EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 11 - Glitch Hop
Genre of the Day - Glitch Hop
Album of the Day - By The Time I Get to Phoenix by Injury Reserve (2021)
Yesterday’s article brought up one spectrum of an individual’s music listening habits in the simple binary of lighter, more uplifting versus darker, more brooding sounds. There’s a wealth of other sliding scales to help us grasp differences in music preferences, though—sparse versus lush, lyrical versus instrumental, polished versus grittiness, stimulating versus soothing. The act of creating music entails considering all of these and more, and we read and account for the balances with the mood of each listening session. Today’s genre considers a less-accounted for spectrum, that of experimentation. What level of jankiness, wonkiness, and off-kilter choices best enhances music for artists and listeners? Glitch hop leans hard into the extreme side of that spectrum, bridging hip-hop to electronically screwy extremes.
Hip-hop has brushed against electronic music since its inception—it wouldn’t have been impossible without samplers and drum machines, and the spacey arpeggios of a record as trailblazing as “The Message” or the electro-futurism of “Planet Rock” reflect how the two worlds have always been intertwined. Glitch hop has raced to fill that gap with further vigor in twitchier and uncharted sounds. Its production approaches evolved out of the clunky-termed intelligent dance music (IDM), which I covered briefly in flashcore’s serpentine explosions. IDM categorized a growing scene of less dancefloor-friendly and experimental compositions emerging in the early ‘90s.
Nerds in that arena who were geared more towards hip-hop began injecting it with IDM’s unpredictability and metallic sonic contraptions at the turn of the decade, and a growing scene coalesced in Los Angeles. As in a few of our recent genres, a particular club acted as a massive canvas for different DJs to test their sounds, and east LA’s Low End Theory nightclub lit up the hearth to cook up glitch hop’s idiosyncratic ideas. Though the club closed in 2018 after twelve years, the influence of its mainstay artists like Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing, and the Glitch Mob plus other pioneers like J Dilla, Machinedrum and Tipper resonates far beyond its now-dusty soundboards. Prominent artists like FKA Twigs, Arca, and JPEG Mafia and scenes like neurohop have continued to propel glitch hop to new and riveting heights.
Injury Reserve is among the post-Low End Theory crop of innovators, and this album emerges from a series of reckonings, released after the death of one member and the dire straits of 2020; it’s equal parts beguiling in its glitch-hop horizons and crushing in its emotional context. “Outside” busts the gates open with whirring buzzes and synths, battle rap declarations, and emcee Ritchie With A T’s high-stakes conclusion that “We cannot end this with an agree to disagree / There is no happy medium” as the track builds to disintegrating yet propulsive cascades of texture. The autotune vocalizations of “Superman That” recall a bit of Travis Scott, but its defibrillating, distorted blasts make ASTROWORLD look like a model rocket in comparison to the track’s extraterrestrial transmissions. The distorted splatters and weather-alert intensity of “Footwork in a Forest Fire” shake you by the shoulders as Ritchie ruminates, “There's one thing I know / Is that we in this thang alone.” It’s a line that echoes in the dismal premise of “Top Picks for You,” a withering piece on trying to hold onto a loved one through the particular digital algorithms in their now-purposeless devices; soft, metallic howls push through like spectral imagined chuckles. The trio harnesses hip-hop’s storytelling abilities with the provoking pushes of erratic, glitchy industrial production with unfettered energy—moreover, from a technical perspective, rapping over beats as volatile as glitch hop is a feat all its own.