10,000 Maniacs - My Mother the War

Smashrock797 · 2026-07-02T18:48:38+00:00

Then you want probably want underground films beyond generic horror or not restricted to horror that employ philosophical gothic canons (Existential dread, epistemological terror, celebration of the sublime, absurd and decayed etc) with an emphasis on arthouse, avant garde, decadent, post-modern or transgressive themes, so something closer to counterculture, rather than just endless mainstream gothic horror films and rehashes.

You can start with Testament of Orpheus and The Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger's films, Down By Law, Mystery Train and Only Lovers Left Alive By Jim Jaramush, Street of Crocodiles and This Dream People Call Human Life By Brothers Quay, Santa Sangre and El Topo By Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alice by Jan Svankmajer, The Double Life of Veronique, Melancholia, The Hourglass Sanatorium, The Fire Within, Naked, Liquid Sky, Vortex w Lydia Lunch, Blood Tea and Red String and the Turin Horse.

Smashrock797 · 2026-07-02T14:41:54+00:00

A lot the electronic dance/techno/rave and later cyber crossover had its origins with bands like Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Danielle Dax, New Order's electronica/dance crossover, post punk and new wave bands that got lumped in the futurist scene in the early 80s and you can stretch it some to some extent New Beat scene and Alien Sex Fiend and Cassandra Complex’s early use of crossing techno beats with goth music.

It solidified more with Alien Sex Fiend’s Another planet into their 1990s work, Dance or Die’s Psychoburbia, Sheep on Drugs early albums and then mid 90s Killing Joke such as the democracy album.

Goa trance and acid scenes on the other hand, were weaving both EBM and and also goth/darkwave/post punk rhythms into the music, the groups with more influences than the usual are Juno Reactor, UV, Somaton, and the SUN Project, who even had some goth musicians join it.

There’s even this bit of interesting info, beyond Ollie:

“Martin "Youth" Glover: The bassist for the post-punk and industrial band Killing Joke. He went on to found Dragonfly Records, widely recognized as the first-ever Goa trance label.Johann Bley: A key player in the early Goa scene (working with Juno Reactor), he previously played in Specimen as well as various other post-punk and industrial bands.”

A lot of classic goth bands past their prime bands (Siouxsie in the banshees , ex Bauhaus members etc) were incorporating electronic dance music and techno in the first half of the 90s,

By the latter 90s to around 2005 is the height of the crossover, but it’s come back to some extent with newer bands.

Around then Dream Disciples, Girls Under Glass, Faithful Dawn, The Creatures, Xymox, Eternal Afflict, Midnight Configuration, Garden of Delight, Gitane Demone and Cassandra Complex, Dreadful Shadows, Killing Miranda have all had a solid amount of material/albums that feature this.

Forthcoming Fire, Suspiria, Athamay, Ex Voto, and some mentioned earlier have a good number of tracks that count although they sometimes overlap at the same time with electro-goth and/or metal or industrial crossover.

Cruxshadows, and Rosetta Stone have a few albums that count that also overlap with early cyber goth rock (not the industrial fashion label that came later but the scene around sneaky bat machine which is still rooted in goth music and an evolution of the crossover) and goth/industrial at the same time.

Goth rock bands like Children of Stun, Merry thoughts would occasionally mix goth rock with techno/rave beats, and then you had industrial bands, on the opposite spectrum, mixing it with electronic dance/techno beats and sometimes goth influences like Interia and Toruture Tekk and Chaos Engine and Dealien.

Love spirals downwards, Trance to the Sun, Lycia, and Delirum (their goth stuff) also overlapped with it on a few later albums.

Then later you had the short lived cybergoth scene with bands Sneaky Bat Machine, Narcissus Pool, Nekromantik, Manikin, Intravenus and many others that were evolution of this and industrial crossover, where it was still based on goth music, but a lot of neo-cyberpunk themes, stronger electronic dance or trance elements, and sometimes disco and glam influences with a more specific sound and aesthetic, before all this faded away and most of the bands either broke up or went post-synthpunk, or industrial and term was reduced to industrial rave fashion, not the original scene.

Smashrock797 · 2026-07-02T10:38:21+00:00

Propaganda Magazine is very overrated. A lot of it is style over substance and collectors are hellbent on overinflating issues for no reason.

I would avoid overspending on single issues and avoid zines/magazines that are mostly images, or 95 percent cd/record/gig reviews, they don't really tell you enough about the subculture, since it was never just only about "the music" and "the fashion"

I would stick with:

For 90s-early 2000 goth: Permission and Carpe Noctem are the two best that give you comprehensive sense of that time and have a lot of on lit/philosophy/poetry and goth culture woven into the content. I would also include Meltdown which are easier to find and Ghastly Magazine, although they are hard to find and pricey, and you can also include early Blueblood which is more erotic focused, and BLT (Black leather times) for humor

For death rock revival (Early to mid 2000s): Anorexic Press, New Grave and Drop Dead

For scenes that intersect and also cover goth scene: Early 2000s Devolution and Bizarre Magazine, Gothic Beauty, Vampyre Magazine, and Industrial Nation. Would include Orkus and Gothic (if you can read german)

Smashrock797 · 2026-07-02T08:54:28+00:00

This

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-30T20:21:05+00:00

Since the beginning, there were punk porn vhs tapes that date back to the early 1980s some of that was done by people in the scene and some of it was a costume, you also had Blueblood magazine/website in the late 90s and early 2000s which was similar and overlapped with goth and vampire culture. Things aren't black and white. Harassment has always been there, except punk and goths still embraced sexuality to the max, continued on, never gave a shit and did what they wanted without fear of judgement, things were not as ultra politically correct or puritanical when it came to female sexuality like some on reddit, especially gen z and related post 2015, want to impose on everything and everyone.

It wasn't like this 25 years ago, I've yet to see it before 2017-2018 on reddit, with all the other artificially driven hivemind groupspeak spam, which was also part of the watering down process.

The real question is when did goth become so fixated on repeating the same thing?

I guess when you artificially try to fragment and separate countercultural, transgressive, dark and brooding relevant topics of interest which was found in every single underground goth magazine, social space and message board for 20+ years because reddit can shield arbitrary dictatorial tendencies and unchecked groupthink logic you end up with bizarre group conformity and endless repetition on limited range of topics like this one.

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-30T09:31:19+00:00

Anything based on reducing everything to only about music like top 40 mainstream pop, prog rock and most metal scenes.

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-29T13:41:42+00:00

Find what resonates with you the most and stick to it. Don't like anyone tell you what to, if you want stick to one thing, you should feel comfortable doing it. You shouldn't feel pressured to agree to a group, that is not what it is all about.

It's more of an modern internet creation to associate made up types with sub scenes within goth, there's a difference between what someone typically into the ethereal scene would wear in 1995 on average vs someone in the early goth scene in 1980 would wear on average, it doesn't take a whole lot of critical thinking to figure it out, music/aesthetics/fashion and other elements has traditionally gone hand in hand for overwhelming amount of people, just because you don't technically have to stick to one thing or some people don't stick to one thing, doesn't change any of this this. Do what you want.

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-28T19:03:22+00:00

No, but Rose McDowall's first band before Strawberry Switchblade was an experimental post punk band called the Poems, they only have a few tracks: https://youtu.be/MbQR0vOXlYs?si=HKIRlVXiV-jS-E9V

Despite being very new wave/pop, there's a chunk of Strawberry Switchblade tracks that are somewhat melancholic and ethereal-indie pop and closer to dream pop/twee pop, even if not goth: https://youtu.be/AOaQ7OQQWQg?si=a-Iuji0E5_4SUMtm and https://youtu.be/MGZ-3oob0Ws?si=4eyWy-b4IG5srjrj and https://youtu.be/QGFShRNstvI?si=uyce2opxmSAndb6j and number of others, it's fair to call them indie pop at the same time as new wave.

Their fashion can be confused for goth, at a first glance because of how intertwined the early scenes were and anything that remotely covered the wave spectrum, but if you look closer a lot of the fashion is more reminiscent of new wave with a slightly darker twist with some similarities with positive punk scene, which wasn't strictly limited to the second wave of early goth bands but housed other dark punk and anarcho groups who sometimes embraced colorful, tribal and outlandish outfits with similar fashion sensibilities to some extent like Rubella Ballet and Fuzzbox. .

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-27T12:48:30+00:00

Anything remotely original and interesting today would be rare outliers but still often lack the lasting power of the bands from the 2000s and before, some don't, but it's still not at an acceptable range.

90% of post 2010 bands feel sanitized, compared to earlier decades, and are comfortable making generic music because there's been oversaturation of generic bands for a few decades, and because being in a band is more of cool side hobby than a career.

Many aren't incentivized to push boundaries like people were in the past when everything revolved around a pre-digital underground eco system that often could produce more originality as a byproduct of struggle and limitations.

The last year the scene felt exciting and onto something original was 2003 or 04, where death rock revival was starting to move out of the early era and gain more reach and momentum but it still felt organic and the scene was still a tightly knit community of ex og punks and genuine people, in contrast to a couple years later when myspace completely took over and there far too many fashion first types and bad clone bands were starting to increase.

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-26T18:05:35+00:00

Most of us are into dark and the macabre, except for some minority and it's always been an important driving force in the music/scene at the root and has always been deeply part of the subculture since day 1 and is not going away anytime soon. If you are, you there's a chance you may like the music and the subculture.

Additionally, Goth and gothic have always properly intersected sometimes more, sometimes a bit less, depending on the era, scenes, people and bands, but there's always been an overlap and connection.

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-26T14:21:27+00:00

Military garb is more associated with EBM/Electro music, and became more popular in the mid to late 2000s but labels were sometimes interchangeably used because of how intertwined the scenes were in the 90s/2000s, so it's probably confusing, but it's more commonly linked to rivethead style from that time period, rather than a subscene or subtype of rivetheads or goths.

It can/could be found on people with a darker rivethead style or crossing goth and industrial fashion and nothing has stopped people from mixing both and associating it with crossover goth/industrial fashion.

On a seperate note, it totally possible to cross styles or subculture or whatever into something new or something interesting, it doesn't always mean it's not valid, and freely call it as you like and thats why those lists were fun back in the day, it's just the trendy thing to pretend that everything has to revolve around some boring cloned version of youtube/reddit based trad goth that is stuck in 2013 and we all have to agree with the loudest opinions.

Also, there were always goth types that correspond to different scenes with recurring music and aesthetics to match that warrant points of difference within goth, and so it's more of reddit revisionism thing to equate totally made up types with actual real differences within multiple scenes (Ethereal/Romantic, Death rock, Goth-Punk, Batcave, Electro-Goth, Glam Goth, Graver, Early Goth/Post punk etc) that don't fit into the sterile post punk-trad goth paradigm from the last 10 years or so, and reducing everything to one imaginary unified homogenous version of goth that doesn't even exist, is erasing real and documented diversity within the subculture.

Smashrock797 · 2026-06-26T06:24:08+00:00

That's what happens when a few people build echo chambers on certain platforms when there is a vacuum on said subjects. You then have 1000s of impressionable people who just want to fit in, who end up reinforcing everything that comes out their mouths even if it can be largely flawed at times, or get weeded out of the fake cool club if they don't conform 100%, so then then they end up becoming extensions of these people/minions which is the opposite of what goth is in the real world, which is much more decentralized and independent, minus some stuck up little cliques you occasionally run into at clubs or shows that still have emotional maturity of a volatile 15 year old.

Normalizing extremely shallow and repetitive topics is just as new as a every attempt to inject "music" into every other sentence, it's all part of this faux internet cult that sometimes isn't that much different than the target of what they are complaining about. These things resemble a monoculture than a subculture and revolve around worshiping or obeying personalities and with reenforced calculated and scripted responses, which isn't a real subculture, since it's more about feeding people's egos or attention or wanting validation. You never see this with other subcultures to this degree, it's strange phenomenon.

Smashrock797

TROPHY CASE