In Spotify Essentials, the Daily Dot curates custom playlists created by some of our favorite artists and writers. In this installment, experiment rap trio clipping. explores the seedier tracks in Spotify's vaults.
While searching Spotify for tracks by the techno artist Female (Peter Sutton), we stumbled across some weird shit.
Browsing the search results, we kept coming across titles like “Female Orgasm Sound.” That’s a fucking dumb name for a song, we thought, because we certainly couldn’t imagine that that title was actually a literal description of a piece of audio. Turns out it was.
All at once we were exposed to a deep, dark corner of Spotify’s vast library. Who is this stuff for? And moreover, why is it recorded so terribly? Most of it sounds like it was taped off old porn VHS tapes using a handheld recorder pressed up against the TV speaker. Others seem like they were encoded at the wrong bitrate, or reduced to such tiny mp3s that they’re full of glitches and digital artifacts. Is there no quality control in the erotic audio recording industry?
Personal favorites include “Female Orgasm Sound 8”—where the titular ‘female’ seems to be a guy whose voice has been pitch shifted up—and “Girl Orgasm Porn Sound 29,” which, we think, is just a mislabeled crowd ambience from a different, non-sex, sound effect library.
Some tracks we picked because of the weird-ass titles: What the fuck is a “Beerpong Female Orgasm”? Is she playing beerpong while fucking— f so, way to go, I guess—or is “beerponging” some filthy sex act we don’t know about yet? And why does it sound so much like the “Yacht Orgy”— which, by the way, consists of only one voice, and contains no seafaring sounds whatsoever? They couldn’t bother to throw a fog horn and some seagulls on that shit?
On top of all that, what with all the recent discussion of how artists get screwed by Spotify on royalties, and how millions of plays per month net an artist a percent of a penny, we wonder if these talented ladies and men see any income from their performances. It’s an outrage. Is David Lowery fighting for them, too?
So here’s our gift to you. clipping. has curated a sampling of some of the most fucked-up sex sounds available on Spotify. Our own music features field recordings and sound effect techniques, so our interest in this stuff is in some way related to clipping.’s practice. It might seem like a stretch, but really, we wear our influences on our sleeve, and if you wanted another playlist of E-40 and Geto Boys tracks, you can find one on your own, I’m sure.
This mix concludes with a subliminal therapy recording you’re really gonna need when you’re done. (For another mind-blowing rabbit hole, check out all the releases by Binaural Beat Brainwave Subliminal Systems.)
clipping.’s Sub Pop debut will be released in 2014. You can listen to the band’s album, midcity, on Soundcloud.
Illustration by Jason Reed