Chop Suey.

This Will Destroy You's Donovan Jones Shares His New Chopped and Screwed Mix.

Last week, This Will Destroy You bassist and ridiculously obsessive hip-hop fan (you'd be hard-pressed to find a touring rap show he doesn't attend in Dallas) passed along to us at CTHQ a pet project he'd spent the past month or so somewhat secretly crafting. He called the almost 50-minute-long mix of chopped and altered tunes currently dominating the radio landscape Cotton Magic, and to be sure, it's an alluring, if somewhat head-scratching, offering.

Jones is quick to explain the curiosity factor at least: “I imagine [people are] gonna wonder why a white boy would do [this],” he said while passing along the link to a stream of his creation. “[But] I grew up watching BET because my parents blocked MTV.” And so his lifelong hip-hop obsession was born — even while, as a musician, his band efforts compelled him to follow a different creative path.

Still, to hear Jones tell it, maybe there isn't such a huge different between his adoration for hip-hop and his efforts in making This Will Destroy You sound to deep and vast.

“As far as I'm concerned, [This Will Destroy You] makes slow jams,” he says. “I love slow jams. I love big bass and seeing people pass out from it. On our last record, Tunnel Blanket, one of our goals was to make it as bass-heavy as possible using many different methods. Screw music and rap music was and is still a large factor in how we approach dynamics. We like that the music literally hits you. The bangers on this mixtape will hit you [like that].”

And he simply chose the tracks he manipulates on the mix because, in listening to Dallas hip-hop radio, certain songs hit him in that same very way.

“Dude, the production for rap and R&B tracks has gotten so much more interesting lately,” he says of his mainstream radio single fandom at the moment. “They chop the tracks up so much now– especially when they gotta turn an explicit track into a radio edit. Not only on the production aspect, either. The live DJs at 97.9 and 104.5 make some of the most dissonant-sounding mash-ups I have ever heard. Seriously, if someone were to just switch to the station during a segue, it would disorient them right off the highway. That shit is tight.”

And, he hopes, so too is this new mix.

“It's a mixtape for poking hoes,” Jones says of the mix, and not even joking in the slightest. “I just love Dallas radio and a lot of these tracks are currently hot. I dunno. That's all I got.”

In our opinion, that's plenty.

This mix goes hard.

TRACKLIST:
BLACK TAFFY – THEM THATS GOT
MISSY ELLIOTT – BEEP ME 911
J. COLE – NOBODY'S PERFECT
BRANDY FT. CHRIS BROWN – PUT IT DOWN
FRANK OCEAN FT. ANDRE 3000 – PINK MATTER
CHRIS BROWN – SWEET LOVE
JUICY J – BANDS A MAKE HER DANCE
BEYONCE – DANCE FOR YOU
MISSY ELLIOTT – HOT BOYZ
AALIYAH – ARE YOU THAT SOMEBODY