16: Iglooghost, rockpooling for subgenres in a parallel world

As if we hadn’t gorged enough on lore last week, this time we welcome one of electronic music’s boldest world-builders, Iglooghost.

Iglooghost’s new album Tidal Memory Exo takes place in a punk-dystopian vision of a British seaside town that’s been cut off from the rest of society. It even comes accompanied by an online forum where users debate the politics and micro-genres of the local “tidal scene” (sporestyle, tektonikore, foamtek) and an online marketplace where people sell mysterious sea creatures and offer theories about their origins, among many other diversions. 

Something else that interested us about the project is that while Iglooghost’s early releases took place in full-on fantasy world, recently he’s started creating parallel universes based in Britain, bringing his lore-making closer to his own reality. Prior to Tidal Memory Exo, he created a whole world around “Lei Music” – a supposedly ancient musical style performed to summon “strange, squeaking entities” in rural Dorset, the part of south-west England where he grew up.

Naturally we spoke to him about all that and about lore in general, as well as getting his insights on the ever-changing nature of the online experience, his obsessive fans, TikTok as a ghost town, and the risk of world-building becoming too cynical. Never go full Marvel, basically.

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