https://web.archive.org/web/20110612233 ... -triangle/
Spoiler
Reasons [Not] to be Cheerful Pt. 1 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Triangle)
Hello Bloglin, I’m Nattymari. I listen to a lot of music. Occasionally I make my own. Some of it can be found here. And some more here. Dub and Screw music have ruled my life for a long time now. A lot of the things I like are considered strange. Dark even. By now they are normal to me. I like to play video games and watch a lot of Japanese movies. My favorite media format is tape, because it deteriorates with every play.
—
Witch House may be the first true cybercvlt. Like any cult, it takes its cues from the interweb’s major religions: the 1337speek of the haxxor, the Unicode tagging of the Gam3rKl4ns and the musical language of the bootleg/mashup kids. A blitzkrieg blend of the Temple ov Psychick Youth and the Church of Subgenius, Witch House mirrors nearly every aspect of today’s information addled society.
To an outsider, it is easy to shrug it off as fad. A fashion statement: punctuated with recycled occult imagery, oft-amateurish darkwave and half-assed remix. What this outsider fails to grasp, however, is that, once initiated, all these things make perfect sense within the context of the subculture. And subculture it is. In fact, Witch House contains nearly all the benchmarks of a full blown culture. Still, like any subculture it is painfully evident that if you don’t understand, we probably don’t want you to.
Our music is encrypted messaging. Passed on from us3r to us3r, who understand it on an intrinsic level. Not to say we don’t want to make music. We do, most of us with a fervor, on a daily basis. Still, the music itself shouts its core philosophy: In a world that seems so over processed, (one might even say autotuned) we strive to make life interesting. It is our alchemy to turn pop culture into esoterica.
What I find most amazing and unique about this Witch House generation is that, not since the Dadaists, has a movement encouraged such a vast amount of variety and experimentation. One of the biggest arguments from the outside is that no two artists sound the same. I think this is the greatest feat for any genre. Take, for example, hardcore punk rock in the early 1980s. Kids across the United States created a huge network of youth culture. Still, the scenes themselves wallowed in conformity. The bands involved were expected to make music a certain way. Artists that deviated from this (Flipper, Butthole Surfers, Minutemen, Nervous Gender…) suffered and were ultimately expatriated. Archivists have worked hard to create subgenres to explain this, but the fact remains Flipper WERE a hardcore band. Quite honestly, the four bands mentioned above seem MASSIVE in their influence when compared to groups such as Ill Repute, Jerry’s Kids and The Necros (all who adhered to the sped up Ramones rubric.)
The Witch House movement is about evolution, not decay. Everything it comes in contact with is sucked up and spat out through its gnashing, gnarled teeth. There really isn’t even time for digestion. The result is an amazingly confounding mess of near random sounds and imagery. The only thing that really ties it together is artifact. Most of us use low bitrate and resolution as our calling card. This is where Lil B fits in. His 96 kbps raps sound at home when placed next to our godless, hedonistic music. This is music created by a genration raised on Real Player and You Tube.
A culture of information overload.
- Nattymari
Hello Bloglin, I’m Nattymari. I listen to a lot of music. Occasionally I make my own. Some of it can be found here. And some more here. Dub and Screw music have ruled my life for a long time now. A lot of the things I like are considered strange. Dark even. By now they are normal to me. I like to play video games and watch a lot of Japanese movies. My favorite media format is tape, because it deteriorates with every play.
—
Witch House may be the first true cybercvlt. Like any cult, it takes its cues from the interweb’s major religions: the 1337speek of the haxxor, the Unicode tagging of the Gam3rKl4ns and the musical language of the bootleg/mashup kids. A blitzkrieg blend of the Temple ov Psychick Youth and the Church of Subgenius, Witch House mirrors nearly every aspect of today’s information addled society.
To an outsider, it is easy to shrug it off as fad. A fashion statement: punctuated with recycled occult imagery, oft-amateurish darkwave and half-assed remix. What this outsider fails to grasp, however, is that, once initiated, all these things make perfect sense within the context of the subculture. And subculture it is. In fact, Witch House contains nearly all the benchmarks of a full blown culture. Still, like any subculture it is painfully evident that if you don’t understand, we probably don’t want you to.
Our music is encrypted messaging. Passed on from us3r to us3r, who understand it on an intrinsic level. Not to say we don’t want to make music. We do, most of us with a fervor, on a daily basis. Still, the music itself shouts its core philosophy: In a world that seems so over processed, (one might even say autotuned) we strive to make life interesting. It is our alchemy to turn pop culture into esoterica.
What I find most amazing and unique about this Witch House generation is that, not since the Dadaists, has a movement encouraged such a vast amount of variety and experimentation. One of the biggest arguments from the outside is that no two artists sound the same. I think this is the greatest feat for any genre. Take, for example, hardcore punk rock in the early 1980s. Kids across the United States created a huge network of youth culture. Still, the scenes themselves wallowed in conformity. The bands involved were expected to make music a certain way. Artists that deviated from this (Flipper, Butthole Surfers, Minutemen, Nervous Gender…) suffered and were ultimately expatriated. Archivists have worked hard to create subgenres to explain this, but the fact remains Flipper WERE a hardcore band. Quite honestly, the four bands mentioned above seem MASSIVE in their influence when compared to groups such as Ill Repute, Jerry’s Kids and The Necros (all who adhered to the sped up Ramones rubric.)
The Witch House movement is about evolution, not decay. Everything it comes in contact with is sucked up and spat out through its gnashing, gnarled teeth. There really isn’t even time for digestion. The result is an amazingly confounding mess of near random sounds and imagery. The only thing that really ties it together is artifact. Most of us use low bitrate and resolution as our calling card. This is where Lil B fits in. His 96 kbps raps sound at home when placed next to our godless, hedonistic music. This is music created by a genration raised on Real Player and You Tube.
A culture of information overload.
- Nattymari