Somewhere along the line I got pulled into the orbit of “slowed + reverb” remixes of songs. I think it may have been through this video where someone took an Alvin and the Chipmunks album and played it at a slow enough speed that the vocals sound normal:
The songs all turn into doomy renditions of 80’s pop rock, which would seem gimmicky if done consciously by some band, but is somewhat delightful as a discovery about production techniques.
Of course this sort of thing has gone on for awhile. There was the period of time where slowing down songs much more was a bit of a meme, kicked off as far as I know by this version of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” stretched out to 10 minutes:
At this level of slowing the song is unrecognizable. It has been turned into something different, an ambient backing for meditation or some such thing. It’s actually quite lovely. If you’ve watched Dredd, the shimmery sounds played whenever a character did Slo-Mo were inspired by this video. A couple of years later a similar recording of “crickets” slowed down went similarly viral, as it sounded like a heavenly chorus rather than waxpaper wings beating against each other. Of course, that story was too good to be true. It’s a bit unclear what exactly was done, but at the very least people are pretty confident that it wasn’t simply slowing down a single recording of cricket chirps. There’s more in this short podcast episode which also gets into, among other things, digital music slowing algorithms.
Right around a year ago was when I started getting video recommendations for “slowed + reverb” remixes of songs.
Back in my youth, people would make AMVs (that is, Anime Music Videos) where they played some song over a fight from Dragonball Z or what have you. I have a particularly fond memory of “Knife Prty” over bits from Spriggan (a movie I’ve still never seen). The above video felt like some updated variant: now some effort was put into altering the music (even though I’m guessing it wasn’t much more than moving some speed slider in Audacity), and much less effort was put into the visuals (we just get a hypnotic, gif-like loop to set a mood, no editing footage to match beats or musical transitions). It’s nice enough; it’s the sort of thing you put on a screen and half ignore while you brush your teeth and wind down for the evening.
The slowing and reverb changes less about the songs than you might expect. Owing to my own YouTube habits I’ve mostly seen Deftones songs get this treatment, and their later, more atmospheric stuff gets stretched out into a more relaxed vibe. In the most typical versions, Chino’s higher vocal excursions get brought into a more earthbound range, and any screams get softened, while the guitars get to shimmer a bit more. What’s interesting is that at least one of the channels has gone to the trouble of pitchshifting things back into place, making the song only different in its pacing and keeping the vocal range intact: compare these two versions of “Kimdracula”.
The higher effort version only has 65 views, while the other has ~12K. I guess the anime visuals are just that important to the aesthetic. Heck, let’s throw in a third version:
That’s from the most recent channel I’ve found doing this stuff, and you can see they’ve gone with yet another aesthetic. The channel is called memories consume1, and I’ll give them this, they do a pretty wide variety of artists, albeit mostly in the general “guitar music for melancholics” category that I’m a sucker for. The visual presentation is all darkwave; maybe anime is just too bright when you’re slowing down these sort of songs.
As I was writing this I came to find out that this is actually a pretty widespread phenomenon, so maybe this is all old hat to you. Still, in a way this is good for me, because the other obvious precursor I have yet to mention is chopped and screwed music, as I only have a passing familiarity with it, but there’s a Pitchfork article and an entire podcast episode tracing out the connections. The big difference is the lack of chopping, but the YouTuber credited with originating this style cites DJ Screw as a direct influence and you really can tell. He started by slowing down much more popular music than I’ve put here, so if you’re looking to hear a song you like from the radio run through the “late night submerged vibe” filter just try typing in its name with “slowed + reverb” after and see what comes up.
I had though this was a Chavez reference, but I was thinking of the phrase “better days will haunt you”. It’s actually a Linkin Park reference.