What is webcore music?
As culture becomes ever more dictated and meshed with the online sphere, the internet’s growing influence on music has reached a fever-pitch in recent years, with whole genres of music and a myriad of off-shoots all stemming from the wave of nostalgia that’s manifested itself in the webcore world.
A firm aesthetic as much as a music genre, webcore pines for a time before Web 2.0 and the smartphone revolution, the formative era of the millennial generation where cyberspace was still an unrefined, open-sourced bliss of GeoCities animations and loud, pixelated blogs reflecting the internet’s original utopian vision as a democratising equaliser of information and accessibility.
Predicting the major shift to the internet as we now know it that was underway, information architecture consultant Darcy DiNucci wrote her prophetic ‘Fragmented Future’ piece for Print magazine in 1999, anticipating the nebulous blur between online and IRL [In Real Life] worlds, the expert wrote: “The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop.”
She added: “The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will…appear on your computer screen,…on your TV set…your car dashboard…your cell phone…hand-held game machines…maybe even your microwave oven.”
How has the internet led to webcore music?
Webcore is, essentially, an aesthetic conglomerate of all these various leaps and time stamps in internet history. Inspired by the ground laid by Grimes, glitch, and PC Music, webcore follows from vaporwave’s visual motifs of obsolete technology and 1990s entertainment for the graphical displays of Windows XP and the pop culture that surrounded it: Pokémon, Windows Messenger, Motorola phones, and Flash animations all evoked in a glossy, propulsive mash of electronica, ambient, and DnB.
One listen to any of Oliver Buckland’s gleaming soundtracks transports to a time of Dreamcast videogames, each play of any given track hitting like a 2000s console start-up. It is a genre defined by nostalgia, technology and the interplay between both in the modern age.
…and who invented webcore?
While acknowledging 1970s works like Mort Garson’s Plantasia and Dominique Guiot’s L’Univers De La Mer as laying important foundations, webcore’s true spark is credited to Peruvian animator Joel G, whose Flash-nodding cartoons would be set to a variety of IDM and techno music. Buckland’s and Graham Kartna’s synth and bass instrumentals would follow, coupled with METAROOM’s techno-heavy trips or even the jungle-inspired Y2K of DJ Orange. Like furry music, webcore is less defined by rigid genre definitions but unified in an embrace of yesteryear’s i n t e r n e t reminisce.
Perhaps an expression of the growing dissatisfaction with neoliberal inertia and the online suffocation at the hands of Silicon Valley corporate giants, London-based digital artist Maria Vorobjova articulated the growing unease with the web’s loss of innocence, telling Dazed in 2022: “At the turn of the century, the early internet harnessed the boundless possibilities offered by cyberspace, providing a liberating and autonomous dreamworld beyond the confines of capitalist structures…”
Concluding, “The tech evolution corresponds with shrinking possibilities, and now we’re all constantly online on the same five websites. This evolution has also seen the rise of a seeming aesthetic paradox.” Webcore reverts back to the beginnings of that—in some representing a desire for simpler times with a sense of whimsy rather than depth, adjacent to trends like Psychobilly that came before.
