Shrunken Monkey Music

Alternative dance blends the textures and songwriting of alternative rock and post‑punk with club‑oriented rhythms and production. Born in the UK at the cusp of the late 1980s “Second Summer of Love,” it embraced house/acid house grooves, sequenced bass lines, and sampling while keeping indie sensibilities, guitars, and song structures. The result is music that works on a dancefloor but still reads like an alternative single. Typical hallmarks include four‑on‑the‑floor or breakbeat drums, jangly or funky guitars, prominent bass (often synth), euphoric pads, and hook‑forward vocals. Landmark albums like New Order’s Technique and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica helped define its palette and ethos.

Alternative rock is a broad umbrella for guitar-based rock that emerged from the independent and college-radio scenes as a counterpoint to mainstream, commercial rock. It blends the energy and ethos of punk with the textural and songwriting experiments of post-punk, new wave, jangle pop, and noise rock, often foregrounding introspective or socially aware lyrics. Across its many strains—from the melodic minimalism of college rock to the loud-quiet-loud dynamics of grunge and the artful experimentation of Radiohead-era modernism—alternative rock prioritizes authenticity, sonic individuality, and a do-it-yourself approach. Its sound ranges from chiming, chorus-laden clean guitars to abrasive distortion and feedback, supported by straightforward rock rhythms or off-kilter grooves, and production that can be either raw and live-sounding or polished yet unconventional.

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.

Bassline (often called bassline house or Niche) is a UK-born, high-energy offshoot of UK garage built around a driving 4x4 kick pattern and huge, modulated sub-bass riffs. Typically sitting around 135–140 BPM, tracks use swung garage percussion, choppy R&B or pop vocal cuts, and bright organ or synth stabs, all arranged for rapid-fire, DJ-friendly drops. The signature is the wobbling, LFO-driven bassline that converses with the drums in tightly looped 8- or 16-bar phrases. Culturally, the style is rooted in northern England club culture (notably Sheffield’s Niche), with MC-led sets, quick blends, and a focus on dancefloor tension-and-release.

Dark electro is a grim, minor-key branch of EBM and electro‑industrial that foregrounds ominous atmospheres, horror‑tinged sampling, distorted or whispered vocals, and tightly sequenced basslines. Compared with classic EBM, it is colder, more cinematic, and more psychologically intense, often evoking dystopia, body horror, and inner turmoil. The style typically runs between medium and club tempos, uses stark drum‑machine patterns, dissonant stabs, and evolving arpeggios, and layers foley/samples to create a claustrophobic soundstage. Production favors saturation, bit‑crushing, and dynamic filtering over glossy sheen, keeping the mix dark, dry, and immediate.

Dark wave is a moody, melancholic offshoot of post-punk and new wave that emphasizes minor-key harmonies, somber timbres, and introspective or romantic lyrical themes. It blends the icy textures of early synthesizers and drum machines with reverb-laden guitars and melodic, driving basslines. The style typically features baritone or ethereal vocals, atmospheric production with heavy use of chorus, delay, and reverb, and tempos that range from slow and brooding to mid-tempo and danceable. Dark wave spans both guitar-oriented and synth-forward approaches, and often overlaps with related movements such as coldwave, minimal wave, and ethereal wave.

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.

IDM (often expanded as "Intelligent Dance Music") is a strand of experimental electronic music that applies the sound palette and production methods of club genres to listening-focused, often home-oriented works. It favors intricate rhythm programming, unusual time signatures, and richly textured sound design, blending ambient atmospheres with techno’s pulse, electro’s syncopation, and breakbeat’s fragmentation. The music often de-emphasizes the dancefloor in favor of headphone detail, algorithmic structure, and timbral exploration. The term itself is contentious—many artists rejected the "intelligent" label—yet it became a convenient tag for the early- to mid‑1990s cluster of Warp, Rephlex, and related scenes that foregrounded complexity, abstraction, and emotional ambiguity.

Indie rock is a guitar-centered rock music movement defined as much by its independent production and DIY ethos as by specific sonic traits. Early practitioners worked outside major-label systems, distributing music via small labels, college radio, and fanzines, which fostered a culture of experimentation and community. Sonically, indie rock ranges from jangly, melodic songs to abrasive noise-leaning textures, from lo-fi home recordings to meticulously arranged studio works. Hallmarks include inventive song structures, literate or introspective lyrics, and a willingness to blend elements of punk, post-punk, folk rock, and psychedelia. Over time, the term has come to describe both an approach to making music and the broad cluster of styles that grew from the independent rock underground.

Occult rock is a dark, vintage-leaning strain of hard and psychedelic rock that centers on esoteric, witchcraft, and ceremonial themes. It pairs heavy, riff-led songwriting with theatrical vocals and ritualistic imagery—candles, robes, sigils—evoking a sense of mystery and forbidden knowledge. Musically it draws on late-1960s/early-1970s hard rock and acid-drenched psychedelia: overdriven guitars, warm tube tones, analog organs (Hammond, Mellotron), fuzz bass, and dry, punchy drums. Songs are typically mid‑tempo, minor‑key, and hooky, favoring modal turns (Aeolian, Phrygian) and occasional tritone or chromatic color to heighten the ominous atmosphere. Lyrically, it references grimoires, folklore, and occult philosophy, often balancing narrative storytelling with chant-like choruses. Modern revivals preserve the 70s aesthetic—tape-saturated mixes and retro gear—while refining arrangements and production for contemporary audiences.

Porn groove is a sultry, tongue‑in‑cheek subset of 1970s funk, soul, and disco closely associated with adult film soundtracks and erotic exploitation cinema. It centers on slinky syncopated bass lines, wah‑wah and muted rhythm guitars, velvety Rhodes or Clavinet keys, syrupy string pads, and breathy saxophone or flute melodies. Drums are typically soft yet insistent—either a lightly swung backbeat or a laid‑back four‑on‑the‑floor—with shakers, congas, and tambourine providing understated motion. Harmony leans on minor 7th chords and jazz‑soul extensions (9ths, 11ths, 13ths), lending a plush, nocturnal sheen. While often instrumental, cues may feature sparse spoken‑word ad‑libs, suggestive call‑and‑response riffs, and vamp‑based arrangements designed to sustain mood more than build drama. Originally cut by session players and library‑music stalwarts for film cues, the style’s production aesthetic favors warm tape saturation, plate/spring reverbs, and close‑miked, intimate textures—conjuring an atmosphere that is both playful and suave.

Halloween is a seasonal, cross-genre style built around spooky, campy, and horror-driven aesthetics used for the Halloween holiday. Rather than a single musical form, it bundles novelty pop and rock, horror film scoring tropes, eerie sound effects, and dark-tinged electronic or rock textures that evoke ghosts, monsters, haunted houses, and cinematic suspense. Its sonic palette tends to include minor keys and chromaticism, church or theater organs, theremin or theremin-like synths, creaking doors and howling winds, dramatic strings, and reverb-drenched surf or garage guitars. Iconic novelty hits (like Monster Mash), horror-punk, and synth-led film themes (like Halloween) sit alongside funk-pop spectacles (like Thriller) in playlists and compilations that define the Halloween “feel.”