Witch house (music genre)

Witch house
Stylistic origins	House, dark ambient, chopped and screwed, noise, drone, shoegazing
Cultural origins	Late-2000s United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Russia and Ukraine
Typical instruments	Synthesizer, drum machine, sequencer, sampler
Other topics
IDM Industrial hip hop

Witch house is occult-themed house music, heavily influenced by the chopped and screwed hip-hop movement created by DJ Screw in Houston, Texas during the 1990s. Witch House applies techniques rooted in Swishahouse hip-hop – drastically slowed tempos with skipping, stop-timed beats – coupled with elements from 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 early industrial bands. The use of hip-hop drum machines, noise atmospherics, creepy samples, dark synthpop-influenced lead melodies, dense reverb, and heavily altered or distorted vocals are the primary attributes that characterize the genre's sound. The concept started out as a joke, with Travis Egedy (commonly known by the stage name Pictureplane) and his friends coining the term in 2009 to refer to their style of music. Shortly after being mentioned to Pitchfork Media, blogs and other mainstream music press began to use the term.

The definition of the term is disputed. While witch house originally referred to occult house-based music, over a period of time, certain publications have described witch house as a fusion of techniques rooted in chopped and screwed hip hop – sluggish tempo with skipping, stop-timed beats – coupled with elements from genres such as noise, drone, and shoegaze. Many artists in the genre have released slowed-down remixes of pop and rap songs, or long mixes of different songs that have been slowed down significantly. Common typographic elements in artist and track names include triangles, crosses, and other elements of unicode, which is seen by some as being part of a larger unified aesthetic within the scene as well as a method of keeping it underground and harder to search for on the Internet.

Bands

Bands linked with the movement include Salem, Balam Acab, Stalker, oOoOO, White Ring,

Criticism and rebuttal

The genre was at one point connected to the name rape gaze, the use of which has since been publicly denounced by its coiners, who never expected it to be used to rename an actual genre, but viewed it as simply a gimmick. Witch house has also been said to be a false label for a micro-genre, constructed by certain publications in the music press (including The Guardian, Pitchfork and various music blogs). These claims have been made by some members of musical acts identified as being in the genre's current movement, as well as by music journalists.

Egedy described witch house as follows:

It’s a joke.

Myself and my friend Shams—he makes house music, too— we were joking about the sort of house music we make, [and we were calling it] witch house because it’s, like, occult-based house music. It was 2009. And then I did this best-of-the-year thing with Pitchfork about witch house, and it was me and Shams and Modern Witch. I was saying that we were witch house bands, and 2010 was going to be the year of witch house, that it was going to get really witchy and stuff. It took off from there. Different people started posting about it on blogs, and it sort of became an internet meme. And someone attached the name witch house to the sounds that bands like Salem were making—the slowed down, spooky, Goth juke kind of stuff." "...But, at the time, when I said witch house, it didn’t even really exist..."

However, Flavorwire said that despite his denials that it didn't really exist, "the genre does exist now, for better or worse".

In August 2011, Pitchfork described †††, a solo project of Chino Moreno as "witch house." However, Carson O'Shoney of Consequence of Sound and Daniel Brockman of The Boston Phoenix note that Crosses only shares a resemblance to witch house in aesthetics and imagery, and not the group's actual music. The group's decision to use this imagery stems from Chino Moreno's interest in the art and mystique around religion. Moreno however also said:

"I didn't want people to think we are a religious band, a satanic band or that we are a witch-house band. It's difficult using a religious symbol, but at the same time, I think in an artistic way, it can totally go somewhere else and I think we are kind of walking that line."