Mystic & ritual

Slowed vocals, heavy reverb and occult symbols: the eeriest electronic music online around 2010.

Lets space arrive before events, and gives weight to what can't be seen.

Slow hip-hop beats, noir samples and murmured vocals, like the secrets of a rainy port city.

Rolling sixteenth basslines and psychedelic effects, dancing in the forest till sunrise.

Makes rhythm a system to explore, not just a dance step.

Touhou Project themes rearranged into rock, metal, electronic and jazz; one game raised an entire doujin music scene.

Tape hiss, eerie samples and slow, hazy rap: dark hip-hop grown from '90s Memphis underground rap.

Swirling guitar effects, long jams and Indian instruments imitate a mind being opened.

Puts shadow, theatre and bodily rhythm into the same song.

Expands rock into works that can hold epics, structure and instrumental exploration.

Cold, raw and distant, shrill tremolo guitars painting an empty winter night.

Orchestra, choir and metal band together, turning heaviness into opera.

Slow heavy metal draped in velvet, beautiful, romantic and touched by death.

Horsehead fiddle, throat singing and distorted guitars gallop across the steppe; metal can carry wind and hoofbeats.

Treats the beat as a vessel for personal language, letting humour, whimsy, melody and different ways of telling enter rap.

Lanterns, paper charms and a night parade of spirits: guofeng melody telling tales of ghosts, karma and the human heart.

Peking and Kunqu opera vocals brought into pop; one line of opera singing lifts the chorus.

Guzheng, erhu, pipa and dizi in the lead, Chinese instrumental music from landscape painting to modern arrangement.

Fiddle, tin whistle and bodhrán, dancing jigs in a stone pub on a misty coast.

House's four-on-the-floor with South African rhythms, melodies and vocals in African languages: dance music with a spiritual feel.

Oud, darbuka and ornamented singing with modern pop production, a desert city night.

First understand why people sang together, then decide why your world needs this solemnity.

Lets traditional breath, storytelling and cycles take part in contemporary sound, rather than serving only as antique decoration.

Shamisen, shakuhachi and taiko meet rock or electronics, a Japanese night under lanterns.

Sitar, tabla and drone; a raga warms slowly from meditation to ecstasy.

Lets the castle keep its former beauty while letting you hear what it's hiding.

First ask how this world sounds, then decide whether it needs familiar instruments.

Gives traditional timbres a place of origin, and gives the fused sound a life of its own.