Glitch

Glitch is a genre of experimental electronic music that emerged in the 1990s, distinguished by the deliberate use of glitches in audio media and other sonic artifacts. The genre takes its sounds from malfunctions in recording equipment and digital electronics, and its practitioners work from a philosophical position that treats errors and failures as compositional material rather than problems to be corrected. In Computer Music Journal, composer and writer Kim Cascone classified glitch as a subgenre of electronica and used the term post-digital to describe the glitch aesthetic.

Production in the genre evolved from the physical manipulation of damaged hardware in the 1990s toward fully software-based simulation of those same failure states in the 2000s. Key albums including Oval's Systemisch (1994), Fennesz's Endless Summer (2001), and the Clicks & Cuts compilation series released by Mille Plateaux from 2000 onward are widely regarded as landmark works in the genre's development.