“The radio has always been a spooky place,” quips Brian Borcherdt, best known as the founder of the band Holy Fuck. Although I can remember a time when their song “Lovely Allen” was inescapable on TV, the band itself has eschewed radio play and the mainstream altogether for 20 years now with their lyricless take on electro-prog—not to mention the “Fuck” of it all.
But the reason we’re chatting has to do with another anniversary, one that’s a little more personal to Borcherdt. In October of 2015, he uploaded a project titled Vol. 1 (a.k.a. Sludgefest) to a SoundCloud account titled chipmunkson16speed—a fairly self-descriptive work of readymade art that was born when his knack for slowing down vinyl records to create doomy sounds out of anything antithetical to a dark energy coincided with the acquisition of an old turntable with the capability to accommodate 16-RPM records. After experimenting with gospel albums, a novelty Smurfs LP, and even Aerosmith singles, a friend passed along a collection of popular new-wave hits reimagined by Alvin and the Chipmunks. Given that the vocals were already sped-up to achieve their chipmunk-like pitch, slowing the record down to 16 speed made them sound human again as they were backed by what could best be described as funereal sludge-metal instrumentals.
While the early 2010s saw a strange fad of slowing artists like Radiohead and Justin Bieber down digitally to create wholly new and barely familiar ambient soundscapes, what’s striking about these renditions of “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” and “Walk Like an Egyptian” is that they’re almost instantly familiar, though equally alien under the crackle of vinyl. As Borcherdt’s elders in his touring band for Holy Fuck circa 2015 pointed out, these remixes essentially turned the upbeat emotions of the songs on their head. “They were finding something accurate in the sadness of it,” he recalls. “They’re hearing a Blondie song that they may have heard at their high school dance, but baked into nostalgia is something bittersweet—it’s part of our lives that we can’t go back to. In a way, it’s sort of appropriate to hear its flesh dripping off it.”
Much like the album itself (which, a month after its release, was followed by a less talked-about Vol. 2—and, three years after that, a particularly hauntological version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”), our conversation about a project that’s fairly ridiculous on its surface had plenty more to reveal on topics like the virality of ideas, the changing landscape of the internet, copyright law, AI scam artists, and more.
It seemed like you did a few podcast interviews when the project first dropped, but I don’t see anything in the way of stories on other websites.
I was taken a bit by surprise [by the project’s success], so any bit of coverage I was getting I thought was pretty remarkable. But it probably has a little bit to do with the passage of time. The mediums have shifted—we weren’t so crazy about streaming or Instagram, we still read blogs and stuff. One of the magazines that apparently ran something on it was Newsweek [laughs]. No one’s running out and grabbing Newsweek right now. So some of that stuff feels like it’s lost because it was at a moment when we were switching mediums.
It seems like this album had a moment on TikTok recently. Do you know what the source of interest lately is?
No, but I know enough about TikTok to know that it doesn’t have to be anything. Over the years, whenever I’d get somebody sending me a message saying, “Hey, check it out, so-and-so’s talking about your thing,” it almost always hyperlinked to somebody who was hosting it sort of dubiously, not explicitly saying that it wasn’t their material, not really mentioning where it came from or who was behind it. It’s always these ephemeral moments that would come up, but you couldn’t really hinge them to anything, because they were referencing someone else’s YouTube that was hosting it, and now that person took it down.
It’s like when you see a meme that you created in the wild and you’re like, “I made that,” but it’s also not necessarily your work—you took something pre-existing and altered it a little bit.
Exactly, and I think there’s so many layers there. I am a musician who holds copyright and ownership in high regard. I was excited to share this in a way that was free and available to everyone without monetizing it—not necessarily for ethics, partially just because I didn’t know much about it. I didn’t want to get sued or anything. I don’t wanna take credit for other people’s work, so I had to take credit for what I thought was my own in it. But then when other people would take it and run with it and post it on Spotify or make their own YouTube accounts and set up ads and get paid, they’re not really taking any of those things into consideration.
“I don’t wanna take credit for other people’s work, so I had to take credit for what I thought was my own in it.”
So it left me in a position of, “Well, how do I do this?” It’s like you said, I’ve taken an aspect of existing work that I do think is valid and it shows some artistry, but it definitely toes a gray line of, “Is this like sampling in hip-hop? What is it?” I’m from a world of writing my own music and releasing it. I’m not super savvy when it comes to covers and samples.
When Vol. 1 dropped I feel like we were all still mad about EDM and dubstep, where it appears to just be someone pushing a button to quickly manufacture songs. Now we’re dealing with actual grifters using AI to churn out soulless music. Have you ever worried that younger listeners may have a hard time differentiating these things from this Chipmunks project?
We really have to be aware of this concept of being genuine. It feels like so much [in the music industry] is up for grabs and so much is free to anyone who wants to distort it—it’s all available to be muddied. And I think that part of that is because our listenership has become more passive—we listen to things that are pleasant, like a playlist that’s not gonna throw us any curveballs. We’ve begun curating our lives with more safety. In the last few years, we haven’t heard a lot of engaging critique of what’s actually going on in the world. The media we grew up with doesn’t want to say anything divisive, so we end up in a world where people have forgotten how to be genuine. I think that’s the case with influencing or TikTok or using these lenses to talk to our fans—y’know, “Hey, what’s up! Smash that like button!” We’ve dumbed it down out of fear, because we wanna make a living, we want exposure, we want the algorithm to like us. But as we dumb it down, we’re kind of doing the thing that we were afraid AI would do: we’re becoming imitations of ourselves, we’re becoming fake.
We talk about young people being force-fed AI in their music, but hopefully it’ll engage them enough to seek out new platforms and new formats of community and ways to share something fun—like a Chipmunks on 16 Speed project—and how to actually find it without someone else curating and projecting it to them. So my hope is that our defense, both from the side of the creators and as the listeners, is just to be more genuine, more human, more curious, more honest. Because that’s something AI can’t do.
“I grew up with Nirvana and Melvins. I really liked bands that played slowly, because it evoked such feelings. As a teenager I loved Codeine and Sleep’s Holy Mountain.”
As far as the music goes, was the sludge-metal sound something you were familiar with?
Yeah, it kind of married together two things that I was really inspired by. One is just that I really love the idea of using something in its simplicity, but still finding a way to use it differently. I think that was part of Holy Fuck for me: I was going up on stage on my own with Casios and I was inspired by how limited they were. It puts me in a place where I really had to be creative to find out how to make it do more. It’s repurposing something—like finding a kid’s toy with a loop on it but realizing it’s really good.
But also I grew up with Nirvana and Melvins. I really liked bands that played slowly, because it evoked such feelings. As a teenager I loved Codeine and Sleep’s Holy Mountain. So for me it was like marrying the type of music I was already aware of from my youth and then having this “aha” moment where I was able to find meaning in a record that’s been pitched down. Because usually the voices screw it up. I’ll play “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith on 16 speed and it turns into the Melvins, but then the vocals are a real bummer. But with these Chipmunks records I found something that was actually remarkably listenable. Like, I loved how doomy and heavy it got, but still is beautiful music.
That’s another interesting layer to it: It’s not just the Chipmunks singing original songs, it’s them covering very familiar pop songs.
It’s kind of perfect. If you can take it at face value then it really presents to you an interesting band—a band that no one’s ever heard before, an unintentional band. That’s sort of the ultimate goal I was looking for.
“If you can take it at face value then it really presents to you an interesting band—a band that no one’s ever heard before, an unintentional band.”
It really toes the line between being funny conceptually and being really good in a way that’s fairly serious.
Yeah, it felt like I was in high school trying to convince all my friends that they needed to do acid [laughs]. Like, “This is gonna change the way you think!” There’s an altruism to it—I know that’s a funny word to use—but in the moment it felt important. I was really excited to share it, and I remember the day I’d finished working on it and had it on my headphones and went for a walk in Toronto, I was so electrified by it. I went to a house party and I remember passing my headphones to friends and being like, “You gotta check this shit out!” The inspiration was to share it—that was my intention above everything, because it was just fun and I actually thought it was quite emotive. It provoked feelings, and I wanted to see how other people felt.
At the same time it isn’t music that’s necessarily getting archived in the way more conventional music is. It kind of feels like a relic of the old internet before we had Know Your Meme articles walking people through the context for something like this.
It’s just old enough that it fell out into the world in a clumsy way. Sometimes I get people like, “Why can’t I hear it here?,” and I’m like, “Well, help me!” I’m a busy musician and I’m not super internet-savvy. I still make music with analog instruments and I still tour in a van. I’d like to find a better way to preserve this for the ages and I’d like to find a way where it’s done legally, with proper songwriter credits. And a lot of it’s just to do either with me not knowing how to do it or me being respectful of it as opposed to someone who just takes it and puts it up on Spotify and says it’s theirs.
You wanna remain respectful to Alvin and his artistic integrity.
Oh my god, I hate those chipmunks. My daughter’s at the right age where she’s watching all the newer versions. It’s really like the fascination is in the music, because otherwise we’re left with this noxious sort of annoying thing that we probably didn’t even like that much when we were kids. Throwing shade on ’em [laughs]. Those little fuckers. FL
