Music & Audio

What is Glitch Electro Music? 7 Artists & Subgenres

Glitch music is an electronic genre built around the sounds of technological malfunction — clicks, cuts, skips, digital artifacts, and system errors transformed into rhythmic and textural elements. Often called glitch electro or glitch electronic music, the genre grew directly from the electro and IDM scenes of the early 1990s, inheriting their synthesizer-driven production while replacing polished sounds with deliberate digital errors. Rather than treating these sounds as problems to fix, glitch musicians elevate them to the primary material of composition, building entire tracks from the noises most producers spend their careers trying to eliminate.

The genre emerged in the mid-1990s from the experimental fringes of electronic music, but its influence now runs through mainstream pop production, hip-hop, sound design, and the broader glitch art movement.

Origins and History

Glitch music’s roots trace back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when artists began experimenting with the sounds produced by malfunctioning CD players, corrupted digital files, and overloaded software.

Oval (Markus Popp) is widely credited with pioneering the genre. In the early 1990s, he physically damaged compact discs with a marker pen, then played them back and recorded the skipping, looping, stuttering results. His albums Systemisch (1994) and 94diskont (1995) demonstrated that these “errors” could be structured into hypnotic, layered compositions that were genuinely musical.

Around the same time, Autechre pushed IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) into increasingly fractured territory, using custom Max/MSP patches to generate rhythms too complex for human hands. Their work from Tri Repetae (1995) onward increasingly embraced digital artifacts as compositional material.

Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) took a more minimalist approach, working with sine waves, digital noise, and signal processing artifacts to create precise, architecturally structured sound. His collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto brought glitch aesthetics to a wider audience.

The German label Mille Plateaux became a hub for glitch music in the late 1990s, releasing compilations like Clicks & Cuts (2000) that codified the genre and introduced key artists including Ryoji Ikeda, Frank Bretschneider, and Taylor Deupree.

Key Techniques and Production Methods

Glitch producers use a range of techniques to generate and manipulate error sounds. Understanding these methods connects directly to visual glitch art techniques — both disciplines exploit the same underlying principle of creative system failure.

Microsound and Granular Synthesis

Microsound operates at the threshold of human perception, manipulating audio at the millisecond level. Granular synthesis breaks sounds into tiny fragments (“grains”) typically 1–100 milliseconds long, then reassembles them in new configurations. The result can range from shimmering textures to abrasive digital noise, depending on grain size, density, and overlap.

Buffer Manipulation

Deliberately overrunning audio buffers — the temporary memory that holds audio data during playback — produces stuttering, repeating, and fragmented output. Many glitch plugins simulate this effect, but early practitioners achieved it by genuinely overwhelming their hardware.

Bit Crushing and Sample Rate Reduction

Bit crushing reduces the resolution of digital audio, introducing quantization noise and harshness. Dropping from 16-bit to 8-bit or lower adds a gritty, lo-fi character. Sample rate reduction creates aliasing artifacts — phantom frequencies that appear when audio is represented with insufficient data points.

CD Skipping and Physical Media Corruption

Following Oval’s approach, some artists physically damage optical media or deliberately misalign playback hardware. The resulting skips, loops, and read errors produce sounds impossible to generate through software alone. This connects directly to databending in visual glitch art.

Real-Time Coding and Algorithmic Composition

Tools like Max/MSP, Pure Data, and SuperCollider allow artists to build custom instruments that generate glitches procedurally. Live coding — writing and modifying code during performance — has become its own subculture within glitch music.

Essential Artists and Albums

Beyond the genre’s founders, these artists represent the breadth of glitch music:

  • Ryoji Ikeda — Works at the intersection of sound and mathematics, using pure data streams as source material. Dataplex (2005) translates raw data directly into audio.
  • Fennesz (Christian Fennesz) — Blends glitch processing with guitar to create lush, textured soundscapes. Endless Summer (2001) is considered a landmark of the genre.
  • Mouse on Mars — Brings playfulness and pop sensibility to glitch, proving the aesthetic works beyond austere minimalism.
  • Pan Sonic (Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen) — Finnish duo whose work with sine waves, feedback, and industrial noise pushed glitch into physical, visceral territory.
  • Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) — While not strictly a glitch artist, albums like Drukqs (2001) incorporate granular synthesis, microsound editing, and prepared piano into electronic frameworks.
  • Tim Hecker — Uses digital processing to transform source recordings into immersive, abstract environments where glitch artifacts dissolve into ambiance.
  • Vladislav Delay — Creates dub-influenced glitch with deep bass, spatial processing, and slowly evolving textures.

Glitch Music Subgenres

The original glitch aesthetic has branched into several distinct directions:

Glitch Hop

Glitch hop fuses stuttering digital aesthetics with hip-hop rhythms and heavy bass. Artists like Tipper, Buku, and Gramatik maintain danceability while incorporating the fragmented, error-based sound design of glitch. The genre thrives in festival culture and live electronic music.

Microsound and Lowercase

The quietest extreme of glitch, microsound and lowercase music work with barely audible sounds — amplified silence, environmental recordings pushed to the threshold of perception, and digital artifacts at whisper volumes. Artists like Steve Roden and Richard Chartier explore what happens when listening itself becomes the active element.

Glitchcore

Glitchcore merges aggressive digital distortion with hyperpop energy, nightcore speed, and internet culture references. The production style pushes fragmentation and processing to extremes, creating deliberately overwhelming sonic experiences.

Deconstructed Club

A more recent evolution, deconstructed club takes glitch aesthetics into dance music contexts, fragmenting club rhythms into disorienting, non-linear structures. Artists like Arca, SOPHIE, and Jlin create music that references dance genres while systematically breaking their conventions.

How Glitch Music Connects to Glitch Art

Glitch music and visual glitch art share fundamental principles — both treat errors as creative material, both reveal hidden technological structures, and both challenge expectations of polished digital output.

The connection goes deeper than philosophy. Many practitioners work across both domains:

  • Audio-reactive visuals translate sound properties into real-time visual glitch effects, creating synchronized audiovisual experiences. See our guide on audio-reactive glitch visuals.
  • Databending works identically in both domains — opening files in unintended software produces visual corruption when applied to images and sonic corruption when applied to audio.
  • Circuit bending modifies hardware to produce both unexpected sounds and unexpected video output, often simultaneously.
  • File format exploitation drives both practices — understanding how codecs compress data enables intentional corruption whether the output is audio or visual.

Live performances frequently combine glitch music with projected visuals, creating unified experiences where sound and image share the same source material or respond to each other in real time.

Getting Started with Glitch Music Production

Creating glitch music requires no specialized equipment. A computer with a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and curiosity about breaking conventions is enough to begin.

Software starting points:

  • Audacity (free) — Import non-audio files as raw data, apply effects, and export the results. The same databending techniques used in visual glitch art produce usable audio material.
  • Pure Data (free) — Visual programming language for building custom audio processors, synthesizers, and glitch generators from scratch.
  • Max/MSP — Professional visual programming environment widely used in academic and experimental music. More polished than Pure Data with extensive documentation.
  • Ableton Live, FL Studio, or any DAW — Most DAWs include effects that produce glitch-adjacent results when pushed to extremes. Extreme time-stretching, granular plugins, and buffer-based effects all generate usable glitch material.

Plugin recommendations:

  • Glitch2 (Illformed) — Dedicated glitch sequencer that applies randomized effects in rhythmic patterns.
  • Fracture (Glitchmachines, free) — Buffer effect processor designed for glitch production.
  • Hysteresis (Glitchmachines, free) — Delay-based glitch processor.

First experiments to try:

  1. Record yourself speaking, then slice the recording into fragments under 100ms. Rearrange them rhythmically.
  2. Import a JPEG image as raw audio data in Audacity. The “sound” of image data produces harsh digital textures usable as source material.
  3. Apply extreme time-stretching (1000%+) to a short sample. The artifacts produced by the stretching algorithm become the composition.
  4. Use a granular synthesis plugin on any source audio with very small grain sizes (5–20ms). Automate the parameters to create evolving textures.
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