3rd place inthe Crumplbangers Discord ‘reverse’ challenge which was a hard one – use a reversed instrumental or acapella in a mashup. Not many things sound good reversed, and beats were a tricky issue…it was hard to get something listenable beyond 30 seconds of reversing, the novelty wears off fast.
I’ve always wanted to work with musical palindromes (music that plays the same backwards as well as forward) and although most of them are classical pieces, there are a few modern tracks like Boards of Canada’s Music Is Math from Geogaddi (an album full of Satanic Reverses – spooky reverse/backmasking songs – interestingly this doesn’t seem to have any). It’s like a mirror song, you can see it in the waveform, part backwards, part forwards.
So following the mirror theme, I looked for tracks that reference beginning and ends, Smashing Pumpkins and NIN didn’t work, but a new track by Crosses did. I knew nothing about Crosses til I found it, it’s the side project of Chino Moreno of the Deftones. And it’s a cover of Cause & Effect.
I also then found the Black Sabbath track, which together give it a doomier feel and something of a paean to the planet and it’s destruction and return to the ‘new normal’ as we come out of lockdown.
Is it the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? We need to repair the system, as Ozzy says…again a personal mashup from me about the status quo.