i don't really know the first time i heard chopped & screwed music. as a native texan i know that it was always somewhere in the water. but how i as a fairly sheltered little white mormon bitch from college station got turned on to the trippy slowed down culture from houston i'm not exactly sure. whenever it hit, it completely reoriented my brain and changed my life, in a way that is not entirely unique amongst many millennial music nerds: see also oneohtrix, spaceghostpurrp, the entirety of vaporwave, etc... what i do know is that i really started to fall in love with chopped & screwed music once i left texas, as i did with most things from texas, because the place of my raising was no longer the entirety of my reality and i could see what made it distinct from other places. the first screwtape i remember listening to in full was chapter 47: codeine fiend. like many children of eccojams i remember trying to slow shit down and make weird audio collages in audacity but didn't really know what i was doing until sometime in 2014 when i downloaded a cracked copy of virtual dj and started to figure it out. i have always been very embarrassed about my lack of like, formal or technical knowledge of music, it's all just been vibing and me teaching myself things because i have often been too stubborn to ask for help or too nervous to share my ideas or too worried to claim my voice. i often felt like hiding behind slowed down music or fucking around with other people's music was a way to like, displace or sublimate the fact that as a ~closested trans person~ i did not really feel comfortable expressing my voice and even now i still struggle to fully be in my voice both figuratively and literally. but i think this is a valid practice unto itself and isn't a way of hiding behind someone else's voice but can be a way of actually genuinely expressing myself. i love the way that slowing something down reveals the hidden layers, recontextualizing it or unearthing buried desires you didn't even know where there. but i think what i really especially love about it is the way that you can always hear the person who made it.

over time my style started to become a little more dub-y and almost shoegaze-y with immense amounts of reverb and echo and distortion and layering as opposed to clean neat chops, in part because i don't come from a turntablist background so i'm not able to do some of the complicated gymnastics that screw could. but even though chopped & screwed seems like a fairly simple formula, it's totally unpredictable, and was essentially anything screw wanted it to be: my favorite moments are when he momentarily mixes in snatches of another song like "moments in love" or "friends." i have also taken to calling my style "chopped and shoegazed" because being a little white now ex-mormon bitch from college station it is not my place to claim the screw name, because screwed music is screw, that's the whole magic of it, that you can hear this man in these tapes: his voice, his taste, his fingerprints.

only screw could have made screwtapes, and only i could have made this, which is the product of a lifetime of contradictions and cosmic coincidences and weird unexpected collisions: it belongs as much to the mormon tabernacle choir and the big room reverb of all the musicals my mom dragged me to, saturday mornings watching country music videos and power ballad infomercials, saturday afternoons with my dad whittling away at pieces of wood in the garage while playing opera on npr as background noise, days faking sick to stay home from school when i secretly watched pop videos on VH1, the U2: the best of 1980-1990 compilation i stole from my dad, the brian eno productions i found through the U2 compilation i stole from my dad, all the jock jams in gym class and texas a&m sporting events, all the rap mixtapes i downloaded in high school because they were free and i didn't have money and my parents wouldn't notice, all the footwork edits and jersey club remixes and cringecore soundclown mashups that i ripped from soundcloud when i started DJing in college, all the zip files of vaporwave and mallsoft and future funk and witch house and whatever the fuck else that i downloaded in college and wrote a hacky paper about that i used in my grad school applications, the late night freestyle sessions after my radio show in college when i would smoke blunts with local rappers while they freestyled over the shoegaze and dream pop show that followed mine, the big sky and suffocating landscape of texas, the bloody history of the tennessee hills, the rusty endless sidewalks of new york, the cheap dollar earbuds rotting inside my skull

there is not a real order to this but if you hear a lower quality jankier degraded file that sounds like it was downloaded from youtube to mp3 and then accidentally run thru the washing machine, it's probably older, if it sounds more like it was downloaded in flac from soulseek and then accidentally run thru the washing machine, it's probably newer

rest in peace to robert earl davis