Witch house (genre)

Witch house (sometimes referred to as drag)^[1] is a microgenre of electronic music that is musically characterized by high-pitched keyboard effects, heavily layered basslines and trap-style drum loops, while it aesthetically employs occult and gothic-inspired themes.^[2][3]

The witch house visual aesthetic includes occultism, witchcraft, shamanism, terror and horror-inspired artworks, collages and photographs as well as significant use of hidden messages and typographic elements such as Unicode symbols.^[4][5] Artworks by witch house visual artists have incorporated imagery from horror films such as The Blair Witch Project,^[6] the television series Twin Peaks,^[7] and the fantasy show Charmed,^[8] as well as mainstream pop culture celebrities of the 2000s. Common typographic elements in titles, such as by Salem and White Ring, include triangles, crosses and Unicode symbols, which are seen by some as a method of gatekeeping (in an effort to keep the scene underground and more difficult to search for on the Internet).^[9]

Despite the name of the genre, witch house has little in common with house music, which generally features a strong up-tempo beat. Instead, witch house adapts techniques rooted in chopped and screwed hip-hop, specifically drastically slowed tempos with skipping, stop-timed beats^[10]—from artists such as DJ Screw,^[11] coupled with elements from other genres such as ethereal wave, noise, drone, and shoegaze.^[12][13] Many artists in the genre have released slowed down and backmasked remixes of pop and hip hop songs,^[11] or long mixes of different songs that have been slowed down significantly. Witch house is also influenced by 1980s ethereal wave bands such as Cocteau Twins,^[1] and by certain industrial and experimental bands, such as Psychic TV and Coil.^[14][15] The use of hip-hop drum machines, noise atmospherics, creepy samples,^[16] dark synthpop-influenced lead melodies, dense reverb, and heavily altered, distorted, and sometimes pitched down vocals are the primary attributes that characterize the genre's sound. Vocals can either be rapped, sung by either a female or male or a song can be entirely instrumental. The genre rose to prominence in the early 2010s with renewed interest in individually produced electronic music and Internet subcultures that spawned on sites like Tumblr. Witch house is often equated with other visually-dependent genres such as seapunk and vaporwave, which also achieved popularity over Tumblr.

The term witch house was coined in 2009 by Travis Egedy, professionally known as Pictureplane.^[17][18] The term was originally conceived as a joke,^[19][20][21] as Egedy explained: "Myself and my friend Shams... were joking about the sort of house music we make, [calling it] witch house because it's, like, occult-based house music. ...I did this best-of-the-year thing with Pitchfork about witch house.... I was saying that we were witch house bands, and 2010 was going to be the year of witch house.... It took off from there. ...But, at the time, when I said witch house, it didn't even really exist..."^[19] Shortly after its mention in Pitchfork, blogs and other mainstream music press began to use the term. Flavorwire said that despite Egedy's insistence, "the genre does exist now, for better or worse".^[22]

Some music journalists, along with some members of musical acts identified as being in the genre's current movement, consider witch house to be a false label for a microgenre, constructed by certain publications in the music press, including The Guardian, Pitchfork, and various music blogs.^[15][23] The genre was also briefly connected to the term rape gaze, the serious use of which was publicly denounced by those who coined it, who never expected it to be used as an actual genre term,^[24][25] but viewed it as simply a joke intended to mock the music press' propensity towards the creation of microgenres.^[23]