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Top 20 Best Glitch Bands You Must Hear

July 14, 2024 By Jimmy Leave a Comment

The genre of glitch music bursts with inventive soundscapes and avant-garde rhythms. Explore the 20 best glitch bands that have revolutionized the scene with their unique musical experiments.

1. Aphex Twin

Aphex Twin , known for pioneering glitch music, has created some of the most influential works in electronic music. His innovative use of unpredictable rhythms and abstract soundscapes has solidified his status as a true pioneer in the genre.

2. Autechre

Autechre stands out in electronic music for their experimental approach and unique sound design. Albums like “Amber” and tracks such as “Gantz Graf” showcase their ability to push the boundaries of the genre.

3. The Glitch Mob

The Glitch Mob , an electronic trio, has a diverse discography blending glitch hop with powerful beats. Their high-energy live performances further captivate audiences, solidifying their place in electronic music.

Matmos is acclaimed for their experimental and glitch art albums, utilizing unconventional sound sources. Their collaborations, like working with Björk, highlight their innovative approach to music production.

Oval significantly impacted the glitch sound with their pioneering use of micro-sampling. Key releases such as “94diskont” have left an indelible mark on electronic music, influencing countless artists in the genre.

Kid606 has made a name in the electronic and breakcore scenes with notable tracks like “Down with the Scene.” His career milestones reflect a fearless approach to pushing musical boundaries and experimenting with sound.

7. Venetian Snares

Venetian Snares is renowned for his complex rhythms and breakcore style, making a significant impact with albums like “Rossz Csillag Alatt Született.” His unique approach to music showcases intricate time signatures and experimental soundscapes.

Fennesz masterfully blends ambient and glitch elements in key albums like “Endless Summer.” His music features lush textures and rich soundscapes that push the boundaries of experimental music.

9. Oneohtrix Point Never

Oneohtrix Point Never has gained critical acclaim for his innovative projects in experimental electronic and glitch music. Albums like “Replica” showcase his ability to create immersive and thought-provoking soundscapes.

10. Squarepusher

Squarepusher stands out for his unique fusion of electronic music with jazz influences, creating a distinct sound. Major works like “Hard Normal Daddy” highlight his technical proficiency and innovative musical approach.

11. Tim Hecker

Tim Hecker crafts an atmospheric blend of ambient and glitch music, resonating deeply with listeners. Important albums like “Ravedeath, 1972” showcase his talent for creating haunting and immersive soundscapes.

12. Jan Jelinek

Jan Jelinek is celebrated for his distinct sound, merging microhouse and glitch into a unique auditory experience. Key releases, such as “Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records,” have earned him a dedicated following.

13. Byetone

Byetone has made significant contributions to electronic music through the Raster-Noton label, where his glitch-infused tracks stand out. Major works like “Death of a Typographer” highlight his innovative approach to sound design.

14. Alva Noto

Alva Noto excels in creating minimalist electronic music, with notable albums like “Xerrox Vol. 3.” His collaborations with artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto showcase his versatility and prowess in sound experimentation.

15. Mr. Oizo

Mr. Oizo has gained wide recognition for his glitch beats and contributions to the French touch movement. Key tracks like “Flat Beat” demonstrate his innovative style and lasting influence in electronic music.

µ-Ziq has carved out a unique niche in the IDM and glitch music scenes, with significant albums like “Lunatic Harness.” His style combines intricate beats and rich melodies, making a distinct mark on electronic music.

17. Iglooghost

Iglooghost is known for his innovative sound and striking visual aesthetics in experimental electronic music. His glitch-infused tracks, found in albums like “Neō Wax Bloom,” create a vivid, immersive listening experience.

18. Prefuse 73

Prefuse 73 masterfully blends instrumental hip hop with glitch elements, crafting a unique sound. Key albums such as “One Word Extinguisher” showcase his innovative approach to genre fusion.

19. Flying Lotus

Flying Lotus has left a significant impact on the music industry with his experimental and glitch-infused sound. Major works like “Cosmogramma” highlight his ability to blend diverse elements into cohesive, groundbreaking compositions.

Baths merges chillwave and glitch pop, creating emotionally resonant music. Significant releases like “Cerulean” explore deep lyrical themes wrapped in innovative soundscapes.

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Glitch Music: The Complete Beginner's Guide

Glitch music is one of those odd subgenres that means vastly different things to different people. However, if there’s one thing most music connoisseurs can agree on, it’s that glitch is a kind of experimental music rooted in technology.

In many ways, it’s an expression or representation of the future. With its many innovators over the past few decades, glitch music has grown into something nearly inexplicable, blending musical and non-musical elements to create deliberate chaos and a unique experience that’s difficult to pin down. 

However, in this guide, I want to take you through the halls of glitch music history and try to suss out what has made this genre such a longstanding staple in electronic music.

What is Glitch Music?

Of course, a lot has changed since the early stages of glitch music, when using modified audio hardware or malfunctioning tech was all the rage. While plenty of artists still work that way, others have shifted their approach, using production software for all their glitch needs.

Through its evolution, we’ve received subgenres like glitch-hop, which blends all the best elements of glitch with a fusion of electronic dance music and hip-hop. 

Consequently, the definition of glitch music is much broader than it ever was.

A Short History of Glitch Music

We can trace the origins of glitch back to the 1980s, particularly in Germany and Japan.

In Germany, the glitch movement found expression through the efforts of artists associated with the Raster-Noton label, such as Alva Noto and Byetone. 

These musicians were influential in shaping the glitch sound, often incorporating computer errors, circuit manipulations, and unconventional audio artifacts into their electronic compositions.

In Japan, artists like Yasunao Tone and Ryoji Ikeda spearheaded the glitch aesthetic. Yasunao Tone, one of my favorite old-school glitch music purveyors, was a founding member of the Fluxus movement. He began exploring unconventional sound sources by utilizing damaged CDs and intentionally manipulating audio playback devices.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that glitch-hop came about, combining elements of hip-hop, such as breakbeats, and IDM, such as synthesizers and glitchy FX.

Prefuse 73 played a pivotal role in the glitch-hop scene. His "Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives" album, which came out in 2001, showcased a style not many had heard before. Of course, glitch-hop would continue evolving, becoming an umbrella term for artists throughout the broader electronic music landscape.

Glitch Music's Unique Sound

The foundation of glitch lies in the intentional use of glitch sounds. I like to think of these as auditory errors.

Glitch producers source them from numerous places, including software, circuit-bent synths, or malfunctioning hardware. Think skips, hardware noise, or system crashes that are deliberately incorporated into a composition and intertwined with traditional percussion elements.

Some glitch music uses pre-recorded samples that the producer will manipulate so that they are nearly indistinguishable. The first thing that comes to mind is Bon Iver’s “22, A Million,” album, where Justin Vernon experimented with all sorts of glitched-out samples and effects, tying it in with organic instrumentation.

How to Make Glitch Music

Many modern glitch producers still embrace old-school techniques, such as bending circuits or recording busted hardware.

While contemporary music production has evolved, and many genres now thrive on minimal laptop setups, there’s still no replacement for the tactile nature of hardware.

Being able to interact directly with your equipment is the best way to get that “human” touch we all long for in music.

If you decide to use hardware, you’ll need an audio interface . There are endless options out there, though if I had to give you one of my best recommendations, it’d be the UAD Apollo. The drivers on this thing sound great and you can get one that caters to your needs, whether you’re recording with a single microphone or multi-tracking a full band.

I also recommend getting a MIDI keyboard or sampler, so you can browse through your library of samples and sounds and play out patterns without having to draw MIDI notes into your DAW. Again, the idea here is “humanizing” your production.

Lastly, I recommend getting a solid pair of headphones or studio monitors to make sure your tracks are up to par with the professional glitch music you like.

Unless you’re recording to tape, you likely rely on your DAW like most glitch music producers. 

Think of a DAW as a virtual studio with non-linear editing capabilities. You get free reign to experiment with and manipulate samples, whether you get them from existing recordings or self-created glitch sounds. 

Most DAWs offer powerful stock editing tools for slicing, rearranging, and processing samples, which is key for glitch music. Of course, some DAWs provide better tools than others, such as Ableton Live and Reason, which is probably why so many glitch music producers gravitate towards them.

Ableton Live has long been a favorite of mine, especially with its unique Session View, which makes triggering loops, samples, and effects in an improvisational way much easier than any other DAW.

Sample Packs

Sound and sample selection, as with any other genre of music, is key in glitch music.

If you don’t want to make your own samples and sounds, you can look for sample packs specifically filled with glitch sounds and artifacts, such as CD skips, vinyl crackles, hardware malfunctions, and electronic glitches.

Beyond FX, I also recommend getting your hands on some percussive sample packs as well, such as those that have glitched-out drum hits or rhythmic stutters. These elements are great for stacking on existing drums.

As a final sample selection tidbit, I’d like to point out that granular synthesis is, in many ways, at the heart of glitch music production. While you can find plenty of granular synth samples out there, I’ll point out some VST options in the following sections that you can use instead.

While there are a million ways to approach glitchy electronic music, I often find that granular synthesis is a good jumping-off point. Here are a few VST options I recommend checking out to get started:

• Granulator II: This Max for Live device (shout out to Ableton) is one of my favorite tools for manipulating audio in real time. With features like grain position, pitch, length, and density control, it’s one of the most versatile pieces of software for creating glitchy textures.
• Quanta 2: Audio Damage’s Quanta 2 is a granular synth VST with an ultra-flexible modulation system and sleek interface, making it easy to inject unpredictability into your sound design.
• Portal: Output has climbed the VST developer ranks over the past few years, crafting some of the most groundbreaking and inspiring software synths and effects around today. Portal, its granular effects plugin, goes above and beyond, offering a range of granular processing modes and tons of presets to optimize your workflow.

Instrumentation

I often find that having a sound palette in place before I start producing helps me optimize the creative process. 

Not only is it a great way to focus your creative efforts, but it also helps things stay consistent and cohesive. 

Since glitch music is all about experimentation, there aren’t really any right or wrong answers when it comes to instrument choice. However, I figured I’d make a small list of elements I often hear from my favorite glitch artists as a guide for your production process. 

• Glitch Samples: Core to glitch music, glitch samples are key. Find some sample packs with malfunctioning audio devices, CD skips, vinyl crackles, hardware noise, and system glitches. If you’re feeling wild, record your own! 
• VST Synths: Digital synthesizers offer plenty of flexibility, and when you start to dig deep into synthesis, you can figure out ways to experiment with different parameters like waveform, modulation, and filters to create glitchy and unpredictable synth sounds.
• Circuit-Bending: A circuit-bent instrument is any creatively rewired or modified electronic device that produces a unique sound. Unless you can make your own, I recommend looking on sites like Etsy or Reverb to purchase one you can experiment with.
• Field Recordings: I’m a huge fan of adding organic, real-world sounds to any kind of music, though with glitch music, it often feels like a must. As for what to record, the world is your oyster. Check out our soundscapes guide to learn more.
• Drum Machines: Drum machines are great for creating glitchy and intricate percussive patterns. The key here is to experiment with unconventional drum sounds and glitched-out percussion hits to make your track sound more complex. 
• Samplers: With a sampler, you can manipulate your current samples, vocal snippets, or just about any other audio element you could think of. I recommend checking out the Teenage Engineering OP-1. It’s one of my favorite little portable pieces of gear for real-time sampling and processing.

While I’m a huge proponent of experimentation, I think it’s a good idea to practice by attempting to replicate glitch music from some of your favorite artists. Building technical skills and techniques with active listening will eventually help you branch out and find your unique voice.

My Top 5 Glitch Artists

Oval is an electronic group formed in 1991 by German musician Markus Popp.

The group is probably one of the biggest pioneering forces in the glitch music genre.

Markus Popp has always maintained a uniquely conceptual artistic vision, intentionally exploring how digital imperfections can influence the broader landscape of electronic music. 

The group’s critical acclaim stems from influential albums like "94diskont" and "O," which are both great examples of evolving musical styles, such as ambient, experimental, and minimalist.

Venetian Snares

Venetian Snares is the moniker of Canadian electronic musician Aaron Funk, who became well-loved in the glitch community for his fearless experimentation.

Funk has always had a unique ability to manipulate and layer complex rhythms and breakbeats, all while using unconventional time signatures. His "Rossz Csillag Alatt Született" album is particularly noteworthy, as it blends all the best glitch aesthetics with orchestral samples and other classical music elements.

Tim Hecker is a sound design guru who became a heavy-hitter in the glitch music scene with his distinctive ambient approach.

He has a unique ability to create immersive compositions, some good examples of which can be heard in albums like "Harmony in Ultraviolet" and "Ravedeath, 1972."

Flying Lotus

Flying Lotus, the alias of Steven Ellison, became a key figure in the Los Angeles beat scene, taking glitch music and infusing it with jazz hip-hop sensibilities. "Cosmogramma" and "You're Dead!" are some of the greatest albums of the 2000s thus far.

In "Cosmogramma," you can hear Ellison sampling and glitching live jazz musicians he collaborated with to get a warmer, more organic sound. I'd go as far as saying he's one of the most significant glitch hop artists around today.

Another cultivator of glitch-hop music is the Glitch Mob. While Flying Lotus might be best known for his instrumental hip hop beats, the Glitch Mob is best known for standing out among the ground of dubstep artists with their EDM-based glitch aesthetic.

Navigating the Glitchscape

What was once an obscure genre flying under the radar of the greater pop, rock, and hip-hop scenes is now exploding into the mainstream. Glitch music has become more accessible, not only to listeners but also to music creators. 

In reality, all you need is a laptop to start making it, so the barrier to entry is relatively non-existent. With the information above, you’re well-equipped to get started making your own glitch art. I wish you luck on your expedition into the great unknown!

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The beginner's guide to: glitch

’90s experimentalism meets digital tech to create the surprisingly influential glitch aesthetic

Some genres are more influential than their mainstream appeal may suggest. Glitch almost certainly falls into that category, alongside previously featured musical movements previously featured in this column, such as musique concrète and Oramics .

The roots of the glitch aesthetic are largely defined by digital technology, which sounds inherently different to faulty analogue gear when it malfunctions. Think of faulty or abused analogue gear and the range of tones is quite familiar: amp distortion, tape saturation, analogue overdrive and so on. By contrast, digital glitches are generally harsher and less predictable, as anyone who’s played a corrupted MP3 or a scratched CD will know.

Incorporating digital malfunctions into a musical context feels, in retrospect, like a logical progression of sound art, musique concrète, industrial music and noise techniques. Japanese artist Yasunao Tone was among the first to experiment with what we might now recognise as post-digital glitch techniques, experimenting with manipulating CD playback soon after the format was introduced in the early 1980s. His 1997 album Solo for Wounded CD is a two-part composition created entirely from sounds of scratched CDs.

4 ways to glitch out your productions

Video game soundtracks and chiptune music also had a major influence on glitch. There are obvious parallels in terms of digital synthesis and sound manipulation, but also direct links in terms of production techniques. 

Notably, Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima’s soundtrack for Sega’s 1994 beat ’em up Streets of Rage 3 employed what Koshiro described as an automated music composition system in order to create “fast-beat techno-like jungle”. The glitchy results were disliked by some fans of Koshiro’s previous work, but proved to be a slow-burning touchstone of glitch production.

Autechre’s Glitch , from the duo’s 1994 Warp album Amber , is often cited as one of the first uses of the term in an electronic music context, though the track itself isn’t particularly glitchy – certainly not by comparison to what the style soon became. ELpH vs Coil’s 1995 album Worship The Glitch is probably a better reference point for the manner in which glitchy sounds cross-pollinated with ambient and experimental production techniques.

Things were aided by software like SuperCollider, Pure Data and Max/MSP , which allowed audio to be processed in glitchy fashion. Advances in DAW s also made it easier to sequence precise, detailed patterns of repetitive, glitchy micro-sounds. By the new millennium, more electronic artists were experimenting with glitch techniques to the point that it could be considered a genre in itself. 

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The best startpoint could be the Clicks & Cuts compilation series launched by German label Mille Plateaux in 2000. The series documents the surprisingly diverse sounds that fall under that broad umbrella of glitch-adjacent sounds: from the first album alone, compare the crystalline abstraction of Alva Noto’s Prototype N , the metallic clank of Kid 606’s Sonqizzmaster , the ambient shuffle of Frank Bretschneider’s Kern ...

There’s an argument that glitch’s biggest mainstream impact wasn’t as a defined genre in itself, but as an aesthetic in other genres, such as glitch hop, which combines glitchy noises with hip-hop-influenced beats. 

In fact, the long-term influence of glitch may not yet have peaked. In recent years, new generations are embracing glitch, from hyperpop producers such as AG Cook embracing weird and wonderful glitch-inspired sounds in pop hits for the likes of Charli XCX, through to the TikTok glitchcore aesthetic, in which pointedly retro video edits are mashed together with hyperpop-inspired emo rap. The influence of glitch lives on.

The past, present and future of glitch

Past: yuzo koshiro and motohiro kawashima – streets of rage 3 ost.

Critically unacclaimed on release in 1994, the Streets of Rage 3 music didn’t immediately become a cult classic like so many other Sega soundtracks. In retrospect, it’s a more challenging listen than the eclectic hip-hop and techno-inspired soundtracks of previous games in the beat ’em up series, but it’s an obvious precursor to glitch aesthetics in electronic music. You can hear it all on YouTube if you don’t fancy tracking down an original console version.

Present: Hyperpop

’90s glitch purists might sneer, but some of the most fascinating glitch in recent years has been concealed within the Trojan horse of pop production, spearheaded by AG Cook’s PC Music collective. Cook’s curated Hyperpop playlist on Spotify is as good a starting point as any, but Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now (2020) and the late SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018) prove that the sound also works just as well in a full-length album format.

Future: Glitchcore

Boomers, look away now. The frighteningly Gen Z world of TikTok may be a step too far for older listeners, but it almost certainly represents the future of glitch. Search for #glitchcore videos and you’ll find thousands of knowingly self-aware #eyestrain edits mashing together glitchy aesthetics with glitchy music from the broad spectrum of hyperpop and SoundCloud rap. Bewildering and terrifying to anyone over the age of 24? Probably.

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InVisible Culture

A journal for visual culture, compression aesthetics: glitch from the avant-garde to kanye west.

Carolyn L. Kane

In a world that esteems technological efficiency, immediacy, and control, the advent of technical noise, glitch, and failure—no matter how colorful or disturbingly beautiful—are avoided at great costs. When distorted and unintelligible artifacts emerge within the official domains of “immersive” consumer experience, they are quickly banished from sight. This aggressive disavowal is particularly strange given that “glitch art” and “compression aesthetics”—loosely defined as the aesthetic use of visual artifacts, accidents, or technical errors—has become increasingly prevalent in media, art, design, and commercial landscapes. 1 Why and how have glitch aesthetics achieved this ambivalent status?

Fig 1.  Rihanna. Rude Boy. Music Video. Directed by Melina Matsoukas (2009). Colored glitches and static create trendy visual effects.

Fig 2. Rihanna. Rude Boy. Music Video. Directed by Melina Matsoukas (2009).

There is something about a glitch or patch of noise that disrupts convention and expectation. A glitch or technical error can be used to pose questions and open up critical spaces in new and unforeseen ways. Herein lies the appeal of glitch to numerous artists past and present, and my primary concern in this article. And yet, because glitches have also been quickly appropriated back into dominant fashions and styles, moving from political or social critique to commodity, glitch aesthetics bear a fundamentally antagonistic relation even to themselves. What then can be done for and with glitches and chromatic noises, if the same cycle of appropriation and reification is intrinsic to their very existence as aesthetic objects?

Take Paul B. Davis’s backstory to Kanye West’s 2009 music video, Welcome to Heartbreak , directed by Nabil Elderkin. A pioneer in the genre, Davis has been creating glitches since the early 2000s, as in his and Jacob Ciocci’s 2007 remix of Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” or of the Cranberries “Zombie” for the work  Compression Study #1 (Untitled data mashup) . Less than two months before the opening of his second show solo show at the Seventeen Gallery in London, Davis woke up to find a flood of emails,

telling me to look at some video on YouTube. Seconds later I saw Kanye West strutting around in a field of digital glitches that looked exactly like my work. It fucked my show up… the very language I was using to critique pop content from the outside was now itself a mainstream cultural reference. 2

Fig 3. Kanye West Heartbreak music video. Directed by Nabil Elderkin. stills. (2009). Color static and glitch remains trendy in pop culture.

Fig 4. Paul B. Davis and Jacob Ciocci. Compression Study #1 (2007). A 2007 glitch remix of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” with the Cranberries “Zombie.”

The “field” he alludes to is the colorful backdrop and mise-en-scène for West’s Welcome to Heartbreak video. The glitch effects in the video not only emulate Davis’s compression aesthetics, now used by many glitch artists, but also they do so with a markedly simulated DIY, “amateur” aesthetic. 3 That is, the Welcome to Heartbreak video simulates a DIY aesthetic, but is not actually derived from DIY strategies, nor does it perform any real critique of pop-culture (given its big budget, high tech, and cutting edge technology West and television broadcast corporations have access to).

Welcome to Heartbreak has more to do with the reification of objects into ready-to-wear styles and consumer objects— the bread and butter of consumer capitalism—or what Kim Cascone has termed the “competitive consumption of style.” 4 If glitch artists seek to unpack and undo the “clean” and highly compressed visual data that make up contemporary computer cultures, then they do so against the tendency of these cultures to weaken press and re-compact not only visual information but new styles, art movement, and design, as such. Thus while the glitch-effects in WTH may temporarily disorient or catch viewers off-guard, the glitch-effect in the video is ultimately eye candy: a novelty in its own right used to expand and lengthen visual consumption in the “now” of fashion and pop culture. That which is easy to consume, but still fresh and novel, can and will be consumed more often and more frequently. Granted the video is full of it colorful affects and raw bits of sensory delight, it is nonetheless void of critique, which is how many glitch artists—and their predecessors, whom we will shortly turn to—have approached the genre and their perceived responsibility as media artists an techno-saturated culture.

WTH is but one example of many from contemporary art, media, and design worlds. 5 Certainly the fact of glitch’s commodification and social or political neutralization is unfortunate for those who remain committed to critique, but how else to proceed? The central question facing new media artists and designers today thus revolves around the capacity to make lasting and sustainable critical works. The best way to make such art is to learn from the successes and failures of the past. To fail best and “fail better,” as Beckett put it.

Beginning with a set of pigment-based glitches from the European avant-garde, in this article I survey strategies that prefigure twenty-first century glitch art and compression aesthetics through their obfuscation of the norms of visual clarity, representation, and fidelity. I also examine aesthetic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, including early instantiations in photography, film, experimental audio, and analog electronic media, and focuses on key works by Nam June Paik and John Cage. I conclude with an analysis of glitch art precursors in experimental audio and noise music developed in the 1980s and 1990s, and close with two examples of digital glitch selected from twenty-first century art and pop-culture. I thus focus almost exclusively on precursors to the glitch art and compression aesthetic of the twenty-first century. By establishing this prehistory, I wish to draw attention to the value of glitch and compression as dominant cultural forms today, which tend to exist in a tension between reduction and excess, reification and critique, function and failure.

Avant-Garde Precursors

In one sense, the entire history of modern art could be construed as a glitch and compression of Enlightenment epistemology. If compression is the reduction or deletion of ostensibly unimportant data, and glitch art the aesthetic use of discarded and deleted data (i.e. errors) then, according to this view, any visual, impressionistic, expressionistic, or psychological divergence from the clarity and precision of classical optics or Renaissance-based perspectival representation function as a “glitch” in the formation of rational, cognitive, visual knowledge. 6 At the same time, such a broad definition fails to address the article’s primary goal in delineating a prehistory of techno-glitches in the (primarily) visual avant-garde from the industrial era onwards. 7

And thus I begin in the age of mechanical reproducibility, where machine-made technical forms for the first time play a pivotal role in art, art making, culture, and aesthetic philosophy.

The introduction of photography in the nineteenth century forced new questions into the domain of painting and art-making. After the relative stabilization of the process in 1839 through the Daguerreotype, and the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey, 8 painting and hand-illustration lost their long-standing monopoly on the realistic and accurate depiction of the world and its inhabitants. Photography could achieve in a fraction of a second what took hours to paint or draw, and thus painters sought new directions for their practice, beyond and away from classical realism, and into the domains of tonality, abstraction, color, frame, format, and medium (as demonstrated by movements such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism). As Eric Kluitenberg puts it, Cubism’s overlapping, fragmented and multidimensional perspective successfully “denied the validity of linear perspective (as it is programmed in the photographic machine), as the ‘correct’ representation of the world in visual terms.” 9 Painting’s broad and varied responses to photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a set of glitches relative to classical aesthetics and then–dominant conventions of visual representation.

New research in the physiological science of optics further aided the epistemic shift away from classicism (which, I argue elsewhere, is a shift towards increased compression). The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters in particular followed cutting edge research into optics and argued that all one ever perceived was a series of light and abstract color patches. 10 Advancements in optical science coupled with mechanically reproducible media, as Paul Virilio demonstrated, engendered a new world wherein mechanical speed, acceleration, and technical precision became characteristic of reality and material experience. Humans now had to learn to catch up and adapt to this new world, which in turn opened the door for new forms and scales of accident. This kind of “failure,” as Virilio argues, was herein programmed into any technical product “from the moment of its production or implementation.” 11

As mechanical errors became commonplace concomitantly with the rise of new mechanically reproducible technology, glitch and error were situated at the core of what it meant to be modern. (This was reflected in much of the art of the time, but not sufficiently addressed in art’s history). The images of Futurism, for instance, actively skewed and distorted the coherency of the composition, taking inspiration from the speed and movement of the motorcars and machines of the industrial era. Examples of this revised aesthetic include Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism Of A Dog On Leash (1912), Carlo Carra’s The Red Horsemen (1913), and Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuit y (1913), all of which attempt to compress multiple perspectives and temporalities into a single image-space.

Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo, inspired by both Marinetti’s poetry and an orchestral performance of a composition by Balilla Pratella, wrote the 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises and designed several “noise machines” or intonarumori (noise intoners), with the intention of replacing old world orchestras with the sounds of modernity. 12 His work, in turn, influenced others, including Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari, who promoted the Futurist-inspired “Movimento d’Arte Concreta” (MAC / Concrete Art) in his 1952 manifesto that also aimed to reconcile art with the new machine ontologies. 13 Alongside movements like Cubism, Purism, De Stijl, 14 and offshoots from the Russian avant-garde, 15 Futurism poeticized the new speed, the mechanical energy and dynamics of industrial machines, and the fragmentation and compression of modern life they engendered. The subtle distinctions between each of these movements and their approach to the reduction and intensification of time and space and visual media, must be discussed elsewhere. Here, I offer instead the general observation that these techniques and movements together marked bold, often revolutionary attempts to deploy the logic and materiality of industrial and mechanical glitches, noises, and errors as a kind of counter-strategy to the new conditions of industrial modernity. Because these strategies were rooted in anti-communicative, erroneous, or uncompressed visual and sonic forms is precisely why they anticipate contemporary glitch art and compression aesthetics.

Dadaism also sought to subvert clear and compressed visuality through a series of decompressed, noisy, political acts. Tristan Tzara—Romanian-born French poet and author of the 1918 Dada manifesto—argued that noise, in opposition to normative views of sound and music, embraced a logic of “complication”, characterized by a “dry and noisy, noisy and monotonous primitivism.” 16 The noisy primitivism embraced by Tzara and the Dadaists signaled a rejection of “natural things,” as well as the (romantic) actions and attitudes of bourgeois culture. 17 Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), for instance, depicts the (normally) fluid and organic process of walking down the stairs as a frozen and staggered series of atomized and mechanical units, like those intrinsic to technical media. Duchamp’s less cited readymade, In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915) also offers an appropriation of a mass-produced object—a snow shovel—which, when detached from its normative function and placed in the gallery (as with Fountain ) comes to signify technical failure through the human, as opposed to the romance of technical progress despite the human.

Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) a.k.a The Large Glass , is key in this narrative because it is through this work that the medium employed to produce the glitch and the depiction of the glitch itself become one. Using such materials as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust, Duchamp assembled two large sheets of glass, sandwiched together and suspended vertically in a gold colored metal frame. Dominant interpretations of the work allude to the mechanization of (modern) love and sexual reproduction, however more pertinent here is the moment in 1926 when the external glass, initially intended to merely “frame” the internal contents, breaks while in transit to the Brooklyn Museum. Upon encountering the fractured glass, Duchamp declared that he preferred the piece this way, and that it was finally complete. 18 In a single stroke, he consolidated chance, accident, technical failure, to lodge a critique against techno-utopia (in glass), to reveal the myth of “transparency” pervasive in the history of visual epistemology in the West, and to question the stable subjectivity of the author.

Fig 5. Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23). After the glass accidentally broke, Duchamp declared the work was finally complete. Image courtesy of ARES and the Museum of Modern Art.

Because the Large Glass does not depict a glitch by way of another medium , as with Nude Descending a Staircase or the other paintings noted above, the glitch here is the art—namely, art’s ability to act as a bearer of its own “content.” In other words, content and frame are inextricably bound. The process of looking at and through the broken glass becomes just as much a part of the art as the so-called autonomous object, which is itself broken into discrete, mechanical unit. Herein lies a second set of critical capacities of glitch art: the use of decompressed bits of data and technical errors to call attention to the process of looking itself, to foreground apparatus that constructs perception in whatever medium looking may occur in or through. 19 The Large Glass thus uses error and breakage to highlight what is normally invisible and functional in practices of looking and knowing, making visible what is otherwise an unconscious and ideological relation to knowledge and truth.

In the postwar period, the Duchampian legacy of chance, glitch, critique, and appropriation finds expression in the work of a number of modern artists. This includes key players like Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, various Fluxus artists, Jasper Johns, and Ed Keinholz, among others, all of whom position art as either a process-based aesthetic or as a dematerialized form awaiting actualization by a spectator. Pollock’s painting Blue Poles (1953), for instance (though much of his work could be cited here), results from flicking paint across the canvas. The work of experimental musician John Cage is also key, not just for his adoption of chance, but also for his reconfiguration of sound and noise. Where Russolo argued that industrial noises were valid in a musical composition, Cage argued that all sounds were.

Born in 1912 in Los Angeles, Cage was a student of Austrian composer and painter Arnold Schönberg, known for revolutionizing modern music by systematically breaking with harmony, melody, and the “teleological implications of tonality.” 20 Following this lead, Cage developed a method for avoiding harmonic melody and, by 1938, had turned to the principles of chance and randomness to explore the capacity for any noise in the sound environment to enter his artwork. Like the glitch in Duchamp’s Large Glass , noise for Cage was immanent to the work, that is, both a part of its materiality and intrinsic to its signifying capacity.

As Cage discovered, silence was actually filled with noise. And thus noise became the core issue in audiovisual experience. 21 This new centrality of noise is also illustrated in American artist Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951), created under an apprenticeship with colorist Josef Albers. These images exerted a strong influence on Cage, due to the way in which they reflected an acute awareness of color that is both relative and ephemeral. The Paintings consist of seven large, white, oil painted panels that act as “hypersensitive” mechanisms in the space so that they show a different image, wherever they are installed, by virtue of the way in which they absorb and reflect the surrounding light, dust, and shadows. The pure white panels are thus “dirtied,” not by gestural abstraction, but by the world itself and its surrounding color, just as any surrounding noise in Cage’s 4’33” (created a year later) would constitute its color and texture. 4’33” , composed for any instrument, was first performed by David Tudor in 1953 in Woodstock, New York. Tudor sat at the piano and acknowledged the beginning and end of the composition by opening and closing its lid. Anything that sounded in between these gestures became a part of the work. 22 Cage’s legacy continued through musique concrète and the experimental compositions of Eric Satie, Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez, to name only four, though colorful visual abstractions were often integrated into their experimental performances, such as the pivotal  multimedia event engineered for the 1957 World’s Fair in Brussels. 23

The introduction of electronic audio synthesizers in the 1950s and 1960s brought new levels and modes of experimentation to the genre, as demonstrated in the work of Reed Ghazala, 24 now considered the “father of circuit bending”; Christian Marclay’s mutilated vinyl records created in 1979; Yasuna Tone’s 1985 Solo For Wounded CD which used sounds from scratched CD’s; or in the work of Masami Akita (aka Merzbow). However, as Ghazala noted later in his life, because of the integrated circuit’s increasingly tighter and smaller development into a single sound and image-processing chip, circuit bending grew more difficult (creating a natural segue into code-based glitch art in the 2000s). Such synthetic noise tendencies were also eventually picked up in punk music, drum breaks and scratches performed on vinyl records, and various other instantiations that are given extensive treatment in historical studies of noise music already in circulation. 25

In the 1960s, Fluxus artists (including La Monte Young, George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins and George Maciunas) produced anti-expressionistic, anti-museum artworks that incorporated happenings, chance, experimental music, and audience participation. Two notable examples are Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film , which contained nothing but clear leader and thus projected onto the gallery wall only the dust and scratches that accrued on the film over time, and George Maciunas’s  Ten Feet of Film with No Camera , of which its title is descriptive. 26

Often overlooked in considerations of glitch and noise precursors is the “junk art” from the 1950s and 1960s, especially the New York School which, like Fluxus, aimed to renounce creative control and intentionality in their mode of production. 27 The work of American sculptor John Chamberlain could also be seen as viable technical precursor to glitch and noise techniques, given the way in which his entire body of work is developed using crushed automobile body parts, reconfigured and repainted in brilliant synthetic colors: literally an aestheticization of un-compressed data. One could also include the re-assemblage machines developed by French artist Jean Tinguely, and the work of French cybernetic artist Nicolas Schöffer.

And while he did not work directly with hardware or broken machine parts, Gerhard Richter must also be seen as a proto-glitch artist, given the way he has painted quasi-photorealistic, highly ambiguous images on canvas for several decades. Richter’s paintings often display visual artifacts (blurs, over exposures, or high contrast obfuscation). For instance in Familie nach Altem Meister ( Family After Old Master , 1965), the allusion to traditional portraiture is blurred over by both image and “authorial” brush. Well known for this technique, Richter employs this blurring device with the goal of “making everything equally important and equally unimportant.” 28 For Richter, imperfection, transience, and incompleteness are natural and given characteristics of memory and experience. This attitude has of course become vernacular in media culture, often illustrated in contemporary video art where, even if there is no technical glitch, there is nonetheless a conceptual glitch or choreographed opacity in visual-cognitive experience (a prime example here is the video artwork of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist). Richter’s blurs, in both his paintings and photographic works, consistently call attention to the imperfect and always mediated act of perception itself, to the thick matter of noise that ensues between any object and a subject’s apprehension of it. In revealing these invisible processes of representation (albeit one contingent on classical metaphysics) and the apparatus of visual perception, Richter visualizes the phenomenal haze of mediation otherwise concealed in discourses of technological fidelity. 29

In sum, almost all of these works have been well traversed within art history’s canons. The point here, however, is to emphasize how they simultaneously function in an alternative aesthetic history of error and failure, and as precursors to new media practices in digital glitch in the present.

Photographic and Cinematic Glitches

Early uses of photomontage and traditional montage (including the numerous devices of proto-cinematic history, such as stereoscopes, zoopraxiscopes, or praxinoscopes), represent another set of important glitch precursors , given the way in which these experiments were often concerned with de-compressing visual data from the increasingly smaller and faster visual spaces and units of time the standardized moving image was to. Revealing the edges and limits of these processes and histories thus became the focus of many avant-garde artists and photographers. For instance, when his film camera jammed in 1896, mid-way through a static camera shot, theater owner George Méliès inadvertently discovered “stop substitution” trick photography, which eventually became integral to the special effects used in his short trick films. 30 Consider also the accidentally melted images that combat photographer Robert Capa shot during the Omaha beach landings in June of 1944. As Lindsay Cox explains it, in the rush to get the images to a courier for delivery to the main office of Life Magazine a darkroom technician dried the film too quickly and the extreme heat it had been exposed to, melted the film. The emulsion distorted beyond recovery on all but ten of the frames from the four rolls processed. And yet, these surviving gritty images are regarded as some of the best war photographs of all time. 31 Visual distortion has since become an intentionally applied vernacular effect, displayed in the work of Gerhard Richter, and in a newer genre of video art that intentionally works with a low-fi, or “dirt style” aesthetic. 32 The rise of this anti-compression aesthetic moves alongside the rise of “high resolution” photography and film in modern culture writ large.

Another set of precursors from photo and film can be drawn from a host of artists engaged in experimental techniques like film scratching, burning, dodging, over-exposure or other (at the time) non-commercially viable effects. For example, the work of Man Ray and Rene Clair has been cited as key to glitch art methods, as well as Len Lye’s A Colour Box from 1937: a kinetic film that consists of scratched and hand-painted celluloid. American filmmaker Stan Brakhage, well-known for consistently scratching on film, painting and gluing objects like insects, chemicals, or food onto blank frames, rapid editing, swirling camera work and deliberately out-of-focus images, also serves as a crucial figure in this prehistory. Like Duchamp’s Large Glass , such techniques use technical breakdown as a means of undermining the so-called transparency of the projected image. Scratches and burns, like Richter’s blurs, ask questions about the relationship between viewer, medium, and maker. Brakhage painting colors on clear celluloid, contemporary glitch artist Nick Briz suggests, is analogous to “a hacker punching 1’s and 0’s into a file to invoke broken shards of colorful pixels exposes the digital medium for what it is.” 33 20111 ed. Nick Briz, et al (Unsorted Books, 2011), 55.] Of course color as pigment and color as number are distinct in each media, and of course there is a crucial difference between computational media and cinematic forms. The former involves a necessary relationship between the code and the interface, which is absent in the latter. Briz’s point is nonetheless an intriguing one. 34

Andy Warhol was also instrumental in laying the groundwork for the glitch. Key to this discussion is his first use of film in 1963, when he did not completely close the viewfinder of his 16mm Bolex camera, intentionally allowing light to leak onto some of the film and then later refused to edit out these “botched” sequences during postproduction. The resulting frame flashes between edits created dramatic full stop effects between scenes, a technique that Warhol would come to use throughout the 1960s. 35 This initial, intentional flash-cut has since become common today, used as a segue in dramas (between memory in the present tense) or in fast-paced action scenes. And again, the popularity of this anti-compression technique of a “glitched reality,” even if it is simulated, denotes a growing concern, I argue, and attempt to respond to and cope with the new demands placed on human consumption, performance, and action by accelerated and increasingly compressed technology.

Likewise, this kind of aesthetic appropriation and popularization has occurred with a number of the formerly disruptive and “glitch” editing techniques developed in the experimental cinema, especially within the sub-genre of “structuralist cinema.” In a sense, structuralist cinema on the whole can be defined by an intrinsic capacity to push color and image to the extreme of perception, engendering conceptual and physiological glitches. Key structuralist filmmakers here include Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, George Landow, 36 Tony Conrad, Ernie Gehr, Joyce Wieland, and Michael Snow, all of whom developed a highly formalist and often materialist form of cinema by foregrounding the role of the medium—the cinematic apparatus—in the production of vision. This effect figures prominently throughout this body of work, although key examples are Conrad’s The Flicker (1966), which investigates perception through use of stroboscopic effects (alternating black and white frames) at various frequencies, and a number of Sharits’ films, including Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976) or Piece Mandala (1966), where colors are introduced in stroboscopic high-frequency patterns. These glitches are effective in the way they intervene into normative modes of perception, calling attention to the very act of cinematic viewing itself, and anticipate a later generation of glitch art, where breakdown, disruption, and error also work to call attention to the material and political logic of the technology, albeit in electronic and liquid crystal form.

Electric Glitches

As celluloid gave way to the cathode ray tube frenzy of the 1960s, alongside the psychedelic counter-culture and birth of personal computing, automated software, the Internet, and liquid and plasma screens in the 1990s, glitch and anti-compression aesthetics—or simply, the stylization of technical error—became an increasingly salient feature of the cultural and artistic landscapes. The more intensified a technical system, the more error and breakdown figure as potent metaphors of dysfunction and anti-communication in material critiques of the media. Thus a paradox lies at the heart of the electronic glitch: the more one attempts to control, to functionalize culture through new technologies, the more does one also proliferate glitches and errors, making these undesirable and unwanted phenomena all the more available to the mechanisms of critique. Because examples of visual electronic glitches are numerous, I will limit my analysis of electronic glitch precursors to key instances in analog video and televisual art, citing two examples from feminist art practices with electronic media, video synthesis, and electronic audio glitches, respectively.

When ABC executives saw the use of analog television static in a segment of comedian Andy Kaufman’s Andy’s Funhouse (1949-1984), they immediately feared viewers would mistake this false static for actual broadcast problems and change the channel. But this was precisely the reaction Kaufman sought. His intentional simulation of television static aimed to catch people off-guard, confronting them with their own processes of viewing. Similarly, Korean-born glitch-pioneer Nam June Paik also generated abstract electronic imagery that caught television viewers, and the art world, off-guard. Paik’s Magnet TV (1965) is the definitive example here. The piece consists of a cathode ray tube (CRT) television set, on top of which a magnet rests to distort the signal. The magnet was powerful enough to draw and detract the high-speed electronic phosphors shooting through the electronic gun, actively and intentionally deforming the “normal” broadcast television image to form instead colorful traces and abstract patterns on the screen. 37

Fig 6. Name June Paik, Magnet TV (1965). Using a magnet, Paik distorted the otherwise “clean” televisual signals. Image courtesy of Paik Studios / Nam June Paik Estate.

If glitch, error, and noise have consistently been framed as Other within Western aesthetics, what better companion to this project of critique than feminist praxis: also marginalized as the “Other” within the long history of Western culture and patriarchy?  Bringing these two themes and histories together, one finds Joan Jonas’s Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1973), a video-performance piece that incorporates mirrors and masks, as it intentionally offsets the vertical blanking signal on the analog video camera, depicting a misalignment between self and mediated subjectivity. 38 Traditionally cited as an early feminist video artwork, the piece also serves as an unacknowledged precursor to Mary Lucier’s Dawn Burn (1975) and Bird’s Eye (1978), which provide empirical records of the distorted optical effects of light burned directly on the video camera’s “eye.” For the former, Lucier aimed the camera’s lens directly at the sun, burning the camera’s vidicon tube in real time and thus inscribing in it the calligraphic abstractions of light, while in Bird’s Eye she aimed a laser directly at the camera lens, producing an analogous but visually distinct effect.

Fig 7. Joan Jonas. Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1973). Video, black and white. Jonas intentionally misaligns the vertical hold in the video camera to create a sense of distortion and failure. Image courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, numerous video artists and engineers experimented with the materiality of video by using video synthesizers and new computational technology. This genre of art eventually became known as video synthesis. 39  American artists Steina and Woody Vasulka are pioneers of this art form, the “first of a generation to ‘open the box’: [to] literally to rip apart pre-set commercial, manufactured media systems.” 40 They re-appropriated television parts toward various low-cost systems, such as the Vasulka Imaging System, as well as a range of audiovisual tools or “machines” built in collaboration with electronic engineers and technicians. Reminiscence (1974), for instance, used the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor to apply Portapak footage of a walk taken by Woody through a farmhouse in Moravia, the artist’s childhood home. And while the Vasulkas’ synthetic, noise- saturated video art certainly stands as an important precursor of contemporary glitch practices in circuit bending and digital glitching in electronic media, others must also be noted.

In addition to the work noted above, however, Nam June Paik’s key contributions to the art of video synthesis warrants more than a mere footnote. Because they have been discussed in detail elsewhere, I will only flag a few, key pieces here. Paik and Shuya Abe’s Raster Manipulation Unit (1970), for instance, which as Rosa Menkman notes was developed to “disrupt data streams” from “an incoming television signal,” is key to setting the stage for a new kind of visual grammar that becomes predominant in glitch art. Paik worked alongside a number of other artists to experiment with video synthesis at the time, including pioneering video artist and talented engineer Eric Siegel, who in 1968 manipulated Einstein’s face in hot pinks and purples, offering only two of numerous examples of analog glitches in video synthesis (other examples from the work of Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, and numerous others, again, the details of this generation must be expanded on elsewhere). In many ways, this entire generation of synthesizers, as with structuralist and experimental cinema, were used and designed by artists only to produce visual and conceptual glitches in conventional and pre-programmed viewing experiences. In short, the same argument regarding glitch in photomontage and structuralist film applies here: the artists used color abstractions to reroute expectations of what media should be used for, and as such the technical glitches, errors, and malfunctions were material, physiological, and crucially, cultural in the ways in which they subverted expectations for media reification and visual consumption. 41

Experimental electronic music from the 1980s and 1990s is perhaps the most recent precursor to twenty-first century glitch art. This generation introduced a “new strain” of glitch to music, which, as Steve Goodman argues, loosely revolved around the concept of a “bug.”

For sound theorist Kim Cascone, the then-emergent genre of glitch music was “characterized by a preoccupation with the sonic artifacts that can result from malfunctioning digital technology, such as those produced by bugs, crashes, system errors, hardware noise, CD skipping, and digital distortion.” 42 The new sonic glitch (or bug) inscribed scars on on the apparently pristine surfaces of science and engineering’s ideals of audio fidelity and crisp sound (as Lucier’s laser did to the video image). The electronica and noise music movements were principally alternative and dance-based, with its sub-genres including house, techno, electro, drum’n’bass, and ambient music. 43 But already by the early 1990s, as Cascone explains, techno music had settled into a formulaic, glitch-laden genre, which served a more or less aesthetically homogeneous market of DJs and dance music aficionados. 44 As Cascone argues, the release of Oval’s “The Politics of Digital Audio” in June of 1996 marked an important turning point for the incorporation of glitch within the lexicon of underground digital audio. In other words, the critical capacity of the glitch had been neutralized. But as we have seen, a neutralization of noise in music had already occurred. That is, while the group is known for introducing scratching and mutilated CDs to produce fragmented, electronic sounds, the stage was already set—through precursors like John Cage—suggesting that while these trends in electronic music of the 1990s may have been pushed up against industrial and commercial norms, these very strategies had already been politically neutralized. 45

This returns us to my introductory claim that glitch art and compression aesthetics are positioned in fundamentally ambivalent relations to themselves both as genres and as counter-strategies to the culture industry. As soon as a work or aesthetic strategy can be nominalized and classified, subjected to genre, convention, and reproducibility, it can no longer carry the transgressive or disruptive capacity it once had. 46 This trajectory applies to all of the work noted above where the use of feedback and video, or simply scratching on film, no longer has the same defamiliarizing, “glitch” effect, but in its reification becomes familiar, even aesthetically comfortable. As Cascone observes, while glitch and noise may be “tactic[s] of subversion,” they eventually “become fashion.” 47

At the same time, Dutch-based glitch artist Rosa Menkman maintains that the critical function of glitch will persist as long as new technologies continue to emerge. 48 To put it differently, the capacity of glitch or anti-compression for critique may endure insofar as those who construct and deploy them are vigilant and responsive to correlative changes in culture, society, and especially to the rapidly shifting conditions of our technological habitus. Like-minded artists and theorists continue to come together in related glitch practices and glitch art events, screenings, and festivals in numerous cities and online venues throughout the world, including symposiums like GLI.TCh/H, BYOB, and BENT Circuit Bending Music and Art in New York. On the ground, these glitch communities are driven by the same DIY ethos of 1990s net art communities, albeit with a twenty-first century, global scope. Indeed, many glitchers maintain that there is also something distinctive about their community. Glitch artist Nick Briz holds to the rich diversity at the festival he organizes—a balance between commercial and hacker-punk types. For Briz, “glitchers partake in glitch art for very different reasons. We have plenty of ‘punks’ present but we also had designers who work at ad agencies.” 49 In other words, glitch art coexists within and through its own reification . Reification, nominalization, and gentrification are necessary orders of business for glitch (art) to exist at all. My point is simply to highlight the growing gap between glitch and noise as a visual style and its disavowal and denial in media and industry practice.

In conclusion, a glitch’s ability to disrupt and challenge assumptions about choice, media consumption, and the ongoing compression of every day life and desiring practices in digital culture rest almost entirely on the particularity of its use and circumstance.  As this history has shown, what might have been a critical glitch yesterday most likely will not be so today or in the future. At the same time, what was commercially viable in pop culture last year, or twenty years ago, may next week be used in a new, unforeseen and politically progressive way. While one aspect of the future of glitch and noise is already inscribed in the sand—namely, its failure—the particular capacity for glitch and noise to disrupt or pose critical questions in other unforeseen ways is still active and potent, insofar as technology is itself always changing. It is from within this ongoing, transformative process that artists, media makers, and filmmakers find the appropriate mode for expressing the desire for social and political change, despite the frequency and inevitability of failure.

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• Numerous audio and video noise and glitch plug-ins are available in iZotope’s “warp” function for audio and Instagram, “iColorama”, and “Hipstamatic” for photography, which imitate analog imperfections with faux vintage lens flares and lomographic discolorations. ↩
• Paul B. Davis, “ Define Your Terms (or Kanye West Fucked Up My Show )” ↩
• And ultimately, as Davis himself points out, the work is actually a kind of “anti-compression aesthetic” because it decodes and un-compresses digital information otherwise compressed in a common “clean,” video file. ↩
• Cascone, GDI, 17-18. ↩
• For instance, glitch and noise are featured in television shows like Nickelodeon’s iCarly ; MTV’s advertisements for The Biggest Loser ; Chairlift’s Evident Utensil (2009), and Rihanna’s Rude Boy (2009) video games like Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days (2009); and feature films such as Cloverfield 1 (2008) , Paranormal Activity (2007), 42 (2013) , and REC 3 (2012). Also see Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Momentum (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), 57. ↩
• For instance, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992); Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50-56; and Jacques Rancière on the The Aesthetic Unconscious (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009). In literature, one could draw on analogies from Joyce’s Ulysses , T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land , or William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury . ↩
• In my forthcoming book, I argue how compression functions within a broader history of human ontology, namely through the narrowing and filtering out of “error and failure” within acceptable and predominant definitions of the human and human experience. Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) ↩
• Marey’s work directly inspired the use of simultaneity in Frantisek Kupka’s work. ↩
• Eric Kluitenberg, “Transfiguration of the Avant-Garde / The Negative Dialectics of the Net,” Nettime (Jan 2002). ↩
• For more on this see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992). ↩
• Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio, The Accident Of Art , trans. Mike Taormina (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 98; Paul Virilio, “The Primal Accident,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 212. ↩
• Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York: Continuum, 2007), 14. ↩
• According to Pierpaolo Antonello, the manifesto was actually written in 1938; Tim Barker, “Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant,” in Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures , ed. Mark Nunes (New York: Continuum, 2011), 42; Henri Gabriel, “The Hanging Mobile: A Historical Review” Leonardo 18; 1 (1985): 40-42. ↩
• Even though De Stijl favors simplicity, it is still concerned with fragmenting and simplicity a pre-existing complexity and fragmentation in the modern experience. ↩
• Including cubo-futurism, abstractionism, rayonism, and suprematism, with artists like Mayakovsky, Gontcharova, Kandinsky, Larionov, and Malevich. ↩
• Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” In The Dada Painters and Poets 2nd Edition, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1981), 80 ↩
• Xtine Burrough, “Add-Art and Your Neighbors’ Biz: A Tactical Manipulation of Noise,” in Error, Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures, ed. Mark Nunes (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 82. ↩
• Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); Natasha Powell, Who is Marcel Duchamp? Accessed April 10, 2013: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~djbromle/contemp03/natasha/art5pgMarcelDuchamp.htm ↩
• See: Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est ,” Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972): 6-17. ↩
• Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940 (New York: Prentice Hall, 2003), 174. ↩
• As already determined by Claude Shannon, Abraham Moles, and Warren Weaver in their work on information theory in the 1940s (illustrating what I have elsewhere referred to as glitch ontology). ↩
• Not coincidentally, Cage had referred to Rauschenberg’s blank white panels similarly, as “landing strips.” See: Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with John Cage (New York: Limelight,1988), 70; Fineberg, Art Since 1940, 178-179; Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). ↩
• The event included a number of electronic sounds and visual abstractions housed in a structure designed by architect le Corbusier. ↩
• In the 1960s, Ghazala began observing a shorted out amplifier emitting “synth” sounds after which he began to intentionally reproduce in his work. ↩
• For instance, in 1982 DJ Grand Wizzard developed this “scratching” sound by accident, after which it became a key textural instrument in his music and what followed in the 1980’s. See: Hegarty, Noise/Music ; Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat ; Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24; 4 (Winter 2000): 12-18.; or Scratch Dir: Doug Pray (Firewalks Films, USA 2001). ↩
• In addition, Aldo Tambellini’s Black Films (1965-7) used clear leader as a scroll. ↩
• For instance consider the work of Jackson Pollock, or Erhard Walther, whose experiments with art “informel” in the 1960s employed error and chance as generative tools. See: Michael Linger, “From Being to Seeing: Michael Linger on Franz Erhard Walther,” FORUM International 4 (1990): 50–55; Tim Barker, “Aesthetics of Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforseen, and the Errant” in Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures , ed. Mark Nunes (New York: Continuum, 2011), 45. ↩
• Ben Luke, “Richter In The ’60s: The Breakthrough Decade” Southeby’s (April 3, 2013). Accessed April10, 2013: http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/blogs/all-blogs/sothebys-at-auction/2013/04/gerhard-richter-1960s-breakthrough.html ↩
• Also see the work of contemporary artist John Horton, who takes this technique one step further by painting images that emulate the distortion of corrupt digital files. ↩
• Frank Kessler On Fairies and Technologies in Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam (2000) 39; Lindsay George Cox, “The Birth and Rebirth of the Glitch” Master of Arts Thesis, Centre for Animation and Interactive Media School of Creative Media. RMIT, Melbourne (April 2009), 16. ↩
• Lindsay George Cox, “The Birth and Rebirth of Glitch,” 16. ↩
• For further discussion of this, see Chapter 5 of Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2014). ↩
• Nick Briz, in GLI.TC/H READER[ROR ↩
• Tom Gunning has contested this point. However, I tend to side with Rosalind Krauss in allowing for a fundamental distinction between the digital and cinematic form. See Rosalind. E. Krauss, “Frame by Frame.” Artforum (September 2012): 416-419. ↩
• In Landow’s Film (1965) sprocket holes, edge lettering and dirt particles appear throughout. ↩
• Segments of Paik’s other works, such as his contribution to The Medium is the Medium (1968) are also part of this prehistory, but must be explored in detail elsewhere. See: Carolyn L. Kane, “The Electric ‘Now Indigo Blue’: Synthetic Color and Video Synthesis circa 1969” Leonardo vol. 46, no. 4 (2013): 360-366. ↩
• Vertical blanking is essentially equivalent to frame rate in the cinema. See: “Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll,” Electronic Arts Intermix. Accessed April 2, 2013: http://www.eai.org/title.htm?id=531 ↩
• For further discussion of this, see Chapter 2 of Carolyn Kane, Chromatic Algorithms . ↩
• Vasulka Lab 1969-2005 . Exhibition curated by Yasmeen Baig-Clifford (April 2006). Archives of the Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. ↩
• Rosa Menkman, “The dominant,” blog post: http://gli.tc/h/blog/2010/09/25/the-dominant-continuing-search-for-a-noiseless-channel-has-been-—-and-will-always-be-—-no-more-than-a-regrettable-ill-fated-dogma/ Accessed April 7, 2013. ↩
• Kim Cascone in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004), 393. ↩
• For specifics see the work of Gantz Graf by Autechre and Szamar Madar by Venetian Snares. Also see: Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24; 4 (Winter 2000): 12-18. And of course the work of Aphex Twin and Autechre are included here. ↩
• Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure,”18. ↩
• German precursors should also be noted, such as Achim Szepanski. ↩
• Raymond Brassier, “Genre is Obsolete” Multitudes No. 28 (Spring 2007). ↩
• There is also the so-called glitch aesthetic (“grunge” rather) emulated in the print based work of graphic designers David Carson and April Greiman. ↩
• Personal correspondence with Rosa Menkman, December 23, 2012. ↩
• See Nick Briz’s video entitled, “ A New Ecology for the Citizen of a Digital Age ” (2009) ↩

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How to make a glitch hop track

Since the late 1990s, glitch hop has become one of the most exploratory genres in the world of EDM. With a heavy focus on creative sound design, glitch hop combines traditional hip hop rhythms with less traditional uses of samples and synthesizers. Arguably more of an aesthetic than a genre, glitch hop is all about experimentation and creating sound combinations no human has ever heard before.

In this tutorial, explore what defines “glitch hop,” as well as some tips for producing your own glitch hop tracks.

But first, meet Ben Cantil, an experienced glitch hop artist who will share with us how to create the unique, distorted glitch hop sound.

Ben Cantil of Zebbler Encanti Experience has made some of my favorite glitch hop tracks to date. We spoke about his thoughts on the genre and picked his brain for some fresh, glitch hop production techniques.

Cantil is nothing short of a “sound nerd.” After writing the new curriculum on music production for the Berklee College of Music , he now spends his time hosting “ beat retreats ” and educating on experimental sound design. His passion for music technology and innovation is truly next-level.

As we explore the genre of glitch hop, we’ll also gaining some of his wisdom. Let’s begin by taking a look at the core characteristics of glitch hop.

Jump to these sections:

What is glitch hop, is glitch hop the same as dubstep.

• Start with a creative idea
• Create a bumpin’ drum groove
• Make a complimentary bass line
• Add a few melodic elements
• Create glitch effects
• Arrange your track
• Mix your track
• Master your track
• Choose the right tools
• Create you-nique sounds
• Listen to glitch hop artists

Follow along with Komplete 14 , the latest go-to suite for producers, composers, and sound designers, loaded with every tool you could ever need.

Get Komplete 14

As a genre, glitch hop is primarily characterized by its intentional use of digital artifacts, glitchy effects, and chopped-up samples to create complex, syncopated rhythms. However, according to Cantil, “glitch hop is really more of a vibe than a definable genre.”

Glitch hop is, essentially, where elements from hip hop, glitch, and EDM music all come together to create a fresh sound. To get a feel for the genre, give Spotify’s Glitch Hop Mix a spin:

When it comes to glitch hop’s BPM, most original glitch hop tracks sit around 80 to 100 beats per minute. But, more recent glitch hop is much less specific on the tempo. Cantil says, “really, any song that goes out of its way to embrace glitches—those weird twists and turns in the sonic tapestry of the music—but still maintains that hip hop aesthetic could be considered glitch hop.”

When we think of defining a genre, we have to realize that every genre is based and built upon a history of the genres that came before it. The word “genre” comes from the same root word as “gene” or “genetics,” so it’s important to consider the family tree when accurately defining genres.

Glitch hop and dubstep share some similar qualities (like their heavy use of hip hop rhythms). They even have some overlapping influences (primarily the breakbeats commonly found in drum and bass). However, glitch hop came around at a similar time as dubstep, so we can think of these two genres more like cousins in the musical family tree.

One key difference between glitch hop and dubstep is that glitch hop is more likely to include the use of samples, whereas dubstep is typically programmed on drum machines. Many early glitch hop tracks were created from sampling old vinyl records, so they typically have more of a swing to them. And, still to this day, glitch hop tends to embrace that “swung” feeling—pushing the boundaries much further from the metronome than you’d typically find in dubstep.

In short: though there are similarities between the two genres, glitch hop is not the same as dubstep.

How to make glitch hop

Now that you’ve got a decent understanding of what makes a track “glitch hop,” let’s jump into how to actually make some glitch hop of your own!

While there’s really no wrong way to go about producing a glitch hop track, there are some common elements you’ll want to keep in mind.

1. Start with a creative idea

When beginning a fresh glitch hop track, Cantil says his go-to trick is to “start with a technique or an idea that’s rooted in curiosity.” For example, you could ask yourself: “what would it sound like if the robot from Lost in Space tried to replicate that old school Timbaland sound ?” That puzzle of getting two flavors that “shouldn’t” mix to actually mesh well together is a huge motivator for Cantil, among many other glitch hop producers.

There are several key elements that a typical glitch hop track will include (more on that down below). But, when it comes to the flow of production tasks, Cantil says there’s no wrong order to approach it. “What facet I work on really depends on what I’m inspired to do that day. Sometimes I’m the composer, writing melodies and harmonies. Some days I’m the sound designer making crazy ‘whomps’ in Massive . And sometimes it just feels like the right day to be the organizer.”

2. Create a bumpin’ drum groove

The drum pattern is crucial to glitch hop. Best practices are to use punchy kicks, snappy snares, and creative percussive sounds. Layering your drums or processing bland beats with creative effects like those found in the Effects Series – Crush Pack can really add depth and character to your percussion. To create more of a glitchy feel, experiment with offbeat patterns, triplet rhythms, and syncopations.

This loop I have from the Concrete Sun Expansion Pack is right along the lines of what you’re gonna need for a good, glitch hop drum groove:

3. Make a complimentary bass line

A powerful bass line that compliments your drums is key to crafting a glitch hop track that’s memorable. Glitch hop bass riffs can be made from synths, sampled recordings, or a combination of both. If you wanna keep true to the genre, you can’t go wrong with a good wobble or the occasional bass growl.

To take your low end to the next level, try processing your bass with some distortion, filtering, and modulation effects to add movement and character. For example, take this bass riff I created using a Massive preset called “FAT WOB” from the Lazer Dice Expansion Pack :

Already, the preset has a ton of motion built into it. But, to take it one step further, I ran it through iZotope Trash 2 using a preset called “Add Sugar.”

Trash is a retired product. If you’re looking for Trash effects, iZotope Neutron has the DSP from Trash built right into its processing.

Let’s give the final bass a listen as it’s played along with the drum groove from above:

4. Add a few melodic elements

When it comes to melodic elements, glitched-up is the name of the game (imagine that). Begin by finding interesting vocal samples, synth loops, or instrument recordings to manipulate. Then, use your DAW’s slicing tools to create new melodies by rearranging or repeating different snippets. You could also use a plugin like iZotope Stutter Edit 2 to quickly apply unique stutter effects to your melodies.

If you want to get really wild, try using the Variable Time or Variable Pitch modules in iZotope RX to time-stretch and pitch-shift your melodic loops into something entirely new.

PRO TIP: As you’re experimenting with effect plugins, make sure to export as a new file whenever something strikes your ear. That way, you’ll have several, unique variations of your melody at your disposal when you begin arranging your final track.

Check this out—I took this vocal loop from the Young Phantom Expansion Pack :

I used iZotope RX to slow it down to match the tempo of my track (85 BPM). Then, I ran it through Stutter Edit 2 to quickly glitch it up so it sounds like this.

Finally, I layered that on top of the bass line and drum groove we’ve been working with. Give it a listen.

5. Create glitch effects

To provide some extra coloring to your mix, you may wish to dollop in some glitchy sound effects throughout. For the example track I’ve been piecing together for this article, I found a few interesting sounds in that same Young Phantom Expansion Pack and sliced them up over top of the rest of the loop. Check out the final track below.

Pulling it all together

Above, I walked you through how to create a simple, eight bar loop—just to demonstrate the core components that are typically expected from a standard glitch hop track. But, obviously, you’re going to want different sections (intros, verses, drops, and breakdowns), and you’re ultimately going to want the whole shebang to sound like a cohesive song by the end of it. So, once you’ve got all the elements, it’s time to pull it all together.

6. Arrange your track

As with any song, you’re going to want to arrange your track in a way that keeps the listener engaged. Experiment with build ups and “drops” to create excitement and tension. Play around with all the different versions of your melodies that you (smartly) saved for later in order to create diversity throughout the composition. And check out our guide on song structure for even more ideas on arranging your song.

Within the glitch hop genre, “surprise, but delight” is a good rule of thumb to follow. Make it interesting enough that people want to keep listening, but accessible enough that they don’t say “this isn’t what I signed up for.”

7. Mix your track

When it comes to mixing, Ben Cantil says, “Don’t wait until later to mix the track. Mixing is a part of the sound design process. The way your percussion all blends and composites together should be thought of right off the bat. As you build the synths, you should be adding compressors and making sure there aren’t any clashes between instruments. Don’t save the mixing for later!”

Mixing as you go along is a good practice to establish when producing glitch hop music. It will save you loads of time and energy when you come to the actual “mixing phase.” By the time you arrive at the final mixing session, all of your elements should sound like they fit together pretty well. But, feel free to use additional EQs, compressors, and other mixing tools to shape the sound and create space for each element as needed.

One great mixing tool that Cantil said he uses regularly is Neutron by iZotope . In our chat, he specifically referenced the brilliance of Neutron’s Unmask feature , which helps create space for competing elements in your mix.

8. Master your track

The last step of the production process is to send it to the mastering chain. When it comes to mastering, Cantil stated that iZotope Ozone is the way to go—stating “you don’t really need anything else!” Ozone’s Master Assistant can help you achieve a killer, radio-ready master from your home studio.

Although Ozone is the most trusted, one-stop-shop mastering plugin on the market, Cantil also had plenty of nice things to say about the one additional plugin he likes to include on the master channel: iZotope Insight . “The Insight plugin was a game changer…the ability to monitor what’s going on in your mix and to be able to see all the measurements in one place is extraordinary.”

Tips for producing glitch hop

Now that we’ve covered how to make a glitch hop track, let’s look at a few final tips for producing in the glitch hop genre.

1. Choose the right tools

Ben says, “The tools that you use as an electronic musician are a really big and important part of your sound. History will remember Massive and Fm8 the way rock and roll remembers the Les Paul guitar. The influence those instruments have had on electronic music are intangible. Every instrument brings something new and different to the table. It’s the composer’s job to deploy their own taste and figure out what they want and need.”

Anyone who’s been following the music production industry for the last decade or so knows that Massive is the foolproof way to go when it comes to designing “whomps” and “growls.” I’ve personally been using Massive for over a decade to create all sorts of larger-than-life sounds. But, Cantil pointed out a useful feature I didn’t even know about: the randomize function that allows you to quickly create never-before-heard sounds with just a click. Check it out in action in the video below.

For more organic textures in his productions, Cantil prefers to rely on Kontakt libraries saying, “When it comes to cinematic sounds and instruments that are meant to sound like organic instruments, there are some sounds you just can’t get with any other means. Kontakt so beautifully captures the essence of the original, live instruments.”

You can hear heavy uses of the Noire Kontakt library on Cantil’s track “Moonrise” below.

2. Create you-nique sounds

Glitch hop is all about creating interesting sonic textures that tickle the senses in new and exciting ways. Get creative with your design process and try to make sounds that are uniquely YOU!

If you’re new to the world of sound design, check out this article on Sound Synthesis 101 to get a feel for the basics. After you’ve got a good grasp on audio synthesis, there’s the perfect guide to using audio filters in your productions to achieve various effects.

Also, Mr. Bill (one of my other favorite glitch hop artists) has some great YouTube videos on sound design specifically for this genre. Check them out below.

Ben says, “When it comes to sound selection, choose sounds quickly! Don’t drain your ears!”

3. Listen to glitch hop artists

One of the best ways to learn how to produce glitch hop is to study the artists who have made the genre what it is today! Here’s a handful of glitch hop artists I’ve been enjoying recently:

Glitch hop artists to check out:

• Zebbler Encanti Experience
• Father Funk
• Of The Trees

Now, go make glitch hop!

I’ve answered the question, “what is glitch hop?” I’ve covered how to make glitch hop. I’ve even given you a handful of pro tips and tricks to help you when producing glitch hop. Now, the only thing left to do is for you to go make some of your own!

The key thing to keep in mind is that glitch hop is primarily about designing a moment. It’s meant to be experimental. So, go crazy with it. You now know the basics, but it’s your job to take that info and run with it.

P.S. If you’re pretty new to electronic music production, I highly recommend reading about Music production 101 and How to make electronic music . Those will get you moving in the right direction even faster!

And if you haven’t already, check out Komplete 14 for the ultimate bundle of tools, sounds, instruments, and more to get you started on your glitch hop journey.

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Gleetchlab2021, Modular DAW For Glitch & Experimental Music

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Gleetchlab2021 is the latest version of Giorgio Sancristoforo’s unique DAW for glitch and experimental music expanded with tons of new sound mangling tools. 

Experimental music software has the advantage that it often looks far beyond classical music production. It offers the musician possibilities that are difficult or impossible to achieve with other software. Here, the designs or the available tools alone are often responsible for this. Inear Display, Glitchmachines, or Giorgio Sancristoforo, for example, are well-known manufacturers who always give their software an experimental spirit.

Giorgio is probably one of the most advanced when it comes to experimental sound tools. Today Giogio Sancristoforo presented the new version of its experimental DAW called Gleetchlab2021 which has a lot of fans out there.

• Gleetchlab2021

Gleetlab2021 is a modular performance DAW dedicated to glitch and experimental music. Instead of a linear workflow like in Logic Pro, Cubase … you work here with six advanced loop players/recorders. They use a buffer in the RAM to store a sound. They have classic looper functions but also deeper ones like random loop points or automation of these. So you can use many elements from a loop at the same time without occupying multiple loop slots.

Then, the audio routing is fully modular and patchable in a VCS-3 like virtual pin matrix. Should Looper 3 come before Looper 1, or should only Looper 2 be in the effects, no problem for Gleetchlab2021. Here, you are not limited to one signal path. The same applies to the six loopers. The software allows external signals to be routed into the Gleetchlab2021 audio veins. So you can process and re-process live and recorded sounds endlessly.

Gleetchlab2021 has a 10-channel mixer with 4 bux mixer with which the individual internal and external streams can join together. It works in mono, stereo but also in quadraphonic or octophonic with additional speaker placement. That’s a powerful feature, especially for live artists. Further, it also features 2 VST FX slots for every channel and bus where you load VST plugin into the signal chain. Great for adding further effects to them or simply to finalize signals.

Creative Effects

In addition to the ability to load effects VSTs, Gleetchlab2021 also has a number of built-in effects. And as it should be, these are not the bread and butter effects that you know from every DAW. From simple filter, saturator, granulator to crazy spectral processors. Friends of experimental sound processors will get their money’s worth here.

• grainy , a new version of Michele Tadini’s T-Grain granulator
• harmony , a multiple pitch-shifter with delay
• dual spectral delay in stereo with 16 bands
• spectral beauty , a 256 spectral EQ with an internal random automation clock
• lazy DJ , sort of crazy auto-mixing processor
• same modal engine from Substania physical modeling Synthesizer
• spectral processor , a fully-programmable 16-channels vocoder inspired by the iconic Buchla 296 module.
• fluffy clouds records sound into a buffer and multiplies it for n times (voices)
• muug filter , a 24db/oct Moog-style transistor ladder filter
• echogeek , a delay inspired by the famous Binson Echorec.
• super looper , a stompbox style overdubbing looper with 60 seconds of buffer
• electronic dysphemia , a stutter effect that can be automated with random values

Gleetchlab2021 offers a lot, a lot that is not known from classic DAWs such as Cubase, Logic Pro … Giorgio’s software invites the user on an experimental sound journey. Workflows that you learned from YouTube tutorials are not important here. This is about trying things out, experimenting with signals, and discovering what is possible with audio.

And best of all, all this experimental fun costs only € 20. It’s a bargain in my opinion, not only for experimental musicians. It is available now as a standalone version for macOS. A Windows version will be available next week. Customers who bought GleetchlabX in 2021 can obtain a free license by emailing their Paypal Transaction Number.

More information here: Giorgio Sancristoforo

Software Standalone News

• experimental music
• Giorgio Sancristoforo
• sound design

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Glitch hop – what is it & how to make it.

Music Gateway Team

Glitch hop is an inventive and rhythmic blend of hip-hop beats, electronic music , and manipulated sounds drawn from audio and digital technology. Its individual aesthetic connects various genres and listeners from all over the vast genre spectrum.

What Is Glitch Hop?

Glitch hop is a subgenre of electronic music that combines elements of electronic dance music (EDM) and hip-hop while integrating features of ‘glitched’ music . Glitch hop is a production technique that employs the deliberate use of a broken reaction form of electronic and digital recording devices, for example, track skipping, distortion, and software crashes.

The required effect for glitch-hop is one that is more human; a hand-crafted sound rather than the refinements in a lot of EDM. This being said, the subgenre has a link to the lo-fi hip-hop aesthetic which embraces studio essentials such as vinyl crackle and allows for the idea of nostalgia to be added to recordings. Neurohop is another category of glitch-hop that became prominent in the early 2010s. it improves the multifaceted basslines and sonic atmosphere of Neurofunk and adds to the EDM-based glitch aesthetic.

The History Of Glitch Hop

The background of glitch-hop dates back to the late 1990s. Electronic music artists and producers such as Machinedrum, Prefuse 73, and Push Button Object began to combine ‘glitch’ elements with instrumental hip-hop beats.

During the early 2000s, glitch-hop groups started to collaborate with top artists (such as rapper Flying Lotus), as it increased in influence. The genre’s core shifted from hip-hop to EDM. A few years later, the tone had moved towards the bass-driven sounds of dubstep and electro house, as heard in glitch-hop music by artists like GRIZ, KOAN Sound, and The Glitch Mob.

Characteristics Of Glitch Hop Music

Various features help determine glitch hop’s distinctive sound. The most distinctive characteristics are:

Mid-tempo beats help determine glitch hop, typically drifting between 80 and 130 beats per minute. The accumulation of dubstep and electro to its DNA has amplified its regular tempo to about 110 to 115 BPM. The rhythm part (drum and bass) has a strong swing and a contemporary feel.

Sliced-up, digitally manipulated sounds that mimic sonic artifacts are the basis of glitch-hop. Skipping, as well as repetitive sounds and phrases, distorted vocals and effects, a deliberate decrease of sound quality with some crushing, and the electronic hum of hardware, have all been included in the sound.

Glitch hop is an extremely adaptable subgenre, smoothly incorporating various styles, from lo-fi, hip-hop and trap , to dubstep, as well as the ambient groove of downtempo. The mix-and-match aesthetics have helped shift glitch hop to EDM-based music and proposed greater creative freedom for the involved artists.

How To Make Glitch Hop Music

In order to produce glitch-hop music, there are some simple steps that artists will need to follow to create the unique sound of the genre. They are simplified as:

Listen To Glitch Hop

As a songwriter or other musical creator, the first step is to become submerged in the music genre that is to be created. A good starting point is to listen to the top glitch-hop artists, including Machinedrum, Dabrye, eDIT, and Mr. Bill.

It is easy to see how varied the genre is and how many distinctive sounds can be involved. Try to focus on the parts of the tracks that are common, and begin to understand what determines the aesthetic. Of course, the music will sound glitchy (as the name suggests). Some sorts of sounds and effects are used to replicate electronic chaos. It is important to recognize that the glitch-hop genre has a precise feel. Some areas, including lo-fi and ambient, are incredibly smooth and tranquil – whereas glitch-hop tends to have an edgy and tense feel overall. The sounds are kind of harsh, and a lot of the rhythms are jumpy.

In the past, glitch-hop artists were creative with hardware in order to capture their sounds. It included circuit blending as well as adapting CD players to intentionally skip. As with plenty of electronic genres, a minimalistic laptop-based setup is all that is required to make pro-level music nowadays. Using an audio interface like Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (or similar) is necessary for any home studio .

Midi keyboards like AKAI MPK Mini MkII and its competitors are powerful tools for electronic music. It enables artists to easily browse sounds and samples, write and play melodies and rhythms, and apply automation effects to their tracks. A great pair of neutral studio monitors or headphones is also necessary.

Similar to most electronic music, the sound created is defined by the software used. For electronic artists, the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is like a virtual studio, with samples and VSTs as the instruments. An alternative way to look at it is that the DAW is the blank canvas.

There are so many choices that it can be overwhelming when choosing a digital audio workstation. Many electronic artists prefer Ableton and FL Studio , but many use Reason – which has an exceptional interface that mimics live synths and rack-mounted effects. Glitch-hop artists typically like the free Jeskola Buzz or Renoise. The DAW is just the host for sounds and effects; the musician brings the skill.

Sample Packs

A key ingredient for glitch-hop music is the use of samples . Lots of early artists created these sounds by hacking electronic devices, however, premade sample packs can easily be used to make great music. The hallmark of glitch-hop is the use of choppy, digitally-distorted sound effects in place or alongside percussion. The tracks usually use glitched sounds instead of snares or clap sounds, and stuttering digital skips in place of hi-hats. Various layers of vibrant sound effects can weave through the percussion. Lots of glitch-hop music uses simple sounds in the bass and synths.

Virtual Studio Technologies

Glitch-hop is a lively genre and the music theory is essentially quite unassuming, and frequently repeated. Other than the glitchy samples, a symbol of the genre is using automation effects to warp and move the song along. Stuttering, digital distortion, pitch shifting, and filters are popular effects that turn a basic tune into chaos. Glitch VSTs are fairly complicated, with an overwhelming display of dials. Some of the greatest glitch-hop effects are produced by randomly messing with settings!

Writing The Music

Once the hardware and software are solidified, it is time to start gathering all the materials for creating the music. No one can educate artists on how to create new music, but a good start is to write a new song part and create a simple loop, which can be used as a starting point to jam over.

A great glitch percussion track will have layers and variations to be profound and complex. Lots of percussion tracks are based upon simple repeating patterns. Start by loading up a kick drum sound, a snare, and a hi-hat. Browse sample packs for glitchy-sounding samples- particularly for the hi-hat.

This might look different depending on the digital audio workstation of choice. Assuming the bottom is the kick, the middle is the snare, and the top is the hi-hat, artists will be capable of creating a comparable rhythm then put the tempo to 150 and loop the rhythm. This design can be the foundation for the track. Try overlaying new percussion samples at numerous points and be creative to see what works best.

Glitch hop is reasonably clean-sounding, deep, commanding bass that cements the track. The bass manages to be unassuming and repetitive, allowing the percussion to change energetically over it.

Glitch hop tends to be about the effects rather than the notes. Use a simple synth such as a saw with one sustained note. When listening back to a track, it might sound dull so try loading some glitch VSTs to the track and experiment with filters, distortion, and other warp effects. Even better, allocate some dials on the virtual studio tech to control them via a MIDI keyboard . Try to play the track and change the effects in real-time. The basic synth can produce some great glitch music.

Replicate Other Songs

One of the best ways to learn techniques and ideas is by trying to imitate sounds that are personally preferred. A good exercise is by reconstructing top glitch songs by ear. Examine various samples and try to copy the effects which are used! There is no harm in replicating in order to learn. A lot can be learned about how other songs are created in this way.

Notable Glitch-Hop Artists

Below is listed some significant glitch-hop artists who have defined the genre and scene with their unique creations:

The Glitch Mob

This popular trio is composed of edit (Edward Ma, Boreta (Justin Boreta), and Ooah (Josh Mayer). They have earned a dedicated following from their 2010 album, Drink The Sea. Their music is the widest spread of glitch-hop music with mainstream audiences. This is due to their remix of the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’, featured in numerous film trailers and advertisements.

New Zealand-born Oscar Davey-Wright, AKA Opiuo, employs heavy funk and psychedelia elements in his songs. His capability to translate electronic compositions for live performances with a band has earned him praise from critics as well as listeners.

Will Weeks and Jim Bastow formed a beat-making duo, who record and perform as KOAN Sound. They began as dubstep artists prior to moving into glitch and neurohop. Their wide range of styles, which are comprised of electronic and organic sources, have led to remixes of tracks by Ed Sheeran, Skrillex, and Massive Attack producer, Deil Davidge.

Pretty Lights

Derek Vincent Smith records and produces as Grammy-nominated Pretty Lights, which started life as a duo – with producer and label owner, Michael Menet. However, Pretty Lights is now a solo entity, with Smith fusing glitch-driven beats with extensive funk and soul samples.

The artists’ debut album, Midnight Menu, was released in 2010. The Korean-American Jennifer Lee incorporates her classical piano background into her music and produces vast soundscapes through the use of live instruments, percussion, and digital manipulation. She is capable of fusing the sounds of the past with her musical ability into something new and experimental.

Now You Know Everything About Glitch Hop!

Glitch music might be a bit obscure and isn’t always considered a mainstream genre, but it is one of those experimental genres that filter down into mainstream forms. It is fair to say the genre of glitch-hop is based on passion and innovation. Glitch-hop artists don’t always produce the most popular and accessible music. Some describe them as like mad scientists, seeing what new and unique places their music can go.

Making glitch-hop music can be challenging at first. Top artists are the best for a reason, they put the time in, to master their art, stay determined, and always aim to improve. It is a good idea to check out some forums related to music production, in particular EDM-related genres, and don’t be afraid about approaching other artists to see how they do certain things. Keep the passion for glitch-hop music alive!

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2024’s Top VSTs For Glitches: The 8 Most Experimental Effect Plugins We Know Of

Will Vance • Mar 4, 2024

Writing and producing fantastic music is hard enough even before you consider what you could do to further process, mangle, and manipulate the music once it’s already created. But in taking, reslicing, and repurposing audio, both that you’ve made yourself or music you’ve found or sampled, completley new sonic aesthetics, vibes, and genres can emerge, and it is on such frontiers of sound that a choice few artists’ careers are made.

So it’s no wonder why so many producers strive to find the uniqueness in their productions that glitch-styled plugins and effects can offer. While many plugins and VSTs are on the market for this purpose, too many create such a garble of noise and static that almost any sort of sound or sample you run through them is useless. 

So, let’s dive into the short list of plugins, VSTs, and effects I’ve used over the years and break down what makes them unique, why you should use them, and how they differentiate themselves from the other options on the market. But before we do, let’s take a quick moment to address some of the more commonly asked questions about glitch music, plugins designed for glitch effects, and more.

How Do Glitch Plugins Actually Work?

Glitch plugins are powerful tools designed to inject a dose of unpredictability and creativity into your music. By manipulating audio in ways that mimic digital errors or intentional distortions, these plugins can transform mundane loops into complex, rhythmically interesting songs. For instance, they can slice, dice, warp, and mangle audio, creating everything from subtle movement to wild, chaotic effects. 

The process involves segmenting audio into tiny bits or “grains,” then rearranging, modulating, or entirely altering these segments in real-time or through predetermined patterns. This technique enables producers to craft unique textures and rhythms, pushing the boundaries of conventional sound design.

Glitch plugins often work with audio transients and MIDI inputs, offering tremendous flexibility in triggering effects. Whether syncing with the beat of a track, reacting to dynamic changes, or being manually controlled via MIDI, these plugins adapt seamlessly to various production situations, such as creating leads, making never-heard-before drum patterns, or FX. Some even allow for detailed wave editing, enabling users to sculpt the effect. 

Whether used sparingly for subtle texture enhancements or employed heavily to create a sonic landscape filled with digital artifacts, glitch plugins serve as indispensable tools for producers looking to explore the limits of electronic music production.

How To Actually Get Usable Sounds Through Glitching

In my production work, I’ve always been fascinated by the ability to create unique ear candy elements that JUMP out of the speakers, so I’ve gravitated towards glitches in my music, albeit used sparingly. The process of glitching isn’t just about creating random noise; it’s about sculpting sound with precision and creativity. Mr. Bill’s “Mudpie” method is probably about as best of an explanation on how to make and use glitches as one could ask for and involves manipulating a set of macros within an instrument rack and resampling the output, resulting in an infinite array of sonic variations. 

By slicing these “Mudpie” clips into tiny, distinct sections, I can introduce uniquely textured audio pieces into my tracks, making the sound design process infinitely more enjoyable and expansive.

This approach allows me to take the already intriguing “Mudpie” sounds and warp them even further, adding layers of granular texture that perfectly complement the base sounds. The granular effects serve as an excellent tool for filling spaces within a mix and help craft atmospheric intros, bridges, and outros, enriching the overall sonic landscape of my projects. 

Additionally, incorporating glitch plugins such as Glitch 2 across entire tracks introduces a cohesive array of artifacts and blips, tying the whole production together with a signature glitchy aesthetic.

In the words of Kyral X Banko: 

“As aggressive and face-melting as glitched-out music can be when you hear it live in the club, the production side of it requires painstaking attention to detail. There simply aren’t any cutting corners when it comes to making amazing glitches in genres like Glitch Hop, Trip Hop, Dubstep, and other genres of bass music.” – KYRAL X BANKO

One of the trickiest things I’ve found about making glitch hop, or even just using glitches in my music, is how meticulous the entire process needs to be. Infected Mushroom once said that they spent days handcrafting slices and glitches to get the desired effect they wanted in one of their tracks, which inspired the creation of another plugin that I’ve included on this list. Still, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. 

And while I know full well that plugins have come a long way in expediting this process, they still can be overwhelming with the options they give you to cut, slice, and manipulate the glitches and audio. 

But not Fracture! 

GlitchMachines’ small, simple, and punchy plugin is my go-to tool for quick glitches. I love it more when I want the glitch effect to complement the rest of the music instead of being the central focus. If I wish to the glitch effects to be the hook or main element, I’ll use a more robust plugin on this list, but for the small details that accentuate the texture or aesthetic the a track, this is one of the plugins I reach for most consistently. If you want a free and even more simple alternative, consider snagging their Hysteresis plugin from there website as well.  

Learn More About This Plugin While Supporting Our Team Of Writers Through Our Affiliate Partnership With Plugin Boutique Here

TimeShaper 3

Having tried out a TON of different glitch plugins and effect sequencers in my tenure as a gear reviewer, I’ve concluded that these specific types of effects are a bit like modular synths; they’re great toys to experiment with, but (trigger warning for all your modular nerds) rarely are good at making music the masses want to listen to.

But TimeShaper 3 is the exact opposite of that, and is one of the powerful plugins on this list for not only shaping a sound into sometime completely different but also effects the rhythm quite heavily so that it can add new levels of swing and groove to an instrument, group, or sample. 

Also, the visualizer helps you keep track of how the audio is being manipulated, a creative feature I came to love while messing around with this plugin during the short trial period that I was noodling on.  

I’ve always considered Infected Mushroom one of the defining musical acts in all genres of experimental dance music. Each of their songs is different, and they constantly push the boundaries of what technology can do to music. As I mentioned above, it took them countless hours in the studio individually slicing micro edits of vocals to create the lead sounds in the hit track ‘I Wish,’ resulting in a heavily affected and glitchy style lead. 

And they didn’t want other producers to have to go through this same tedium, which is why they developed, alongside Polyverse, this vocal-freezing plugin takes micro snipets of a vocal (or any loop really) and repeats them so fast that they take on a pitch of their own. While I tried not to include too many granular plugins in this article, as they deserve a list in their own right, I did want to give this fantastic plugin a shoutout just because it can make some super robotic pitch slides and glitches out of samples and loops.

SANDMAN PRO 

My favorite thing about this humble little plugin is its powerful modularity, which most of the other plugins on this list omit entirely. It opens up a ton of functionality, creativity, and originality for anyone willing to go down the rabbit hole of connecting the correct wires to unconventional modules in this plugin. And while it comes in stock with many great presets, any producer who uses this plugin certainly will develop their bank of unique presets as well, as it rewards you for experimenting. 

I create a completley new patch every time I open this plugin. 

Another absolute game-changer feature that I’ve been using all the time with this plugin is the reverse and no-echo features, which allowed me to create punchy reverse sounds out of the loops and glitches without having to tame long delay tales (if I wanted that effect, I’d bust out Crystallizer!). 

Learn More About This Plugin  Here

Instalooper 3

Instalooper 3 is another plugin that rewards those who want to get into its weeds. It’s probably got the most robust automation system and loop length potentiality out of all of the plugins on this list. This is the best plugin if you’re looking to turn a primary loop into a whacked-out, glitchy, texturally dense hook or supporting phrase. 

And while this plugin has a ton going on underneath its hood which makes it not for the faint of heart, once you’ve learned it like the back of your hand it has the potential to be the de-facto plugin for making glitches on stage or as part of your live performance. It’s far more musical than other comparable plugin like Stutter Edit and Effectrix (which are included later on in this list, and each have their own set of X-factors of course). 

Don’t be fooled by this plugin’s rather sterile GUI, as it’s one of the more powerful glitches plugins in the music production world.

I love experimenting with glitch effects, but I don’t love adding one wrong parameter or effect and having the volume jump so drastically through volume or ear-ripping distortion that it hurts my ear drums. It happens all the time, and at best it’s annoying and at worst it’s cumbersome having to fine tune the other parameters to accommodate the volume jumps (like reducing the gain by hand). 

But the fact that Tantra is a robust multi-effects plugin with a suite of master-chain tools like a brickwall limiter, dry/wet controls and more really allow you to go crazy with the effects and sequencing in the plugin’s core without having to worry about blowing our your ear drums. 

The dry/wet feature is excellent in its own right as well, allowing you to gradually automate the effects throughout the song so that there is little modulation of glitchiness during the dense parts of an arrangement but become automated up during the builds and transitions so that during a sparse breakdown section or build the sounds become heavily affected, distorted, and come alive with tasty glitchy movement. 

Learn More About This Plugin Here

Sugar Bytes Effectrix 2

Sugar Bytes is back at it with a long-overdue update to one of the most iconic multi-effect sequencers ever made. Effectrix was a powerhouse plugin that set the standard for what these glitch and effect plugins should be capable of, and the second iteration improves upon almost all of what made the original so great. 

I appreciate the subtle enhancements and quality-of-life improvements that make the experience even more rewarding. Small but significant changes, such as the ability to resize the plugin window, facilitate the precise adjustment of effects. This feature is equally useful on a larger screen, enhancing usability. Moreover, the ability to chain Effectrix 2 with other plugins and adjust the plugin window size greatly simplifies fine-tuning parameters across different plugins, significantly improving workflow efficiency.

Finally, I love the addition of the Choas parameter. 

Instead of doing all the trial and error by hand like in the original version you can get the plugin most of the way there and then start letting the Chaos feature do the rest of the heavy lifting to create wildly different iterations on the plugin’s output. 

Izotope Stutter Edit 2

Here’s another iconic plugin with a new facelift and a second iteration. 

Because Stutter Edit 1 was another one of those plugins where you never knew what you would get out of it. Sometimes it would create incredibly complex and intricate glitches that were begging to be used, but more often than not you had to wade through a lot of crazy and useless scratch glitches to find the gems. But Stutter Edit 2 ramped up the usability and musicality of the plugin.

Even better, the new addition seems easier to load on the CPU. I was using Stutter Edit a lot back in the day, and granted I have a much more powerful computer now, but the couple of cut outs and blips I got from the CPU strain using the first one made me way too nervous ever to use it in a live performance setting. But the smooth and CPU-friendly Sutter Edit 2 is ripe for on-stage manipulations and glitches.  

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GLITCH MOLECULE

Experimental Minimalism

Glitch Molecule (Alpertunga Pelik) is a multifaceted sound designer, Mechatronics Engineer, and DJ whose music spans from Rominimal/Microhouse to IDM. Known for his meticulous sound design, Glitch Molecule infuses his tracks with a distinctive and innovative character.

Glitch Molecule has released standout tracks on iconic labels such as Harthouse, showcasing his ability to create captivating music. His academic background in Mechatronics Engineering from Istanbul Bilgi University has endowed him with a profound understanding of signals and systems, accelerating his grasp of electronic music theory.

Before embarking on his musical journey, Glitch Molecule gained valuable experience in film recording, sound design, and mixing, which further enriched his experimental approach to electronic music production. His work is a fusion of technical expertise and artistic creativity, resulting in a truly unique sonic experience.