i spent quite a bit of time over '10 and '11 sorting through a lot of *wave/*house music, trying to find some decent new "idm", after coming to the conclusion that it was my most likely source. idm was a 90s term used to refer to the more elaborate type of electronic music you'd find on the warp records label (amongst other places), in contrast to your typical club-oriented 4/4 boom-boom house music. i guess the distinction is still pretty real, contrasting this to your average pile of edm garbage.
there was a low signal to noise ratio, but i ended up finding a lot of stuff i really liked. i also came to the conclusion rather quickly that it wasn't going to find an audience off bandcamp. it just seemed inherently closed. it almost seemed like i was peering into the kind of alternate universe that is inhabited entirely by children and would therefore evaporate, by definition, at the precise moment an adult were to find out about it. i drifted off when i realized i was missing a brief moment in time where punk rock had managed to reclaim itself from the suck...
i didn't bump into salem at the time. but, it's nice to see some of the more abstract stuff has managed to leap frog over the washed outs and neon indians of the world into a bigger audience...
there's nothing lo-fi about the production on the track. this is built up using the same kind of software that every mainstream artist uses (lo-fi in the 90s was defined by using simpler technology; that is not true for this), it's just manipulated to sound heavily distorted. it would have taken a lot of trial and error and careful effort to get to the final point. you can't nail this on that basis - not any more than you can call my bloody valentine badly produced, or butch vig a hack fucking around with some fuzz pedals.
further, the voicing on the sampling is quite intricate. you can not like it if you want, but tearing this down for a lack of musicality is merely a demonstration of ignorance.
i bumped into a large amount of really shoddy chillwave when i was exploring. it's out there, and it can be as horrific as the worst examples of any other genre...
...but this is actually pretty good, for what it is.
Woozz93
House is EDM, no matter how it is done, it's far from being IDM. Witch House is no exception, it's not IDM music.
deathtokoalas
the distinction we used in the 90s was the question of "is it meant to dance to?" or "is it meant to listen to?". the term at the time was eBm (meaning electronic body/booty music).
there's always been some grey area. coil is often cited as an influence, and it falls firmly into the idm sphere; skinny puppy is considered a pioneer in dark music, but they fall equally into both camps (you can dance to it, but you can also interpret it as "art rock" or even "progressive rock").
i think that the "house" in "witch house" is sort of a misnomer. it's not really coming out of that scene. it's more of a watered down type of industrial music.
that said, even if a lot of the influence of the *house/*wave stuff is in the idm sphere, there's really no use in trying to draw a clean partition. i think that certain house artists would argue it's rather insulting to suggest that what they do is never listenable outside of the dance floor - it would strip them of any claim to artistry. the claim may be inherently weaker than in other forms of music, but it's not absent. it's a non-trivial intersection.
there was a band out of chicago in the 80s called die warzau that was close to the chicago house sound, but tossed in all kinds of artistic curves. and, the aphex twin himself came out of the acid house movement.
so, i think you need to rethink that.
jazzy jay
house is house
