DJ Yo-Yo Dieting - Regurgitation as Birth (2009)

The original concept of 'Chopped and Screwed' Hip Hop was developed by Robert Earl Evans AKA DJ Screw in Houston during the mid 1980's. His tracks leaked codeine-imbibed beats which slowed the BPM down to a crawl.  During the early 1990s, he invited some of Houston’s most renowned rappers from the south side of the city to flow on his 'Screw' tapes. What originally began as a small Houston scene, 'Chopped and Screwed' music started getting more widespread attention in the late 90s which ultimately led to DJ Screw becoming a much sought after Hip Hop producer.

Pat Maherr AKA DJ Yo-Yo Dieting first appeared on the radar with the dilapidated droneworks of his Indignant Senility releases in the late 1990's and again recently with the mighty fine Diamond Catalog album 'Magnified Palette'. But it was his ultra-slow, stodgy and wildly psychedelic take on Hip Hop as DJ Yo-Yo Dieting that brought him to the attention of more adventurous listeners. Maherr took the original ideas of 'Chopped and Screwed' Hip Hop but added his own lo-fi, deeply experimental agenda. What he created was a complete side-step away from the template set down by DJ Screw. The pace was dropped to a sludgy, crippled crawl and the samples time-stretched and pitch bent almost out of all recognition until the ghouls between their crevices were released in some kind of audio William Burroughs-esque edit technique. 

Maherr’s mysteriously inert, gravity crushed arrangements frequently reach such cataleptic tempos that you begin to become physically affected and totally hypnotised by them. Layers of fucked samples grind against flickering ripples of echo, various disorientating audio effects and cassette tape artefacts like tectonic plates. This is nothing short of the very furthest antithesis of everything created in Hip Hop since day one and truly has to be heard to be believed.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend anything that his man has his name on as essential listening, irrespective of what music is normally your thing.

The album 'Regurgitation as Birth' was completed at the end of 2009 and self-released on C90 via the Portland Bad Date Line imprint. Like all releases under the name of DJ Yo-Yo Dieting, none of the tracks have any names letting you concentrate more on the music contained therein.