Chillwave, glo-fi, "hypnagogic pop": in a year that many critics agree didn't provide much in the way of musical innovation, the main novelty in indie circles flew under names that sounded awesome but meant … well, what the hell did they mean, exactly?
The music -- made by bands with evocative names like Neon Indian, Memory Cassette and Washed Out -- sounds much like you would expect something called "glo-fi" to sound: luminous and lysergic, grounded in '80s pop, but with echo, reverb and fuzzed-out harmonies trumping songwriting and lyrical expression. (Imagine the soundtrack to Ghostbusters gone avant-garde.)
Like so many fly-by-night styles, I'm not sure that is a "real" subgenre; the music is too variable, the layers of influence (shoegaze, ambient, lo-fi, electro-funk, house, '60s pop) too porous to build anything durable or even particularly coherent. A wide gulf separates Ganglians' noisy garage pop and Pictureplane's bedroom rave. Many of the acts associated with the fad might bristle at their inclusion, in fact. But it's precisely that unstable quality that makes the phenomenon so interesting. It's less a genre than a meme: call it hashtag music, with a slew of acts all repping for an unmistakably woozy kind of effect, without necessarily agreeing on how to get there.
There are plenty of precedents, of course, from Dan Deacon's last few years of loony tunes to the mid-'00s "folktronica" of Four Tet and Caribou, and all the way back to the beginning of the decade, with the Avalanches' Since I Left You, a high-water mark of super-saturated sampledelia.
And there are even more outliers, artists whose music bears some relation to the queasy roller-coaster rush this stuff induces but tilts more in the direction of ambient drone, freak-folk or other strains of in-betweenness: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Grouper, White Rainbow, Lucky Dragons, Animal Collective, even polychromatic post-dubstepper Joy Orbison -- the list goes on and on.
But I don't think we have to commit ourselves to a strict definition of glo-fi and chillwave (or even keep using those terms for too much longer) to agree that a whole lot of indie acts and bedroom producers are currently drinking from the same punchbowl -- and that the combined results add up to something that's way more interesting than mere microgenre hype.
Read on for a handy cheat-sheet of artists associated with the phenomenon, broken out into stylistic subsets, and check out a three-hour playlist of their muddled sounds. As always, you can listen to the playlist and all the albums mentioned here (plus about 6 million more) by simply signing up for a free Rhapsody trial subscription.
File Under: Avant-Pop
Memory Cassette: Dayve Hawk's various projects (including Memory Tapes and Weird Tapes) are an iridescent tangle of pitter-pat drum machines, placid harmonies, '80s pop and oodles of reverb; "Last One Awake" bears Aphex Twin's thumbprint -- covered with fingerpaint, of course.
Atlas Sound: Lo-fi gear and doe-eyed songwriting help give the side project of Deerhunter's Brandon Cox an unusual sense of intimacy and immediacy; it's the soundtrack for campfire meltdowns and AM radio revelations, suffused with grit in a way that recalls a last glass of unfiltered red wine.
Here We Go Magic: Full of Steve Reich-style circle drumming, back-porch strumming, Afropop-leaning vocals and judicious synths, Here We Go Magic's music translates a hard-to-pin-down nostalgia into music that's refreshingly direct and remarkably elegant — frayed edges and all.
A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Tambourine and tremolo guitars affix a '60s fetish on ambient passages that sprawl like fields of amethyst; agreeably off-key vocals cheer the death of Auto-Tune, while the drum machine keeps on ticking. A particularly misty take on a classic 4AD/Sarah Records sound.
File Under: Postmodern Primitives
Ganglians: Sacramento's Ganglians pack plenty of clutter in their garage, banging out tunes that sound alternately like the Ramones gone folk ("Try to Understand") and dizzy, detuned cruise-ship anthems fronted by crackingly pubescent voices ("Voodoo").
Small Black: Using garage-sale drum machines and plenty of fuzzed-up Postal Service guitar/keys harmonizing, and yelping well outside their vocal range, Brooklyn's Small Black specialize in corroded Breakfast Club memories ("Despicable Dogs") and a particularly blissed-out fusion of Big Black and My Bloody Valentine ("Bad Lover").
Wavves: Wavves' music is primitivism with a vengeance, garage rock pushed through a battery of distortion pedals and recorded with what sounds like a setup of tin cans and twine. But there's something genuinely spine-tingling about his multitracked vocals, and things get weirder with blippy experiments like "Goth Girls," which burns with the glow of a thousand blown fuses.
HEALTH: They talk about white noise and even pink noise, but L.A.'s HEALTH churn out a pastel-tinted din, with vocals smeared into an alien wail and guitars, keyboards and drums blown down a cotton-candy wind tunnel. Blissing out never sounded so dangerous (and vice versa).
Chll Pll: Zach Hill (ex-Hella) and Zac Nelson (Prints) flit between Animal Collective's epic melodic urges and Battles' muscular amalgam of rock and electronics on their debut album, with insanely complicated drum blasts anchoring helium hooks and laughing-gas tangents.
A Mountain of One: Their new album is, if anything, a fairly hi-fi brand of indie rock with a light dusting of lysergic yearning; their late-'80s Collected Works is more velvety, with bliss-out choruses, Italo-disco keyboards and the odd spangle of exotica. Don't miss the House of House remix of "Bones" for a more muscled-up dancefloor version.
File Under: Fluorescent Funk
Neon Indian: Tones as warped as a cassette tape soaked in bubble bath, and textures as chewy as taffy; it's all phased and filtered like Daft Punk remixing Hall and Oates, and just as headily goofy.
Nite Jewel: Less disco than their peers on the Italians Do It Better label, this L.A. duo employs lilting keyboards and faraway vocals in their honeysuckle funk; reaching beyond indie kids, they even collaborated with Stones Throw artist Dam-Funk as Nite Funk.
Washed Out: Earnest young Southerner Ernest Greene couldn't have picked a better name for a project that soaks brooding, harmonic, '80s-inspired pop in the sticky colors of an old Polaroid. CFCF: Montreal's Mike Silver broke out with remixes for HEALTH and Crystal Castles; his debut album casts an eerie tungsten glow over dulcet synths and keen rhythm programming, somewhere between Miami Vice and Quiet Village.
Teengirl Fantasy: Oberlin students Teengirl Fantasy blow up naïve electro-pop sequences into ballooning psychedelic shapes; in line with the laws of physics, they throw off sparks when rubbed with a stubby comb of drum-machine beats.
Nosaj Thing: If you're gonna stick baby in a corner, most accounts would file L.A.'s Nosaj Thing as instrumental hip-hop in the vein of Prefuse 73, Dabrye and, more recently, Flying Lotus. But the weirdly spectral quality of his melodies — ghostly and garish in equal measure, like Day-Glo wraiths — finds an unexpected middle ground between the wonky refrains of Zomby, Joker et al and the perverse dreamscapes of glo-wave at its bleepiest.
File Under: Dance Dance Devolution
Pictureplane: This is the sound of Denver's Travis Egedy recycling scraps of everything from Burial to Daft Punk to Paul van Dyk, without an apparent shred of irony; the results range from ethno-house on backward tapes to the voluminous vacuum of Luomo's Vocalcity being inflated with fluorescent gas and cracked open with hammers. It's Spartan but undisciplined, played out on a handful of machines running perilously out of synch, clocked only by a wing and a prayer.
F*ck Buttons: Producer Andrew Weatherall provided F*ck Buttons with the booster rocket to take Tarot Sport to the outer limits, but songs like "Olympians" and "Space Mountain" offer a time-capsule payload stocked with '80s pop curios and '90s techno pulses.
Toro y Moi: The fuzzed guitars and synths might recall French nu-electro acts like Justice, but the silences between the beats loom like monoliths of negative space, lending an invitingly hollow quality to music as brittle as a glossy piñata; curiously mellow yelped vocals help tip this disco party into Rapture-on-Prozac territory.
Gold Panda: In Gold Panda's homespun exoticism, the hand claps sound like they're right in the room with you, but the vocals and sitars are one long-haul jumbo jet flight away; everything's glitched and frizzed over beats ranging from rickety hip-hop to manic, tribal techno freakouts.
Memory Cassette: Dayve Hawk's various projects (including Memory Tapes and Weird Tapes) are an iridescent tangle of pitter-pat drum machines, placid harmonies, '80s pop and oodles of reverb; "Last One Awake" bears Aphex Twin's thumbprint -- covered with fingerpaint, of course.
Atlas Sound: Lo-fi gear and doe-eyed songwriting help give the side project of Deerhunter's Brandon Cox an unusual sense of intimacy and immediacy; it's the soundtrack for campfire meltdowns and AM radio revelations, suffused with grit in a way that recalls a last glass of unfiltered red wine.
Here We Go Magic: Full of Steve Reich-style circle drumming, back-porch strumming, Afropop-leaning vocals and judicious synths, Here We Go Magic's music translates a hard-to-pin-down nostalgia into music that's refreshingly direct and remarkably elegant — frayed edges and all.
A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Tambourine and tremolo guitars affix a '60s fetish on ambient passages that sprawl like fields of amethyst; agreeably off-key vocals cheer the death of Auto-Tune, while the drum machine keeps on ticking. A particularly misty take on a classic 4AD/Sarah Records sound.
File Under: Postmodern Primitives
Ganglians: Sacramento's Ganglians pack plenty of clutter in their garage, banging out tunes that sound alternately like the Ramones gone folk ("Try to Understand") and dizzy, detuned cruise-ship anthems fronted by crackingly pubescent voices ("Voodoo").
Small Black: Using garage-sale drum machines and plenty of fuzzed-up Postal Service guitar/keys harmonizing, and yelping well outside their vocal range, Brooklyn's Small Black specialize in corroded Breakfast Club memories ("Despicable Dogs") and a particularly blissed-out fusion of Big Black and My Bloody Valentine ("Bad Lover").
Wavves: Wavves' music is primitivism with a vengeance, garage rock pushed through a battery of distortion pedals and recorded with what sounds like a setup of tin cans and twine. But there's something genuinely spine-tingling about his multitracked vocals, and things get weirder with blippy experiments like "Goth Girls," which burns with the glow of a thousand blown fuses.
HEALTH: They talk about white noise and even pink noise, but L.A.'s HEALTH churn out a pastel-tinted din, with vocals smeared into an alien wail and guitars, keyboards and drums blown down a cotton-candy wind tunnel. Blissing out never sounded so dangerous (and vice versa).
Chll Pll: Zach Hill (ex-Hella) and Zac Nelson (Prints) flit between Animal Collective's epic melodic urges and Battles' muscular amalgam of rock and electronics on their debut album, with insanely complicated drum blasts anchoring helium hooks and laughing-gas tangents.
A Mountain of One: Their new album is, if anything, a fairly hi-fi brand of indie rock with a light dusting of lysergic yearning; their late-'80s Collected Works is more velvety, with bliss-out choruses, Italo-disco keyboards and the odd spangle of exotica. Don't miss the House of House remix of "Bones" for a more muscled-up dancefloor version.
File Under: Fluorescent Funk
Neon Indian: Tones as warped as a cassette tape soaked in bubble bath, and textures as chewy as taffy; it's all phased and filtered like Daft Punk remixing Hall and Oates, and just as headily goofy.
Nite Jewel: Less disco than their peers on the Italians Do It Better label, this L.A. duo employs lilting keyboards and faraway vocals in their honeysuckle funk; reaching beyond indie kids, they even collaborated with Stones Throw artist Dam-Funk as Nite Funk.
Washed Out: Earnest young Southerner Ernest Greene couldn't have picked a better name for a project that soaks brooding, harmonic, '80s-inspired pop in the sticky colors of an old Polaroid. CFCF: Montreal's Mike Silver broke out with remixes for HEALTH and Crystal Castles; his debut album casts an eerie tungsten glow over dulcet synths and keen rhythm programming, somewhere between Miami Vice and Quiet Village.
Teengirl Fantasy: Oberlin students Teengirl Fantasy blow up naïve electro-pop sequences into ballooning psychedelic shapes; in line with the laws of physics, they throw off sparks when rubbed with a stubby comb of drum-machine beats.
Nosaj Thing: If you're gonna stick baby in a corner, most accounts would file L.A.'s Nosaj Thing as instrumental hip-hop in the vein of Prefuse 73, Dabrye and, more recently, Flying Lotus. But the weirdly spectral quality of his melodies — ghostly and garish in equal measure, like Day-Glo wraiths — finds an unexpected middle ground between the wonky refrains of Zomby, Joker et al and the perverse dreamscapes of glo-wave at its bleepiest.
File Under: Dance Dance Devolution
Pictureplane: This is the sound of Denver's Travis Egedy recycling scraps of everything from Burial to Daft Punk to Paul van Dyk, without an apparent shred of irony; the results range from ethno-house on backward tapes to the voluminous vacuum of Luomo's Vocalcity being inflated with fluorescent gas and cracked open with hammers. It's Spartan but undisciplined, played out on a handful of machines running perilously out of synch, clocked only by a wing and a prayer.
F*ck Buttons: Producer Andrew Weatherall provided F*ck Buttons with the booster rocket to take Tarot Sport to the outer limits, but songs like "Olympians" and "Space Mountain" offer a time-capsule payload stocked with '80s pop curios and '90s techno pulses.
Toro y Moi: The fuzzed guitars and synths might recall French nu-electro acts like Justice, but the silences between the beats loom like monoliths of negative space, lending an invitingly hollow quality to music as brittle as a glossy piñata; curiously mellow yelped vocals help tip this disco party into Rapture-on-Prozac territory.
Gold Panda: In Gold Panda's homespun exoticism, the hand claps sound like they're right in the room with you, but the vocals and sitars are one long-haul jumbo jet flight away; everything's glitched and frizzed over beats ranging from rickety hip-hop to manic, tribal techno freakouts.
Portions of album content provided by All Music Guide © 2011 All Media Guide, LLC ® 1999-2011 Rhapsody International Inc.
Thanks for identifying and profiling the trend. I'm not a huge fan of reading endlessly about music (I was about 15 years ago), especially when I'm on a streaming music site where I'd rather listen than read.
So my question is: Will you be compiling a playlist that showcases the best or at least most interesting songs and acts mentioned in the blog post above? Because yes, I could click on each individual link above and then click on the selections for each of those acts, but I don't have the patience to go through the whole list.
And my point is: As long as you're providing added value with this blog, it would be very helpful if you added an audio aspect too ... this being a streaming music site and all.
(If you've already done that and I simply missed the link, then I question the choices made by your designers, not your content crew.)
Given that this post has been up for over a week and mine is the first comment, you may want to give thought to how well this text-intensive blog format is serving your readers.
Thanks! Happy New Year!
Great post!
i find Philip's blogs essential