Been grinding my brain against Lake Radio for the last couple weeks now. So far, “King Bixby” remains my biggest takeaway. Weirdly, outside of Bandcamp it only seems to be listed as “666.”
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yo this music rules, i downloaded the second one you listed and have been looping it for the past couple days.
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It turns out that this is built out of a Ladytron song. I like both versions.
Here are a couple more artists that I like but have not listened to in a few years (until just now):
SPIDER▲WEBS
GHOST PLANET
What’s with all the deltas?
This one is neat.
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Just realized that a lot of this sounds kinda like lost Silent Hill music.
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while not specifically witch house, you may enjoy my local friend Lav Andula’s stuff
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In the original wave of witch house, it was an attempt to create truly underground music in the 21st century by using names that would be ungooglable. This was almost immediately undermined when †‡† started also going by Ritualz and it’s existed mostly as a genre signifier since.
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I get the appeal of glitching the system. What I wonder is, how one learned about things at all if they made such an effort to be obscure. I guess the point was to keep out people who weren’t already in the know, but. Who was in? And how?
When I was in college—this was around 1996, '97, when the Web was more a jungle of specialized pages than any organized system of information and there wasn’t really any reliable way to use it to find anything practical—I often heard other students, acquaintances, talk about concerts they’d been to. Some local bands; some major ones I’d actually heard of or owned CDs from. I’d never really been to a rock show, so eventually I started asking, how do you find out this stuff—who’s playing and where, and when? And they’d just scowl at me, and say things like, “Huh. Yeah, I guess I can see how that might be confusing,” then continue with whatever they had been doing, without answering the question.
Summary
This is what, like, 95% of navigating a neurotypical world feels like to me—interpersonal stuff; anything to do with hygiene, money, general navigation of life: the bewilderment that I could possibly not just know things, then bemusement with the fact I’m asking such a silly thing, then brushing it off as not worth answering. Then, with some issues, growing agitation with me that I keep pretending that I don’t understand such a thing, because surely that isn’t possible.
And then maybe, literal decades later, after endless difficulty I might start to put the pieces together and figure out the general picture for myself. By which point I’ve got so many maladapted coping mechanisms and workarounds to deal with these voids that it’s almost too much trouble to try to unpick them.
So while on the one hand I respect the anarchy of intentional obscurity and the mysticism of shibboleths and whatever, I kind of feel annoyed by the needless gatekeeping of simple information such that people can’t even ask the question.
I hesitate to use the word, but thinking about this is kind of triggering in the genuine complex PTSD sense.
EDIT TO ADD: Reading it back, this probably comes off more intense than intended. It’s all actually… more or less neutral, emotionally. It’s just a long muse on a nuance that kind of bugged me, and trying to figure out why that may be. Stated bluntly, because, you know. Autistic, yo.
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my assumption is that this was clever marketing on their part. or like, someone broke the story or whatever.
kind of like how Health Goth was mostly a joke/anti-fashion and then became a “real” thing and now everyone wears “Athleisure.”
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I don’t know what any of those things are.
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I guess it’s like if I Love Bees were leading to the secret knowledge that is vaporwave?
when slash tights started popping up at every yoga shop a few years ago i definitely thought ‘health goth has gone too far’ but i never actually thought about it like this
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This isn’t too far off, but god the internet was a different place 10 years ago (and god, when you really look at it we’ve lost so much. All the random internet forums and blogspots, livejournals, ect. all fucking gone and we’re left with people like me, 10 years of anxiety and dysphoria brain damage later. I wasn’t even paying attention at the time! NO ONE TOLD ME THIS WOULD BE ON THE TEST!)
It was more like a creepypasta than anything.
The best point of comparision is probably pornogrind of all things. I once heard pornogrind shows described as ‘mostly pornogrind bands playing to other pornogrind bands, many of whom are also playing that show’ and that’s kind of the right idea. It was just a bunch of kids who realized that slowing down music made it sound creepy mixed with a ‘occult’ aesthetic. Stuff would be uploaded to youtube channels as their only video with characters that couldn’t be searched, and you and your dork friends would swap videos on random internet forums and blogs and shit.
Similarly, early witch house was really… I don’t want to use the term ‘anti-commercial’ because I don’t think that was ever the intention behind it, but it was much more abrasive and way less listenable than what it turned into once people got record contracts. Hell, the whole ‘chopped and screwed’ aspect was kind of half serious/half a joke in the way those All Star remixes are these days. For most people making witch house, chopped and screwed would have been huge in middle school and early high school before falling out of favor. The same goes for all the pop samples and the obsession with playing classic rock riffs backwards and stuff like that. The first version of Salem’s Frost just used a preset drum track from a keyboard which I distinctly remember annoying Wourme 10 years ago when I showed it to him. A lot of the early lyrics were pretty gross too!
I remember when the name ‘witch house’ became codified (probably from some pitchfork article) and everyone was very against it. I always thought ‘shoegaze crunk’ was the most descriptive label but I suppose that’s not very ‘cool’. That’s also not really what most of the genre turned out to be.
Grimes and Health used to be considered witch house adjacent, funny how that sort of thing changes.
Anyways, I always shunned ‘witch house remxies’ because I was worried it’d compromise my ability to look down on nightcore, but I always did like this one:
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The funniest joke of 2018 was watching Grimes-loving hipsters suddenly find themselves fans of Elon Musk’s girlfriend. They chose POORLY
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Oh. We had a thread about that, ha.
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hey it’s 2020 can we never use the word hipster on this website unless we’re talking about 20 years ago
(note: this comes off aggressive, but please read it as playful)
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even back in 2016 you were all giving grimes too much credit
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so did anyone ever find out which house
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