From the Vault: Play the Record Backwards, Part 1

Rusty Needles Record Club. Today's episode is going to be something of a crossover episode because we're going to be talking about Stuff to Blow your Mind type stuff, but this one is going to veer directly into vinyl record territory for I think a large a large portion of the episode, and especially when you get into that area, I'm really going to have to defer to you, Seth, being the master of records that you are, and with myself being someone who was told from an early age

not to touch records, yes, and being an obedient child, I obeyed everyone on that and I have virtually not touched any vinyl my entire life, because that's what grown ups are supposed to do.

never touch the grooves. Even I just because I'm a human being, I'll be clumsy and drop something and it'll like scratch against an edge and like, well that's ruined forever, you know, So I can't imagine in trusting that to a child. You know, That's why children's records are always just scratched into oblivion. So so you know, I understand, and I also understand why even adults have are hesitance to jump into that world.

into vinyl. But yeah, just from an early age, I was told shouldn't touch that, and I agree.

it back on the other side. You know, like I have an active interest in what I'm listening to, and therefore it makes me appreciate it more. It's just like eating sunflower seeds. You know, cracking open the shells is half the fun.

little more background on right. All right, So the first stop is going to take us back before musical recording was possible, or at least to a time when the main way to record music was at least via media was to put it on paper, was to write down the music, and even then a certain amount of musical encoding is possible. So we have to be reminded that music is information. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that hidden information can be present in music in ways

that pre date analog or digital media. Not getting into what's possible with language itself, because obviously, you know any given song's lyrics in any given language, there's going to be enough complexity there that you can hide things that you can sort of get across points Subliminally. You can use metaphors. I mean, all the weapons of language are at your disposal if you at all know how to

use them when you're crafting lyrics. But beyond that, we can certainly look at examples of musical cryptograms, because basically musical symbols and musical notes can and have been used in substitution ciphers. And we've talked about substitution ciphers on pasted up of stuff to blow your mind. When musical theorists in the West began to assign letter names to notes, steering I believe the ninth century CE, it also became

possible to turn things around. Though it wasn't until I believe the Romantic period and beyond that that this was really explored. So you might be wondering, well, okay, what are you talking about here with the obviously we have notes, we have an play, an a play, A B natural, et cetera. And this is where we see a great example of this, and this is one that I mentioned

a number of you're familiar with. The famed Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived sixteen eighty five through seventeen fifty, would employ what we call the Bach motif. So that's a B flat an A A C and then a B natural. Now you might say, well, well that's a B A C B that's meaningless. Well, in German, a B flat is B and a B natural is H, thus spelling out Bach.

of notes. In fact, I remember there was a gosh I believe it was a scene in the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia where they're on like a game show and these are like what these are things you'll bring to a picnic and they'll just play notes and they'll like spell out the words, so like egg, I'll bring an egg, that kind of thing, you know, like it's it's something you can do and it's fun, it's puzzley, it's it's good times. So I've looked this up in

the past. There are approximately, especially if you include the h as a part of it, around two hundred words that you can spell using just musical notes. You know, things like cabbage head. You know, like these things, these things are possible, they're a part of that language. So I think it would be difficult, but I bet you could form a message you could form sentences and you know, we'll talk more about more examples right now.

this kind of hidden messages in music activity. There are also older examples of musical cryptograms, including the work of Renaissance musician Jocquin de Prez lived fourteen fifty five through fifteen twenty one. He was a French Flemish composer and he composed a particular work, this is Missa Hercules du Ferrari. It was for the Duke of Ferrara, and the music is derived from the musical letters in the Duke's name, a musical cryptogram that was later known as the Soghetto cavato.

Another example, American occultist Paul Foster Case would create a cryptogram in the twentieth century that made use of esoteric symbols and concepts and if I understand what I was reading on it correctly. It used occult symbols Hebrew and Latin to translate a word into notes, though the usage

here would be more ceremonial than anything. But one of several examples will be touching on that either is within the realm of the occult or we'll touch on examples later that are more in the area of sort of like foe occultism or accusations of occultism, etc.

let's move on to some more analog examples. So the first thing we're going to look at with actual recorded audio is something that I'm sure many, if not most, of you are familiar with at this point, either by virtue of various panics over popular music, especially satanic panic, and its reverberations through media from everything from horror movies

to supernatural television shows and so forth. But also it impacts actual record an actual recording practice, an actual production practice, a technique known as back masking.

you know you know it when you hear it. Basic backward speech, which is also sometimes utilized in media for like alien words or arcane spells and so forth. A lot of times it's used for creepy effects. And I think we all we you know it when you hear it. You can hear this this sound effect, and it's it's people speaking backwards. That's what it is.

that's that's reversed audio. We know what it sounds like, you know, we know, we know the hallmarks of it.

and that gets into a whole other area. Now, the other side of the equation we mentioned allegations of back masking, erroneous back masking, arguments that especially dangerous seeming rock bands of previous decades, the idea that they were actually back masking in a way so that what sounds like just normal lyrics can be reversed and have a totally different meaning, usually one that is satanic.

businessman would experiment with playing music backwards. I think, notably a whistled version of Yankee Doodle Dandy, and this would have been used via tinfoil phonograph recordings. He observed that music quote is still melodious in many cases, and some of the strains are sweet and novel, but all together different from the song reproduced in the right way. And I think this is a realization that certainly someone like Thomas Edison was in a position to acknowledge and admire

back then. And then there's kind of been a wave of it throughout audio history and certainly nowadays. I'd never really looked at this before, but if you go on like YouTube, you'll find so many examples of people taking music and reversing like whole albums, just to play it backwards and see what happens. Sometimes they have a specific thing they're going for, maybe they're after something in the lyrics, or it's one of the cases that we'll be touching

on later on in this episode. But other times, especially with I saw the number of ambient albums, people just want to experience the album. I love both both the forwards and backwards.

Krea Brecken. Okay, so they released while they were married a collaborative album together called Pull Hair Rabbi All right, now, when this album first leaked back in the days when like leaking was a big issue. Folks would listen to it and they were like, oh, this is a bad leak. It sounds like the entire album is played backwards. Someone let me know when you get a real version of the leak. Well, av Tair himself came onto these boards

and was like, no, no, that's the real version. When he and his wife had finished recording their album, they decided, you know, the entire album sounds better if you play it backwards. So what became a pretty straightforward folk album became a pretty foreign sounding backwards album and it's wonderful. It's called pull Hair Rubbi. I highly recommend it, and

it sounds almost instrumental. It sounds very foreign, and it sounds very strange because once they did reverse it initially and they decided, yes, this whole album just will be backwards versions of every single song, then they did start leaning into that. They made special decisions that really highlighted those choices, and it worked out really well. Genuinely, it's a wonderful album. I think people should.

what the technology does to what I started with. What can I do to optimally change the results and make it even more in line with what I'm trying to create.

pull out, and that's supposed to help you with your production process. Like you know, there's lots of examples of this, and yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I think AI and intentional reversing just takes a few of those decisions out of the hands of the artist.

case and found it amusing. But it touches on something that will We'll keep coming back to the idea that sometimes when you take spoken language and you reverse it, it can sound like other words in that language. And yeah, and then then there's a lot of psychological layering to put on top of that. But we'll get to that now. Eventually, real to real tapes came along, this would have in the nineteen thirties, and it became increasingly easy for audio

lovers to experiment with the medium. So, for instance, French composer Pierre Schaeffer lived nineteen ten through nineteen ninety five experimented with t looping, sampling and back masking, and the use of back masking would then increase among avant garde musicians during the nineteen fifties, according to Stassnow, and certainly I think a lot of you out there can think of various recording artists who use some of these tools,

tape loops especially. There are a lot of ambient recording artists that I can think of that make use of this, But it comes down to just manipulating the recorded data at heart. Now, in the history of back masking, it's impossible to talk about all this without touching on the Beatles. And it's not just because all of the Beatles are popular and are an easy band to source for all this.

Like that, they really were the ones that are credited with sort of bringing back masking into the mainstream, both for good and kind of also for bad, for the you know, leaning into the whole panic area. So to be clear, though, all major and serious accounts, which which stalls Now discusses in their paper, seem to drive on the Beatles engaged in back masking purely for novelty's sake.

This entails large. I think The main examples here three tracks off of the legendary nineteen sixty six album Revolver that would be I'm Only Sleeping Tomorrow never Knows. But then also the single Rain, which wasn't on that album but came out of the same recordings. So specifically, on these I'm Only Sleeping you have a back masked lead guitar part by George Harrison. So George Harrison played it

one way. When they were tinkering around and figuring out, you know, how they're putting all this together, they said, hey, we like it better in reverse. Let's use it that way. It helps create this kind of dreamlike, you know, psychedelic sound.

a little bit because it features backward vocals. So these are popular and I guess somewhat obvious examples of backmasking in the biggest band in the world. And so of course this leads to greater scrutiny, great greater awareness of the technique. And this is going to mean that that later on people were looking at subsequent Beatles albums and saying, well, I wonder what's forwards, but what's backwards? Are they using

this again? And this ends up this ends up leading to a lot of speculation from some of the more I guess, you know, conspiracy minded fans about what may be hidden in subsequent albums. Those stalls now writes in their paper quote, there were no hidden messages until the

fans and fanatics went looking for them. And so from here we begin to veer into this area of accusations of back masking and getting into urban legends about songs like Revolution nine off of nineteen sixty eight's The White Album. If this is something I wasn't super familiar with, but there's a voice saying number nine, number nine, number nine, and the legend goes that if you reverse that, you

hear turn me on dead Man, and you can. You can find examples of this on I think just the Wikipedia page for the White Album or for Revolution number nine, and you can hear it. I was listening to it just the other day, and I have to say I did not find it particularly convincing. I feel like you really have to want to hear turn me on dead Man, And then you get into that area where it's like, if this is the hidden message, why is the hidden message? Like so like clunky.

Paul look alike at one point. It's obviously very untrue, but there are many examples that conspiracy theorists like to talk about, like, oh gosh, here here's one. For example, if you look at the cover of Abbey Road picture in your mind, you have the four Beetles walking across the road. They're all dressed in kind of interesting clothing, very distinct from one another. I'm going off the top of my head, but I think I can do this

all the way. At the back you have George Harrison, who is dressed kind of like a working man, kind of like working man's clothes, denim, nothing fancy. In front of that, you have Ringo who's wearing like kind of a fancier suit and tie. Okay. In front of that you have Paul, also dressed, you know, pretty casually, and I think he's not wearing shoes all right, And then in front of him you have John Lennon, who is dressed all in white with long flowing hair, et cetera,

et cetera. So the message you were supposed to receive from that is that John Lennon was God and he was taking home the dead body of Paul McCartney. He wasn't wearing shoes because something to do with like being buried without your shoes on. It was something this one referenced. Ringo represented like the priest who was like burying and giving the eulogy, and George Harrison was representing the grave digger, the man actually burying Paul. And it's like, yeah, I guess,

you know, like that's quite a stretch. There's a lot of other things too, Like if you hold a mirror up to the bass drum on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it allegedly like gives you the date that Paul died. And like if you look at like the pictures on the cover of Let It Be, I think Paul's is the only one with like a red background and everyone else's is white or something like that. Like there's all these little things and they're all meaningless.

But this was another one to turn me on dead Man. It's I don't know, I don't know why someone could put so much stock in this, but I suppose it's fun, you know, just to look for clues and hints and stuff.

graphic design on the albums. There's plenty to sort of latch onto in both of these and some of one of those things, I guess you look at a lot of conspiracy thinking some of this may have began for fun, it's just as an amusement, but then it can kind of take on an energy of its own, and you begin to wonder to what extent are people truly buying into this idea that Paul is dead and has been

replaced by a look alike. And obviously the most rational thing you would do if you were perpetrating this kind of conspiracy was leave a lot of clues for it in your subsequent album output. Absolutely so, anyway, Paul McCartney was not dead then, and as of this recordings still alive. Actually now, it is worth noting that a day in the life off of Sergeant Pepper's Only Hearts Club Band, which will come back to again that it does contain

some sounds that are just for dogs. Though there's also the allegation that a reverse section at the end of the song can be reversed into something crude, but according to Martin, this is all just gibberish reverse. They just recorded a lot of gibberish and then reversed it.

hide amongst them. Okay. So I was hanging out at a friend of mine's house and I heard her her I think it was her stepfather, was in the other room playing this record out loud, and I was like, oh my gosh, I know a hidden message in this record that if if you play it backwards, that it says you cannot hide. Hide, amongst them, and she's like, oh, go to the go tell. I'm like, okay, this is

gonna be great. So I go to this adult little teenage boy and I'm like, you know, if you play this song backwards, you can hear, you can hear hidden messages, you can hear, you cannot hide hide amongst them. And he goes. He stares me for a while, cocks his head. He's just like, you smoke a lot of pot, do you No, I'm just a music lover. I love playing my records backwards. And yeah, didn't. I didn't get the reaction I was hoping for, which was awe and praise and a standing ovation.

So yeah, so that that is a feature that many record players have a literal reverse button, but on the less expensive ones, And this is the way I used to do it when I was younger. You would turn off the belt that that drives the actual turning of the record, and you would but you would leave the speaker on and you would manually move your hand backwards, pushing the record in reverse, which makes it sound even creepier because it's not even like, you know, at like

a regular pace. It's got like this like human lurch to it's you know. So, but I also know that there are record players that just will not go in reverse, no matter if you push them, you'll just end up breaking them. So yeah, there's different kinds, but some actually just have a button that plays it in reverse.

listening to recordings backwards. And while I think this sounds kind of silly, this notion and the ripples of this notion certainly influence the eventual place of backtracking in Satanic panic. Satanic Panic, of course, this is something that we've touched

on in the show before. This was a moral panic, mostly in the United States and then also in the UK and parts of Europe here in the eighties and nineties, though its reverberations in subsequent years and subsequent decades can be found in different parts of the world and also in different sort of communities and certainly faith communities as well.

Basically just whips everyone into a frenzy over the idea that something that had never really existed in the world, that is, the organized worship of Satan, was in engaging in covert means of corrupting the youth of the world, as well as ritually torturing and murdering children. So, yeah, there's much more one could say about satantic panic in its awfulness and also like the real cost of it to actual human beings. There's also a lot to be said into how it ends up impacting media, how it

impacts music and horror and so forth. But backmasking comes into play as a part of all of this as well, because you had allegations that scary metal bands and even bands that we might not think of today as being scary, we're using backmasking to corrupt listeners with incantations of devil, magic, drugs and more.

to go, wait, there's a backward spell on this. Oh well, good things. Spells don't work, so who cares? You know?

playing in a rocking band? Like what? Like? Why do you need to also hide the Satanism if you're basically saying praise Satan right there in.

Wikipedia for the entry for this song. But led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven classic rock song, like it's it's a song that I think is great, but I couldn't tell you because I've heard it too many times on the radio. So it's it's not my favorite led Zeppelin song because I've just heard it too many times. It would not like in the top ten for me. And it contains it does contain some actual lyrics that go as follows. If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed.

Now I'm not entirely sure what that means, but that those are just part of the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven. And the accusation is that if you play this backwards, then you hear the words Here's to my sweet Satan, the one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He'll give you, He'll give you six sixty six. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad, satan.

satanic lyrics. Oh really, there are plenty of examples in led Zeppelin's lyrics that are, on the face, more shocking than what we have right here in the alleged back masking.

that interesting. And I don't know this is maybe just me, but I feel like if they had actually done this on purpose, it's one thing to cover it up during the initial period of satanic panic during the you know, certainly in the eighties and even nineties, but it seems like if this, if they had actually back masked some content here and gone to some links to put some satanic silliness in here, it would have come out right, Like how great are the surviving members of led Zeppelin

going to really be at keeping secrets like this?

There's plenty of stuff you can do with language that hasn't been reversed, and great lyricists are going to be able to use those tools, like doing this whole backtracking technique is just such a crude and ineffective way of hiding your secret message if you actually have a secret message you want to get out there.

and it spells a new secret message. Hey, that's going to be actually harder to decipher, you know, So it's not even a very good secret message.

contained secret messages? Because if it's backwards, I can't understand it. Right. Well, that's where we get into these claims, and I think these are this is this is pretty much been refuted as pseudoscience at this point. But this idea that backmasked messages can be understood subconsciously even if you're not consciously understanding them. So one of the main proponents of the power of reverse speech is an individual by the name of David John Oates. And this is a guy that's

appeared on the likes of Coast to Coast. This is the you know, the radio station radio show rather that's popular and known for its various treatment of UFOs and so forth. You know, a lot of what I guess you've described a sort of fringe ideas. And Oates would discover this notion that normal speech contains a smaller percentage of backward speech that I'm not sure I even understand

exactly what the idea here is. That maybe it kind of cuts to the chase a bit that the thing that you're sort of trying to say through with forward facing speech, you're also saying, at least in a simplistic form, through the reverse of the speech. There is an example that is sometimes used to support this, and it's apparently if you take Neil Armstrong in nineteen sixty nine saying small step for man of course during the lunar landing. If you were to reverse that it sounds something like

manual spacewalk. And this one I thought sounded pretty pretty silly to me. I mean, what does that even mean? Why? What? What's my take home from that? If this is some sort of meaningful content, like I guess, it would at best mean that the smart things that you say forward sound stupid or backwards.

time again researching for this episode. Like when you go to the audio examples on the Wikipedia for Stairway to Heaven, he tells you what you're about to hear, what you were going to hear straightforward, and what you were expected to hear in reverse. So you're going into it to it looking for that template to line up. But what's

really going on is something called paridolia. This is the tendency for humans to find meaning in something, be it seeing a face in the surface of the moon, secret messages in a reverse song, connections between this album and this movie when this movie's played on mute, that sort of thing, and it's I mean, it's a powerful force. It's it's a it's something that guides a lot of our creativity that we can look at, like a smear

on the wall. We can look at a cloud in the sky and we can we can we can lean into a version of it that's not there. We can make we can apply some sort of logic to it and create fantasy. And I think that, I mean, that's I feel like easily the far more sensible way of understanding any kind of sense that seems to come out

of reverse speech. I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that meaningful reverse speech would simply emerge from traditional speech, as well as the idea that meaningful information could then be understood by our brain and even on like a subliminal level, like mad dog and goddamn sorry to have to curse again.

But this is the one of the historical examples. These ideas are maybe not completely unconnected from each other, but they're also like there's not really a strong meaningful connection either, Like I'm not sure what the argument would be between those two words.

the myan calendar or something. It's like, yeah, but they didn't use like leap days like we do, you know, like what time zone were they using? Like like these things don't line up, like like different cultures have different ways to kind of like parcel out our lives, and they don't match up cross culturally, so you can't just say something is a universal truth. It's just like, well, maybe that only works in English for me when I have the words written down.

In nineteen eighty five, JR. Voki and JD. Reid suggested that some information might pass through when you were when you were reversing using reversed audio, But they were also very firm on the matter being misrepresented in the media in this in nineteen eighty five and one of their papers, they write, quote, is there any evidence to warrant ascertations that such a messages affect our behavior across a wide variety of tasks. We were unable to find any evidence

to support such a claim. Secondarily, we present evidence to suggest that the apparent presence of backward messages in popular music is a function more of active construction on the part of the perceiver than of the existence of the messages themselves.

speech on word processing. And I think that's this is really key, because we know that priming works with forward with normal language, that I can say something to you and I can prime you for something, and the effects of that priming is measurable through experimentation. So if something wise to come through via reversed audio through back masking, it would have an effect on priming, and we would be able to measure that. And there's nothing to measure

because it doesn't work. It doesn't do that. Now that being said, there's still plenty of fun examples of back masking in music. One that came up for me and this is another example of the song that I've heard many times, but I did not really think about the back masking in it because I'm just so used to hearing this technique. It's cool, but I don't give it a lot of second thought or even wonder what's being reversed.

But there's a great Boards of Canada album Geogotti and there's a track titled you Could Feel the Sky, and there's definitely some back mask audio in there, and it may be reversed. It seems like it's likely a reversal of a clip from I think a documentary on paganism that says the God with Horns, and I guess this is maybe just kind of a cheeky nod to back masking history in some of the Satanic panic ideas, which of course Boards of Canada would have very much been

familiar with. And there's still so many examples too of people going into business for themselves on back masking, playing stuff backwards, sharing it on YouTube and saying, hey, clearly, if you play this Black Sabbath lyric backwards, you hear I want to be like Jesus. Stuff like that. I mean, there's if you're just going into it purely for fun. Yes, there's probably some fun and amusing quote unquote discoveries to make.

Parnhesies did indeed play the Devil's music. While most people Christian or otherwise found all this rather silly, these fears did reflect more pervasive fears that the media had become a subliminal master of puppets, fears that would themselves come to inspire some nineteen eighties metal and I think this one might have also been the paper to point out that you also get these ridiculous images and ridiculous footage of some of the provocateurs of Satanic Panic, some of

the individuals that were making these accusations, messing around with record players and playing stuff backwards and just really gazing hard and deep and trying to find evidence of Satan in the reversed audio.

like Spinning Plates. It sounds so odd because it originally started off as a song called I Will, which is very funny because Radiohead eventually actually finished that song and released it on a later album. But enough about that. They were trying to record this song during this recording session called I Will, and they just couldn't get it

to work. They were just messing around with it, doing whatever, and at one point they decided to play it backwards and they're like, yeah, that's it, that's the album I want to hear. So they had this instrumental for this song backwards and I this is good. This is good, And so Tom York, the lead singer, he created a new vocal melody to go over it. But when you played the forward vocal melody over the backwards song, it just didn't quite line up. It just didn't sound right.

They didn't mesh together. So what he decided to do instead was to phonetically take the words he wanted to say, reverse them, and then sing it backwards. He was obviously singing forward in real time, but he's singing the backwards result of what he wanted, so when he reversed it, it would sound like forward words. Oh wow, So I'll

say that in a morsisstinct way. Tom York made up new words that were phonetically the backwards version of his new forward vocals, and then reverse the recording, creating lyrics that sounded forward in the final song but are actually being reversed. A very similar system was used in the TV show Twin Peaks for the character the Man from Another Place aka the Arm. He's the guy that's like, you know, sometimes my arm's been back. You know that you like will come back in style that guy. That's

very similar system. Yeah, but as we'll point out, it's just like all this discussion we've been having that character of the man from Another Place from Twin Peaks, he always had subtitles, because would you really be able to understand what he was saying backwards if there weren't subtitles there. I don't know.

as opposed to a deliverer of actual linguistic information. And I don't mean that as like a slam on them, and it doesn't necessarily mean that I can't understand what they're saying. I mean sometimes I think of people like like Maynard from Tool. You know, It's like I can understand the words he's saying, but I'm not really engaging with what he's saying on a lyrical level. It's more about like the pure sound experience, and I feel like that's that's what I have with Tom York.

which is a very iconic backwards sound. I suppose, you know, I'm the one who edits these episodes. I could just put in a reverse sound there, but no, no, no, I like making with my mouth instead. But but yeah, I think that's a big part of it. And Tom York has a very vowel heavy, very floaty, ethereal singing style, lots of oohs and ahs and moaning and kind of like soft sounds. So because of that, forwards and backwards

doesn't affect it too much. You know, he's not a percussive, you know, singer, and the percussion is really what signifies, oh, something's backwards here.

Vinyl records. In the meantime, I'll just remind everybody that core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed Mondays, we do listener mail. Wednesdays we do a short form artifactor Monster Effect, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema our time to set aside most series concerns and just talk about a weird film. By the time you're listening to this, I think Joe is actually back, So uh, we should be welcoming Joe back

on some episodes in the very near future. But we recorded these episodes ahead of time. And as always, thanks to Seth Nichols Johnson for not only co hosting but of course producing Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And if you want to reach out to any of us, if you have feedback on this episode, you have thoughts about reversed music and so forth. Well, you can email us at contact. It's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.