The Guide #240: My new obsession is the mesmerising world of the Chipmunks at 16rpm
The best album I’ve heard so far this year isn’t from this year at all.It’s from 2015 (though its recordings were made decades before that), and is a collection of sludgy, doomy covers of late-70s punk, new wave and pop perennials: My Sharona, Call Me, Walk Like an Egyptian.The guitars on this mysterious tribute album have had their pitch tuned down to a low, thick squelch, the drum beats are slow and punishingly thudding, and the vocals, while sung in a sweet tenor, have a strange, almost lobotomised quality to them.The weirdest thing of all though is who is performing: Alvin, Simon, Theodore.OK, let’s explain.
Just over 10 years ago, Canadian musician Brian Borcherdt – best known as one half of experimental noise duo Holy Fuck – bought an old 16rpm turntable, designed for playing slow-speed records such as spoken-word albums.Naturally, Borcherdt immediately started messing about with it, playing normal 45rpm records on the turntable, which slowed them to a disorienting crawl.After experimenting with slowing down a few LPs, he landed on his masterwork: the Chipmunks album Chipmunk Punk, a cynical 1980 attempt by the creators of the squeaky-voiced cartoon rodents to capitalise on the ascendant musical genre of the moment, while of course not sounding the slightest bit punk at all.When played at 16rpm, the album’s high, pitch-shifted vocals are returned to something like the register they were recorded in, but the instruments, which weren’t shifted to a higher pitch like the vocals, become glacially, gelatinously slow.Borcherdt captured some of Chipmunk Punk’s slowed-down tracks, along with other Chipmunk covers and originals, and whacked a couple of volumes of compilations on SoundCloud (and later Bandcamp) under the project name Chipmunks on 16 Speed, a groan-worthy pun on the 00s electroclash group Chicks on Speed.
In the decade or so since, the project has attained cult status, periodically going viral on TikTok and Twitter (which is where I encountered it), and amassing a small army of fans who, in YouTube and Reddit comments, reimagine the Chipmunks as doomed, hell-raising rock stars,(“RIP Alvin,Saw him live only once,Cleveland, 81,Will never forget that sound.
So young.Full of piss and vinegar.”)Listening to Chipmunks on 16 Speed, you can understand the adoration.In their decelerated form, the songs are both menacing and beguiling in a manner their original performers could never have anticipated.At points, things get genuinely gnarly – doom metal bands have spent decades fruitlessly seeking a guitar tone as nasty as the one heard on the cover of Pat Benatar’s Heartbreaker.
But there’s also a haunted, found-in-an-old-tape-deck quality to the songs that reminds me of Cindy Lee’s great 2024 album Diamond Jubilee, or Panda Bear at his most spectral.At points they are disarmingly beautiful: Heaven is a Place On Earth transformed into a Beach Boys spiritual; the chorus of Jessie’s Girl emerging from the sludge in a sunburst of harmony.Slowing music down certainly isn’t a new phenomenon: in the early 2010s there was a vogue for stretching out tracks by the likes of Justin Bieber to 10 or 20 times their length, transforming them into ambient soundscapes.(For a while my go-to focus music in the office was the Jurassic Park theme slowed down by 1000% percent – try it, it really works!) While those versions maintained the songs’ original pitches, they were superseded later in the decade by “slowed + reverb”, an internet microgenre that slows down the rpm of rap and R&B tracks, deepening the vocals in the process, and adding lashings of reverb to the mix, which gives the songs a woozy and slightly mournful quality.It’s a trend that has proved remarkably enduring, not to mention wide-reaching – anyone with a passing interest in football, for example, will have almost certainly encountered a “slowed + reverb” remix via a compilation clip of a known “baller”.
“Slowed + reverb” has run in parallel with the also unkillable, though by now very tired, trope of soundtracking movie trailers with sad, slowed-down versions of usually upbeat songs,Just a few days ago, Warner Bros released the teaser for their new DC superhero horror movie Clayface, set to a glum reimagining of – of all things – The Flaming Lips’ Do You Realize??,So what’s the appeal of this molasses-slow music? By reducing songs to a crawl, these reimaginings seem to capture something: a sort of woozy, alienating, downbeat register that feels both a reflection on, and rejection of, our overstimulated age,An achievement I’m guessing the Chipmunks and their session musicians weren’t aiming for when they sat down to make some cash-in covers of pop hits more than 40 years ago,To read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
Claire’s to close remaining UK stores on Tuesday with more than 1,000 job losses
Jewellery and accessories chain Claire’s is closing its final UK stores on Monday with the loss of more than 1,000 jobs and ending three decades on British high streets.Sources said staff at Claire’s, which had 154 stores when it collapsed in January, had been asked to pack up the final stock and equipment with the remaining outlets to formally close after successive waves of closures in recent weeks.Administrators at Kroll confirmed that all remaining shops ceased trading on Monday and “all store employees have been advised of redundancy”.The move does not affect the retailer’s 356 concessions, including many in Asda stores, and its head office.Talks are thought to be continuing to find a new owner for the Claire’s brand in the UK with French entrepreneur Julien Jarjoura, who controls the brand in several mainland European countries
Shell to buy Canadian shale producer ARC Resources for $16.4bn
Shell has agreed to buy Canadian shale producer ARC Resources for $16.4bn, five years after Europe’s biggest gas and oil producer sold its US shale business.The deal, which includes $13.6bn in cash and shares and taking on ARC’s $2.8bn debt, would be Shell’s biggest acquisition since it bought BG Group a decade ago
Goldman raises oil price forecasts as Iran war deadlock continues; Shell buying Canada’s ARC in $13.6bn deal – as it happened
The deadlock in the Middle East confict has prompted Goldman Sachs to raise its oil price forecast.Goldman Sachs now estimate that Brent crude will trade at about $90 a barrrel in the last quarter of this year, up from an earlier projection of $80. US crude is forecast to average $83 in October-December, up from $75 before.Goldman blames “lower Persian Gulf production” for the upgrade, telling clients:double quotation markWe now assume a normalisation in Gulf exports by end-June (v mid-May prior) and a slower Gulf production recovery. The economic risks are larger than our crude base case alone suggests because of the net upside risks to oil prices, unusually high refined product prices, products shortages risks, and the unprecedented scale of the shock
What’s going on with Spirit Airlines and could the White House bail them out?
Soaring fuel prices are threatening air carriers around the world, and in the US the White House is scrambling to save the long-troubled Spirit Airlines.The carrier is in bankruptcy court and is quickly running out of cash. Reports last week suggested that the Trump administration was in talks to loan as much as $500m to the company as it teetered on the brink of liquidation. Then on Thursday, Donald Trump told reporters the federal government might buy the ailing airline.“We’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it,” Trump said, adding that the government could “sell it for a profit” when oil prices come down
G7 central banks poised to hold borrowing costs amid concerns over prolonged Iran war
The world’s most powerful central banks are poised to hold borrowing costs unchanged this week amid growing concerns over the unfolding inflation shock from the Iran war.In a critical week for the global economy, each of the central banks in the G7 are expected to issue warnings over the risks from the Middle East war driving up prices for households and businesses.Financial markets are braced for signals from the central banks of the US, Canada, Japan, Britain and the eurozone on the prospects for interest rates amid concerns that a prolonged conflict could force them to keep borrowing costs higher for longer.“Another week of no fighting, no deal and no energy flows, another week that pressure on inflation and supply chains continues to build,” said Wei Yao, an analyst at the French bank Société Générale.“We will probably see all the major central banks sticking to the strategy of ‘keep clam but stay vigilant’
HSBC ‘reviewing’ private school perk for bankers in Hong Kong
HSBC is reportedly reviewing a perk that covers school fees for bankers in Hong Kong as part of a big overhaul of the bank under its chief executive, Georges Elhedery.Europe’s largest bank is considering whether to scrap the perk for new employees or make changes to total compensation, Bloomberg News reported. No decisions have been made yet.Hundreds of staff in Hong Kong – HSBC’s biggest market – benefit from the subsidy, which costs the lender tens of millions of dollars a year, and is not available in its other hubs around the world, reportedly leading to tension at its headquarters in London.It is also not offered to staff of Hang Seng Bank, which HSBC acquired in full in January for £10bn and delisted from the local stock exchange
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