Upon landing on London producer Voidboi's Instagram account, you come across a meme of a Microsoft 95 pop-up with the words: "you cannot delete yourself." Scroll down and you'll see an image of Pepe the Frog inside Hieronymous Bosch's hell and Lala from the Teletubbies giving birth to the girl from The Ring. Since they began shitposting three months ago, Voidboi's follower count has tripled. "I'm a pretty chaotic person and I feel like you can get that pretty much instantly when you see or hear the kind of stuff I put out," they tell me over the phone.

The memes are intentionally obscure and confusing. They blend cryptic imagery with weirdcore aesthetics and existentialist captions to reveal snapshots of the artist beyond hour-long DJ sets or the occasional track release on SoundCloud. Like other memetic subcultures—online groups gathered around sharing funny images—coherent aesthetic presents a distinct worldview: based and void-pilled. "When I make music I'm trying to trigger an extreme emotional response in a dance floor setting, which is nothing like the much more intimate communication I'm trying to have with people when I post memes," explains Voidboi. "I guess people must just relate to those aspects of myself more than I ever realised."

As an extension of popular culture and our personalities, memes cast a mirror onto reality, highlighting the humour (and absurdity) of our everyday lives. With each account reflecting a particular set of moods and social signifiers, electronic music meme pages serve as exclusive yet accessible online spaces where those within the community can be in on the joke. One such platform is catsquith, the meme alias of London-based DJ and producer asquith, who heads record label Lobster Theremin. The page—which has 70k followers—features a hilarious mix of memes, from DJ bro archetypes and If You See This In His Apartment red flags (field kit, space echo, kalimba), to SOPHIE memes and Julia Fox techno chick collages. Similarly, Berlin Club Memes offers tongue-in-cheek critiques of the city's club circuit, with favourites including digs on Berlin's all-black club aesthetic and jests about punters in the vein of "Oh shit I took both pills and now I'm stuck in the Berghain queue."

Memes have also become an essential part of an artist's toolkit in helping them engage with their fans. Packaged into easily digestible, bite-sized chunks, they are now the core means (memes?) of communication for a generation of digital natives with short attention spans. "It takes no effort to look at a meme, you don't have to think twice to get what something means if you're the intended audience for the shared knowledge it contains," says Voidboi.

London artist ShyOne, for example, regularly shares her favourite memes from across the internet, which help to convey her personality beyond her artist persona. Elsewhere, Rico Nasty applies meme formats to real-world situations to highlight the humour in the everyday, while Honduras-born artist Isabella Lovestory's cheeky Instagram posts and eyewatering Twitter exchanges can easily be screenshotted into memeic chunks. In one tweet, the singer shares a throwback of herself holding an abacus next to indie sleaze icon Uffie in 2009. When one commenter asks, "why are you holding an abacus?", she responds, "to measure the BPM, bitch." The memes quickly ensued.

"People do anything to stand out these days and plenty of artists have transformed their accounts into meme pages because they get more engagement," Peggy Viennetta, co-organiser of London-based hardcore night Planet Fun, says when we speak. Featuring fringe weirdos by the likes of DJ Gobshite, DJ Snot, DJ Lord of the Rings and Trancey Beaker, Planet Fun has immediate memeic appeal. Each night comes with a theme and its own extensive lore, which is backed up by a litany of memes and TikToks (Nurgle from Warhammer, videos of Scooter) on its official Instagram. "You can almost say that meme culture is bigger than club culture, as people spend more time staring at memes than they do on the dance floor every day. Once accounts build a specific brand that sets them apart, then that's as big as having a recognisable DJ or producer brand," they add.

Similarly, London-based Hard Crew have translated their URL jokes into IRL events through a series of absurd visuals, fancy dress costumes and props. Pre-pandemic, the group performed inside their own meme museum at London's FOLD, while their northern tour saw them disperse bootleg HMT/WKD bottles into the crowd. If there's no spin-off product in the cards, the group has been known to stage elaborate centrepieces, or "a motif made flesh." This might be unveiling a Banger Button that dancers smack when it's time to go turbo, or spending hundreds of pounds on a 4.5-metre glow-in-the-dark mesh banner of H.P. Baxxter with the HMT logo tattooed on his eyeballs. "Pushing an already stupid theme beyond the edge of reason is very gratifying in a KLF-ian sense, where neither punter nor performer ever truly knows where the bit ends, or even that there was a bit to begin with—just that they're having a laugh along the way," they explain.

Combining typically bad aesthetics with the anarchic attitude of a shitposter gives artists a humorous edge, serving as an antidote to the distinctly humour-less club culture prevalent in some house and techno circles. "Planet Fun definitely started as a way to drag the fun back into clubbing," agrees DJ Fingerblast, Planet Fun co-organiser. "Obviously going out and partying is (mainly) always fun anyway. But if you can have fun the whole time, before and after said club night, through content that reflects its DJs and audience, then why not do it?"

He credits DJ Detweiler, AKA the creator of 2014 meme genre #FluteDrop, and Polish travelling rave crew WIXAPOL, as the main inspirations for Planet Fun's online presence. The latter, whose logo features a black and yellow smiley with a tramp stamp for eyes, is known for its politically incorrect humour as epitomised through their papal donk music: samples of former pope John Paul II (an alleged paedophile) layered over savage gabber beats. Its Instagram account, too, is populated with dank memes of hench doges, Pepes and snogging minions. Their presence is so colossal that it's inspired several spin-off accounts, including @wixapolonia and @wixapol_affirmations, while embroidered t-shirts, laser-etched necklaces and football scarves emblazoned with the group's logo help carry the meme offline.

Hardcore has embraced meme culture for as long as it has existed, even if it wasn't called that back then. With roots in the rave optics of the '90s, music tempos grew increasingly slapstick and comedy-sized in ecstasy. Artists pushed sounds to their logical extremes, from the breakneck silliness of Urban Hype's "A Trip to Trumpton" to Altern-8's club classic "E-Vapour-8" and the chipmunk foolery of Hixxy & Sharkey's "Toytown." The smiley—the symbol most ubiquitous with '90s rave—spread like memefire, while CG-heavy flyers featuring cartoon characters and playful text recalled the humorous culture splicing of early text-image meme formats.

In Britain, northwest donk legends The Blackout Crew broke speed limits (and brain cells) with their manic, unintelligible MCing, their tongue-in-cheek music videos, repetitiveness and humorously boastful lyrics evoking the same energy as viral YouTube hits like "Badgers" and "Peanut Butter Jelly." Anarchic electronic duo KLF trolled their fans with outrageous stunts both on and off the stage, including machine-gunning the audience with blanks at the 1992 BRIT Awards and, their signature statement, burning a million British pounds and filming it in 1994. More generally, it wasn't uncommon for DJs to don stupid outfits and launch pool floaties into the crowd to a backdrop of airhorns and whistles.

Initially written off by critics as a joke, hardcore has since gained renewed importance as a Y2K relic, mixed into DJ sets among other experimental strains of music by a new generation of party-goers who have grown up with the all-access freedom of the internet. Its social ascent somewhat mirrors the rise of memes, from obscure 4chan fodder—an image board website that has become increasingly affiliated with hate speech and the alt right—to prime cultural commodity. It makes sense that a younger generation of DJs and collectives are applying the genre's rich history of hijinks to the rapid-fire world of memes.

Part of the allure of memes is being in on the joke. If meme communities are built around shared images, each contains its own visual language, consisting of recurrent images and self-referential in-jokes. Whether that's Polish tramp stamp smileys or Terror Tubbies montages is up to you. "The memes you engage with are a reflection of yourself; you post ones that you think are funny in the hope that others will engage with them as well, and you can share in the joy of the joke together," explains Peggy Viennetta. "But isn't that just what being an artist is? You're making content and sharing it in the hope that people engage with it and you can feel the joy of being connected to other people."

In an era of Peak Identity, shitposting—like alt-Twitter accounts and finstas—is a retaliation to overly serious millennials' branding exercises on Instagram. Or, in electronic music terms, an antidote to the neverending self-promotion wheel of selfies, photoshoots and brand partnerships. "Anonymity is an appropriate response to a time when nobody will shut up about themselves," writes art critic Dean Kissick. Shitposting, then, liberates the artist by rejecting the status quo, with each Pepe or Shrek meme an assertion of individual freedom within online communities—a sort of ego death through posting, if you will. This creates a more authentic line of communication between an artist and their fanbase not dictated by hype, money or fashion.

But there's a risk that a meme persona can turn Frankenstein, taking on a life of its own and skewering the artist's image completely. "I've seen people who have made their name off being a meme become burned-out and jaded with the persona they've created for themselves, which is genuinely sad when they're clearly talented at what they do," warns Voidboi. As memes take a greater role in the mainstream, artists must tread carefully if they wish to jump down the rabbit hole. Or else, they risk becoming the meme themselves.