Beyond even the aesthetic influence, "drag" does feel like a close relative to screwed and chopped. With its purposefully sluggish bpm and manipulated vocals, chopped and screwed turned no-nonsense street rap into something moodier and more psychedelic. It was an underground, even subversive genre, tied to syrup abuse and its mixtapes circulated among peers. And in a sense, that's what the "drag" musicians are doing with pop-- twisting it and slowing it down, making it druggier, and for now, working in a loose scene that's unrelated to a lot of what's happening in indie

Each artist has his own take: Balam Acab sounds almost like rudimentary dubstep, oOoOO's songs are ethereal and sample heavy, and White Ring are on the darker edge of synth-pop. But they share some common traits. "Drag" tracks are always beat-driven but molasses-paced-- the bass is prominent, but drowsy and languid. Vocals are there, but no one's singing upfront. (Typically, vocals are manipulated in some way and buried in the mix.) It's not necessarily tech-y music-- there's a human quality to these songs but it's ghostly and distorted, as if the tracks themselves are haunted

En una reciente entrevista a Vice Magazine, oOoOO cuenta que un amigo les dijo que "sonaban como la música de una escena de película en la que un hombre ha entrado en un abarrotado restaurante en Mumbai y ha disparado a todo el mundo. Y ahora está caminando, a cámara lenta, bajo una intensa lluvia, a media noche, a través de las mugrientas calles de la ciudad, llorando y torturado por los remordimientos de lo que acaba de hacer."

The term "drag" is partly a reference to screwed and chopped hip-hop, the syrupy style cooked up by DJ Screw and others in 1990s Houston, and was first used by the band Salem to describe their music.

Chopped and screwed (sometimes called screwed and chopped or slowed and throwed) refers to a technique of remixing hip hop music which developed in the Houston hip hop scene in the 1990s. This is accomplished by slowing the tempo down to between 60 - 70 quarter-note beats per minute and applying techniques such as skipping beats, record scratching, stop-time, and affecting portions of the music to make a "chopped-up" version of the original

esto de las etiquetas es cada vez mas (y mas) ridiculo...

Hombre chinaski, supongo que lo que dices, soocio lo sabe perfectamente y creo que no va por ahí su "queja". hay demasiadas etiquetas innecesarias en mi opinión. por ejemplo, ¿es realmente necesario el nombre de witch house? ¿sin esa etiqueta no podríamos catalogarlo? ¿dista tanto de algún estilo o combina tantos elementos como para darle el nombre de un nuevo estilo o tenerlo como una nueva rama de "x" estilo? yo creo que no, ahora bien, es una opinión.

escucharlo, que te emocione o no, que te guste o no, es independiente a las etiquetas (o debe ser así, solo que a MUCHOS hoy en día se les ha olvidado), con lo que debemos separarlo el que guste/disguste o las sensaciones que produzca con pensar que pertenece a una nueva etiqueta. a lo mejor a soocio le ha encantado pero le ha parecido estúpido pensar que es un nuevo estilo o simplemente un hijo bastardo (que ya es) de algún otro. le sonaba a algo de sobra inventado ya. quizás si lo nuevo son ciertos sonidos o la forma de utilizarlos, bastaría con decir el estilo que es sumado a ciertos adjetivos, simplemente.

a mi a veces con tanta etiqueta (que me parecen importantes por lo que has comentado) se me hace la picha un lío. a veces me gustaría que no hubiesen TANTAS, porque al final solo consiguen meterme en un lío que a veces no sé ni como salir. a veces incluso me hacen parecer tonto, porque no veo yo esas diferencias que lo hacen convertirse en un nuevo estilo.

When Salem first stepped from the shadows in late 2007, people had fun describing their creepy and creeping sound: screwgaze, cave crunk, ghost juke and crimsonwave were just a few of the proposed monikers. Now, as a herd of imitators (White Ring), admirers (Fostercare) and like-minded lost souls (Balam Acab and oOoOO) haul themselves into the murky, flickering spotlight, Salem themselves have come up with the best genre name of all: drag.

A short but deceptively complicated word, it expresses so much of what makes their music vital: its tormented protraction, sexual ambiguity, the heavy burden it seems to carry. The trio also like to smoke a lot on stage. Heather Marlatt from the band explains. "Our music is not like some other types where the energy is back and forth – music considered drag is like giving up oneself, to be pulled and controlled," she says. "We also use it to describe music that has been slowed down or 'screwed'."

One of this new sound's most obvious influences is a form of late 90s hip-hop pioneered by Houston's DJ Screw, who pitched down rap songs so dramatically they became hazy and sinister – not so much remixes as long, twisted shadows cast by the songs themselves. The form was later explored by Berlin-based art collective AIDS-3D, who "screwed" Eurodance hits, making monsters of songs like Rhythm Is a Dancer and Renegade Master. Salem first deployed the term drag on a number of screwed-style remixes, most notably a version of Skeeter Davis's 1963 country hit The End of the World, which in their hands becomes pregnant with impossible pain.

Salem signed to the pioneering Acephale Records, and among the first to discover their dark charms was eclectic Brighton-based music blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats (XXJFG). One of their number, Robin Carolan, has helped track the scene's evolution, and with his newly launched record label Tri Angle looks set to have a hand in its future development. He described the sound's appeal to me in typically verbose fashion. "It's like a witching-hour vision of Cocteau Twins dream pop, meshed with the soundtrack to a particularly angsty Gregg Araki film full of Gen X shoegazer atmospherics and industrial beats, brought bang up to the date by the influence of raw hip hop mutations like chopped and screwed and juke." Tri Angle will release music by some of the fledgling scene's more interesting new acts: the haunted Balam Acab and the eerie oOoOO, as well as exploring the bizarre and varied terrain that has become XXJFG's home.

The scene that Salem spawned has developed a distinctly dislocated worldview. "There's an interest in superstition and the occult, but filtered through the very modern mindset of individuals who have grown up glued to the internet," says Carolan. "It adds to the feeling of isolation, melancholy and loneliness." That perspective has helped forge a strong visual identity (aided in part by artists like Terence Koh) that echoes the sound's darker notes, as well as its bone-dry humour. "There's a lot of re-contextualisation of religious and mythical symbolism," says Carolan. "They are obsessing over how they can create their own version of the hexagram as an emoticon."