Would music theory help me with witch house?

[mellowautomata]

Hi everyone.

The topic is probably bit confusing. We've decided, together with a singer, that we want to start "doing" witch house (a music genre of sorts). Neither of us knows too much of music theory, though she sings and plays guitar meanwhile I play keyboard and handle the technical production related stuff & recording for the most part (as I formally am a sound engineer). I know mostly about scales, chords (along with sus2/4, nth etc) and basics of chord progressions. Yet, very little about cadences and details such as where I could use suspended or nth chords, instead of just stumbling upon such moments accidentally. Not to mention, modulation.

However, I have right now plenty of time in my hands and I'm thinking whenever it would be useful to start studying music theory in more depth along with ear training. The genre in itself, in my eyes, seems not to be "interesting" in particular along the terms of musical theory (please keep in mind, I think this is just me lacking the proficiency). But I'm guessing that understanding form & harmony would allow me to breeze through ideas and express them with more ease?

Here's a couple of examples that I suspect are of minimal interest in terms of music theory. Actually, if I had to guess, few of these artists actually have studied music theory. Though some of them who I know have done that, are coming up with quite interesting music.



This is one of the most depressing songs I've heard and I can't quite understand why. To me, it brings the kind of feeling that the ending of Melancholia (the movie) gave to me. Is it really just the sound design and production choices, or can music theory help to explain this better?



This is another example that, to me, feels like it's all about the production techniques to create that anxiety.



Here is an example of an artist who actually has studied music theory and got categorized as "witch house". It's not exactly the style we're interested in, but it's very unique.

I'd appreciate any input a lot!

[cdverson]

Yeah it seems like you want to create a lot tension. Try using some dissonant sounding chords.

[mellowautomata]

Yeah it seems like you want to create a lot tension. Try using some dissonant sounding chords.

I've heard that octatonic scales can help with this. However, the music theory I have stumbled in, has not actually dealt in this topic much at all. I've tried some chord progressions derived from it and generally speaking, it does sound quite haunting. On the other hand, I've no knowledge on how these chords relate to each other in terms of tonic, dominant etc. I'm guessing that they do have additional rules?