Witch House as the name would suggest is occult themed electronic music. It's dark and kind of mellow while having a hint of horror to it most of the time not always though. It also goes by the names drag, rapegaze and haunted house. Haunted House is my favorite name for it I think thats clever and punny but I call it Witch House 98% of the time. There is also an aesthetic and a fashion that is pretty interesting. The dress is kind of like goth meets punk meets the occult. To dress witch house you would dress goth lots of black and white with occult symbols but it takes more of a playful punk direction by doing things like "Cat Magick" and have a cat with an upside down pentacle and an upside down cross on its third eye like its poking fun at christians who think those are demonic or satanic exclusive symbols. For real pagan witches it might seem a bit offensive at time but most of the time it's not as offensive as that. There are a bunch of retailers you can find on etsy and instagram (I see alot on instagram) Here's what it looks like:
Contrary to the name though this music isnt actually house music in the slightest. its alot of screwey hip hop beats with like distorted industrial noises and distorted synth leads, drum machines and strange experimental sounds and vocal samples. To make it you want to go for dark and ethereal think of a ghost talking through the white noise on an old tv with hip hop or trap type beats with a slow tempo. The white noise sounding bassline is a staple for alot of the witch house tracks but so is chiptune and more contemporary synths.
The witch house aesthetic of writing uses alot of unicode symbols like triangles, omega symbols, random foreign special characters even ogham and futhark runes are common. It's like using 13375p34k but with unicode instead of numbers. They say to do this to thwart search engines so it's harder to find witch house on the internet to keep it an underground movement so hope I don't get in trouble with the witch house police for making a blog post about it lol but this isn't a popular blog so I think it should be fine. ;)
They say it was created as a joke to describe a certain groups (shams) production sound but music journalists got ahold of it and it kind of stuck and is here to stay. There really isn't any set defining sound that says if you don't use this sound its not witch house its more of a vibe that makes something witch house, a little confusing. Of course you should have those elements like the gritty distorted sounds the hip hop drums, dense reverb, synthpop melodies to create that vibe but no particular one thing makes it witch house. Even some witch house mixtapes have things that you might say don't even classify as "witchhousey" but still make it in and help that witch house vibe keep flowing which is the most important part of the genre.
To get into Witch House I would check out the reddit page and check out those artists and i'll also have a good witch house playlist here as well. Salem has a bunch of mixtapes up for free as well but I don't think they are that great. I also made a mixtape i'll put up here.
My Witchhouse Mixtapes:
Top Artists
Salem
oOoOO
White Ring
Purity Ring
Balam Acab
Crim3s
Grimes
Crystal Castles
Ritualz
Holy Other
XXYYXX
0 comments:
Post a Comment