Text by Sam HaiNe
You never quite know what will cross your path late at night while aimlessly trekking through the internet. Amidst the various obscure word searches you might just find something worth your time. This is exactly the case when I somehow stumbled upon this mixtape from Purple Tape Pedigree & Steady Bloggin’.
Screwing Yourself To Live: A Chopped & Slowed Tribute To Black Sabbath, is a collection of Black Sabbath songs that have been meticulously slowed and throwed by Geng-Grizzly.
If you haven’t the slightest clue what chopped & screwed is, it is the remixing of songs by slowing the tempo down to between 60 and 70 quarter-note beats per minute and using techniques such as scratches, doubles and stop-time to chop the song into a chopped up version of its original. This technique was first developed in Houston, Texas by the late DJ Screw and has grown in popularity into its own sub-culture.
The result of this on Black Sabbath results in something rare and successful. Why is very simple; slowing the tempo down will either reveal sloppy production or highlight exceptional production. Black Sabbath still to this day is one of the best bands of musicians ever to play. The slower/screwed tempos here put breathing room between each instrument and give them defined textures, often turning riffs into walls of distorted doom and blues. The vocals are dropped down to their lowest level with an almost non-human effect. Throw in some film samples throughout the mixtape and you have here my friends a darkly fuzzed out head trip down to the bottom of a codeine bottle.
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