This is a pleasure warning for the hedonistically and technologically
challenged.
Not exactly a secret track, but it schizzed me out of my tranquility.
On Funki Porcini's "hed phone sex" CD, track 7 includes random skippy
hippie noise and then a woman's voice saying something to the effect of:
"We're sorry. Your CD player is unable to properly play track 7. Please
try again."
Really weirded me out, as this CD player has in fact been acting up of
late, and has in fact been temperamentally skipping quite a bit recently.
Time to disassemble and clean the lens, I imagine.
Anyway, how did the Porcini-heds know?
I had to search my entire apartment for surveillence equipment. I found
none,except for that which I had installed myself (to spy on my other
personalities, of course, especially the pathological liar) and a few tapes
marked "R. Nixon", which were just a lot of boring babble not even worth
their weight in samples, so I threw them out.
Better still, the last track is called "it's a long road".
As I was working on something else at the time, I let the CD play on in the
background.
The last track on the record had run on a good fifteen minutes and seemed
to be growing a bit repetetive, even for an abstrakt kut. I listened more
closely.
A male voice sample kept repeating, "It's a long road" over a happening
beat with some funky breaks. One of the breaks sounded so suspiciously
funky that I had to get up and check the player. Alright, first I tried
to play the break on my drums, and found that this break was actually out
of time and off the beat. Well, this record is full of off tempo changes
and beat breaks, so anything is possible. But something made me
wonder...so I went over to the equipment rack and stared with the sternest
expression I could muster.
Now, it's too ironic what with the title of the song being so relevant, and
reminders of that Orbital "time becomes a loop" loop.
I watched the player carefully. Unlike quantum particles, it exhibited the
same behavior while observed.
The player would count down to 00:00:51 remaining, then SKIP instantly back
to 00:01:10 remaining, and was in fact looping itself. After enough
listening to enough hi-tech boytoys and after the hijinx of track 7 (there
is no rule number 5), I was ready to believe anything.
I wondered if it were possible to include data in a CD to intentionally
make it skip, or to simply send silly numbers to the player's time display?
Or, better yet, I wonder if the last track simply was set to intentionally
run off the edge of the CD (since, as we all know, CDs play from the inside
out), leaving the player mechanism to its own devices, desperately trying
to get back on track?
What the hell was going down?
As it turned out, nothing so clever. I tried the CD in another player, and
it played straight through to the end of this last track without a glitch.
How dull. I was beginning to like that skipping effect. It was the
ultimate remix. Give the DJ time to catch a smoke and chat up a desirable
femme fatale.
It was perfectly apropos to the rather depraved method and contents of this
groovy record (high marks for this CD, by the way).
Anyway, perhaps this anecdote antidote offers some devious inspiration to
others out there about to cut some plastic (scratch) of their own.
By the way, one must love the liner notes to this record.
Better yet, the CD itself is marked with a huge label stating explicitly:
"IF YOU ARE NOT COMPLETELY SATISFIED WITH THIS RECORD, LISTEN TO IT AGAIN
AND THEN REALIZE THAT YOU HAVE WASTED YOUR MONEY."
Once again, a high hand to the Funki Porcini boys and girls, who've put
together a weird and wonderful assemblage of jazzfunkambientabstrakt
wreckage, sure to please anyone who likes assemblages of
jazzfunkambientabstrakt wreckage. It's down riddimatic.
Best,
Zenon M. Feszczak
Philosopher ex nihilo