Taxonomy

There’s a type of music I like that I’ve heard defined so many different ways that I almost think it should be a genre. It’s heavily processed guitar music that usually employs a relatively simple song structure and lots of repetition. Now, as of late, people are describing bands like that as either Shoegazing or post rock, but that doesn’t quite fit because I can trace a fairly straight line from Krautrock, with the Motorik beat through some of the punk bands, into the New Wave, and then, into both the shoegazing scene and into the “Madchester” baggy trousered Brit Pop, and then, into the Goth Scenes, and into the Stoner Rock category. That’s the problem with such a broad category: it can apply to lots of bands, some of whom are even working at cross purposes.
Of course, I like a lot of music, and music is important to me, so I might be viewing this through a distorted lens, but I do get somewhat put off by some of the attempts to pigeonhole this stuff. At the same time, it is such a handy tool to be able to pigeonhole things a bit. That’s why I’ve adopted the “swirlie/Swirly” tag for this kind of music. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Can, or Neu! going all the way to Silence is Sexy, if I mention that something sounds like that, or if I use that term, please understand that I’m talking about vaguely psychedelic rock music, employing a simple beat, lots of processing on the guitars, and some drone, producing a hypnotic, drift-to-maelstrom “swirl”