HexD

HexD is an internet microgenre of electronic music and, originally, a style of DJ mixing that emerged on SoundCloud in the late 2010s. To "hex" a track is to subject it to heavy bitcrushing, downsampling, pitch-shifting and speeding-up until it turns grainy, aliased and euphoric, a treatment applied most often to trance and cloud rap but portable to almost any source material. Practised by collectives and netlabels rather than clubs, the style is inseparable from its visual world of anime imagery, early Web 2.0 graphics and *Blingee*-era nostalgia, and it overlaps with digicore, nightcore and hyperpop while remaining defined by degradation of audio fidelity itself.