[Ontogenics] Genre: Weightless

Welcome be, dear reader. This may be a bit of a longer read... hope you enjoy anyway and I hope this will help you understand and appreciate this niche genre.

My introduction to weightless

The story begins here: Some 3-4 years ago I discovered the existence of a website called "every noise at once". The website is basically a huge wall of different music genres, with playable snippets of several representative tracks in the genre. On there, I accidentally stumbled across the illusive name: "weightless". The representative track that seemed to be written in the largest text was Angelica from Rabit featuring Eartheater. Not sure what that text size measure represents, I'm guessing a mix of popularity and correlation with the genre. Either way, I played the snippet, watched the video on YouTube and I was hooked. It was experimental and morphed synths with real cello sounds. I was blown away, wanting to discover more. Little did I know the "weightless grime" part of Angelica was the awkward and choppy hidden percussion beneath all the good stuff.

My following venture was the next best on the website, Take Time from Mundance and Novelist. My disappointment was immeasurable. Weird choppy hat rolls that were too long, basically no melodics except for a weird octaved 808esque sound that slid down for far too long. Just weirdly dry and sparse sounds and random samples that just ceased to form a groove I could hold onto. At that time, it sounded like a joke to me. I didn't give the genre another try for a while, until I stumbled upon Iglew's likely more universally enjoyable Urban Myth early in 2026.

Controversial things, like the aforementioned Take Time, are, however, the most ground-breaking. Urban Myth, with its great combo of visual and auditory language, both being intriguingly mysterious, once again put me on the track for weightless. It became a bit of an obsession, and I approached the sound more openly.

After this long story time, you might be thinking: "OK, but what is weightless?" To answer that, we have to go to England around the 2010s, or even earlier, but we will get to that.

A brief look into history

Weightless evolved from a larger movement that aimed to redefine grime in the 2010s. "The 2nd wave" resulted in the nascence of several experimental grime branches and subgenres. Weightless was one of them. Its definitive evolution starts with 2 important artists from the UK, that had the greatest impact on defining and honing the genre. According to an interview from Redbull Music, sometime in 2012, Mumdance & Logos got to know each other and started collaborating. Frustrated at the lack of variation in their contemporary grime scene, Mumdance started incorporating longer sections of silence in his tracks, omitting drums over all, while Logos got enamoured by grime's capacity for quietude, crypticness, more mellow and romantic sounds. Their collective effort and overlap of interest resulted in a genre and a music label that was home to it. That spacious grime, now heard in clubs as palette cleansers or BPM bridgers earned the name weightless. The name then further established itself in 2014, in the release of the album Weightless Volume 1 on the duo's Different Circles label. Several important weightless discs hailed from there, with, in my opinion, the most defining being the aforementioned 1st volume, Weightless Volume 2, and the 2016 compilation Mumdance & Logos present: Different Circles.

But this was by far not the true start of this sound's existence. Mumdance cites Wiley as inspiration for the genre. Wiley's "devil mixes" going all the way back to 2002 (the first instance I found), featured drumless instrumental grime dubs. While it's questionable whether people on RYM accurately categorise albums and songs, there are several instances of weightless way before 2012. For example, dubstep mainstay - Starkey's album Ephemeral Exhibits from 2008.

Another important spearhead from the dubstep circles, that also permanently connected weightless to deconstructed club is Untold. His bizarre and divisive Gonna Work Out Fine EP from 2009 was a trailblazer on multiple fronts. One of the first projects that would later acquire the deconstructed club label and also one of the first to make use of approaches later heard in weightless. Other notable artists associated as the first in the scene are Fatima Al Quadiri, Strict Face, Jam City, Rabit, Mr. Mitch, Murlo or Scratcha DVA.

While weightless may have experienced a decline in its grime circles, the experimental grime sound is still alive in the deconstructed club scene. Deconstructed club made its waves across the EU and Australia, (from my understanding) resulting in the adoption of grime in the vaporwave/utopian virtual scene. What came out of it was the sub-scene of eco grime and the Eco Futurism Corporation label that held experimental grime in its grasp strongly until 2025, when they decided to branch out. From those circles, another significant project emerged - Herbarium's album Divine Herba. It is a somewhat loose umbrella term, encompassing several genres and it thrived on several different labels and collectives.

Specifics and genre relations

That is one part of the explanation. The other is the actual sound. The explanation of it solely being instrumental grime music is insufficient. While weightless often still uses the choppy, glitchy drums of grime, its defining feature is sparsity. Either sparse in melody or consistent beat (As in the work of Mumdance) or omitting drums altogether. For that reason, it becomes relatively difficult to differentiate between ambient music and weightless, and those are only the 2 most common directions. Genre correlations are many, and there were several directions into which weightless developed. I will attempt to faithfully describe them below. At least in my experience, weightless isn't very concrete. Sometimes the lines get very blurry, so forgive me if I make some unrefined claims.

Experimental Grime/Eskibeat branch - Doesn't shy away from more abrasive sounds. Can be heard in Mumdance's Novelist collaborations, and the collabs with Logos. It also appears in the work from Tom E. Vercetti, Bloom, Pinch, Ling, Zomby, WEN, Two Fingers and other more traditional grime and dubstep artists. Features in-the face percussion rolls, industrial sounds, icy cold instrumentals or completely lack traditional melody.
(relatively) Traditional grime, but chill - Features beats, but with less importance put onto experimenting with them and using more traditional sounds. Rhythmic, with relatively non-challenging instrumentals. Can be heard in works from Slackk, Mr. Mitch, LTHL, Visionist, Dark0, Murlo, Offshore and Iglew. It has significant cross-over with the experimental branch. These 2 first branches have a very solid cross-over with UK Bass and dubstep.
Ambient grime - Completely removes drums or leaves only sparse, quiet percussion hits to establish rhythm. Often uses a minimal sound palette. The result is either a completely melody-focused composition, or focused on long, floating atmospheres. The difference between this and normal ambient is mostly only the preservation of a rhythmic pattern somewhere within the melody. Artists that have made use of this aesthetic are Rabit, Dark0, Logos, Yamaneko, Zomby, CORIN, Herbarium, Strict Face, O$VMV$M, Sky H1 and most other producers associated with the weightless scene. It has plenty of cross-over with the other branches. Additionally, the sound can be associated with ambient dub, progressive electronic, ambient trance and such.
Linear Beat/trap/wave branch - I am not even quite sure whether I can call it grime, necessarily, but the relations in the scene are relatively strong. Even if grime was always associated with hip-hop and dubstep. Likely taking inspiration from Dark0's work, instead of the relatively non-linear percussion, this branch uses the good old half-time rhythm with the snare sitting on every 9th 16th note. Simply, trap drums. Due to Dark0's use of euphoric, relaxing melodies and the genres he fused in his projects, the cross-influence between weightless, wave and the related neo-grime are undeniable.
Euphoric ambient branch - Through people like Dark0, but also many other artists, there is plenty of similarity in ambient trance. A direction I was enamoured with far before I knew what weightless was. Weightless, but epic. Explored by artists like Escha, Ytem, Money Lang or Quit Life.
RnB ambient branch - A very lively path for weightless is its adaptation of sampled sung vocals as the main focus. This branch also proved to be the most popular and survived in some form until this day in alternative rnb. Proof of concept is the widely cited and popular Xe2 by Mssigno that a lot of electronic music fans likely have stumbled across at least once. Outside of the aforementioned, Mr. Mitch, Zomby, Letta, Dark0, Scratcha DVA, Money Lang, amil raja and even recently Skrillex made the track Cheeni, which would fit the genre as well.
Not sure how to categorize - everything I don't know where to put. Sometimes it's difficult to say what genre the track is and whether it has anything to do with weightless.
Deconstructed club affiliated branch - Due to Untold's work defining both genres alongside each other, this club scene later continued adopting experimental techniques from weightless in its arsenal. It is, in some form, inseparable. Artists sought to combine the off-kelter grooves, crazy sound-design with memorable melodies, crafting complex catchy rhythms, making powerful percussive collages. Since deconstructed club is somewhat associated with bubblegum bass and the hyperpop scene, crossover with the futuristic utopic virtual genre was bound to emerge. While somewhat older than hyperpop, eco grime emerged from this scene using sounds from nature as well as industrial noise. This branch has multiple styles as well. Some artists making more ambient sounds, some returning to more purist weightless, some fusing it with atonality and noise, some fusing it with classical music, some fusing it with trance.

Playlists for the 445Hz people

And that is everything I found out about it. I was quite fascinated with the genre and was curious to hear some music from the pen of fellow producers. Below, I've provided playlists with examples from the branches (many tracks fit multiple categories), a general playlist to put on shuffle if you want and an ordered playlist of my favourite tracks in the genre.

Each entry of the list is clickable and will link you to YouTube.

That is all, hope those who want to participate in the challenge got some good info out of this and now have a better understanding what I demand lol. Have a nice rest of the day and happy exploring.

YMuT (yito's music talk)