Harvard Graduate Journalism Program
MUSIC AND CULTURE: WITCH HOUSE

​AUGUST 11, 2011  
TEXT BY ALISA NIZHNIY

​

It's pitch black in the back of a tiny bar called the Great Scott in Allston, Massachusetts. A crowd gathers around the stage. Flashing LED lights emanate. College kids dance passionately, alongside a few hipsters in their late twenties who wear their clothes backwards, cut holes in their hats, and shave half their heads.

 

Pictureplane, Travis Egedy's Denver-based electronic music project, plays to the diverse crowd. Accompanied on stage by two dancers wearing black, spandex bodysuits and masks, Egedy plays synthesizers over a backing track and sings breathily, "Can we find what's real? I can feel your mind."

 

"I'm personally interested in the occult, symbols and magic," said Egedy.

 

Egedy is one of the founders of witch house, a musical genre that is not tied together by a specific sound as much as it is cohered by a lifestyle: artists who share an interest in practicing magic, flaunting witchcraft imagery and creating musical and visual content to exchange with likeminded peers through the Internet. Witch house, with its ominous sound and symbols of the occult, has been virally building an online community for almost two years. In a sense, witch house is an updated, cyber version of the '80s goth movement. Now, some fans are glad that it broke into mainstream pop culture with recognition from the Deftones. Others are already moving on to the next online trend.

 

The growth of witch house music and culture happened quickly, starting with Egedy and a conversation he had nearly two years ago. Egedy, 26, said he always wanted to coin a cultural catch phrase and create a social meme. Half-jokingly, he mentioned the term "witch house" in December 2009 in an article for Pitchfork, a Chicago-based internet music publication, where Egedy predicted that 2010 would be "straight-up witchy."

 

"Witch house really happened at the right time," said Egedy. "It's in fashion right now to use occult imagery and dark symbolism. Witch house is an attraction to the dark aesthetic."

 

Less than three weeks after Egedy's Pitchfork article hit the Internet, one blog posted a song by the group Salem and tagged the blog entry with the words witch house.

 

Soon after, Berlin-based magazine writer and music festival promoter Daniel Jones tagged Salem as the first witch house artist on Last.FM, a music website where fans can network, adding artist names and labeling them with genre tags. But even before he decided to start calling it witch house, Jones was already blogging about "occvlt" music, spelled with a V. "The V is just a triangle," said Jones. "The triangle, as far back as I know, has been one of the bigger symbols of the occult."

 

Jones found Egedy's witch house term more appealing, so he decided to use it instead. "When I first was thinking about the word witch house, I wasn't thinking of spooky forests. What it really made me think of was deserts and mass expanses that made it seem very mystical," said Jones, explaining the emotional darkness that witch house music evoked for him. "You felt like you were listening to art."

 

Jones used the term witch house to connect what he felt were emotionally dark artists, who did not necessarily have similar sounding music. He hoped that other fans would catch on and do the same.

 

Jones continued blogging about witch house over the next eight months. He continued finding new music and distributing mix tapes through the social networking websites MySpace, Live Journal and Facebook. He continued tagging artist pages on Last.FM. People caught on. But still, the trend stayed relatively small. There are currently 1,574 people who have tagged music on Last.FM as witch house. Many of them are also popular music bloggers who further spread the word.

 

The witch house term took off, but not in the way that Egedy or Jones intended. The phrase most resonated among bloggers when it overlapped with the "drag" genre, which emerged in 2008: a hybrid of reverb-heavy, chopped and screwed hip-hop with overdriven, dissonant, rave music synthesizers, topped with echoing, obscured, despondent-sounding vocals.

 

Fans said they liked the mystery of witch house music. "I liked how unique it was," said Pedro Salazar, an avid fan from Houston who contributes to Artist Advocacy, a blog that is dedicated to connecting artists to each other and to fans. "No one knew a whole lot about who was behind it, making the music," he said.

 

The genre has developed into a distinctly Internet-based subculture that extended beyond music and symbols. "There isn't one sound of what it is," said Egedy. "It's a whole visual language that's Internet-based." He described a network of peers making and exchanging occult-influenced music, imagery and feedback over the Internet. Egedy said witch house became an online lifestyle.

 

It is possible to mistake witch house for a fashionable Internet identity that is based just around symbols, according to Egedy. "It's really easy to look witch house. You can put some upside-down crosses and triangles and anything else next to your name," said Egedy. "People just like to see the dark imagery. A lot of people don't get why they're attracted to these symbols at all."

 

"People like to wear what they hear," said Germany-based witch house music producer Nadine Platzek, explaining that the ominous sound of witch house has shaped the occult symbolism and decadent fashion aesthetics that draw attention to the scene. "Music and art… are very close to each other," she said. "Both are creatures of an artist's mind."

 

Los Angeles-based collage artist Calla Donofrio, 21, popularized much of the aesthetic that is associated with witch house. Donofrio juxtaposed occult themes with high fashion magazine clippings in her artworks. Donofrio said her art was influenced by witch house music in 2009, especially Salem. "It came from a real and personal place. It made me want to be part of that," said Donofrio, explaining how Salem made honest music about practicing witchcraft.

 

Donofrio said she believes the timing was perfect because notable high fashion designers were drawing influences from gothic aesthetics last winter. "I had been a goth in high school, and it really set me apart from everyone else," said Donofrio. "Now, what's underground and what's mainstream is becoming the same thing, and it's not so weird to be a freaky person. It's considered cool."

 

After music blogs began to feature Donofrio's occult-themed artworks, she received emails from witch house musicians requesting album art. Donofrio is best known for producing an album cover for Clan Destine Records, which depicts an image of a blindfolded girl facing a triangle.

 

Donofrio's art is characterized by triangles and occult themes. "I decided to use those symbols in my art because it was a language I knew really well," said Donofrio, who studied anthropology in college, focusing on witchcraft and religion. "A lot of people could understand it and thought it was comforting."

 

Dafydd McKaharay, a DJ and prominent music trend blogger for Mishka NYC, explained how symbols began to define witch house. "Occult imagery has been one of the most stable aspects of the ever-changing meme," said McKaharay. "Symbols imprint into your brain, and they also say, 'Look at this.'"

 

McKaharay explained that witch house artists initially used symbols in their names to stay obscure and secretive; it's difficult to Google a triangle or a paragraph symbol, for example. For this reason, occult practitioners, as well as hackers and video gamers, who were familiar with the symbols, were immediately attracted to witch house. "A culture has to have music, dances, a religion," said McKaharay. "So you saw this weird mixture of the occult with the hardcore Internet user culture."

 

But witch house didn't stay a secret for long. By February 2011, witch house symbols and imagery began to creep into the mainstream. McKaharay said witch house started to "emboss itself into the fabric of popular culture," pointing to Lady Gaga, who used conspicuous triangles and other sigils in her "Born This Way" music video. "The starkness of an image hits like a tattoo in people's mind," said McKaharay, explaining the effect.

 

In August, Chino Moreno of the platinum-certified Deftones announced his new music project. The project's title consists of three cross symbols, which sparked a wave of excitement and disapproval in the witch house community. McKaharay explained that some people within the witch house scene are trying to produce more commercially successful music, while others want the scene to stay underground. Jones said he believes symbols are being overused.

 

Donofrio said she believes that anyone involved in the music scene knows what witch house is by now and that the Internet community is moving on. "I think it was a spark that started up a lot of really cool ideas in other areas," said Donofrio.

 

McKaharay emphasized that people within the witch house community are continuously pushing limits by sharing music from outside of the genres that are popular within the scene. This flux of deviant music keeps influencing artists to incorporate new sounds and ideas into witch house.

 

In fact, the scene that began as witch house is now reinventing a brighter, slightly upbeat adaptation of itself called "post-rave," a variant of witch house music that is blended with the '90s U.K. rave aesthetic. "The mainstream always finds a way to take over genres," said McKaharay, "but are they going to be able to attack a beast that changes its head so many times?"