Pumice

Shitgaze is a deliberately lo‑fi, noise‑blasted strain of indie rock that pushes recording equipment to its limits—embracing tape hiss, clipping, blown‑out drums, and overloaded guitars as aesthetic choices rather than flaws. Coined as a tongue‑in‑cheek nod to shoegaze, the term emerged around a Columbus, Ohio–centered DIY scene whose bands favored 4‑track cassettes, cheap mics, and first‑take energy. The songs are short, hooky, and punk‑paced, but smeared with distortion and room noise, yielding a sound that is both catchy and caustic. Beyond provocation, shitgaze frames rawness as a form of honesty: immediacy over polish, texture over fidelity, and irreverent humor over studio perfection.

Experimental psych is a loose, underground strain of psychedelic music that merges free-form experimentation with the mind-altering aesthetics of 1960s psych. It privileges texture, trance, and timbral exploration over conventional song structures, often blurring lines between drone, noise, folk, ambient, and improvised music. Field recordings, tape hiss, handmade instruments, detuned strings, and non-Western modal ideas are common; so are extended techniques, ritualistic repetition, and lo‑fi production choices that foreground atmosphere and sensation. Rather than aiming for pop 'hooks,' this style seeks altered states of attention: hypnotic, otherworldly soundscapes, cracked folk miniatures, and long-form improvisations that feel simultaneously ancient and future-facing.

Noise rock is a subgenre of rock that deliberately embraces distortion, feedback, dissonance, and abrasive textures as primary musical materials rather than mere effects. It prioritizes timbre, volume, and sonic density over conventional melody and harmony, often using nonstandard tunings, prepared or detuned guitars, and extended techniques to generate harsh overtones and sheets of sound. Rhythm sections tend to be driving and repetitive, anchoring the chaos with motorik pulses, lurching grooves, or pummeling, minimal patterns. Vocals range from spoken and murmured to shouted and cathartic, with lyrics that skew cryptic, confrontational, or surreal. Aesthetically, noise rock traces a line from punk’s anti-virtuosity and DIY ethos through no wave’s iconoclasm and the avant-garde’s interest in sound-as-sound, yielding music that can be physically intense, psychologically unsettling, and artistically exploratory.