I've been a bit stuck on genre for weeks. There's something very important about contextualizing our work and understanding who it relates to and who it rhymes with. It's extremely difficult to market without an understanding of who you're trying to reach. Often the best way to find them is to figure out who is like you that they like and trace back from there. Someone suggested to me recently that you could google image search the album covers of artists that sound like you to find a list of all the journalists that have covered similar artists. But this leaves a bigger problem. Who sounds like me?
I've been describing in a few ways, one of my favorite of my own subgenres being "Breakbeat Techno with Sparkly Ass Synths." This seems to be a trend among musicians, to describe their work as a sort of hybrid word soup of things that are related. What you end up with is a kind of gestalt. A feeling that points to a place. What I think we're actually trying to point to is our creative process. The equipment, education, and emotions that we underly the work.
In our continued specification, endless subdivision, and constant bickering about genre, we are idolizing the products of past processes. We are worshipping at the wrong altar.
This thought led me to a blog post - Genre Is Idolatry
Stepping back to look at my work from the lens of genre of process. My genre is not techno, or breakbeat electronic. I am a queer, trans women who's primary conceptual occupations are creative process, identity (personal and synthetic), and affective technology. I write morning pages and then make music with a modular synthesizer. I spent a lot of time in NYC and Berlin warehouses dancing to techno, as did I listening to records of post-classical "ambient" producers and avant-garde sound artists.
My genre is a Meta Art of the Creative Process. My mediums are music, words, and installations.