EVERY GENRE PROJECT - April 19 - Organic House
Genre of the Day - Organic House
Album of the Day - Prender el alma by Nicola Cruz (2015)
April 19, 2024 (written in the morning, before any Coachella festivities commenced)
What’s the least annoying way to declare you have arrived at Coachella? Perhaps there is none. It is a bit unfortunate that such a world class musical spectacle and arts expo has made such a name for itself based on how tedious and influencery the crowd was roughly eight years ago. Luckily, it feels significantly less influencer and hypebeast heavy since COVID. This is my first time, though, so I’ll have to observe the situation on the ground once things get started up. There will be some Coachella articles to come. It’s only morning right now: I’m sitting in the blazing sun as we’re still 10 degrees out from the daily temperature high, a breezy 94 F°.
However, Coachella and today’s genre go hand in hand ideologically to a near uncanny extent. First of all, today’s genre is a very distinctive offshoot of house. As I was surprised to learn in my history of EDM class, Coachella was a major standard bearer of EDM genres like big beat and acid house in its early days alongside its rock repertoire before making a more pop pivot (although my genre analysis will be underway). Marry this history to Coachella’s boho-chic, naturalist pantomimes and you’ve got an aesthetic fusion that feels stylistically akin to organic house. Organic house is another marriage of rave and dance elements with the natural emerging in the late 2010s: it tends to use real instruments and percussion, often drawing from foreign instruments, rather than the traditional 808s and 909s of house for a stunning, ambient groove.
It’s certainly a starkly different vibe from the typical house ethos. Many house genres are hard-hitting and brash: it’s dance music originally intended for gritty spaces like warehouses, after all. However, as it’s gone worldwide and into a variety of settings, house has been tweaked and tailored for the beach (tropical house), any pleasant commercial space that needs an equally pleasant tune, like a quaint little restaurant in a millennial dominated neighborhood (melodic house), and even studying (lo-fi house). It makes sense that it would eventually come full circle to elements from before house in its original iteration was even possible. It’s one of the coolest marriages of musical heritage and sonic futurism I’ve experienced on this column.
While some of tropical house and adjacent genres like organic house’s perceived pitfalls lie in exoticism and merely including foreign or unusual instruments for the sake of it, when artists can draw from their heritage to create something between their history and the dance future, it can be magical. This is the case of today’s producer, Nicola Cruz, who hails from Ecuador and draws on indigenous South American cosmology and the Andean and African musical roots of Ecuador in his vision of organic house. While the music is calm, don’t mistake this for uninteresting: through the use of crackling vocal samples of kids singing in an indigenous Ecuadorian language (“Eclipse”) and an innovative combination of organic percussion and occasional more traditional house moments and even four on the floor beats, he stretches the limits of organic house in his quest for ambience fueled by an ancient musical lineage. When is his headlining spot?