The five weirdest music genres you’ve never heard of, live from Bandcamp

I’ve decided to give up honest music writing for the sake of pure clickbait, so here we are. This list is absolutely not the definitive top five, but hopefully, it can give a glimpse into the dustier corners of the music platform we all know and love. Or, maybe it’s just a cry for help because I’m forever cursed with the knowledge of what gorenoise is.

Gorenoise:

Gorenoise, a.k.a.: the sounds your toilet makes after you let it borrow your Carcass tapes (only the first couple albums though). This pleasant tag houses such artists as the frog-themed Phyllomedusa, easily the most accessible to be found here, as well as a slew of other basement-dwelling edgelords with the most visually and aurally offensive sounds on the internet. The genre itself is a mixture of harsh noise and goregrind, which in itself is a microgenre that offers a horror movie/gore obsessed take on grindcore, the pleasant mixture of hardcore punk and thrash/death metal we all know and love. To be honest, I can’t say I enjoy gorenoise in the slightest, nor can I recommend you click the tag and view for yourself the horrors to be found there, but I can point you toward a beautifully written piece over at No Clean Singing to answer your burning questions. (https://www.nocleansinging.com/2014/03/26/christian-molenaars-guide-to-gorenoise/)

Lowercase:

Okay, did Bandcamp daily JUST run a piece on lowercase? Yes, they did. But I swear I’ve known about this thing for a lot longer than the last couple days.

Lowercase lies somewhere between ambient noise, drone, and field recordings, in that the genre relies on soundscapes entirely made up of sounds that are otherwise inaudible to the human ear. Early examples include amplified sounds of human fingers dragging across the pages of a book, and current projects make use of everything from harps, frog sounds, and more or less everything you can imagine in ways that you could never hear.

Post-Cybergrind:

To be completely honest, I had no idea that “post-cybergrind” even existed until I saw it as a related tag on the Bandcamp “crunkcore” page (another hilariously atrocious internet microgenre) and boy oh boy, did I find a gem.

So I guess to start off we should establish what regular cybergrind is: a subgenre of the grindcore I mentioned earlier, but this time with inhuman drum machine beats and sometimes more futuristic or dystopian lyrical themes (see: everything Agoraphobic Nosebleed put out before Arc (2016). What happens when we stick the all-powerful “post with a hyphen” tag in front of it? Hilarity ensues. What’s already an obnoxious punk/metal subgenre gets even more obnoxious with, for lack of a better word, “scene” sounding elements of things like crunkcore, and we’re left with a weird, heaping mess I don’t think I ever need more of. Except for Machine Girl.

Gabber:

According to Wikipedia, “Although arguably a house variant from Detroit, techno music reached Amsterdam in the late 1980s, and it was the producers and DJs from Rotterdam in the early 1990s who evolved it, mixing it with industrial into a harder house variant which is today known as ‘gabber.’” What we have is essentially Dutch hardcore house music that takes cues from industrial, and that now has found a comfortable home on Bandcamp. Listening to it feels like putting on a sweatsuit and going to a warehouse, dancing with skinny white dudes and seeing lots of neon colors. In Europe. The key is that we’re in Europe.

Seapunk:

Drop a comment below about what your Tumblr feed looked like because we’re going down that rabbit hole, through time and space back to 2011. The lesser known younger sibling of vaporwave, seapunk takes weird 2012-via-1996 computer graphics and throws them in the ocean, makes a beat afterward, then sad posts on the internet for days at a time.

Allegedly, the genre’s name comes from a text post that read “Seapunk leather jacket with barnacles where the studs used to be” which really has nothing to do with what the genre became, but nonetheless gave it a name and somewhat of a face. Sonically, seapunk isn’t far from vaporwave, with the motifs of slowed down, chopped-n-screwed-esque, bass-heavy house-adjacent sounds remaining intact, but with a more nautical theme present in album covers and song titles. 2012 was a beautiful time.

Article by Kieran Zimmer