The second nomination by readers for a genre deconstruction was ‘darkstep’, which in comparison to past challenges should be a fairly easy one given how established the genre is amongst the dnb community. Put simply, it’s a sub-genre of drum and bass, with a splash of breakbeat, industrial techno, darkcore - the major rule is dark and low-slung bass. Consider it a branch on the ancestral tree of dnb, growing out of junglist, hardstep and darkcore rhythms in the late 90s.
The major difference to mainstream dnb (a gap which is fast closing as more dnb artists break into the traditionally pop-dominated charts) is the ‘mood’. Ascending and descending semitones induce the sense of urgency or melancholy, building step by step to the typical dnb ‘drop’. Sampling comes in handy to create the ethereal atmospherics - if you can imagine the track in a sci-fi movie, you’re reaching darkstep territory.
Looking around the web, a great definition can be found on last.fm, and darkstep.org can deliver the goods as only a fan-site can, complete with upcoming darkstep releases for 2011.
Oh, and if you hear anyone chuck in techstep or neurofunk look no further than darkstep for your definition; if you become embroiled in a neurofunk vs darkstep row - agree to disagree, across pages and pages of darkstep/neurofunk debates no firm conclusion as to which is the ‘true‘ genre has been reached.
A few notable darkstep artists to get you in the mood:
Black Sun Empire
Trace
Ed Rush
The Panacea
Calyx and Teebee
Counterstrike
Spor
Future genre deconstructions include tropical, post-dubstep, juke and any more nominations by the readers - email me or leave a comment to question the genre or sub-genre you're interested in!
In our last deconstruction we looked at the origins of witch house, and now look further into the artists behind the sound and how they interpret it.
Houston hip-hop drowsy beats provide an underlay to the sound, but the additions are down to the individual artists and include goth, electro, dub, ambient, house, chill-out, synth-pop, psychedelia, 80s, indie and more. Vocals can be present but are used as ethereal side-notes or ghostly voices and the occult themes linger throughout. There’s also a visual trend amongst the artist names also, and commentators have been quicker to pick up on the deliberate use of symbols as band naming conventions - think Prince () then times it by ten, and you can get the unsearchable Google nightmare known as witch house acts.
Journalist Tom Ewing commented that “artificial scarcity is one way of restoring context to music - releasing it on non-digital formats, or never recording certain tracks. In the case of witch house, the scene’s penchant for non-Googleable names (oOoOO or Gr†ll Gr†ll) may be an attempt to create scarcity.” Scarcity has been a known technique used in the techno community to create limited exclusiveness (and handily raise releases to collector item status) and witch house employs it to carve out an underground tunnel with limited entrances. Like something out of a fantasy film, you find yourself trying to identify the passages with geometric shapes, symbols, punctuation; there is a distinct lack of actual words. It's an enforced restriction; perhaps to keep out naysayers, perhaps to keep in exclusivity.
If you want to find witch house artists online you’ll find them, but it’s not a 3 second job - the subtle message is ‘we are not easy access’. And this is also reflected in the actual music - the hooks aren’t instant and the style doesn’t fit in with our natural urge for catchy beats.
The Labels:
Houston’s Disaro and Tri Angle are two of the main ‘witch house’ stables, but the latter is less easy with the ‘drag’ term and more readily embraces the listenable styles of witch house - less distortion and more melodic catch (Balam Acab, oOoOO). Disaro, situated in the middle of purple drank heritage country has reached out to the chopped and ‘screwed’ sounds of witch house / drag artists (Salem, White Ring, Mater Suspiria Vision, Fostercare, //TENSE//, Modern Witch, Gr†ll Gr†ll, /// ▲▲▲ \\\, †‡†).
Some of the Artists and their Sounds:
oOoOO - more commonly known as Christopher Dexter Greenspan, a self-confessed Burial follower. Ethereal, dubstep, mainstream rap / hip-hop, drag.
Creep - Lauren Dillard and Lauren Flax also signed to Tri Angle; Flax is already known on the house circuit, and as Fischerspooner’s tour DJ. Influences come from the likes of Hyperdub, house, UK bass, ethereal dub, pop.
White Ring - Bryan Kurkimilis and Kendra Malia are signed to Disaro, situated in the middle of Houston’s drag scene. Hip-hop and gangster rap are strong influences, but the dark synth pop, horror sounds and weirded-out vocals provide a fuller embrace to the witch house thematics.
Salem - John Holland, Heather Marlatt and Jack Donoghue have just released their debut LP on IAMSOUND, composed of sluggish hip-hop, nails down a chalk board samples, fuzzy percussion, and some serious dubstep lifting. A bit like dubstep washed up on the beach as a corroded, raggy corpse.
Mater Suspiria Vision - drones aplenty, reverbed to fuck and incessant knockings of beats. Reminds me of a restrained Atari Teenage Riot without the shouty screaming.
ℑ⊇≥◊≤⊆ℜ - a member of Mater Suspiria Vision, her remix of Lady Gaga reconfirms for me that witch house may be more effective as a remix tool. A corrosion of the present rather than creating from destruction. In regards to the name - I give up, I think pronounciation may involve tongue removal.
Gr†ll Gr†ll - Atmospheric, similar to choral drones, distinct lack of beats on occasion.
Modern Witch - Bit of creepy electro, playing with softer noises to create psychedelia, beaten on by off-kilter percussion.
Pwin ▲▲Teaks - More like drowning in a sea of distortion, hearing sounds filtered through salt water and very little rhythm.
Tearist - Darker electro pop, there are discernible hooks to grasp onto.
Fostercare - An obvious disciple of Burial taking the name from a Burial track. Clearer vocals, a faster beat, kind of like dubstep turning into spoken-word electro.
twYIYZoNe - more drones, echoes; like trying to remember half-speed dubstep in a dream.
†‡†- I believe this is pronounced ritualz, but then again I may not have decoded right. At this point in the article I've seen enough freaky films to be confused over whether I am actually in an Italian art-house death dirge. Dirge is also a fitting word for their music, appended to purple drank electro-hop (see I'm just making my own genres up here now).
And here's some more artists for you to peruse, with free downloads!
After all that deconstruction it’s still difficult to summarise in one sentence, but I’ll do my best: building on a ‘screwed’ hip-hop style popularised by Houston rappers in the 90s, witch house is almost completely unrelated to house music and cosier with occult or goth-themed, lo-fi, distorted bass-heavy rhythms with synth pop slathers.
First rumblings about the ‘witch house’ genre began spreading on the internet just before Summer 2010 and had finally filtered through to mainstream media such as The Guardian by August. Before it’s even fully taken off, the internet naysayers and musos have begun to rubbish the genre as nonsense and already subverted by advances / devolutions in already established fields.
It’s been listed as goth, library music, drone, doom ambient, ghost trance, glo-fi, post-punk, hauntology, ghost drone, spectral pop, drag, were house, haunted house, and an extension of chill-wave: either way it appears the leaders of the genre-coining movement, or the bands themselves, have been channelling Nathan Barley for inspiration.
It could also be considered Facebook or Myspace music; a genre growing from disparate groups of people who never meet but produce and share ghostly influenced music - like electro-pop in a morphine slurry. First glances show a collective of young artists, and I suspect so young that the full extent of the 80s and 90s music scenes have bypassed them in a rather concrete way. The term ‘drag’ is supposed to reference a Houston sound perpetuated in the 90s by DJ Screw and similar crews: the major addition to their sluggish music was the strong influence of cough-syrup codeine and fizzy juice known as purple drank - it frequently led to deaths, including DJ Screw at the age of 29, who turned down record deals to remain with his purple drank crew.
The music, his crew and codeine came first, and he remained in his working-class lifestyle downing syrup mixed with Sprite until his death. Drug abuse was experienced as culture, and the culture drove on the music - a move away into the shiny world of record deals could have signed the death knell for purple drank beats, and they remained true to their addiction and music vision.
The witch house band Salem jumped on DJ Screw’s legacy and kept the chopped-up, sluggish and ethereal quality while working in synths and vocals along a Boris Karloff theme. Other artists chuck in electro-rock, or dub, or ambient, but the genre seems entirely based on themes of the occult and the paranormal, albeit through a psychedelic aperture. A side-look at dubstep suggests the likes of Burial helped to add some ethereal inspiration to the genre. .
One of the labels behind the witch house sound is Tri Angle, founded by Robin Carolan. He has been quoted as saying: “Hip-hop and rnb, in essence, is a commercial kind of music. But when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, it’s sonically at least really strange music. And there’s so much you can do with that. I’m surprised it’s taken so long for it to start being experimented with by people who aren’t in that world.”
And for me, that’s the crux of it - “people who aren’t in that world”. Houston’s drag hip-hop / street-rap artists in the 90s ran a merry-go-round with codeine syrup abuse, plenty of whom didn’t survive their ‘muse’, and they were predominantly from poorer African-American backgrounds. Witch house or whatever you want to call it, comes from people who saw little of that era first hand simply due to age differences, and they come from markedly different backgrounds - in some way it reminds me of a marketing plan to extract a culture-specific genre/style and tweak it for the mass market. Strip off the syrup abuse, add in genres tapping a definite trend, and it is reborn with little contemplative thought for the founding fathers who did not survive long enough to see purple drank music without the purple drank aspect.
Tom Ewing of The Guardian disagrees, suggesting: “What witch house tells me is that genres now aren't exercises in innovation or marketing, so much as ways of framing an experience. And if you won't feel open to that experience, your investigation of it won't get far.”
So, underground trend marketing or framing an experience? Stay tuned to this blog for the second part in Witch House deconstruction, where we delve into the artists, their naming conventions and their different interpretations of the sound.
Ok, if you're vaguely like me, there will be a plethora of genres you've seen scattered across reviews and features and thought 'what the hell are they talking about'? Names seem to be pulled from nowhere and can often be misleading - I'm still musing over 'Tropical' given that I instantly think of Calypso music and fresh coconut milk. With this in mind I'm putting it to my readers (however few or many there are*) to nominate the next genres to deconstruct with reckless abandon and music bytes. Every genre will be written about, so get commenting on this post to tear apart the style confusing you.
*checking this week's blog stats, I have to give a shout out to the people of Brazil and Serbia for their sudden interest!
Until about two weeks ago, the genre of UK Funky was ashamedly unbeknownst to this writer, and searching the web reveals limited press coverage. Ok, it's not a brand new genre but like most can be considered a mutation or evolution of dance music; take a house template then carefully add some meaty r&b, and infuse with your choice of rhythms - whether that be afrobeat, soca, latin, garage or extremely bass heavy.
2008 appears to mark the genre's advance into clubbers' consciousness, via underground clubs in Lahndahn. Now, although it is a 'funky' music based on house, artists are quick to ascertain the difference to funky house.
Listen to the vids below for a very basic introduction to the difference in sounds:
Roska - Climate Change (UK Funky)
StoneBridge Feat. Therese - Put Them High(Funky house)
If you want to break it down into the technical similarities / dissimilarities we'll a) be here all day, and b) will end up further away from any definitive conclusion than when we started. The quickest breakdown relies on the general 'feeling' of the track, and which elements are emphasised most: here it is clear that UK funky is far more 'urban' and grime/garage influenced than traditional funky house, and certainly leans heavily on tribal percussion.
Hands down the number one resource for indulging your interests is ukfunky.com, with a forum moderated by the freshest UK funky artists; mp3 store; charts; videos; latest news, as well as being the home of UK Funky Records.
) then times it by ten, and you can get the unsearchable Google nightmare known as witch house acts.
