Starhenge Records

Ambient is a form of electronic and electroacoustic music that prioritizes tone, atmosphere, and texture over conventional song structures and rhythmic drive. It typically features slow-moving harmonies, sustained drones, gentle timbral shifts, and extensive use of space and silence. Rather than drawing attention to itself through hooks or beats, ambient is designed to be as ignorable as it is interesting, rewarding both background listening and focused immersion. Artists often employ synthesizers, samplers, tape loops, field recordings, and subtle acoustic instruments, with reverb and delay creating a sense of place. Substyles range from luminous, consonant soundscapes to darker, more dissonant atmospheres.

Americana is a contemporary umbrella term for U.S. roots music that blends folk, country, blues, bluegrass, gospel, and roots rock into a songwriter-centered, largely acoustic-leaning sound. Hallmarks include story-driven lyrics; warm, organic production; and traditional instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, harmonica, pedal steel, upright or electric bass, and restrained drums. Rhythms often draw on the train beat, shuffles, two-step, waltz time, and relaxed backbeats. Harmonically it favors diatonic progressions (I–IV–V, I–vi–IV–V), modal tinges (Mixolydian), and close vocal harmonies. Rather than a rigid style, Americana functions as a bridge among related roots traditions, emphasizing authenticity, regional imagery, and narrative songwriting over genre flashiness.

Avant-garde music is an umbrella term for boundary-pushing practices that challenge prevailing norms of harmony, rhythm, timbre, form, and performance. It privileges experimentation, conceptual rigor, and a willingness to reframe what counts as music at all. Historically tied to early 20th‑century artistic modernism, avant-garde music introduced atonality, the emancipation of noise, and new forms of notation and process. It embraces indeterminacy, extended techniques, electronics, spatialization, and multimedia performance, treating sound as material to be sculpted, questioned, and reinvented.

Barber beats is a vaporwave-adjacent microgenre characterized by slowed, loop-based instrumentals built from lounge, smooth jazz, and easy-listening samples. Producers emphasize a soft, cushiony drum groove, heavy time-stretching, subtle pitch shifting, and warm, dusty textures that evoke waiting rooms, lobbies, and late‑night cable atmospheres. Typical tracks sit around 85–105 BPM, lean on mellow chords, brushed snares or gentle drum-machine kits, and favor tasteful filtering, vinyl crackle, and roomy reverb. The result is hypnotic, low-stakes background music that feels both nostalgic and liminal—less overtly ironic than classic vaporwave, yet still rooted in sample-based moodcraft and retro corporate aesthetics.

Breakbeat is an electronic dance music style built around syncopated, sampled drum "breaks" rather than a straight four-on-the-floor kick. Producers chop, loop, and rearrange classic drum breaks (such as the Amen, Apache, and Think breaks) to create swung, shuffling rhythms with strong backbeat accents. Emerging from the UK rave continuum, breakbeat draws heavily on hip hop’s sampling culture and electro’s machine-funk, while adopting house/acid-house sound design and club-focused arrangements. Tempos most commonly sit between 125–140 BPM (though broader ranges occur), featuring heavy sub-bass, crunchy snares, and edits/fills that propel dancefloors without relying on a 4/4 kick. As a scene, "breaks" spans everything from big-room, party-leaning grooves to techy, nu skool textures and regional variants like Florida breaks. It also functions as a foundational rhythmic vocabulary that informed jungle and drum and bass, and it underpins much of modern bass music.

Breakcore is a high-intensity electronic music genre built around hyper-edited breakbeats, extreme dynamics, and a deliberately transgressive, collage-like approach to sampling. It prioritizes rhythmic complexity, abrupt structural shifts, and heavy sound design over smooth continuity. Typical tempos range from 160 to 220 BPM (and beyond), with the Amen break, Think break, and other classic breakbeats chopped into micro-fragments, re-sequenced, and processed with distortion, compression, and glitch edits. The palette freely fuses elements from jungle and drum and bass with gabber kicks, industrial noise, classical or choral snippets, ragga vocals, metal guitar samples, and odd-meter patterns. More than a single “sound,” breakcore is a methodology: confrontational energy, maximalist editing, and anti-formalist structures that often subvert dance-music expectations. It thrives in DIY scenes, warehouse parties, and netlabel cultures, where forward-pushing experimentation and boundary-blurring sampling are central values.

Chillwave is a late-2000s microgenre of electronic pop characterized by hazy, retro-tinged synthesizers, lo‑fi textures, understated drum machines, and heavily processed, dreamlike vocals. Its sound evokes sun-faded nostalgia, often referencing 1980s synth-pop and soft rock atmospheres filtered through cassette hiss, chorus, and reverb. Built by bedroom producers during the blog era, chillwave prizes mood over virtuosity: gentle major-seventh harmonies, loop-friendly motifs, and sidechain‑pumped pads create a warm, gauzy drift. Visual and conceptual aesthetics—VHS artifacts, pastel palettes, palm trees, and memories of an endless summer—are integral to its identity.

Dark jazz is a moody, slow-burning strain of jazz that blends late-night noir atmospheres with ambient, drone, and doom-influenced pacing. It favors minimal harmony, cavernous reverbs, and an emphasis on space and texture over virtuosic solos. Smoky saxophones, bowed double bass, brushed drums, piano or Rhodes, vibraphone, and guitars drenched in delay are common timbral anchors. Rather than bebop’s momentum or swing’s buoyancy, dark jazz lingers on hushed dynamics and sustained tones, creating a cinematic, often melancholic aura reminiscent of urban rain, deserted streets, and after-hours solitude.

Downtempo is a mellow, groove-oriented branch of electronic music characterized by slower tempos, plush textures, and a focus on atmosphere over dancefloor intensity. Typical tempos range from about 60–110 BPM, with swung or laid-back rhythms, dub-informed basslines, and warm, jazz-tinged harmonies. Stylistically, it blends the spaciousness of ambient, the head-nodding rhythms of hip hop and breakbeat, and the cosmopolitan smoothness of lounge and acid jazz. Producers often use sampled drums, Rhodes or Wurlitzer electric pianos, guitar licks with delay, and field recordings to create intimate, cinematic soundscapes. The mood spans from soulful and romantic to introspective and dusk-lit, making it a staple of after-hours listening, cafes, and relaxed club back rooms.

Dungeon synth is a dark, fantasy-focused branch of ambient music that grew out of the early 1990s black metal underground. It typically uses inexpensive or vintage-sounding synthesizers to evoke medieval, folkloric, and high-fantasy worlds—dungeons, castles, forests, and forgotten realms—through simple modal melodies, drones, and processional harmonies. The style is intentionally lo‑fi and atmospheric: orchestral pads, choirs, pipe organs, harps, flutes, and bell tones are layered with tape-like hiss, room reverb, and steady pedal notes. Percussion is sparse or absent; when used, it tends toward martial snare patterns or timpani rolls rather than driving drum kits. Albums often function as worldbuilding artifacts with narrative track sequences, thematic leitmotifs, and evocative artwork.

EDM (Electronic Dance Music) refers to the mainstream, festival-oriented wave of electronic dance styles that rose to global prominence in the early 2010s. It emphasizes high-energy drops, ear-catching toplines, and crowd-pleasing arrangements designed for large stages and mass audiences. Musically, EDM typically sits around 124–130 BPM with a strong four-on-the-floor kick, wide supersaw leads, bright plucks, and heavily sidechained pads and basses for a pumping feel. Tracks are structured around tension-and-release: intros and builds lead to explosive drops, followed by breakdowns that rebuild energy. Vocals and pop-style songwriting frequently appear, enabling crossover success on radio and streaming platforms.

Electronic is a broad umbrella genre defined by the primary use of electronically generated or electronically processed sound. It encompasses music made with synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, computers, and studio/tape techniques, as well as electroacoustic manipulation of recorded or synthetic sources. The genre ranges from academic and experimental traditions to popular and dance-oriented forms. While its sonic palette is rooted in electricity and circuitry, its aesthetics span minimal and textural explorations, structured song forms, and beat-driven club permutations. Electronic emphasizes sound design, timbre, and studio-as-instrument practices as much as melody and harmony.

Experimental music is an umbrella term for practices that prioritize exploration, process, and discovery over adherence to established genre norms. It embraces new sound sources, nonstandard tuning systems, indeterminacy and chance operations, graphic and open-form scores, extended techniques, and technology-led sound design (tape, electronics, computers, and live processing). Rather than a single style, it is a methodology and ethos: testing hypotheses about sound, structure, and performance, often blurring boundaries between composition, improvisation, sound art, and performance art. Listeners can expect unfamiliar timbres, unusual forms, and an emphasis on how music is made as much as the resulting sound.

Experimental hip hop (often called avant-rap or left-field hip hop) pushes rap beyond conventional song forms, sound palettes, and production techniques. It hybridizes boom‑bap and contemporary hip hop rhythms with ideas from industrial, noise, IDM, electroacoustic music, and free jazz, favoring timbral risk‑taking, collage, and abstraction over radio‑oriented polish. Producers and MCs in this style disrupt expectations with unusual meters, asymmetric loops, microtiming, extreme dynamics, and heavy sound design (distortion, granular and spectral processing, tape manipulation). Vocals may range from conventional rapping to spoken word, chant, screams, or heavily processed deliveries. The result foregrounds texture, mood, and concept as much as groove and lyrical content.

Folk is a song-centered acoustic tradition rooted in community storytelling, everyday life, and social history. It emphasizes clear melodies, simple harmonies, and lyrics that foreground narrative, protest, and personal testimony. As a modern recorded genre, folk coalesced in the early-to-mid 20th century in the United States out of older ballad, work song, and rural dance traditions. It typically features acoustic instruments (guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica), strophic song forms, and participatory singing (choruses, call-and-response).

Industrial is an experimental electronic music tradition that uses abrasive timbres, mechanical rhythms, and transgressive aesthetics. Its sound palette often includes distorted drum machines, tape loops, metallic percussion, feedback, and found-object recordings alongside synthesizers and samplers. Emerging from late-1970s UK underground art and performance scenes, industrial foregrounds themes of dehumanization, technology, surveillance, and power. Releases frequently embrace anti-commercial presentation, stark graphic design, and confrontational performance art, treating the studio as a laboratory for sonic manipulation rather than a vehicle for conventional songcraft. While early industrial emphasized noise, tape processing, and avant-garde collage, later waves fused the style with dancefloor precision (EBM), rock and metal heft, and club-oriented production, giving rise to a broad post-industrial family that remains influential in experimental, electronic, and popular music.

Lounge is a mid-20th-century style of easy listening that blends jazz harmony, light orchestral arranging, and Latin/exotica rhythms into suave, unobtrusive music designed for relaxation and sophisticated ambience. Typically associated with cocktail lounges, tiki bars, and the hi‑fi/stereo boom, it emphasizes lush strings, vibraphone and marimba timbres, brushed drums, gentle horns, and occasional wordless vocals or whistling. Melodies are memorable yet restrained, arrangements are polished, and production often highlights spacious reverbs and playful stereo effects. A 1990s revival reframed lounge as retro‑chic, intersecting with downtempo, chillout, and nu‑jazz while preserving its trademark mood: warm, cosmopolitan, and stylishly relaxed.

Medieval music refers to the diverse sacred and secular musical practices of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the dawn of the Renaissance. It spans more than eight centuries, from early monophonic chant to the first notated polyphony. Core features include the use of church modes rather than major/minor, extensive reliance on vocal music (Latin sacred chant as well as vernacular song), and the progressive development from unmeasured chant to rhythmic modal notation and, later, mensural notation. Texture evolves from monophony (plainchant, troubadour songs) to organum, conductus, and the motet, culminating in complex isorhythmic works by the late 13th–14th centuries. Secular traditions—troubadours and trouvères in France, Minnesänger in German lands, and the Iberian Cantigas—coexisted with and influenced sacred practice. Instruments such as the vielle, harp, psaltery, recorder, shawm, hurdy-gurdy, and portative organ often doubled or accompanied voices, though much music remained purely vocal.

Noise is an experimental music genre that uses non-traditional sound sources, distortion, feedback, and extreme dynamics as primary musical materials. Instead of emphasizing melody, harmony, or conventional rhythm, it focuses on texture, density, timbre, and the physical presence of sound. Practitioners sculpt saturated walls of sound, piercing feedback, metallic clatter, contact-mic scrapes, tape hiss, and electronic interference into works that can be confrontational or meditative. Performances often highlight process and immediacy—improvisation, body movement, and site-specific acoustics—while recordings can range from lo-fi cassette overload to meticulously layered studio constructions. Though rooted in early avant-garde ideas, the genre coalesced as a distinct practice in the late 1970s and 1980s, especially through Japan’s ‘Japanoise’ scene, and subsequently influenced numerous styles across industrial, punk-adjacent, and experimental electronic music.

Progressive rock is a rock subgenre that expands the genre’s formal, harmonic, and conceptual boundaries. It favors long-form compositions, intricate arrangements, and virtuosic musicianship, often drawing on Western classical, jazz, folk, and psychedelic idioms. Typical hallmarks include multi-part suites, shifting time signatures, extended instrumental passages, recurring motifs, and concept albums that present unified themes or narratives. The sound palette commonly features electric guitar, bass, and drums alongside an array of keyboards (Hammond organ, Mellotron, Moog/ARP synthesizers, piano), woodwinds or brass, and occasional orchestral additions. Lyrics often explore science fiction, mythology, philosophy, social commentary, and introspective themes.

Psychedelic is an umbrella term for music that seeks to evoke, emulate, or accompany altered states of consciousness through sound, arrangement, and studio technique. It emphasizes timbral color, drones, modal harmony, surreal or mystical lyrics, and immersive production, often using tape manipulation, extended effects, and non‑Western instruments (notably from Indian classical traditions). The result ranges from delicate, dreamlike textures to dense, kaleidoscopic soundscapes intended to expand perception and dissolve conventional song form.

Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that seeks to evoke, simulate, or amplify altered states of consciousness. It emphasizes timbral color, textural layering, and extended forms over traditional verse–chorus efficiency. Hallmarks include droning or modal harmonies, jangling or heavily fuzzed guitars, swirling organs or synthesizers, and extensive use of studio effects such as tape delay, reverse tape, phasing, flanging, and Leslie-speaker rotation. Rhythms often loosen into hypnotic vamps and long improvisations, while lyrics tend toward surreal imagery, cosmic themes, and introspection. The sound draws from Indian classical drones and scales, blues and R&B roots, folk lyricism, free-jazz openness, and the burgeoning studio experimentalism of the mid‑1960s. It became a cultural emblem of the counterculture era.

Punk is a fast, abrasive, and minimalist form of rock music built around short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and confrontational, anti-establishment lyrics. It emphasizes DIY ethics, raw energy, and immediacy over virtuosity, often featuring distorted guitars, shouted or sneered vocals, and simple, catchy melodies. Typical songs run 1–3 minutes, sit around 140–200 BPM, use power chords and basic progressions (often I–IV–V), and favor live, unpolished production. Beyond sound, punk is a cultural movement encompassing zines, independent labels, political activism, and a fashion vocabulary of ripped clothes, leather, and safety pins.

Rock is a broad family of popular music centered on amplified instruments, a strong backbeat, and song forms that foreground riffs, choruses, and anthemic hooks. Emerging from mid‑20th‑century American styles like rhythm & blues, country, and gospel-inflected rock and roll, rock quickly expanded in scope—absorbing folk, blues, and psychedelic ideas—while shaping global youth culture. Core sonic markers include electric guitar (often overdriven), electric bass, drum kit emphasizing beats 2 and 4, and emotive lead vocals. Rock songs commonly use verse–chorus structures, blues-derived harmony, and memorable melodic motifs, ranging from intimate ballads to high‑energy, stadium‑sized performances.

Synth-pop is a pop-oriented style that foregrounds the synthesizer as its primary instrument, often paired with drum machines and sequencers. It favors clean, melodic hooks, concise song structures, and a sleek, modernist sound that ranges from cool and minimal to lush and romantic. Emerging at the turn of the 1980s from the UK new wave and post-punk scenes, synth-pop leveraged affordable analog and then digital keyboards to bring electronic textures into the mainstream. Its sonic palette includes arpeggiated basslines, shimmering pads, bright leads, gated or machine-driven drums, and polished vocals that convey both futuristic detachment and emotional immediacy.

Trip hop is a downtempo, atmospheric fusion of hip hop rhythm and sampling techniques with the textures of dub, soul, jazz, and ambient music. Emerging from the Bristol scene in the early 1990s, it favors slow, head‑nodding breakbeats, deep bass, and cinematic sound design. The style is characterized by moody harmonies (often in minor keys), woozy tape- and vinyl-derived timbres, and liberal use of delay and reverb. Vocals frequently alternate between intimate, breathy singing and spoken word/rap, and lyrical themes tend toward noir, introspective, and melancholic subjects. Strings, Rhodes pianos, turntable scratches, and field recordings are common, creating a shadowy, filmic vibe.

Vaporwave is an internet-born microgenre and visual aesthetic that repurposes late‑20th‑century commercial sound—mu zak, smooth jazz, soft rock, synth‑pop, city pop, and corporate training tapes—into hazy, slowed, and looped collages. Its sound foregrounds pitched‑down samples, heavy reverb, tape hiss, vinyl crackle, and dreamy pads to evoke a mood between satire and sincere nostalgia. Beyond music, vaporwave is inseparable from its graphic language: Greco‑Roman busts, Japanese text, retro operating systems, chrome logos, palm trees, neon gradients, and “mall culture” architecture. The result feels like a haunted shopping mall: part critique of consumer capitalism, part wistful memory of media and retail spaces from the 1980s–2000s. Tempos are typically slow (roughly 60–90 BPM), harmonies tend toward lush seventh and extended chords, and rhythms range from barely perceptible loops to minimal, gated drum programming. Many tracks are short, vignette‑like studies in texture and mood.

Zolo is a quirky, hyper-melodic strain of late-1970s/early-1980s new wave and art-pop characterized by jittery rhythms, staccato guitar figures, rubbery basslines, and bright, cartoonish synthesizers. Its songs are typically tightly arranged but unusually busy, with sudden stops, metric feints, and modulations that nod to progressive rock and the Canterbury scene while keeping an ear for punchy pop hooks. Vocals often lean toward playful, neurotic, or satirical deliveries, with lyrics about everyday anxieties, technology, suburbia, and social oddities. The overall effect is energetic and clever—brainy pop that dances between art-rock intricacy and new wave immediacy.

Synth punk is a raw, high‑energy fusion of punk’s velocity and attitude with the abrasive, synthetic timbres of analog keyboards, drum machines, and noise gear. Instead of guitar-driven riffs, synth punk typically foregrounds distorted monosynth bass lines, cheap combo organs, or primitive sequencers pounding out repetitive patterns at punk tempos. Vocals are often shouted, sneered, or delivered deadpan; lyrics skewer consumer culture, media saturation, technology, and urban alienation. Production values tend toward the minimal and DIY: overdriven inputs, tape saturation, room mics, and purposeful crudity. The result is a confrontational, mechanical churn—danceable yet hostile—that helped open a direct line between punk, early industrial, and later synth-oriented underground scenes.