Track of the Moment: Bill Gates/Never Leave by XXYYXX

If you follow what I write (which is a whole bunch of people, or at least that’s what I tell myself to make me feel better), then you know I’m a huge fan of open beats and lots of lows/bass. However, I’m generally not a fan of chopped and screwed songs, and that’s where XXYYXX doesn’t sound like he would appeal to me. However, there are a few artists who are good at it; The Weeknd on the track “Initiation”, Pogo (who will get his own TotM soon enough), and XXYYXX.

For those that don’t know (which I assume is most of you, if you haven’t already Googled “Chopped and Screwed”), is when the DJ takes a vocal track and divides it up into small pieces so that it’s mostly just fairly unintelligible syllables, although the bits can be long enough to include a word or 2. Once the DJ has his “chopped” vocal samples, he then “screws” them by playing with the pitch and length of each sample. While it may sound like it would hectic, a good artist can do some amazing things with it, and use it the same way someone would use a guitar or synth. Which XXYYXX does better than most of what I’ve heard.

He’s currently got 2 full albums and an EP out, with XXYYXX (that’s his 2^nd album) and Mystify (that’s the EP) being the good ones of the trio. XXYYXX features more of what I like; very calm, open beats with minimal sounds, relying on extended chopped vocals and the occasional synthesized sound. It’s rather ambient, but it’s the good ambient – the kind that you put on in the background, but still find yourself splitting your attention.

However, Mystify is a crossbreed of XXYYXX and Flying Lotus’s Cosmogramma, which, if you remember, was one of my top 42 albums. While it does have a few chopped and screwed vocal elements to it, it mostly stays in the soft-jazzy realm with multiple layers (but nothing that approaches FL’s controlled chaos), crackly beats, quiet and omnipresent low-frequency synths, and a variety of MIDI beeps and boops (which sometimes get replaced by a cool synth). It’s a bit more fun than the album up there, but still XXYYXX’s own ambient sound.

Check him out on Band Camp. His stuff is only a $1 there, so it’s a pretty low-risk investment. You can also stream all of his stuff off of Band Camp, so you can try before you buy. But to save you that extra step that we all know you won’t take, here’s a little something off of Mystify, and a solid track from XXYYXX.