows what you're gonna get? And man, that's fun. Like you can't get that with other mediums.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the CD type culture we never had anything like that. We'll get into some examples of what we did have, but they didn't create this kind of level of almost quantum uncertainty, like what will happen when I start playing this song? I mean, to a certain extent, that mystery is there when you play a new album for the first time, but the idea that subsequent returns to that album that there could be not just things that were subjectively different, but objectively different things about the listening experience.
Yeah, absolutely, all.
Right, Well, let's get into the CD age A little bit, and let's eventually get into the digital realm as well. Let's talk a little bit about so called hidden tracks, secret tracks. Uh, this is this is an area that I have more familiarity with because again I was I was more of a CD guy than certainly than than than anything like the CDs were. This was the right period where I really got into like choosing my own musical interest, choosing the bands that I wanted to devote time to. And then also I guess at the time too, it's like CDs were starting to get a little pricey, so whatever you bought like this was a deliberate choice. Not only is this an album you wanted to listen to, you would you would make sure you liked it, or you would really give it a chance, because this was going to be your album for the you know, for a week or two maybe more, until you could conceivably buy another album. So, you know, we get into this realm of secret tracks, and I guess the thing about secret and hidden tracks is they ultimately really weren't that well hidden. I mean, certainly nothing compared to vinyl examples we've discussed, right right.
I mean I did enjoy sometimes and I think This is pretty rare when there was literally a hidden disc inside the CD packaging. That was fun when that would happen on occasion, but for the most part it was yeah, you'll explain. For the most part, it was pretty straightforward to have some hidden songs.
Yeah, Like the main examples that come to my mind are like Tools Undertow and the Nine Inch Nails EP Broken. The versions that I had just had a bunch of like extra blank tracks and then eventually the tracks containing the extra songs. And I didn't know about this tool. I was just researching it again for this episode. But apparently with Nine Inch Nails, the original CD pressing and the vinyl pressing of Broken had an extra smaller disc that had the bonus tracks on them.
That was a very brief window when Yeah, there were like these little mini CDs that in theory could play in any CD player, Like in fact, if you happen to have a CD player at home, especially when the kind of with like a tray, you pop it open and you'll notice that there's actually a smaller imprint inside where the bigger imprint is. That's for these smaller CDs, but that medium lasted like a blink of an Eye. I think they were more popular in somewhere in Asia. I want to say Japan, that they lasted longer, but yeah, no, they didn't last here very long at all.
I remember, though, thinking that this was clever and cool, and there was this kind of idea that it's like, yeah, nine inch nails, they're kind of they're sticking it to the man. They have these and they're they're then they're delivering bonus content to us the fans that the clear the record labels didn't want this on here, but they said, no, we insist. We're going to hide it at the end where the inspectors won't find it first.
Right, Hey, hey, why not? I like that narrative. I like picturing, you know, a Trent Reznor with these little mini CDs hiding at the factory, just slipping them into each and every package.
I mean, I guess it wouldn't be entirely out of carre. There were the later story I figure what album this was, but the idea that, like some of the tracks were leaked to the media by leaving a USB in a bathroom at a concert or something.
Right, right, Yeah, that's all fun stuff.
Now, another example for the secret track. Another way the secret track or hidden track was often utilized would be just have a big long gap after the final listed track on the album, and then eventually a hidden track starts playing. And of course the reverse of that is, once you know it's there, if you want to listen to the hidden track, you just fast forward through the final track to get to that content.
It's funny too, because all of these examples, they're all so tied to the CD itself. In fact, do you remember negative time on a CD player?
Yeah, I'm trying to remember what. I had one album in particular that did this, but I can't recall what.
It was a big thing that would happen. This is like not during the early days of CDs, but more towards the later days, when basically a CD was really kind of being pushed to its limits of like what it could contain and maybe getting a bit more secretive, getting a bit weirder with it. If there was like a bit of audio that existed kind of between tracks, whether it be like maybe a bit of a skit or an intro, or just sort of like an in the studio outtake or something when it was playing, and you could watch the time on the little the digital readout, it would be like, you know, five seconds, six seconds, seven seconds, negative six seconds, negative five seconds, negative four seconds, and in that negative space would be this additional noise, little skit, little outtake, whatever, little intro. So that way, when you skipped to the final to like the real song, it would start where the song starts. But if you listen to the album all the way through, this negative space would just give a bit more context, a bit more padding, a bit more like continuity, you know. And I thought that was pretty fun. But also when we reached the age of digitizing our CDs and putting them onto to you know, our MP three players and whatever, oh, that became a headache.
Now I don't even know how to classify this one. This one's not an example that was brought up in the paper, but an album that I had. And this is a great album that the Kaias album from nineteen ninety four, Welcome to Sky Valley comes to mind. This one had this weird structure where it does have a hidden track at the end, which is real dumb. But it also has ten tracks overall. The first that the I mean ten songs overall. The first three songs are all one track, the next three songs are all one track, and the last four songs are all one track. And I'm not really clear on why they did this, but I remember being more annoyed by it than anything, because sometimes you want to listen to an album all the way through, but sometimes you just want to hear Demon Cleaner, which is a really great track off of that album, a really great song off of that album, but it's the third song in track number two. It's a little hard to get to if you just want that.
I can't speak to this specific example, but I can give this example. Just recently. I had Joe on my podcast, Rusty Needle's Record Club, and we did the self titled Black Sabbath album, and on it, the American version combined a bunch of the tracks into fewer tracks. So like the original European version, let's say, had ten tracks, the American version had like six tracks. The albums were more or less identical. They swapped out one song, but that's beside the point. More or less identical, just far fewer tracks. And when you look it up, like why did this happen? It was just a record label thing, They're like, oh, we were paying them by the track, so if we give them fewer tracks, we don't have to pay them as many residuals, you know. And what's funny is like now the opposite is true. Like, for example, let's go back to the idea of like a hidden track inside of a CD where it used to be. Let's say let's say there are ten tracks on the album and one hidden bonus track, so that tenth track would be a song, long long gap, and then another song, So eleven songs, ten physical tracks. In today's modern streaming age, basically, they've gotten they've they've more or less gotten rid of that. Now whenever I see something that used to have a hidden track, it's just chopped off and turned into a bonus track, because the opposite is true now. Now the record label gets paid by these streaming services for every single individual track, so they want as many tracks as possible. If they can, they'll cut up into a hundred tracks.
You know.
And it's just interesting, like the opposite is true of the record label wanting more money. They used to force you to put it in as few tracks as possible, and now they're forcing you to cut it into as many tracks as possible, and it's just you know, it's going to keep flip flopping forever until I don't know, until business people don't want money, so beats me.
Yeah, So there are plenty of examples that you can point to where if nothing else they do the whole just throw an extra hidden song there at the end, after some blank, blank space, you know, a little quiet and and something else pops up. And sometimes it was clearly they were trying to be cheeky, and maybe it was some sort of a track that was a little cruider or a little little dumber or supposed to be cryptic. And other times it was like, I think I had a Natalie Merchant album that just had a really neat folk song at the very end of things, and there's not really a neat I don't know if there's any logical reason to have this be a hidden track, but it was. It was there hidden. But yeah, nowadays you pull up these same albums and I guess sometimes they're still going to keep that together, but a lot of times the hidden track is just going to be listed there. Right.
Look, I'm not working for Jack Whites. I'm not getting paid for every time I mentioned the Lazaretto Ultra LP. But I'm gonna bring it up one more time because get this. These are a couple of examples of hidden tracks that blow my mind. He hid tracks underneath the paper labels on the record itself, and also he put them with two different speeds revolutions per minute than the record itself. The record itself is thirty three and a third. Underneath one paper label, it's seventy eight RPM, and then underneath the other one is forty five. So on this one record it has three different RPMs. It's wild and the way it works basically is that he did imprint a song on traditional grooves under in that center space that's reserved for the label, and then when you do the actual pressing pressing, what happens is that the label itself just kind of gets sucked into it a little bit, so the sound quality is not that great. And I guess if you really wanted to, you could like remove the label, you could like tear it off, but you can it's possible just to play it directly through the label. You just place your needle directly on top of that paper label and it will play the song that's underneath.
Oh, my goodness.
Once again, not an ad for Jack White. I like him, but he's not paying me.
All right, Well, there may be some more examples of hidden songs and tracks from well, perhaps from vinyl, but it certainly maybe some more examples from the CD folks can mention, I guess without even getting into it much. There also is that late CD period. I guess it's kind of late CD period where you also have CDs that can be placed inside in your computer's disk drive so you can go to some sort of crappy website or some sort of like a visual thing that lines up with the album. But I don't know if that has Jack White come back around to that now.
I think he's mostly an analog guy. I don't think he is hiding, you know, PC wallpapers on any of his records yet.
Now there is another really interesting area that some of you may be thinking of already, and this gets into the idea of having images hidden, not as a PC wallpaper, not as something that's in the liner notes for the album or anything like that, but actually in the sound data itself. Uh. And the idea here is that, yeah, you'll have something in the sound data that if you run it through a spectrogram editor and synthesizer, you can produce an image the image that was encoded as music or encoded is sound anyway inside of a musical piece or inside of an album.
These are absolutely stunning to me. I I I do this stuff every day. And in fact, because you know the programs that you use to look at these images, they're the programs I used to edit these shows.
You know.
That's that's that's that's just part of my repertoire. And I have actually looked into creating these myself, and I'm still in awe even though I know how they do it. It's ridiculous.
If the most famous example of this I think, or well, it's one of the most famous examples, and in some circles, the most famous example, and this is the one that's mentioned in that paper from from Wineld, Griffiths and Cunningham, the nineteen ninety nine song Window Liquor by Aphex Twin. If you run this one particular part of the song the sound through this system, you of course get to see Richard James, that's Aphex Twin. You get to see his grinning face.
It's amazing because first of all, it looks even spookier than it always looks. You know, Richard D. James is always doing some kind of spooky thing with his face, whether it's turning it into a mask and putting on a child or whatever. But man, oh man, it's so fascinating it too, because, like you know, if you think about these programs, what they're doing is they're showing you, you know, the visualization of the audio waves. So the way you put these images in there is you reverse engineer it. You create the image first, and then you basically determine what those sounds would need to be to create that image, and then you can just basically put it in your song and boom, you've got it. But it's so funny because every example of this I've seen, it's very obvious that something strange is going on in the audio because this is not a typical wave. It's a picture of Richard James face.
Yeah, it's not just a case where oh yeah, that's if you play this backward satanic message, like, it's clear that something is there, and then when you when you run it through, you can see the artist's face or in the case of a particular track from Venetian Snares that's the moniker of Aaron Funk. There's a picture of his cat that one I found very very sweet, of course, in part because I wasn't familiar with it. I was familiar with the aphex twin example, and when I heard there was a Venetian snares when I was like, I don't know what this image is going to be, but it's it's just a cat.
Yeah, it's nice. It's a fun way to do this, and I think I particularly like these two. It reminds me of I've seen people in the olden days when they were computer programmers in the deep past, not in the contemporary sense, but the way that you're actually fooling around with like micro chips, Like that old style of computer programmer. The computer programers would write little messages to one another onside the chips when they put them in computers.
That way.
Years later, you come across something and it has something written on it that no one would read except another programmer who is fiddling around with this machine. And from what I understand, people who write code these days often do a similar thing. So I think this kind of hidden message in a song very much is like one audio producer talking to another audio producer going like, hey, look in this funny and it's like, yeah, it is. Good job.
There's at least one more really good example of this, and this might be in some sort of This might be the most famous example, depending on where you're coming from. But the two thousand and seven Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero, which which I think is a great album. Occasionally play this one agreed today. It has I think two different spectrograms. I was only familiar with the first one by the spectrogram at the end of the track My Violent Heart and it's of like a hand reaching down from the sky, which is also a theme of the cover for the album.
I mean, I can't imagine how many of these are unseen in the world, because I think even more so than oh a hidden song on a record or a hidden song on a CD, the vast majority of people will never run their audio through a spectrogram. It's never going to happen. So unless you are a person you know who has that background and you think you hear something and you happen to upload it in and look at it, I bet there's a lot of hidden stuff that's never been seen before.
Now there's one more example that's brought up, and that is this idea of black midies, which is not something I was familiar with, but it's brought up in this paper about Easter eggs and music. And these are apparently midi files that contain an absurd amount of data that, when played back in a program, can produce patterns when they cause the program to fail. And I'm not sure I completely understand this one, but it's still interesting. There's still some thing about it. Almost sounds like let's take the music and like crash it, and in doing so, we'll we'll create these visuals.
So the idea of the black midi is pretty interesting too because it ties into a much older idea, which is we as human beings, are limited by what we can do with our hands. It's difficult for us to go beyond what is physically possible. We have two hands for the most part, ten fingers for the most part. This is what we can do. Let's say, on a piano. A piano can only do what the human being can do. Maybe you can add another person, but other than that, we're just human beings. So back in the days when people first started mechanizing musical instruments, folks started experimenting with this. One of my favorites. I'm gonna get his name wrong because I don't think I've ever pronounced it correctly because I've heard it too many ways. A guy named Conlin Noncarro con l O n n A n c A R R O W. He's an experimental musician. And now one of the things he did, which many call him the first electronic musician because of this, is he would create roles for player pianos, you know, those kind of pianos that play themselves. And he was like, oh, wait a minute, this isn't a human being, this is a machine. I can make this thing do whatever I want. So he would do things that he would program for these player pianos that were impossible. You know, too many hands, notes, playing too quickly in succession, you know all these things. A lot of it was really really fast, and it was just it was such like a fascinating idea of like, oh, I'm going to create music that was meant to replicate human hands, but I'm going to make it for nobody. This is completely imaginary music that nobody could ever play. And so his music's really fascinating. I highly recommend it. Look it up. But that's the same idea behind a black midi which is, if folks don't know, a MIDI file is more or less the zeros and ones behind a digital instrument playing music. It's a kind of music that's played in most video games, et cetera, et cetera. And so if you are playing a piano that turns it into midi data, it's documenting it and you know, putting all those little pieces in place, so when you play it back, it plays it back the exact same way. Same thing. Just like with that idea that Canlin Nakaro was doing. You just start putting an extra data, things that are completely impossible, things that your hands could never do, things that there there aren't there isn't enough time, there is there aren't enough fingers in the world to ever actually play this. And it gets to such an enormous degree that it's that it's impossible and it breaks. So there's an example of this. I don't know if you if you've ever heard about this, but do you know the song rush E I don't Oh, I'm gonna show this to you audience will be right back.
Whoo. That that was something it's it started off rather subtle and kind of pleasant, and then it got really intense. I guess to describe this to anyone who hasn't watched the video of presentation of this is you have a keyboard at the bottom, and you have little blocks falling and it's kind of like tetris. I guess you have blocks. When they reach the bottom, they just play the keys that they land on.
A bit like a Guitar Hero too.
Oh yeah, yeah, like Guitar Hero. And I guess the idea is that early on we're seeing things that are very possible with human hands, with a human piano player, but then it gets increasingly complex to the level where no human with even like four arms to play this thing.
No, I mean, and I honestly commend the creator of this. I believe this one is created by someone named sheet music Boss. You can find this video online. It's very popular. It's been memed to death. It's gosh, got many many millions of views, so check it out if you haven't. It is something to see. I really to commend them on like the build of this, because it starts off just like mildly impossible, and then like, wow, this is really impossible, and by the time you each the end, it's ludicrously impossible, like like like like like it's crisscrossing, it's spelling images, it's like it's it's every key being played simultaneously, and yet it still sounds pretty good, you know.
Yeah, yeah, just like orders of magnitude though, and complexity begin to drop on you. I mean in a way, it's kind of like, yeah, if Tetris suddenly got like like huge leap and difficulty and just now overwhelming, that feels. I mean it was a little anxious watching and listening to it.
So yeah, So this song is called rush E. It's a it's very much a meme song. There's a long backstory to how this came to be. It has to do with market Plier, the YouTube gamer Like, it's a long history that I can't go into right now. But ultimately it's just a song that's so complex that not only is it impossible for humans to play, but it's even too complex for some computers to handle. And thus its title of being a black Midi, uh that it's basically it's gonna brick your computer. Uh So that's more or less what a black METI is and Rushy is perhaps the most famous example of a black Mity. Now. I've said the words black Mite several times, so I would be completely remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite contemporary bands, Black Mity. They've released three albums so far. Their twenty twenty two album, hell Fire, is in contention for one of my favorite albums of the year. And I assume they picked their band name because their sound is very maximalist. It's very busy, it's very complex, and it's very intricate, so I'm sure they picked their band name for that purpose. But a wonderful group. I highly recommend people check out hell Fire, one of the best albums twenty twenty two.
I promise you, Oh Neat, let's check that out. Now. Going in the entirely opposite direction from PC crashing complexity, there is another, just one last topic to touch on here, and this this is by no means an exhaustive list of the way that stuff can be hidden in music. There may be other examples, and feel free to write in about them. But another thing you can do is simply take a sound, take a song, and either speed it up or stretch it out so time stretching is one worth mentioning here. It's a matter of taking sonic information and stretching it out so that it's unrecognizable, but in doing so perhaps making it interesting, more interesting, certainly more ambient, or in the reverse, you know, you can you can certainly speed things up. In all of this, it reminded me a bit of various videos that'll do this online, where they'll take Alvin and the Chipmunk songs in which, of course you have human voices sped up to be the voices of chipmunks, and then if you slow it down enough, the chipmunks sound like normal adult human beings, and it's everything else that sounds like it's from the Twilight Zone in a realm of monsters.
It's very sludgy, very slow, very lethargic. And it's very fun to listen to a whole album of these slowed down Chipmunk songs. But it's also amazing how much slower and longer these songs are, like, you know, because imagine, if you're listening to it at its regular speed, it's what you know, half hour something like that. You slow it down and man, you've got like an hour and a half Alvin and the Chipmunks album. Maybe you don't want to be listening to it that long, but it's it's fun. It's always fun.
Yeah, it listening to too much audio sped up or slowed down. I find it kind of sorts messing with me after a while. Like if I'm qing an episode and I have sped up too much, I feel like I have to walk outside a little bit afterwards.
Now, when I'm editing these episodes, a little peak behind the curtain for our listeners. Quite often I'll do it at either plus twenty five percent, plus fifty percent, and on rare occasions up to plus one hundred percent. So I'm listening to two x speed, and usually it doesn't last too long because I'll have to stop to make edits and stuff. But man, oh man, I am very familiar with the chip conversion of Roberts and the Chipmunk version of Joe Wow.
Point two five is pretty comfortable for me, and I actually, since I don't really like listening to my own voice, I find that if I listened to it at point two five, I feel like I sound better, and maybe I sound like enough like a different person that I can kind of listen to myself more and not judge myself. But when I'm at point five, yeah, it's already a little maddening. And I just can't do double time. It's just too much.
Yeah, And at a certain point for me as an editor, you know, obviously I'm looking for things that I need to you know, sinch up or remove or whatever. At a certain point, I can't tell what people are saying anymore, so I have to stop. I have to slow it down again.
But yeah, you can also, of course stretch out sounds and so forth in order to make music and create novel sounds. A Pierre Schaeffer made use of time stretching, not so much to include easter eggs or hidden information, but just as a part of the experimentation and music making. I'm not sure offhand if there are notable examples of this, but I feel like I've run across some examples in the past where some drone and ambient music creators have used this authect like take something really, slow it down, and even if the source material is not ambient and drone, you can create an ambient and drone experience from it.
Potentially, There's been a couple of very again, we're getting into like kind of like meme music at this point again, but a very popular example of this was bouncing around the internet. A while ago. Someone took the very popular Justin Bieber song Baby and they slowed it down by eight hundred percent and the result was beautiful. It was very ambient. Many people compared it to like a Sigurro song, and it's fun to listen to. And then the cool part is is that that kicked off the idea of like, oh, I can do this to anything, you know, and so people just started applying this slow it down by eight hundred percent philosophy to nearly any song and it always has basically the same ethereal floaty sugur ROAs like Vibe, which makes me really want to speed up sugar Roast by eight hundred percent just to see what that'll sound like. But I haven't done that yet. I'm sure someone has on the internet, so I'll have to check that out. But it's fun. In fact, I came across a it was a website where there the website's entire purpose was just a slow down audio that you fed into it. That you would feed in something and it would slow it down by eight hundred percent for you. It's it's a fun little trick. I mean, I think, just like all gimmicks, it can be overplayed and kind of loses its creativity. But it's fun. It's fun stuff.
It reminds me a bit too. All this of the the science fiction and satirical ideas that on one hand, Frank Herbert explored a little bit in the Doune books with the Simuta music, which is a type of music that we would listen to while so doing the drug Simmuda, and it's like you could only appreciate the music while your brain was altered by the drug because of potentially because of the way it slowed down or sped things up. And then also the British satire series Brass Eye from Chris Morris, they had an episode on drugs that was a parody of the anti drug Hysteria in the UK, and they had a whole bit about this made up drug called cake, and there was a whole bit in there about like this is the music that they listened to while they're on cake, and this is how it sounds to us. But if you're on cake, it sounds like this, and so it's yeah, I can't help but bring that up.
I literally just read a book about the Pink Floyd debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I just finished it, like maybe a day ago, and there's actually a big chunk in there about that too, really really leaning into the idea of like, there's an audience here that is willing to put up with a fifteen minute song. Most of them are on acid, but there is an audience for this. Can we Pink Floyd pivot from being a single based band into an album based band where we can have those fifteen minute songs and this kind of like internal debate about that, and of course then you get into like all the Sid Barrett stuff and Roger Waters and it goes onto a whole other world. But hey, if you enjoy this kind of talk, you should tune into Rusty Needles Record Club.
Yeah yeah, yeah, tell everybody where they can find Rusty Needles Record Club. Seth.
It's a podcast that I host weekly, new episode every Friday. I'm a big old music nerd and I just need an outlet for talking about music, and thankfully Robert and Joe are nice enough to have me on here to do it every once in a while, but if you need it all the time, you look up any place where you find your podcasts Rusty Needles Record Club, and you'll find me, my friends, my co hosts, and we talk about music. It's like a book club, but for music instead, and each episode is a different album, and it's a great way to, you know, have a surrogate music friend. It's a great way to be introduced to new music, and it's a great way just to like kind of get some good recommendation. It's fun because, in particular, a lot of the episodes we do are chosen by our listeners. People will write in say hey, you got to listen to this, and then that becomes the album of that week. So it's fun. It's just a great way to open yourself up to the wide spectrum of music in the world.
Awesome, All right, Well we're going to go and close it out here these two episodes on Hidden Material and music, Easter Eggs and music and so forth. But yeah, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have thoughts on the techniques that we discussed in these episodes, if you have thoughts on the specific examples that we discussed, and if you have new examples or new techniques that come to mind, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. A reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast and our core episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster Effect, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird Thanks as always to Seth for not only co hosting these two episodes, but also producing Stuff to Blow Your Mind in Weirdhouse Cinema in general, and if you want to reach out to us, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows
