Is “Glitchhall” the next big thing?
posted on October 6th, 2009 by Tobias in Article, Audio
On his blog “Birdseed´s Tunedown”, Swedish author and student of musicology Johan Palme, today sees a next sub-genre of dancehall emerging: after Trancehall and Garrissontech, he states “Glitchhall” could be next:
Jamaican music has long been a contributor to the European avant garde and you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary highbrow genre in the nebulous art-popular field that doesn’t reference or relate to (at least) dub in some way. Glitch, for instance, definitely counts dub among its chief influences, as Jamaicans were among the first to create music on a larger scale by consistently misusing technical equipment to create strange noises. Well, in autumn 2009 this influence seems to have gone full circle.
He lists new releases from Blak Ryno (“Pon Di Earth“) and Busy Signal (“Black Belt“) as examples:
The riddim (“Arrhythmia”) of the first track has a second “snare drum” totally done in glitch style with some sort of noisy digital cut thing, whereas the “metronome” in the second track seems to be made up of skip-around clicks. Brilliant! I’m not going to claim it’s a conscious connection, but some people in Jamaica are obviously fucking around with their machinery… AGAIN.
Curious to see if this turns into a real trend.
In other news, a man got arrested over the murder of a British consul in Jamaica and 80s dancehall legend Major Mackerel got wounded by a man samuraiing his way through Mackarel´s Brooklyn neighbourhood (see picture above, via Boomshots).
Share your thoughts.