Net Positive Records

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.

HexD is a net-native microgenre and editing style that subjects rap, emo rap, and digicore/hyperpop vocals to heavy detuning, extreme bit-depth/sample-rate reduction, clipping, and cavernous reverb. Instead of the bright, high-energy rush of nightcore or hyperpop, HexD inverts the palette: songs are slowed or pitch-shifted downward, vocals become monstrous or androgynous, and mixes feel foggy, corroded, and occult. The result is a hypnotic, haunted atmosphere that blends chopped-and-screwed pacing with witch-house gloom and glitchy, lo‑fi digital artifacts. HexD is closely tied to online platforms (especially SoundCloud), where anonymous editors, small producers, and tight-knit collectives trade edits, covers, and original tracks that emphasize mood, texture, and internet-era gothic aesthetics over pristine fidelity.

Nightcore is a remixing style that speeds up and pitch-shifts existing songs—most often Eurodance, trance, and pop—creating a brighter, higher-pitched vocal timbre and a faster, energetic groove. Typical edits raise the tempo by roughly 20–35% and increase the pitch 2–4 semitones, giving the vocals a youthful, "chipmunk-like" sheen. Born from a Norwegian DJ duo’s party edits in the early 2000s and later amplified by YouTube communities, Nightcore functions both as an aesthetic and a technique. It emphasizes momentum, euphoria, and emotive immediacy, frequently paired with anime or fan-art visuals that reinforce its internet-native, youth-centric identity.

Plunderphonics is a sample-based music practice in which new compositions are made entirely or predominantly from pre‑existing recordings. Rather than using short, unrecognizable snippets as texture, plunderphonic works foreground recognizable materials—pop hits, classical excerpts, commercials, voice-overs—and transform them through juxtaposition, layering, pitch-shifting, time-stretching, and collage. Coined by Canadian composer John Oswald in the mid‑1980s, the term names both a technique and a critical stance that questions authorship, originality, and ownership in the age of reproducible media. Plunderphonics often functions as cultural commentary or satire, drawing attention to how meaning changes when familiar sounds are recontextualized. Stylistically, it ranges from dense cut‑up cacophony to groove-oriented rearrangements that remain danceable and accessible.

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.