Chopped & Screwed

VINYL FORMAT. In between working on their follow-up to 2009's Jewellery and time on the road, Micachu & the Shapes chose to offer their fans a different kind of live album. Chopped & Screwed isn't your run-of-the-mill soundboard recording of a choice night on tour. It's more of an experiment by the United Kingdom-based band and its frontwoman, Mica Levi. She was approached by the London Sinfonietta Orchestra, who asked her to compose songs that reflected her influences.

As fans of the band know, the Shapes' tunes don't typically stick within a single genre. So it's not that big of a shocker that the songs Levi brought back to perform with her band and the Sinfonietta are abstract pieces that jump from folk to classical to drone. And if you didn't already guess it, yes, Levi was influenced by DJ Screw's widely popular "chopping and screwing" technique. - Prefix