Interpreting a palindrome through sound is almost too easy a challenge. Record some music, process it to play backwards, then butt the two ends together to arrive at a “forward + backward” outcome. Instant palindrome.
To our benefit or detriment, Suss Müsik doesn’t do anything the easy way. A typical Suss Müsik piece improves reductively and methodically over many iterations. It takes a long time to filter out the dodgy playing and sour notes to reveal any good stuff buried within.
In this short piece, Suss Müsik began with a simple “forward + backward” rule: whatever one plays, try to trace it back to the origin. A bit of reverse-reverb was applied to the guitar to create the effect of coming and going in equal distance.
The piano and percussion bits came out of an attempt to play “five-prime to three-prime” phrases. The intention was to match the nucleic composition of double-stranded DNA when it forms a double helix. In genetic science, this is known as a palindromic sequence. Now you know.
Eventually, “fives to threes” became “sixes to twos.” Both add up to eight, so we called it a wash and built upon it. The reverse-reverb treatment was applied to the piano chords for the ending, which at one point sounded exactly the same played backwards or forwards.
The result is a sloppy, sentimental mess of a piece, pretty much the opposite of what one would expect for this exercise. We’re not really sure how it happened. Suss Müsik in a nutshell.
The piece is titled Detartrated, a palindrome word to describe the process of improving the taste of fruit juice by removing bitter citric tartrates.
