izzy walter

this is a continuous blogpost - article in progress
STARTED: 2/sept/2026 LAST UPDATED 3/sept/2026

RHYTHMIC ASMR

ORIGINS
I’ve been into ASMR for a very long time, since I was 17 - so approx. 7 years - when I lost my cool-year-above-friend’s fake ID by getting paralytically drunk at the club (well outside the club, i didn’t get in and my mum had to come pick me up, bathe me, and put me limply to bed like I was a toddler). I remember being in the bath the day after and feeling so unable to relax, haunted by the idea that I’d destroyed my fragile-teen-girl-social-life, whilst burning a friendship to the ground. Naturally, like every loser with a computer I typed ‘anxiety relief’ / ‘everything is going to be okay’ or something similarly desperate and sweet into youtube and found my genesis. Gibi ASMR , my magesterial entryway into what became a 3 hour daily usage during COVID lockdown a year later. As someone who grew up online but before AI , I wonder if other people my age also found ASMR this way, by having a total meltdown and needing immediate emotional relief that wasn’t symptom checking but actually craving something real when your only portal is youtube.com. I think even now if you type these phrases of mental weariness into the browse, you will stumble across ASMR whether you like it or not. It’s material is niche but the appeal is not.

But only yesterday did I find Rhythmic ASMR. I didn’t realise it was a defined genre / thumbnail category although I had been interested in the crossover between music and ASMR for a long time - and have incorporated ASMR style whispering into a festival performance with my longtime musical collaborator Adam Possener. ‘This is the beginning, this is the start’ i repeatedly hoarsed into the microphone to open our set.

NOTES

It’s like those big commercial sports adverts (an sharp intake breath, scrape of shoe on stadium track, alarm clock etc. . ). Huge commercial scale vs. ‘outsider’ art vibes / ‘amateur’ art vibes youtube channels

But also like so expert

And way less economic to film

But like amateur art in that no one teaches you to do this

CASE STUDIES

In this one

She’s like experimenting with it and different sounds have different bar lengths

But in the later ones they are more consistent and the consistent bar lengths allow for longer phrasing and more of a Flow

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