DJ Rozwell (real name James Sherrill) is an American electronic musician and multimedia artist.
Rozwell is best known for three works: the "roguelike" album NONE OF THIS IS REAL, the Alternate Reality Game mostly known as "Erratas", and its associated tie-in musical side project KFC Murder Chicks.
His musical output has evolved over the years from extremely long and dense beat tapes full of upwards of 30 or 40 songs, to increasingly melodic and focused albums, while still retaining an extremely lo-fi production value and an emphasis on strange, obscure spoken word samples.
Elements of this sound carried over into his initially-anonymous Industrial Metal side project KFC Murder Chicks - ostensibly a band composed of three women with Rozwell merely providing mixing and mastering on two of their tracks. This "band" was the Entry Point into the "Erratas" ARG, a bizarre narrative revolving around a plot by an advanced AI algorithm to delete all traces of itself from the internet. Due to personal events in Rozwell's life, this ARG was (apparently) abandoned, until, in a bizarre turn of events, it received heavy amounts of attention in 2019 due to coverage from high-profile horror YouTubers such as Nightmare Expo and Blameitonjorge. By this point, the ARG had been left dormant and unfinished, and Rozwell has confirmed that there are no plans to revive it.
Discography
- NONE OF THIS IS REAL (EP, 2014)
- Slush Country (EP, 2014)
- Sludge Dredd (LP, 2014)
- Peel Sessions (LP, 2014)
- Longhair Through the Village (EP, 2014)
- NONE OF THIS IS REAL EXPANSION PACK: GALACTIC SURVEY (LP, 2014)
- Potato Big Plus (EP, 2014)
- Late Night Serial Killer Prank (LP, 2014)
- Golden Age of Gross Mystery (EP, as KFC Murder Chicks, 2014)
- NONE OF THIS IS REAL EXPANSION PACK: SCARE TACTICS (LP, 2015)
- Databender (EP, collaboration with BB Pirate, 2015)
- DARIAJAMS (Mixtape, as KFC Murder Chicks, 2015)
- 90s Remixes and Covers Vol. 1 (EP, 2015)
- Fangs Out (EP, as KFC Murder Chicks, collaboration with Soma, 2015)
- Murder Burger (LP, 2015)
- Cortex Rampage (LP, as KFC Murder Chicks, 2016)
- Sitcom (LP, 2017)
- Kali Yuga Survivalist (LP, collaboration with Surgeryhead, 2018)
- Sludge Judy (LP, 2018)
- The Shape of a Burning Credit Card (EP, as KFC Murder Chicks, 2019)
- Lizard Man Lake/Wednesday (DJ Rozwell/KFC Murder Chicks split, cassette only, 2020)
- Kayfabe Music: NONE OF THIS IS REAL and its first expansion pack are ostensibly "recovered from a series of dusty, unmarked Zip disks found in a condemned Massachusetts apartment building in 2001". Likewise, the expansion pack SCARE TACTICS was "recovered over the course of 2006-2014 from posts on a now-defunct audio-recovery forum".
- Quite a few songs are credited as "featuring" members of KFC Murder Chicks.
- Manipulative Editing: Most notably, voice clips of Action Bronson and Barack Obama on "Answer".
- Phrase Salad Lyrics: "Socks".This feels just like I'm running from cops
Is life (is life) just cumming in socks - Uncommon Time: Many tracks feature shifting and odd-numbered time signatures. The main pattern of "Need To Eat" features 2 bars of 7/8, 1 bar of 4/4, and then another of 7/8 before repeating again.
- Entry Point: The eponymous album details the ARG's lore and serves to attract people into playing it.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: According to the ARG, merely searching for the word Erratas will cause an algorithm to target you, taking down your YouTube video and even getting you fired.
- Mind Screw: Imagine Year Zero mixed with Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Due to its nature - where most clues were wiped from the internet shortly after being discovered - it rapidly became impossible for anybody to determine what was going on. How much of this is postmodernism and how much of this was unintentional is largely a mystery.
- Miniscule Rocking: Most of their songs are two minutes in length or less.
- New Sound Album: The Shape of a Burning Credit Card is more straightforward rock and electronic. Notably, "Wild Alien Baby" stands out from the rest of their discography for featuring vocals in a standard verse/chorus structure.
- Nightmare Face: A recurring motif. An uncanny police sketch is used as an avatar of sorts for the algorithm, and KFC Murder Chicks' logo is a blurred and distorted image of Frankenstein's monster.
- Stylistic Suck: Chronosforlife's YouTube channel. All the videos are in 144p. Taken even further with "The Lost World Jurassic Park Tribute [RE-UPLOAD]"
, which starts in 144p and actually somehow drops even further in sound and audio quality towards the end, far lower than the default export settings of most modern video codecs. - Uncommon Time: Mostly averted, compared to Rozwell's solo output. Even the more ambient tracks have fairly non-complex rhythmic structure to them. However, "PSNEAKYSYS" shifts into 5/4 time in the middle without warning, and "Konnekt4" descends into totally freeform jazz drumming in its final few seconds.
