Cloud Aesthetics dives into electronic music subgenres that emerged in the 2010s, through the music of "witch house" band Salem, against a backdrop of cultural malaise.

The music group Salem was formed in Traverse City, Michigan in 2006. Salem is usually cited as the originator of the electronic music subgenre "witch house." Salem is also an apt point of entry into the "cloud aesthetic" in music and art of the margins (vaporwave, signalwave, cloud rap, synthwave, and other permutations of hauntology) during the 2010s, as well as the larger cultural and spiritual forces at play: the opioid epidemic; the normalization of mental health diagnoses; the frustration of lower-middle-class cis-hetero white men; the persistence of understated and anonymous acts of kindness in the midst of the abject dehumanization of capitalism.

Salem's noise-meets-Southern-hip-hop sound attained a modicum of mainstream success, but the band's momentum slackened before they could claim the popularity of peers like Lana Del Rey and Tyler the Creator. Cloud aesthetics, in the music of Salem and other artists and thinkers from Yung Lean to the philosopher Mark Fisher, pertains not only to ambient or nebulous-sounding music, but to an attendant cultural shift toward aporia, the state of being at a complete loss, or disbelief in certainty.

Cloud Aesthetics makes sense of the tangle of popular music aesthetics of the previous decade, remaining deeply rooted in the social, cultural, and political events of the era, extending forward and backward from the 2010s to explore influences and the persistence of certain sounds and ideas.