I just really enjoyed a Justin Bieber song!

Justin Bieber: Irritating pop-goblin rendered lovely by technology...

I hadn’t heard of who Justin Bieber was until some Twitbook type campaign tried to get him to play some gig somewhere or other.

Even when I found out his identity I wasn’t in a rush to hear one of his songs particularly, so filed him in the back of my mind in the place where other such nonentities are placed to be ignored when they may encroach upon my daily doings.

Until today.

Thanks to my friend Alex’s awesome discovery, there appears to be a way to render this flaccid excuse for music into something beautiful.  By stretching out the song ‘U Smile’ by 800%, suddenly the squeaking histrionics is transformed into a beautiful ambient soundscape lasting over 35 minutes.

If you like a bit of ambient music I think you’ll really enjoy it.  I’ve just downloaded it in mp3 form, I reckon it could make awesome ‘go to sleep’ music – and you can check it out by utilising the handy music player widget thing just below this paragraph.

Tantalisingly on the artists’ SoundCloud page are instructions on how the slowed-down version of the Bieber song was achieved.  Instructions that I have followed, and am eager to share.  Whilst I’m pleased to have heard Justin Bieber 800% more slow than his producers intended, I still have no desire to listen to him at full speed.

So what if I were to slow down a song I actually knew really well and liked?

Well that’s precisely what I’ve done – rather than go for squeaky safe pop music (which admittedly not many examples of which fall into the two above categories!), I decided to go for something that you would never ever consider as anything approximating ambient.

Ladies and gentleman, I invite you to take an ambient journey into the world of Motorhead, and their seminal hit ‘Ace of Spades‘ slowed down by the same 800% as the Bieber experiment linked above*.  I think I’d go as far as to say it’s been an interesting experiment!

But d’you know what’s depressing, and I never thought I’d say this, I think I prefer Justin Bieber to Motorhead!  It was also quite impressive that Cat identified the artist upon first listen despite not knowing what I was up to… definitely more foreboding and malignant sounding that lil’ Justin though.

Having gotten over the technical wibblery (ie. me being a bit of a fucktard) I continued the theme, and this result I’m really pleased with – so below is the Levellers (a fairly obscure album track) ‘Maid of the River’ – one of my favourite ever songs, rendered much slower, and it’s nearly as beautiful as the original, and pisses on Bieber.  Oh yes.  Fuck you, Justin!

Have a listen to the following wonderful epic, and then go and get yourself some Levellers albums, because they’re awesome at full speed too!

*Footnote – it would have taken considerably less time if I’d paid attention to the instructions rather than leap in and create a 36 hour rendering of Ace of Spades by using the wrong ratio measure, the file clocking in at over 1GB!