Organic house, afro house, tribal, downtempo: what I mean when I say each

If you have looked at the tags on my mixes you will have seen organic house, tribal, tribal fusion and downtempo used on the same set, sometimes on the same track. That is partly because genre names in dance music are a mess and partly because the words describe different things: one is where a shop files the record, one is what the drums are doing, one is how fast it goes. Here is how I use each of them.

Organic house

This is the shop word. Beatport has a category called Organic House / Downtempo and most of my releases sit in it. In practice it means house music at a walking pace that uses acoustic sounds: hand drums, plucked strings, flutes, voices, field recordings, things that sound like they were made by a person in a room rather than a machine in a box. It is warm, it is mid-tempo, and it does not have a drop.

Every guide to it online tells the same origin story about a certain American desert festival and a certain party brand. I was not there and I am not going to repeat it. What I can tell you is what it is for: it is the sound that lets a room dance for three hours without being shouted at.

My records that get filed here: Om Namah Shivaya, on Flow in 2023, which Beatport picked for its Best New Hype organic house list, and In the Garden of Light, on Nothing But in 2022, which went on their Organic House Essentials compilation.

Afro house

Close cousin, different weight. The drums are further forward and there are more of them, the tempo is a little higher, and the vocals, when there are any, are more likely to be sung than sampled. It has a swing that organic house often does not. The two get played back to back constantly, by me included, and a lot of what gets filed as organic house would have been called afro house five years ago and vice versa. The honest difference is what the drums are doing. Afro house drums lead. Organic house drums accompany.

Tribal

This is my word, and it is not a shop word. Tribal, to me, is anything where the percussion is the point. Not the melody, not the bassline, not the vocal: the drums. It cuts across the other categories. There is tribal organic house and tribal afro house and there is tribal drum and bass, which is what happens in my Oh Shala Bakti set when the room can take it. When I tag a mix tribal I mean that if you took the drums out there would be nothing left worth hearing.

I also play a djembe over my sets, live, which is the most literal version of the word I have.

Downtempo

This one is about speed and nothing else. Downtempo is anything slow enough that you could not run to it. On a long set it is where I start, and it is where I end, and the whole middle is the business of getting from one to the other and back. Plenty of downtempo has no drums at all. Plenty of it is organic house played at a tempo where nobody would call it house.

Rough tempos, for people who like numbers

I am giving these as ranges because the ranges are what matter, and a record does not become a different genre because it crosses a line by two beats.

• Downtempo: slow enough to walk to, not to run to.
• Organic house: a fast walk. The tempo tools put the sweet spot in the low 120s.
• Afro house: a little quicker again, and it feels quicker still because of the swing.
• Drum and bass: roughly twice the speed of everything above. The trick is that the half-time feel means a room does not have to double its effort to follow it.

Why I say tribal when the shop says organic house

A promoter booking organic house is booking a sound. A promoter booking tribal is booking a room full of drums with a man hitting one of them, and that is the more accurate description of what turns up.

The shop word describes the record. My word describes what I do with it.

Hear the difference

The mixes page is the easiest way. The studio mix Tribal Tales of the Jungle is organic house all the way through. The Oh Shala Bakti set from 2025 covers everything on this page in one afternoon, in the order this page describes it.