By now, we’re all pretty used to people speeding up vocal samples to make them sound like Alvin And The Chipmunks. It’s how Kanye West launched his career. But what happens when you slow down Alvin And The Chipmunks so much that the vocals sound like they were sung by a regular human? As it turns out, you get an amazing collision of pop vocals and sludge-filled doom metal instrumentals.
Toronto-based electronic musician Brian Borcherdt, best known for his work with Holy Fuck, is the mind behind chipmunkson16speed, which is the result of finding both a bunch of old Chipmunks records and a suitcase record player with 16 RPM setting.
In an interview with Toronto alt-weekly Now, Borcherdt said that slowing down a Chipmunks record had been a goal of his for some time:
Years ago when I first started playing with Holy Fuck, that turntable was one of the things we would bring around with us. Sometimes we’d play various records really deep and guttural and slow, and work that into the fabric of whatever we were building. It’s not meant to travel though, and it eventually took a spill and broke. I never got the chance to do a bunch of things that I wanted to do, one of which was this Alvin and the Chipmunks thing.
“You Keep Me Hanging On” has never been so haunting.