Raven, Your Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness and her pal Tara are on a goth-lite freakout!
 
Meet the new store-bought modern angst. The truth found herein is something even Marilyn Manson probably couldn’t have predicted. Amazingly, these girls were lucky enough to find each other, their short-lived cohort Azer, and YouTube. And now we can look into their black fishbowl and see what goes on in the deepest recesses of the mall goth’s bedroom. Watching them strangle themselves, bitch each other out and desperately try to lip-sync while losing themselves, busting out with grunts & out of tune screaming is a revelation! Not from The Satanic Bible though, but more from a redecorated-in-black Barbie comic book. Having been in Danzig for a bunch of years, I had met tons of demented teens with good & bad ideas, but this is a whole new thing. I would put money on the fact that Raven, Your Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness and her pal Tara have never heard of The Church of Satan. Anton LaVey’s photo would surely bring a collective “ewwwwwww.” Their taste in music (and their terrible Harry Potter fan fiction) is appalling and their motivation is quite skewed (to me). It’s new! It’s now! It makes no sense! Gotta love it.
 
In this early video that they made with their friend Azer, Mime of Satan’s Bidding (whose father wouldn’t let him be on YouTube, but then didn’t care, so they posted it), we have a perfect introduction to our new “serious as death” friends:
 

 
If they weren’t so young & so real it could be a Saturday Night Live sketch, but as much as I don’t get their motivation, I love how happy and in-the-moment “the darkness” makes them. When they really let go and forget they’re lip-syncing and the grunts of joy burst forth it’s like a cute exorcism.
 

 
“We like” (together) “BEING GOTH! It’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle.” Their relatives think Hot Topic is a devil store. “AFI & My Chemical Romance saved my life!” they scream desperately.

Azer, Mime of Satan’s Bidding got caught going into the “prep mall” while they were being goth across the street at Hot Topic, causing his ousting, explained here:
 

 
Death to false goth! Easy come, easy go. See ya Azer, Mime of Satan’s Bidding! These girls are so insane & so funny I just hope that there’s a lot of them out there! Haha! Tara’s mom comes in at one point and tells them to be quiet just before they sing “Hate will kill us all!” Then Raven accuses Tara of stealing her moves. I could watch this all day. Oh, I have! This was all uploaded five, six years ago, so I wonder—what are these two doing now?
 

 
And finally this last message, probably the best video I’ve seen in years, the poignant “A Message To The Haters.”
 

 
Hail Satan.

 
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.