Fiddle Me This
ISSUE #231
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and while I’m no fan of Corporate America’s rude habit of jumping on heritage holidays for joyless H.R. ploys like bringing green donuts to the office, I am a huge fan of Irish fiddle music—and since Earwyrms has no office and never will, I thought this would be the perfect time to highlight an instrument without which American mountain music would scarcely exist in today’s form.
I always loved the sound of the violin—which is, at least physically, a fiddle, and only differs by the style of play. Though I play instruments, violin is one of the few I’d never dared touch in my musical education. What if my fingers were to sully it’s sublime beauty? It lead to my love of all kinds of traditional music, from to klezmer to spiritual to cowboy to Appalachian. This affinity is probably why I glommed onto Black Country, New Road so hard last year—what’s the wailing finale of “Concorde” but an overclocked Irish lament?
I figured I could break my own rule and celebrate the holiday for two reasons: 1) it’s Friday, and that’s Earwyrms day; and 2) I’ve been to Ireland, where I once ran a rental car off a mountain road because in County Donegal they’re as narrow as foot trails (and they drive on the other side of them).
So here’s a playlist full of Irish fiddle music. If you’ve ever craved the sound, on the regular or on a whim, this playlist is forever here for you—just like the Emerald Isle.
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 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). These boundary pushers are chopping and screwing so hard it sounds like a chainsaw, their samples reduced to little more by the end than glitter and stardust.