Kaleidosonics: Descents into Post-Nightcore
ISSUE #283
Plunderphonics is a technique by which a musician takes existing audio recordings and manipulates them to make new compositions; it is a genre whose very existence pokes at copyright and prods at the legality of sampling. Meanwhile, there’s nightcore, a genre in which a producer takes existing songs, speeds them up, and pairs them with anime screenshots or fantasy imagery.
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.
Some fans and critics have begun to try to name this kind of sound: stuff like nu-phonics, post-nightcore, or any mutation that gestures toward this deep-web chaos. For me, this realm is called kaleidosonics, and I’ve tried to introduce a primer here. But listener beware—depth of night required; computer glow not included.
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.