- Here’s some stuff to listen to if you need a break from the same old radio hits.
The modern day is a fantastic time to be alive if you’re a music fan. Never before in human history have we had such a huge variety of music available to us.
With a simple online search, you can find dainty acoustic guitar ballads, soul-crushingly brutal sonic blasts, and even reconstructions of ancient songs from thousands of years ago. Anything goes!
Of course, not every music genre that’s popped is equally accessible to most people. Some of them are just plain bizarre, either because of the music itself or the associated theatrics.
Here are 9 examples of some of the strangest musical genres artists have dreamed up. If you happen to like any of this stuff, note that we never said it’s bad — it’s just weird.
1. Lowercase
Whatever you might expect from a genre called “lowercase,” you probably won’t get what you thought. Lowercase is an extreme (if you can use that word to describe this stuff) form of minimal ambient music consisting of very quiet sounds amplified to ridiculous levels.
That doesn’t mean lowercase consists of unpleasant screeching and scraping. Most of it sounds just really… Well, minimal.
The artists in the genre might record a noise like dropping a pillow on the floor and process the hell out of it. Unsurprisingly, lowercase has produced plenty of debate over whether it counts as music.
Sample work: Steve Roden – Form of Paper (recorded by pressing a microphone against book pages)
2. Pirate Metal
Pirate metal is a bizarre offshoot of folk metal (which is already a relatively niche genre). The music itself isn’t all that weird, though.
Most of it is fairly straightforward heavy metal. It’s just all about pirates — for some reason.
You’ll often hear appropriately scallywag-y instruments in the songs, like fiddles, flutes, and so on. The band members often also dress as pirates for live shows, which we suppose is par for the course.
Sample work: Alestorm – Keelhauled
3. Crunkcore
In the mid-2000s, both hardcore emo and crunk music (think Lil’ Jon) were popular among teenagers. Naturally, somebody got the bright idea of mashing the two together to draw in the fans of both crowds.
That experiment didn’t work out all that well. With party-oriented hip-hop beats overlaid with throat-shredding screamo screeches, the stuff just isn’t very pleasant to listen to.
Also, the bands that tried making this stuff looked absolutely ridiculous. Sometimes you have to wonder if crunkcore would’ve gone down better if you could’ve taken at least one of the artists seriously.
Sample work: brokeNCYDE – FreaXXX
4. Unblack Metal
Black metal is one of the most notorious subgenres of heavy metal. Not only is the music itself so extreme and low-fi that some people find it utterly unlistenable, but the bands’ lyrics are often openly satanic, misanthropic, and genocidal. Some black metal artists have even gone to jail for church burnings and murders.
So, what’s “unblack” metal then? It’s what happens when someone decides to answer the question: “What if we took black metal but made it Christian?”
Unblack metal (or white metal) sounds and looks more or less like its anti-Christian counterpart — the bands just sing about liking Jesus instead. Don’t know about you, but this stuff does give us a bit of thematic whiplash.
Sample work: Crimson Moonlight – Where Darkness Cannot Reach
5. Tuvan Throat Singing
We feel a bit bad about calling Tuvan throat singing weird — after all, it’s a traditional form of music from the Russian region of Tuva. It does initially sound a bit strange to Western ears, but Tuvan throat singing has ancient roots.
Way, way back in the day, shamans used it as a meditative tool to fall into a trance. The practice is intricately linked to Tuvan history and is practiced in local animistic traditions even today.
In recent years, though, Tuvan throat singing has become reasonably popular elsewhere as well. That’s partially thanks to bands like The Hu, who blend throat singing with more accessible rock music.
Sample work: The Hu – Wolf Totem
6. Splittercore
Splittercore sounds like a horror movie title, and some of the music wouldn’t be out of place on a sci-fi splatter film’s soundtrack. This subgenre of a subgenre aims to do one thing and one thing only — take hardcore techno and make it stupidly fast.
And we mean fast. Splittercore songs generally reach BPMs well above 500, with some songs pushing close to 1,000 BPM.
At those speeds, the music becomes pretty much noise. But hey, it’s what splittercore fans want.
Sample work: Diabarha – Intensive Care Unit
7. Black MIDI
You may have noticed that a lot of these genres take one thing and hyperfocus on that. Black MIDI, also known as impossible music, is no different.
This type of electronic music aims to cram as many notes as possible into every single beat of the songs. It’s not weird to find thousands of notes in every second of black MIDI songs.
That’s where the name comes from — if you wrote the songs out in standard music notation, you’d end up with an entirely black sheet of paper. It’s also called “impossible music” because the songs are utterly impossible to play with acoustic instruments due to their sheer density.
Sample work: John L. Sinneloschen – Red Zone
8. Musique Concrète
Did you think lowercase was a weird genre? Well, say hello to its granddaddy!
Musique concrete (literally concrete music) emerged in the early 1900s with the development of actually usable recording equipment. Some musicians (and some audio engineers) wondered whether they could manipulate random recorded sounds to make something resembling “real” music.
Most musique concrète is admittedly pretty impenetrable stuff, but the genre was vital to the development of practically every single sampling technique. Without it, we wouldn’t have electronic music as we know it today.
Sample work: Pierre Schaeffer – Etude aux Chemins de Fer
8. Danger Music
Danger music straddles the line between music and performance art. Technically, the music can be anything — it just needs to put the performer or the audience in danger.
Danger music compositions might use dangerous “instruments,” like shattering glass or angle grinders. Or, the notation might simply order the musicians to, for example, sever their own limbs or throw explosives into the audience as part of the performance.
Obviously, most of this stuff is not intended to ever be actually played. It’s really more of a statement than anything else.
Sample work: We’d rather not.