Disaro Records - Isvolt (2010) [Robot Elephant] // Grade: B

How does one legitimize a Bastard music?  As a signifier, the term “Witch House” seems to elicit more confusion and hatred than any other of the new genre tags out there.  There’s good reason for this: as far as the music goes, most of the wounds it incurs are self inflicted.  With the exception of a shared love for dark imagery and cryptoquixotic titles, the sound of this “genre” seems nearly impossible to identify.

With this in mind, Robot Elephant’s retrospective of the Disaro catalog, ISVOLT, acts quite well as a label compilation. It fails, however, in giving the casual listener a benchmark on what exactly it means to be “Witch House.”  With his dual citizenship in both the Screw capital of the world (Houston, TX) and a huge minimal synth/industrial town (Los Angeles, CA) Robert Disaro deserves recognition as being one of the few that molded the dark sounds of dragged up EBM and New Wave in the early days (what was it? 2008).

His roster of artists were definitely the soundtrack for the crop of animal tranquilized trailer park dwellers that decided to download their own bootlegged Ableton and start making sound of their own. With seminal artists like Mater Suspiria Vison, //TENSE// and Modern Witch, as a label, Disaro is quite possibly unchallenged as the harbingers ov Thee Hexan Danse Musik.

What is strange though, is how none of this sounds ANYTHING like what one hears today if they decide to dig this scene. Most of the music presented sounds like really good industrial coldwave.  Perhaps it is slurred and slowed a bit, but in today’s arena it sounds rather tame.  What stands out, though, are the seeds of what is happening now. In retrospect, the amateurish 808 beats and near death tempos obscured by low bitrates and tape hiss seem more important than the music itself.  Everything on this compilation sounds joylessly unpolished (and that is a GOOD thing.)

I said recently on Facebook that I hope more kids want to make music like Yes I Smoke Crack than King Night and I meant it.  Let’s hope that Witch House remains, not a genre… but a meme.

- Nattymari