The somewhat contested underground sub-genre of music, witch-house, is an interesting phenomenon. It has been described as any of the following: occult-based house music, sluggish tunes with stop-timed beats, shoegrazing, noise and drone, dark melodic or dark music-cult. The music itself is usually dark and slow, but the severity of the darkness of the music wavers. Another common feature in this genre is audio loops of people talking or quietly wailing about politics, spirituality or other unintelligible emissions.
Another unique feature of the genre is that most of the artists names are typographic and include symbols like crosses, triangles and other elements of unicode. For example: ~▲†▲~ , ∆N∆ZT∆Z†∆, DE▲th▲Co▲ST, K▼L▲M†††B▲R▲NG or WIZ∆RDS. Part of the reason for this is aesthetic solidarity but also partly to make it harder to find on the internet or to download and to keep it underground.
Common features in the album artwork or the names of the artists are supernatural in content. Lots of crosses, ethereal figures and mystical images. In fact the very name witch-house is explanatory enough. I thought this an interesting example of young people still engaging in spirituality through music, albeit the darker side of spirituality. Below I have posted a video clip for the witch-house artist LAKE R▲DIO who also goes by the alias Ritualzz. The clip features audio loops of the following lyrics:
Ghetto Ass Witch, I'm writing rhymes on Ouija boards,Ghetto Ass Witch, Satanic swag and wicked ho*s, Ghetto Ass Witch, I'm ghost-riding blasting drone, Ghetto Ass Witch, Big magic hustling demon dope
Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7A_s6jtS7Y&feature=related
Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1087848
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