Witch house (music genre)
| Witch house | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Late 2000s, United States, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and United Kingdom |
| Typical instruments | |
| Other topics | |
| Vaporwave | |
Witch house (also known as drag or haunted house) is an occult-themed dark electronic music genre and visual aesthetic that emerged in the early 2010s. The music is heavily influenced by chopped and screwed hip-hop soundscapes, industrial and noise experimentation, and features use of synthesizers, drum machines, obscure samples, droning repetition and heavily altered, ethereal, indiscernible vocals.
The witch house visual aesthetic includes occult, witchcraft, shamanism and horror-inspired artworks, collages and photographs as well as significant use of typographic elements such as Unicode symbols. Many works by witch house visual artists incorporate themes from horror films such as The Blair Witch Project, the television series Twin Peaks, and mainstream pop culture celebrities. Common typographic elements in artist and track names include triangles, crosses, and other Unicode symbols, which are seen by some as a method of keeping the scene underground and harder to search for on the Internet as well as references to the television series Twin Peaks and Charmed.
Witch house applies techniques rooted in chopped and screwed hip-hop—drastically slowed tempos with skipping, stop-timed beats—from artists such as DJ Screw, coupled with elements from other genres such as noise, drone, and shoegaze. Witch house is also influenced by hazy 1980s goth bands, including Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Christian Death and Dead Can Dance, as well as being heavily influenced by certain industrial and experimental bands such as Psychic TV and Coil. The use of hip-hop drum machines, noise atmospherics, creepy samples, dark synthpop-influenced lead melodies, dense reverb, and heavily altered, distorted, and pitched down vocals are the primary attributes that characterize the genre's sound.
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