I discovered the “Witch House” genre a few years ago, and I still listen to it a lot. I might not have the boundaries of the genre quite right, but that’s okay because I like borderline and adjacent things as well.
If I remember correctly, my introduction to the term came with LAKE R▲DIO. These are probably my two favorite Lake Radio songs:
Another artist that I like is Horse MacGyver, who I think I discovered before hearing the term witch house.
Here are some songs that I like by ∆Aimon:
And here are a couple good ones by Glass Teeth (I mean GL▲SS †33†H):
In 2012 my best friend was really into witch house so I was too. I imagine XXYYXX is like the most normie witch house I could possibly choose, but I was never more than a witch house normie. This song is classic, one of those great concurrences of sample and attitude.
amazing that crystal castles managed to be good in spite of like LITERALLY EVERYTHING the shithead abusive producer guy did. ilu alice fuck that guy!!!
Yeah for real please do not label anything you can’t fucking dance to house, I would just like the world to do me this one kindness, I already take enough psychic damage from people that apparently consider Geto Boys “pop rap.” I like witch house conceptually though, its the kind of music you play at 8am when everybody is fucked up but ultimately I never got super into it
The more interesting outcome of a decade+ of trap development is that it is actually surprisingly esoteric once one looks past the 808s and hat rolls
I’m just going to link a Simon Reynolds blog post because he does my work for me
i never really understood people bitching about “mumble rap” or soundcloud rap or whatever because having the vocals blend together over a trap beat is kind of the fucking point of it all you know?
Biggest personal turnoff with trap is literally the bpm but it’s something of a relief that we can still point to a genre expression that captures an era on more or less its own terms
I don’t normally see people connect trap to ambient which is annoying because it seems pretty fucking obvious, but people always downplay hip-hop, like idiots praising (white) rappers or Kanye West for finally addressing mental health or whatever like Bushwick Bill or Three 6 Mafia or Gravediggaz weren’t already out here talking about this shit decades ago. The idea of rap as some kind of degenerate genre of music when it actually has incredibly rich influences, as pointed out in that post, is annoying
In the past year or so, a lot of the witch house music that I’ve been listening to has been from these Russian “Mutantfunk” collections. Each has an overwhelming number of tracks, and I have only a few of them but I guess I might gradually collect all of them. Some of them are free.
There are more than I’ve listed here. These are just the ones I’m familiar with. Here’s a track that I like from the most recent one that I picked up (about a month ago):