"Down" by Selrahc Drof
"I met a girl, but she went to hell...." So begins the spoken portion of this multisectional improvisatory vocalization—a soliloquy that darkly but humorously parodies the conventional amatory lyrics of commercial pop music. "Down" was created using various digital hardware and software that allowed the original track to be spectrally altered (e.g., "human to chipmunk," "male to Lurch"); reversed; and temporally compressed to less than half of its initial length. The paradoxical result is that most of the spoken language is rendered unintelligible by means of the very technological means used to convey it to the listener and can only be understood in terms of its inflectional and/or sonic content. The accompanying image, in which two fish-like creatures (actually created by fusing photographic negative details of the composers' eyes and hands) consort like Yin and Yang amidst a swarm of horned, fanged embryonic demons.
