Article on BBC website about hidden – or not so hidden – album tracks, messages in songs etc.
Any examples spring to mind?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/aac75208-b3d0-4d22-af04-cfa95bbd43ae
Easter Egg Hunt
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There are a number of CDs that have a Track -1 (ie something hidden before Track 1 starts, put the CD in press play and then press back).
Buggered if I can remember any specifics apart from David Gray White Ladder album (and I can’t actually remember the track, just the fact that it was there)
I knew there was some “authoritative source material” somewhere
(OK, it’s only Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hidden_in_the_pregap
Boards of Canada do lots of stuff like this. Ferinstance: “You Could Feel the Sky” has a creepy backward masked “I am a horned God” sample in it, you can check it out of Youtube, where obsessives have posted all their tracks reversed.
Another neat one by them is that the entire track ” A is to B as B is to C ” is an audio palindrom .
palindrome.
Not sure if the whole idea has done it’s dash – but I remember a secret track on an Ash album, which is just the band talking drunkenly. Then someone throws up.
One of my favourites was on the World Party album “Bang!” where they added a hidden track after the end called “Surfing in Kuwait City” (a Beach Boys pastiche about the Gulf War).
Apparently it was only on the UK release – I remember something about the tape op elsewhere thought the album was finished etc etc.
And here it is….
Computers make the whole thing a bit pointless unless the band is particularly creative about it (Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin etc). When it was just the CD being played then “hidden tracks” we’re feasible, but not once they’re ripped to MP3 or whatever: it’s all painfully obvious, eg the 82 x 1 second tracks at the end of Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar etc.
The best CD Easter Egg I can think of is on Nurse With Wound’s “variety pack” compilation Livin’ Fear of James Last – when you load this through iTunes or wherever, the “Genre” for this harsh experimental electronic racket comes up as “Easy Listening”.
The best cases were presumably on vinyl, where things can remain pleasantly opaque. I always thought the best (and best known?) example was the second side of Monty Python’s Matching Tie & Handkerchief, where there are in fact two parallel tracks and where you drop the needle at the start determines which of the two grooves you get.
The 12″ single of Kate Bush’s The Sensual World was also double-grooved, with the vocal and instrumental versions. There was a story in the NME at the time about Robert Smith wanting to lay it to a friend and getting the instrumental version about 5 times in a row and starting to think he’d imagined the vocal.
There are quite a few other spectogram doodles out there apart from the Aphex one in the article. The Plaid track “3 Recurring”, for example, is programmed so that it creates an endless row of threes when put through a spectogram (and sounds like it).