Transverse Reverse the Universe

Transverse Reverse the Universe is an experimental version of the Transverse song, itself a detournement of another song from 1970. This track was constructed by transforming certain of Gerald Raunig's concepts — like the temporary overlappings of theory and practice, or of revolutionary and artistic machines — into techniques of production; and specially by digging deep down into the procedures of his transversion. The first part of the track is a dividual reading of the Transverse lyrics, following a very basic Brechtian mechanism of dialectically articulating naturalistic identification and the edition of the voice reinforcing the simple technological, three-dimensional mode of its recording in the reverberating library space of Casa Azul, Málaga. The second part is a machinic reconstruction of Transverse’ theoretical background: Chapter 9 of Gerald Raunig’s book Making Multiplicity, titled "Of Technologies and Transverses". The vocoder used here in a non-conformist, sometimes unfriendly manner, is in itself a conceptual distortion of how this technical effect was originally used in electronic and pop music (from Kraftwerk to Giorgio Moroder) during the 1970s as an — ambivalent — utopian assemblage of human beings and machines. The drone in the background was generated by overlapping layers of Transverse's actual melodic line played on a Rhodes piano, isolated from the original singer's voice and extremely slowed down until it becomes a substrate or the underground roar of the ritornello-like way of (vocoder) theoretical reading. The third part is a secondary expropriation of the detourned 1970 song from Spotify, recorded in the air over and over — until an accident happened when the detourned and the retourned song overlapped by chance in the process. The whole of it was reversed, inversed, and finally speeded up and cut-up edited in order to produce a sonic multiplicity through the construction of this beyond-the-discursive, a-signifying multitude of human-and-non-human singing voices.

Headphones recommended.

The audio file will be released on 4 Nov. 2026.