This new year has seen a rash of music bloggers attempting to properly categorize Witch House. From the good, the dry, all the way to the silly. As always, the problem lies in the attempt to define it in reference to traditional journalistic benchmarks. This is in vain, for it is impossible to organize anarchy. The movement most often referred to as Witch House owes its roots more to the way the internet functions than any specific musical style. It is a movement based on trending, interaction and hyperlinking… it is not simply “Electroclash 2.0”

This new mythology suggests that the music started with Salem. Recent articles have stressed the importance of the Chicago group to the point of overstatement. While an integral early player, it’s a misnomer that the music of Salem is truly that important to the music being made today, just a few short years from their formation. Although many within the Witch House enjoy Salem, there was plenty of music floating around during the years of 2007-8 that helped shape the vague vision that exists today.  The main issue that I have is that this all reeks of good PR and lazy journalism and without refutation, the myth of Salem as the sole mothers of invention will be etched into history, which is always scripted by the victors.

Slowed up music has always been rooted in pitch experimentation. Whereas most slowed music tends to pitch things down anywhere between 25-50% there have always been DJs who have experimented with much slower tempos. Although it still seems exotic to some people, Screw’s music has existed for well over twenty years now so there isn’t any mystery to it’s influence, it’s simply evolution. Most don’t feel the need to mention Kraftwerk in each and every single article/review of electronic and dance music do they? That influence is a given at this point and mostly strays far from explaining the greater picture.

For Example, Memphis’ DJ Black deserves a great deal of credit for creating mixes at especially crawling tempos, which have become an integral part to the Witch House arsenal.  A fixture in the South and Midwest, slowed music has never really been quarantined to hip hop.  Flea Market DJs have been “Screwing” everything from rock music to pr0n ever since Robert Davis started selling tapes out of Apt. 100. Big name groups like Swishahouse and Beltway 8 have been doing it since the late 1990s.  Add this to the dark imagery associated with the Memphis hip hop scene, and the inherent sadness and melancholy involved in most Texas music, and the evolution to Witch House seems rather organic.

Ask Tennessee artist $LØW HE▲D, who credits the Chattanooga music scene as his main inspiration to make music (need link). $LØW HE▲D, who formerly recorded under names like Game Syndicate and Horrid Veil has been experimenting with slow music for over a decade. He also credits Kansas City art fags Ssion with helping to pioneer the current sound, yet they too usually stand on the outside looking in on articles defining the evolution of “Witch House.” With a new split cassette coming out with RΛINИIΛЯ he stresses the idea of community: “We all should be working together more often, it’s a really good time to be involved with music.”

Disaro Records and Disaro artist Party Trash can both trace their roots straight to Houston, Texas, the (oft disputed) birthplace of Screw Music. Growing up in Houston, codeine slurred beats are a fixture, and hardly even something someone in their twenties would notice. Its just everyday life.

But the magic really happened when this small group of Americans came in contact with an equally experimental group of Europeans. Something sadly, and conspicuously absent from almost all attempts by the mainstream press to define the origins of Witch House. Around 2009 music blogs caught wind of the sound and vision of conceptual artists AIDS-3D and Mater Suspiria Vision.

AIDS-3D, who started out as Berlin based installation artists, had a sound that was similar to what was starting to happen stateside. A warped and blurred version of pop music that was created to accent their equally dark and evocative video art. Mater Susperia Vision, on the other hand, had a sound all of their own. Vaguely influenced by the Giallo scores of Simonetti and Company, MSV built walls of echo drenched drone over tempos that bordered on catatonia.  Added to the visual aspect, created by the equally elusive video artist and blog historian Cosmotropia de Xam, it was MSV who directly gave the movement its main aesthetic. Shaken video images culled from old horror movies fused with bold helvetica sigilism. It was a thing of beauty, and mystery.

Cosmotropia de Xam and Mater Suspiria Vision, if anyone, also gave the burgeoning genre it’s cloaked and secret mystique. Although much of that original “For Madmen Only” crypticism is gone, that and a few triangles managed to make the whole thing seem a lot bigger than it actually was. It acted as more than a hype engine, though. This “Secret little club” mentality is what actually drove people to meet and network on social networks like Myspace and Last.FM solidifying this as a valid music and video movement.

By the summer of 2010 literally hundreds of artists discovered that there were a handful of people all over the world doing similar things in their small circle. It is a lot like the Beat Generation, in every city that Jack, Neil and Ginsy visited, they would find at least a handful of freaks. The only difference is that this in the internet, and the infection is viral.

There is no denying that Salem has had an impact on the music, but so has Fever Ray. So have a lot of the artists that have come out of the indie underground.  In fact, one listen to King Night and it becomes apparent that Salem were actually very influenced by what was going on in Witch House over the past year, not necessarily the other way around.

And this is in no way a knock on Salem, in fact recent talks with the growing scene in Russia have illustrated that the success Salem has had has only helped expose more people to our movement. Personally, I just don’t want to see such a drastic oversimplification of the truth negating the efforts of everyone involved. Even this article is by no means definitive.

Every day it seems, someone pops up who has been making music that simply meshes with the madness.  Some come from the Black Metal scene, others from IDM and electronica. So many, like Mike Textbeak, were merely hiding in the woodworks of the industrial and goth counterculture for nearly a decade before anyone really seemed to notice. That truly is the power of all of this- it isn’t a sound, but a place where we can stay and feel comfortable.

OUR Witch House.

- Nattymari