(2010 Nov 4) New York Times publishes 'DJ Screw's legacy - Seeping Out of Houston, Slowly'

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(2010 Nov 4) New York Times publishes 'DJ Screw's legacy - Seeping Out of Houston, Slowly'

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Seeping Out of Houston, Slowly
By JON CARAMANICA
Published: November 4, 2010

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Willie Davis for The New York Times
Ten years after the death of DJ Screw, who slowed hip-hop music down to almost sluggish pacing, the influence of his sound is affecting a broader soundscape than ever, including the experimental electronic music of Daniel Lopatin, above, who performs as Oneohtrix Point Never.

THROUGHOUT the 1990s, DJ Screw pioneered hip-hop’s slide into the psychedelic. From his base on Houston’s south side, his method of slowing and manipulating records, a style that came to be known aƒs chopped and screwed — or just screw music — took rap to a state of primordial ooze. His music was woozy and immersive, elastic and gummy, and also an apt companion to the prescription-grade cough syrup that was one of the city’s favored narcotics. He was the figurehead for the style up until he died, from an overdose of codeine in combination with other drugs, in 2000.

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Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Salem, including, from left, Jack Donoghue, Heather Marlatt and John Holland, uses the chop-and-screw method popularized by DJ Screw, below, as an element in their own witch-house music.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of his death, and his influence is creeping ever further outward, far from Houston hip-hop into new, unanticipated places. His fingerprints are all over a new wave of slow music, from artists like White Ring, Balam Acab and oOoOO of the Internet-centric microgenre called witch house, or drag, to experimental electronic musicians like Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, and Tom Krell, who, performing as How to Dress Well, makes spacey post-R&B.; There is chopped and screwed cumbia and reggaetón, and one of this year’s strangest viral hits was the low-concept Shamantis remix of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile,” slowed down into a ghostly, oceanic 35-minute epic.

In all of these sounds, DJ Screw lurks in the distance, a firsthand or thirdhand influence, helping to cement his legacy as an underappreciated avant-gardist, creator of a sui generis sound that’s still growing and mutating.

The new wave began, in part, in Houston, where Robert Disaro grew up listening to DJ Screw, attending car shows in the city’s Third Ward and seeking out DJ Screw’s “gray tapes,” or original releases. In 2007 he started Disaro Records, and one of the early acts he released was Salem, from Michigan, who were making a gauzy, gothic stripe of electronic music.

As a teenager, John Holland of Salem said, he would use “my parents’ computer, going in on any screwed and chopped record I could find.” He began making music on a four-track recorder, then would slow down the results: “I used to like it more than when it was sped up.”

The aesthetic stuck, and eventually became a template. “No one else was making the kind of music Salem was making at the time,” said Robin Carolan, proprietor of the music blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats (20jazzfunkgreats.co.uk) and the record label Tri Angle, which releases music by similarly minded artists.

The sound that Salem helped to spearhead is called, loosely, witch house. Needless to say, the name has few adherents within the scene, if it is indeed even a scene in any formal way. “There’s no center for it, it’s definitely Internet-based,” said Bryan Kurkimilis of White Ring. It’s also a small community, but growing. A few blogs specialize in witch house, and recent releases by Tri Angle have appeared in the top 10 of the iTunes electronic-music chart. While they don’t have geography in common, witch house acts share several signifiers. The music is hollow and reverb-heavy yet spare, a triumph of texture more than traditional song structure. And of course, it’s slow, taking the screw mood and updating it. Like its predecessors, it can require almost monastic focus, songs creeping along at such a sluggish pace that the ear and brain are preparing for the next shift before the song is ready to deliver it.

Brendan Telzrow, who is a manager of Salem and records as Stalker, said that slowness forces attention and creates “detachment.” It isn’t the only goal, though. “It’s hearing something that’s not in the forefront, and you want to amplify that,” he said, a principle that applies equally to slowing the music of others and to making original songs. Many of these artists do both, releasing their own music — often in the evanescent CD-R format — and also compiling mixtapes of other peoples songs subjected to a barrage of manipulations and effects. A few artists, including Mr. Lopatin and Nike7Up, make hazy, image-shredding videos to accompany their songs.

“Memory manipulation,” is how these releases are described by Michael McGregor, who runs a music blog, Chocolate Bobka, and contributes to Altered Zones, the microgenre-fetishizing spinoff of the music site Pitchfork.com. “Songs you know come out in this totally cyborgish, psychedelic way.”

When DJ Screw made slow records, it required clever manipulation of hardware with built-in limitations. One method was to pitch down his turntable while simultaneously recording on a cassette player running at slow speed.

Nothing of the sort is required anymore, thanks to the preponderance of computer software — Logic, Ableton, Audacity, GarageBand, FruityLoops and others — that make manipulating music preposterously easy: “Programs that are instruments in and of themselves,” Mr. Telzrow said.

DJ Screw died before his influence fully trickled out of Houston. It was the stars of the city’s north side, from the Swishahouse label — not his Screwed Up Click — who first gained national attention. For a brief spell in the mid-2000s, some major-label rap albums were released in chopped-and-screwed versions, a mainstream nod to Houston’s screw scene, where the double release of regular and slow versions was a longstanding practice.

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Deron Neblett

It helped expose many outsiders to the style. Indeed, of the generation of electronic musicians making slow music, most weren’t old enough to have listened to DJ Screw when he was alive. They downloaded his music posthumously, or picked up on the music made by acolytes and imitators, from the Swishahouse label to the more gothically inclined Memphis hip-hop scene and beyond.

“By the time I knew about screw music, he was dead,” said Mr. McGregor, who makes a point of listening to the Sunday night radio show of Swishahouse’s Michael Watts, streamed over the Internet from Houston.

Many of these artists are in their early to mid-20s, which meant that in their formative teenage years, screw music had already had its moment in the national spotlight. That they would tap into it as an influence isn’t as odd as it might have been even a few years ago. The Internet had made it accessible and acceptable. “These artists can take what they want from it and not be indie pariahs,” said Mr. Carolan.

Mr. Kurkimilis of White Ring said of the generational shift that “in the years leading up to this, it was pretty much dance beats, kind of fast. It gets to the point where you can only do so much with that kind of stuff.”

Choosing to get lost in slow music, Mr. Telzrow said, “felt like a way of dissociating from having so much stimulus, with music and the Internet, so much input to manage.”

Retreat is a recurring theme in witch house: many artists use tough-to-type triangles and crosses in their names, and several prefer not to be photographed, or in the case of Balam Acab, even identified. The purposeful obscurity is “a reaction against the Internet,” Mr. Carolan theorized. The mood is reclusive, sometimes outright reluctant.

But gone is the symbiosis of music and drug so crucial to Houston hip-hop. The new wave of artists is quick to distance its music from codeine culture — most insist they’ve never used syrup recreationally. But they understand that an altered state can lead to a different level of comprehension of their music. “You definitely don’t need to take painkillers to hear it,” said Mr. Holland of Salem, “but if your body feels relaxed, it’s definitely something.”

The creators of witch house and its spinoffs see their work as part of a spectrum of noirish music. Mr. Kurkimilis likens the current moment to the post-punk of the early 1980s, also a response to a time of economic stress. Mr. Telzrow has been “listening to a lot of Xasthur,” the one-man D.I.Y. black metal band, and Chris Dexter, who records as oOoOO — “It’s not meant to be pronounced” — cites “hippieish but dark” musicians like Jana Hunter and Matteah Baim as influences. “If I ended up writing soundtracks for B horror movies,” he said, “that would be cool.”

That may be a reasonable goal, though there’s occasional evidence that these sorts of sounds might be welcomed by mainstream ears. Echoes of Houston’s quicksand sound still occasionally pop up in hip-hop and R&B; — recent examples include Ciara’s “Ride” and Chris Brown’s “Deuces” — even if the city’s time in the spotlight has passed. And thanks to Lil Wayne and others, syrup has remained part of hip-hop’s narcotic mythology.

Screw music also remains vital to the fabric of Houston. The shop DJ Screw founded, Screwed Up Records & Tapes, still sits on Cullen Boulevard, with the same posters and list of available tapes (now double CDs) that have been there for years. The University of Houston library system has begun to collect artifacts of the DJ Screw era.

But local artists don’t always release slow versions of their albums, as was once the norm, said E.S.G. of the Screwed Up Click. “People buy the old classics,” he said, “but now you got apps on the iPhone to screw music. It’s taking the originality away.”

Even a decade removed, though, the sound is indelible. “Screw, it’s just like a regular word now,” said DJ Chill, DJ Screw’s close friend and host of the weekly Damage Control radio show, which features screwed mixes by DJ Lil Randy. “A style outliving a person — you don’t see that too much.”

Pop, from 3-4 Action, another Screwed Up Click affiliate, remembers DJ Screw having huge ambition for his sound: “He would always say, ‘I’m going to screw the world,’ and it’s crazy, because the man screwed the world.”

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