FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

We Listened to d'Eon's Entire Album Backwards

The EP was designed to be played in any direction.

Montreal's oddball producer d'Eon has been firmly off the radar for the last couple of years. After gaining some notoriety through a split EP with Grimes in 2011, and a subsequent album in 2012, the producer pretty much disappeared. Now, d'Eon has returned with an EP of unreleased material titled Foxconn / Trios.

Recorded in 2012, the EP seems to shatter all current genre signifiers. Through meteoric drum ripples and rapid synth cuts, this break-neck display could only be described as future-footwork. Adding another layer to d'Eon's enigmatic new offering, is the producer's claim that the album can be listened to backwards.

Advertisement

"If all notes in a phrase and all chords in a progression work equally well with their neighbours before them and their neighbour after, the direction of the clock is irrelevant," he says in a press release. "By putting together small arrangements using low sample-rate soundfonts in a tracker, and by writing short loops that are legible both forwards and backwards, the MIDI information can be traversed in any arbitrary direction at any arbitrary intervals and still be harmonically and contrapuntally sound."

Read More on THUMP: Talking Innovation And Enjoyment With Apparat

In order to test the theory, we uploaded the album's individual audio files into a music editing suite and reversed them. Surprisingly, the claim wasn't just some erudite troll. Granted, these tracks are jarring to begin with, so playing them in reverse was never going to be a huge shock to the system. They still sound like bone-fide songs. There's no satanic message hidden here though, just a slight shift in dynamic.

When reversed, the tracks on Foxconn / Trios switch from pummelling to fluttering. The snare drum that normally hammers your head like a woodpecker on meth is instead sucked back into the ether, creating wispy, dream-like recordings. "Infosys II," in particular, actually comes out better when played backwards, while tracks like "Datamatics Global Services II" and "Satyam Integrated Engineering Solutions" are surprisingly similar to their forward-facing cousins.

Read More on THUMP: Konx-Om-Pax's Planet Mu Mix Is Stacked With 20 Years of Experimental Bangers

Realistically, no one's going to be reversing this EP and insisting that it's better than the conventional approach, but the fact that it works at all could be the start of something very interesting. Who knows, we could be on the cusp of a new 'multi-directional' movement, with d'Eon leading the pack — backwards.

Foxconn / Trios is out via Kuedo and Joe Shakespeare's Knives imprint on Nov 27th.

Daryl Keating is on Twitter.