EVERY GENRE PACKAGES: Absurdities (7 January 2025)

Jan 08, 2025

Absurdities: The Zany and Wacky

Today’s genre category is an ode to whimsy, a word that has delightfully garnered a bit of social media currency in the last couple of years, and to all music producers who are clearly crazed (if that doesn’t apply to all of them on a certain level). These random genres I encountered last year were some of the most joyful days, as I picked these creative scenes’ brains and frolicked among their visionary bizarreness.

(scroll to the bottom for all the genres in question)

This may contain: a painting with many different things on it and some trees in the background, including vases — soundscapes that might feel like this

The two genres that particularly came to mind as I conceptualized this grouping were zeuhl and suomisaundi. Zeuhl was peak prog-rock insanitymaxing in France’s late 1970s, as the band Magma kickstarted a scene by constructing a language and building an alien world through classical, prog-rock, and jazz fusion celestial visions. Suomisaundi finds Finnish producers referencing long-gone and idiosyncratic sounds in a spiraling vision of psytrance, which is already a hallucinatory circle of the dance world. It produced tunes I described as “blenders of dissonance, speed, and off-the-rails cartoonishness.”

Freakbeat also deserves a shoutout—who’s going to freak it harder than The Who’s Roger Daltrey awash in beans?

Beyond these touchstones, these genres bear a vast range of influences and origin stories. Some play with technological scale through different eras, like break-in’s comedic sound collage and early manifestation of sampling in the ‘50s, speedcore’s wild BPM maximization, or black MIDI’s hurricanes on digital piano keys. Others blossomed as city or region-specific scenes, their glorious eccentricity carried through word-of-mouth, like psichedelia occulta italiana or Canterbury Scene.

Electronic dance music allows for much flow and experimentation, so it’s no surprise some of the most quirked-up genres originate from its world. Dutch-Caribbean bubbling sprung from a happy accident produced from hitting the wrong speed setting while DJing, and aquacrunk literally diverged from the wonky scene. Ballroom’s production brashness (those crashes are tattooed on my brain) and its singers’ stand-out visual sense earned it a mention, even though it’s also associated with luxury and elegance.

Most of these selections have no true thoroughline other than their exceeding eccentricities. Some are not strange for their moment, but stand as music-history curiosities now like exotica’s clumsy synthesis of foreign sounds incorporated into lounge music. Like zeuhl, it’s funny how some of these genres are inspired by a single group of oddballs, like egg punk’s homages to the beloved, energy dome-clad group Devo.

Today, I listened to a touch of picopop, a bleepy and speedy offshoot of Japanese shibuya-kei kitschy retro pop. From the C+C Music Factoryesque synth disco romp that opens this album by CAPSULE to “twinkle twinkle poppp!” and its charming, sparkling jazz, it’s a delight, forays into cutesified drum’n’bass sharing space with pure synthpop moments. However, on the weirdoscale I can admit that it does not exceed some of these genres. I suppose we must wait patiently for an album that somehow combines them all—if their existence is any evidence, I believe it’s possible.