Screw would have two copies of the same record spinning on the turntables, one playing just behind the other, and he’d “chop” back and forth between them with his crossfader at moments he wanted to bring out; scratching and running records back to repeat phrases and double up beats, sometimes dragging a finger alongside the wheel to give it a warble. He had his fader set to Hamster style, the reverse of most turntable setups, so that he could make quicker stabs between the discs.

This would all be recorded live to tape, with Screw knowing exactly how long he could record for and still stretch it out to fill one side of a 100-minute Maxell gray cassette. Then, he’d run that recording back through the tape deck, slowing it down with the four-track’s pitch control and taking the tape down another generation. The waves of the music were buried into the natural rattle of the cassette, and that was where Screw found his frequency.

“The technology we have today makes it real simple,” said Lil’ Randy, a DJ who appeared on numerous Screwtapes and still implements the same vinyl to tape methods as Screw. “They doin’ it now because of Serato, and all these other programs that they got that tell you the beat count. But doin’ a blend? Screw was doin’ that straight off his own mind. There was no machine that was showin’ him how to do it. The turntable didn’t have a beat counter on it. Nothing had a beat counter on it. He was just actually listening to the song through his headphones and hearing a beat count in his mind. There was no such thing as BPM to him.”

Screw towed a whole swarm of analog sound with him into a new dimension: where you could hear the music being torn apart as it rushed by, where you could count the letters of every word being spoken like they were being spoken to you. The storytelling came alive, and the vibration beneath it was built from a vast library of hip hop, funk, soul, reggae and R&B records that Screw would rope together and drag down to the same level, no matter the origin of the sound.