Over the past few years the amount of people making music in their bedroom and finding a captive audience solely through tools available on the internet has blown up significantly. The process of discovery and taste making has quickly shifted online in the past decade (as most information has) with the rise of music blogging and the monolithic Pitchfork Music, but lately whole genres of music are being created almost exclusively online. Specifically, the rise of the slightly stupid sounding "Witch House" or "Grave Wave".
Witch House
SALEM
oOoOO
M△S▴C△RA - The Five Wounds from Video Horror Show on Vimeo.
M△S▴C△RA
This is just a small sample of the more successful groups from this genre. Salem in particular acts as the standard bearer for a quickly growing and splintered genre. What really seems to connect all these groups sonically is broad cultural plundering of sounds, specifically the Chopped and Screwed movement from Houston in the late 90's, early oughts. The highly revered DJ Screw is best known for remixing rap and r&b tracks with distinctly slowed down vocals and trebly percussion. This paired well with what seemed to be Houston's drug of choice at the time, codeine cough syrup (purple drank). Also, lots of weed.
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DJ Screw
Swishahouse
SALEM
These influences are recontextualized into dark and atmospeheric tracks paying homage to early industrial acts such as Throbbing Gristle and Caberet Volatire as well as early Goth bands such as the Cure and Cocteau Twins and even early Shoegaze acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Catherine Wheel.
Cocteau Twins
Throbbing Gristle
Ride
What attracts me to this music most is the immaterial nature of the whole thing. Save for one band, none of these groups really tour. In fact, many of these bands don't even exist outside of a tumblr and soundcloud account. Almost all of them have an unintelligible name and remain anonymous, choosing to post appropriated images on their blogs and as their album art. What's more, as soon as a loose grouping of these artists were labeled as witch house, hundreds of groups sprung up to jump on the band wagon and than dozens more came along to damn them as posers and the definition of the genre as inaccurate. This happened within the span of, more or less, a year. In that time, SALEM released a highly anticipated and critically praised album, the New York Times wrote an article on the genre, and then it became bloated and sort of died. Now you can find groups making simillar music under the banner of many "new" genres such as, grave wave, drag, screw gaze, etc and so forth.
This article, at its best, is an extremely broad impression of a genre that is willfully obscure and physically inaccessible. If you'd like to investigate further, here is a list of links and band names
Michael Jordan Pog (Platinum Edition)
Cosmotropia de Xam (video collagist)
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