Bram E. Gieben (aka Texture) is the editor of the Edinburgh-based fiction/non-fiction website Weaponizer, and also co-founder of the net label Black Lantern Music. I asked him to write DM a primer on the genre “witch house”:

The Niallist (aka Niall O’Conghaile) asked me to write something about witch house, summing it up, providing a genre overview, and talking about some of the artists I’ve discovered over the last year or so. The problem is witch house is nothing like a traditional genre. It is not defined by a tempo, a style of production, a specific group of artists, a region or country or city, or any of the things one could use to pigeonhole, say, shoegaze, dubstep or hip-hop. Even the pool of influences from which it draws are so diverse as to stagger the mind of even the most ardent avant garde completist: witch house can (and does) sound like everything from experimental noise and drone to EBM and darkwave and aggrotech, from hip-hop to punk rock and black metal, often all at the same time.

Witch house is perhaps the first anti-genre, in that it has always actively resisted not just definition, but also detection. Much mockery has been made of artists spelling their band names with strange typographic symbols, but in the early days of witch house this had a specific intent: namely to create a ‘lexical darknet’ (to quote Warren Ellis, the comics writer and novelist whose blog posts led me to my first discoveries in the field), whereby fans had to use the specific symbols in the band names to locate their music online.

Witch house has incubated and mutated on free music sharing platforms such as Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and survives and breeds on private forums like www.witch-house.com, and on invite-only Facebook groups like Witchbook and Dior Nights, which use Facebook to run miniature secret societies and covens. These technologies (or services, however you want to define them) are core to the distribution of the music, but equally important have been the Tumblr and Vimeo platforms. The cut-and-paste ethos behind many witch house projects extends to their visuals, and the gifs, music videos and photo collages that populate artists’ feeds and channels are as much a part of the aesthetic of witch house as the music is.

The equal importance of visual and audio material helps us get closer to a definition of witch house: it is a mood or a feeling, the kind of atmosphere generated by the seminal Goblin’s soundtrack for ‘Suspiria,’ the creeping, schizophrenic suspense of the Laura Palmer mystery, or the Red Room at the heart of Twin Peaks, the final twenty minutes of The Wicker Man, or a basement rave in the house at the end of The Blair Witch Project. In repose, it generates an aura of ritual, darkness and suspense. In motion, it combines the glamour of fetish clubs and serial murder and hard drugs into an amoral dystopia of sound and vision.

Excited yet? You should be. Witch house is almost completely free from the constraints of mainstream hype - aside perhaps from the majestic witch pop of S4LEM, the mysterious feedback glyphs of WU LYF, and the luxurious electronic experimentation of Balam Acab, the three artists closest to crossing over into mainstream consciousness.
 

 
After the jump, the bands including Gummy Bear, Ritualz, Skeleton Kids, Fostercare, Gvcci Hvcci, Mater Suspiria Vision, oOoOO and many, many more.

 
Rob Ager has no academic credentials in the realms of psychology or film making, but he clearly doesn’t need them. He has an incredible intuitive grasp of the links between celluloid and the subconscious mind. He’s not only a brilliant thinker, he’s a tenacious researcher. In this fascinating study of Stanley Kubrick’s disruption of spatial logic in order to create a sense of unease in his film The Shining, Ager gets at the heart of what makes the movie so spooky - the fact that it’s so fucking disorienting, an Escher-like maze of endless corridors drifting into infinity. A terrifying dream folding into itself. Jung would have loved this movie and Ager’s take on it.

Ager wrote, narrated and edited this outstanding analysis of Kubrick’s much-maligned vertiginous masterpiece.
 

 
Via Mister Honk

 
It S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-S!
 
Via Copy Ranter

 
Nick Cave slings Warren Ellis to the stage floor while performing “Get It On” in Belgium earlier this month. Was it part of the act or some real shit being worked out between two old friends? Maybe they’re training for the WWF? Tag team duo The Grinder Men!

The smackdown occurs around the 1:30 mark. Cave hurls Ellis to the canvas, maracas flying.  Ellis is back up in a flash with a flying kick, but doesn’t connect. The crowd goes wild.
 

 
The Amy Winehouse teapot by artist Charles Krafft and Mike Leavitt. As Dangerous Minds pal Adam Parfrey puts it, “Here’s how everyone can enjoy Amy Winehouse forever, and also pour poppy tea…”

 
Fuck me but pop music hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Headlining this year’s UK festivals is the very best of what the 1990s had to offer, Radiohead, Primal Scream, Pulp, The Prodigy, The Charlatan, and even, er, U2. Okay, the Gallagher brothers are unlikely to kiss-and-make-up, but there are still rumors about a Blur reunion, which means we can party like it’s 1995.

The very thought could make a fan weak-eyed and teary-kneed for the glorious UK music mag Select, which faithfully documented the very best of music during the decade.

Select‘s dedication to Brit Pop was only part of its appeal, for what made the magazine delightful, fun and certainly essential, was the quality of its writers who penned columns, interviews and reviews in its silky pages.

Now these names read like a Who’s Who of TV and pop culture, from the darkly handsome genius of Graham Linehan, through the grumbling brilliance of wit and wisdom from David Quantick, to the ever-smiling J. B.Priestly of pop, Stuart Maconie, and let’s not forget Miranda Sawyer, Alexis Petridis, Andrew Collins, Sarra Manning, and Caitlin Moran.

To jump start the memories, some kindly soul has scanned a damn fine selection of covers and some lovely features from Select magazine “to give random flashbacks to the 90s music scene.” How cool is that? Answers on a postcard, please.

Now check the Select scans here.
 

 

 
Previously on dangerous Minds

 
More groovy covers, after the jump…
 

 
Tess Adamski’s Jack Kerouac tattoo by Thor at Yonge Street Tattoos.

(via Everlasting Blort)

 
If this out-of-control trailer is any indication, then Kevin Smith’s new independently-produced horror film, Red State, really takes the whole Deliverance , crazy Christian, Westoboro Baptist, David Koresh-thing to a whole new level. The title alone piqued my curiosity and for sure, this trailer had the intended effect (on me at least). If horror films function as some sort of pop culture marker or indicator of mass fears and nightmares, it’s fascinating to consider how fanatical Christians are rapidly becoming archetypal Hollywood bad guys in the new century. (Of course Red State’s release is rather well-timed with the recent tragedy in Norway…)

Kevin Smith has been self-distributing Red State in a traveling roadshow, appearing himself as part of the attraction before the film premieres on pay-per-view on September 1. Smith will be attending a slate of screenings next month Los Angeles:

Kevin Smith and SModcast Pictures are proud to announce a one week exclusive Academy Award qualifying run of Red State beginning Friday, August 19th at Quentin Tarantino’s legendary New Beverly Cinema. Each screening of Red State will be followed by a live Q&A with writer - director Kevin Smith.

Red State had its controversial and much talked about debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where Smith bought the distribution rights for $20.

Smith decided to self distribute the film and immediately set up 15 special screenings throughout the U.S. as part of the “Red State U.S.A. Tour”. The tour began at the historic Radio City Music Hall in New York on March 5th and finished one month later at the infamous Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

More information at the Red State website
 

 
Remember what former Representative Alan Grayson famously said about the GOP plans to reform US healthcare:

Don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.

 
(via The High Definite)

 
In today’s social media connected world, when you fuck up, you can fuck up LARGE. But when you’re an international media conglomerate with a several billion-dollar market cap that a sizable portion of the European and North American populations already find to be a noxious, corrosive, evil influence on modern life, and you fuck up, you fuck up in ways that can cost your investors billions.

The Murdochs are now social pariahs in the UK. No one is going to stand up for them, no one at all. How much longer can they credibly continue to do business in Britain? Not a pretty picture for a public company to be in. Expect their shareholders to start fleeing as the holes they dug for themselves are revealed to be deeper than anyone ever imagined as deep as everyone has always suspected.

Of course, as the Murdoch/News International/NewsCorp death spiral takes new twists and turns—like today’s blockbuster revelations—we’re sure not going to hear about the company’s travails from a NewsCorp outlet, are we? But who wants that shit anyway? Problem is, Murdoch and co. own so much of the media that it’s hard to keep track of what is theirs and what’s not. A new browser plug-in called MurdochAlert will alert web surfers when then unwittingly happen upon a website owned by parent company NewsCorp or one of their subsidiaries. From the MurdochAlert free download page:

NewsCorp agents in multiple countries have been arrested for hacking into the phones and computers of at least thousands of innocent people. Since the Murdoch family controls 100+ high-traffic domains, it is difficult for average users to know which sites could potentially place them at risk.

MurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hacking. MurdochAlert shows a bottom warning box whenever you visit a Murdoch-controlled sited.

Nicely! And then there is Murdoch Block, which is a bit more hardcore and will block Murdoch-owned website altogether:

Install this app to if you want to estimate News Corp’s influence on your internet life, install it to make a statement to the Murdoch empire or install it because you’ve just had enough lies.

Thousands of these plug-ins have been downloaded in the past few days.
 

 
Via News Junkie Post