Organic Circuitry
ISSUE #332
There’s a new subgenre of IDM that I’ve discovered since last week’s Boards of Canada issue. IDM is the condescendingly named “Intelligent Dance Music,” which is rarely even danceable and came when electronic musicians looked past the dance floor to the more experimental realm of personal, quiet spaces. The name evolved from EDM—what can you do? It’s hard enough to use words to describe music, let alone put names to their genres with any plan or intention. More often the names just branch out over time, neurons of sonic history, warping and twisting and fractalizing.
This fractal nature can also be used to describe the rhythms and textures of IDM, and the genre’s pioneers typically used them to create cold and mechanical atmospheres. But there are plenty of producers out there using softer, greener sounds—this is where the subgenre comes in. I’ve found a group that’s warmer, filled with more organic circuitry. If these are machines, they’re the pneumonic sort—fluid, living, swirling like roots in the Earth.
In this house, we love Questlove. His is one of the greatest working minds in the creation, curation, synthesis, and analysis of music as a cultural force. Over winter break, I read his latest book, Hip Hop is History, and it’s his best work yet. It’s at once a comprehensive history and a personal work of music biography—as both a listener and creator—from a man whose heart is as big as his brain.
There are now roving bands of sonic scavengers in the fractured data gutters of the post–Web 2.0 internet, musicians often known by little more than alt-code symbols (♡u∫agi幻覚∀∁ⓛᙌ✬) or keyboard vomit (Sophiaaaahjkl;8901).
There’s a genre I included on last week’s summer pop playlist that I decided to dive deeper into today: Japanese city pop. This wave of what would best (if reductively) be described as “Japanese Steely Dan” was like a sister to the American yacht rock of the 1970s and 80s.
The scientists here at Earwyrms are always digging for new sonic gold, and well folks, today we struck an enormous vein. There’s an emergent genre down here that just might get us filthy rich if we take it to the ambient market.
You can hear dixieland jazz’s verve in the bounce music that came later. Both came from the irrepressible hunger to move, the desperate need to usurp polite society—the inevitably, if you will, of that ass to shake itself.
I am about to be fulfilled—I have tickets to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this weekend, proof that Lydia Tár’s influence still leaks like spilled ink. The performance tomorrow will highlight Bach and two of his contemporaries, Handel and Vivaldi, in honor of Johann’s birthday.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and I thought this would be the perfect time to highlight an instrument without which American mountain music would scarcely exist in today’s form. So here’s a playlist full of Irish fiddle music. If you’ve ever craved the sound, this playlist is forever here for you.
Walk with me past the weathered gravestones, black with ages of grime. At the steps of a mausoleum, I grab my stick of chalk. The School of Goth is now in session.
Dungeon Synth is a genre fit for fantasy novels, inspired by video games, film scores, the neoclassical darkwave of the goth era, and the burgeoning home electronica on the horizon.
That gum you like? It’s coming back in style—today I made a playlist of bands that would almost certainly play at the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks, from dream pop to darkwave to jazz-flavored country.
Memory is the building block of everything — there’s no vision of the future unmoored from material history. When we picture where we’re headed, the vision is imbued with society’s hopes and dreams, concepts which could not exist without the past itself.
From the lab: another microgenre discovered in the field. Pop songs that cruise around 150 bpm with a kick-kick-snare-kick that could snap off your heel.
Dark Academia, if you haven't already heard, is a subculture emerging on TikTok and Instagram that adopts the aesthetics of the ivy-trussed campus: think browns and burgundies, greys and ivories, blazers and books like Mrs. Dalloway and The Idiot (Dostoevsky's, though the case could be made for Batuman's as well).
This week's playlist is the result of a thought experiment: what if I were asked to DJ a new Monster Mash? This led me deep into this early-2010s occult-flavored club genre called witch house. It's vaporwave's goth sister.
There’s a new subgenre of IDM that I’ve discovered since last week’s Boards of Canada issue. IDM is the condescendingly named “Intelligent Dance Music,” which is rarely even danceable and came when electronic musicians looked past the dance floor to the more experimental realm of personal, quiet spaces.