Salem

Last Thursday the transmundane blogosphere took a hit… and it was a big one.  Jumping at the chance to appear cooler than everyone else, a few of the bigger blogs (who’s names will be kept quiet by us to save them from humiliation) creamed in their binary genes when given the chance to leak the new Salem track.  The only problem was, it wasn’t made by Salem. Instead, listeners were treated to a fairly slopped together dragmix of the new track “Endless Days” by New York based post-punkers Dream Affair.

It would have been laughable, had the fact not remained that the track only sounded vaguely like Salem. Using a rough approximation of a generic “witch house” sound and lyrics written by the Witch House/Chill Wave Name Generator, Dream Affair’s Abby Echiverri and Hayden Payne managed to expose the plethora of problems with today’s blogged down genre-alism and the mighty myth of Witch House.

Abby Echiverri explains:

It’s so easy to mimic people’s perceptions of what witch house is, and I made it a point to limit the amount of alterations I made to the originally-post-punk song so that I could prove this.  It was a matter of dissecting the musical language of Salem and witch house, which just meant using some cheap reverb plugins for detached vocals, flanger plugin over a boring synth line, and a lo-fi filter over samples of 808 snares.  I had to say it was recorded on cassette tape because I was using a noisy recording interface, and blogs ate that up as well because nowadays analog makes you more charming.

It would be easy to write this off as a cheap publicity stunt, but the young musicians were hardly looking to be eventually exposed, they were looking to make a point. However, once the track and hoax spread quickly out of control, embarrassing some who posted it and angering Salem’s management, Abby decided to come forward with the truth later that day via the following email.

Sorry for punking all of you. This was a culture jamming assignment for my NYU class, Digital Art with Brad Troemel.  We were asked to intervene into society using the internet.  I was mimicking the work of Eva and Franco Mattes, who turned a lolcat into a fake sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan, where it was positively received.  But here I was questioning “what is music” rather than “what is art” – would something made in 20 minutes be received positively if given a name to back it?  It also was meant to be a demonstration on the superficiality of internet hype and the speed of the blogosphere, especially with buzz bands.

Stepping back to the idea… during the mastering of my LP with my band (that is not witch house at all), we opened the title track and Pro Tools misread the sampling rate, so it played at half the tempo and pitched down.  I thought that if I added snares, and generated lyrics off of the Witch House Name Generator, add some flanger/reverb plugins, I could get away with fooling a couple of small blogs.  The song took 20 minutes to doctor.  Afterwards I bought the domain “biz3pr.info” to sound like “biz3.net” and made a fake email, did some HTML work to look like a real release.

I apologize for ruffling feathers, I didn’t expect this to get as big as it did.. It was an interesting social experiment.

The prank also exposed the sad truth that Witch House has been taking itself far too seriously lately. With a new crop of fans and artists emerging, less and less people realize that the genre itself was started as an elaborate prank; almost an inside joke between a handful of bloggers and underground musicians. I have personally likened it to a real life Second Life, and lately taken to calling it RPG Funk, in reverence to the late, great Nate Dogg. Once the “genre with no definable sound,” Witch House is indeed starting to homogenize, as it caves into the pressure of mass media, with dreams of L’Oreal commercials and a double bill with Tyler at the Fader Fort.

That’s not to say that there’s still not a lot of life left in the malevolent movement, it seems that as the more formulaic artists clamor for opening spots on Salem’s tour another endless wave of über transgressive artists always seems to emerge. Most of the artists involved, including Chris from I†† and Benjamin of Black Bvs Records and § agree that they thrive in an environment that is chaotic and diverse. In fact, the cookie cutter Witch House fakers seem to be the ones that stand out most in a crowd.

Dream Affair Live

The “666 Novelty” itself has started to wear thin as new scenesters, most no more than ex-Slipknot fans with groups named after the characters of “Charmed” jockey for rank and recognition. As the media becomes more and more aware of what is going on, those involved are going to face the serious decision of whether we are going to let them trap us and tag us for a few dollars in our pockets or not. I have no doubt some will go gladly, just as I have no doubt others will stick around to fight the good fight.

As for Dream Affair, after being forced to come clean, they have no other choice but to cash in on their prank. If this leads to a little more exposure for the band then so be it. Here’s the track that was manipulated to perform the hoax. In it’s original form it’s post-punkishness leans more towards the poppy sides of  Echo and the Bunnymen circa “Porcupine” than Easter and the Totem, and is a significant departure from the music Hayden made when he was in Void Vision.  The trio doesn’t plan on renaming themselves ※ ‡ ‡ ※ anytime soon and will have a debut album due later in May.

- Nattymari