Let's Take It Slow
The Wonders Of Slowing Down Music And The Importance Of The Long Form Listening Experience
With the recent release of Slow Astro Vol. 3&4 I wanted to take some time to discuss two things - my love for slowing down music and the long form listening experience. Both seem simple on the surface and ultimately they are, but once you start digging there’s lots to discover - something I’ve been doing over the last few years on my record label Astrophonica. As an artist it is crucial to understand your influences and reference points and I wanted to share a long read to give some deeper understanding of what I do, why I do it and how I got here.
Changing, or even subverting, the context of a piece of music can have such profound results. A great example of this is Acen’s samping of The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes The Sun’ in his 1992 masterpiece ‘Close Your Eyes’. The sample in question appears abruptly around 4 minutes in and conjures images of bleary eyed ravers in a field watching the sunrise after 12 hours solid drug fuelled dancing to paranoid techno and hyped-up breakbeats. I doubt this is what George Harrison was thinking when he wrote the original song - thus a complete change in meaning and context. There’s no trickery here. It’s not mangled, manipulated or hidden. It’s there in all its golden glory. Pure genius. Another example of this and a more direct influence on the Slow Astro series is Houston’s DJ Screw. His approach to flipping the context was to slow music down - specifically, Hip Hop. More often than not genius ideas are there in plain sight waiting for the right person at the right time and DJ Screw in the early 90s was certainly that person. On the classic Screw mixtape ‘It’s All Good’, the deceptively simple idea of slowing down Hip Hop bangers transforms Biggie Smalls’ neck snapping and aggressive diss track ‘Kick In The Door’ into a piece of sonic wizardry that somehow feels warm, psychedelic and meditative - maybe I’ll kick in the door later but for now I’m just gonna sit down and drift. Screw’s influence was huge and continues to have an effect on Hip Hop today with Travis Scott’s 2018 ‘RIP Screw’ as just one example. It goes without saying that DJ Screw has had a big influence on me but experiments with pitch go back even further into my childhood.
Like most kids in the 80s and 90s I grew up with the tape cassette. It’s a cheap, robust and incredibly tactile format - you can touch it, feel it and manipulate it. The cassettes and players could take quite a battering and indeed a battering they got. Some cassette recorders at the time had built-in microphones and my brother and I used them to record skits and nonsensical conversations. I soon realised that you could mess with the pitch of the recording by half pressing the play button, causing the tape to play back faster. We perfected the art of saying phrases really slowly and in a deep voice, recording them and then playing back at twice the speed - home made chipmunks. On some machines you could squeeze the motors as the tape was playing, causing them to stick and slow down - resulting in a wobbly and worn-out trip. As I got older, similar experiments took place with a pair of turntables and Jungle records played at 33rpm which shifts the tempo from 160bpm to 120bpm. The result is a dramatic change in context as the sped up breakbeats are suddenly closer to their original pitch while all the sounds around them get slow and low - completely flipping the aesthetic and mood. This stayed as a bit of an abstract concept until I saw Weekend Rush’s DJ Vitamin mixing Krust’s Set Speed on 33 into a Garage set at a 90s Hackney squat party. I didn’t know it at the time but that experience probably started the transformation of my speculative experiments into concrete ideas, embedding themselves somewhere deep in my subconscious to be dug back out at the right time.
It wasn’t until some years later that these ideas and concepts resurfaced. In 2015 I’d just released an EP on Metalheadz with Manchester producer Chimpo. As part of the campaign we needed a mix for Fact Mag but wanted to do something a bit different to the standard 60 mins of Jungle and Drum & Bass. We got together a set of influences ranging from Hip Hop to Pop and Garage to IDM and agreed we wanted to create a continuous listening experience - a problem as all the music was at different tempos. Being fans of DJ Screw, the simple answer was to slow tracks down to the same tempo. It was one of the most enjoyable mixes I’ve worked on and the frivolous excitement took me back to my earlier childhood experiments. Another chef in the communal slow cooked Screw stew was fellow perineal pitch shifter Om Unit who furthered the seasoning by playing Dubstep records at the wrong speed in his 2016 ’33’ mix. Then, in 2021 I dipped back into the pot and recorded some slow mixes of my earliest Pop Music memories as the ‘Slow Sevens’ series - David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ became Let’s Nod and poor old Kate Bush was getting nowhere by Walking Up That Hill. The crackle and dust on the old 7 inches also slows down creating nostalgic artifacts and familiar yet dream-like grooves and the perfect hypo-reality. Everything I’ve just discussed led to the lightbulb moment of applying these ideas and techniques to the Astrophonica back catalogue and thus ‘Slow Astro’ - subverting the context of the music released on the label via the manipulation of pitch and tempo.
The Slow Astro series, like Screw’s mixtapes, present themselves to the listener as a long form listening experience designed to have a lasting and unique effect. It's easy to talk about long form as a counter to short form single track streaming and the curated playlists that can often feel a bit shallow - but I think that’s all pretty obvious and has already been covered - short is short and long is long, but what I do want to do is preach my love for the worldbuilding long forms. I grew up listening to albums and the ones that often resonated the most were the ones that provided something more that the sum of its parts. I was immediately drawn in on a deeper level by albums like 1993’s ‘Enter The Wu-Tang’ with its Kung Fu film samples, rapper skits and recurring themes that tie all the tracks together and provide an insight to the world of the Wu - way more than just music. Hip Hop in general made great use of the long form and there are so many more I could talk about but some that come to mind immediately are Quasimoto’s ‘The Unseen’, Kool Keith’s ‘Dr Octagon’ or Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’. Worldbuilding long forms of course go beyond Hip Hop and in the past I’ve mentioned my love of The KLF and their approach to releasing music and this is a great chance to speak about their 1991 ‘Chill Out’ album. Its ambient soundscapes, environmental foley and reoccuring slide guitar themes create a unique world inhabited by no one else but them and you - the listener. At 44 minutes long it’s exactly the duration of one side of a TDK D90 Cassette. A Coincidence? Or did they want for this album to live on its own in someone’s home recorded collection? Listening to pirate radio was also an ingredient in my love for sonic journeys. The experience was more than just listening to a DJ play tracks on the radio - there was interaction with the audience, bits of fuzz, memorable mixes and iconic chatter. To this day there are still certain tunes that take me back to particular tapes and I immediately remember what the MC said or what the next mix was - incredibly evocative and a world all of its own.
The rise of the cassette is well documented but there's more to the format and recent releases on Astrophonica have seen a few long form projects starting with ‘Testbed_Output_01’ by the anonymous self aware Electro machine Client_03 in 2020. It’s a 22 track mixtape and experimental film & A/V project punctuated with the recording of the clinical assessment of Client_03 which acts like a narrative arc and ties the music together - summed up by the ever reliable Top YouTube Comment "This is probably the best way to release a mixed album ever ".
Then came the first of the Slow Astro series in 2021 and after that my Pirate Radio based 0860 project - The true format of which was indeed the continuous mixtape. In this case it has 11 additional tracks to the vinyl/digital with skits and interludes creating a journey through the airwaves in my endeavour to interpret my influences. Along with interviews and pirate radio mix archives I created a 90 minute loop of degraded ambient Jungle breakdowns which we broadcast live from our pop up radio station for the duration of the campaign - the ‘0860 Ambient Test Signal’.
2021 also saw the release of the Omura album with Sam Binga and although it’s not a continuous listening experience as such there was indeed some world building at play including mythology, artwork, photography and an accompanying mix which expanded on the story and gave further vision into themes of magic, creativity and omni-present creatures.
As ever it’s important to mention that I am not claiming ownership of the ideas discussed here. There are many more examples of playing with pitch and long form listening experiences out there. I must send a shout out to dBridge and Instra:Mental for their work with the Autonomic Podcasts at the end of the 2000s and into the 10s - an incredible journey across 12 ‘layers’ presenting a Drum & Bass aesthetic at half tempo by simply changing the amount of snares per bar, or even dropping them completely and thus kick starting the sub genre known as Half Time. Much of music on the podcasts was released later by their respective authors but somehow it has more purpose and meaning when part of the Autonomic world in a much similar way to the previously discussed experience of listening to a DJ on pirate radio. That is not to say that the tracks are not strong on their own but rather to say together they form like Voltron. This rabbit hole goes deep and much like Alan Moore’s Ideaspace or Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious it seems many people arrive at the same concepts like a shared well of inspiration. Even as recently as this year I watched a Mexican film called ‘I’m No Longer Here’ that tells the story of a Monterrey street gang who spend their time dancing to a slowed down version of Colombian Cumbia, or Cumbia Rebajada. I looked into this and discovered a whole genre that was stumbled across when Mexican soundboy Sonido Dueñez’s broken turntable started slowing down community faves - they loved it. This was happening right under my nose and I had no ‘idea’. I wonder if DJ Screw knew? Maybe we’re all just tapping into the same Collective Unconscious. I feel comfortable here. I feel like the mixtape, the world building and the long form listening experiences offer something else, something to contemplate and something to inspire. You can expect more long form from me and Astrophonica.
Below are some links to the projects discussed in this piece. Thanks for reading, listening & supporting.