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Some artists labeled with the "hypnagogic pop" tag, such as Neon Indian and [[Toro Y Moi]], have rejected the label or denied that such a unified style exists.<ref name=atlantic/> ''[[The Guardian]]'' called the hypnagogic tag "pretentious".<ref name="Lynskey2010">{{cite web|last1=Lynskey|first1=Dorian|title=Chillwave or twee-fi? Pop's latest genre folly|url=https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/25/chill-wave-twee-pop-genres|website=[[The Guardian]]|date=February 25, 2010}}</ref> ''[[New York Times]]'' writer [[Jon Pareles]] criticized the style as "annoyingly noncommittal music."<ref name=atlantic/> In 2009, producer Daniel Lopatin (AKA [[Oneohtrix Point Never]]) said: "I don't think the hpop tag is representative of a movement or constituted by a select group of artists. I see it more as a discussion about nostalgia and its subliminal effects on culture. I don't see anything wrong with the tag—it's just a way of engaging with a phenomenon."<ref name="tmt">{{cite web|last1=Keith|first1=Kawaii|date=November 24, 2009|title=Oneohtrix Point Never interview|url=http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/oneohtrix-point-never|website=[[Tiny Mix Tapes]]|accessdate=15 August 2016}}</ref>
Some artists labeled with the "hypnagogic pop" tag, such as Neon Indian and [[Toro Y Moi]], have rejected the label or denied that such a unified style exists.<ref name=atlantic/> ''[[The Guardian]]'' called the hypnagogic tag "pretentious".<ref name="Lynskey2010">{{cite web|last1=Lynskey|first1=Dorian|title=Chillwave or twee-fi? Pop's latest genre folly|url=https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/25/chill-wave-twee-pop-genres|website=[[The Guardian]]|date=February 25, 2010}}</ref> ''[[New York Times]]'' writer [[Jon Pareles]] criticized the style as "annoyingly noncommittal music."<ref name=atlantic/> In 2009, producer Daniel Lopatin (AKA [[Oneohtrix Point Never]]) said: "I don't think the hpop tag is representative of a movement or constituted by a select group of artists. I see it more as a discussion about nostalgia and its subliminal effects on culture. I don't see anything wrong with the tag—it's just a way of engaging with a phenomenon."<ref name="tmt">{{cite web|last1=Keith|first1=Kawaii|date=November 24, 2009|title=Oneohtrix Point Never interview|url=http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/oneohtrix-point-never|website=[[Tiny Mix Tapes]]|accessdate=15 August 2016}}</ref>

Harper, responding to assertions by Reynolds, wrote: "The reductive tendency to pre-judge contemporary underground pop as ‘nostalgic’ (again with the Pink-tinted-spectacles), while not entirely or always unsubstantiated, has been all too prevalent in recent years, and it’s undermining the unique contributions made by its artists. ... It hopefully doesn’t need emphasising that Ariel Pink didn’t invent home-recording, or lo-fi, or even retro-lo-fi. In fact, if we look at the history of home-recording and lo-fi, Pink can begin to look like the end of an era rather than the beginning of one." Among Pink's precedents, Harper notes [[R. Stevie Moore]] and [[Martin Newell]].<ref>{{cite web|last1=Harper|first1=Adam|title=Essay: Shades of Ariel Pink|url=http://www.dummymag.com/features/essay-shades-of-ariel-pink|website=[[Dummy Mag]]|date=April 23, 2014}}</ref>


==Associated artists==
==Associated artists==

Revision as of 16:23, 4 April 2017

Hypnagogic pop
EtymologyHypnagogia
Other names
Stylistic origins
Cultural originsMid 2000s, United States
Typical instruments
Derivative formsVaporwave[1]
Other topics

Hypnagogic pop (sometimes used interchangeably with "chillwave" or "glo-fi") is a style of pop music[2][3] or a general musical approach[4] that developed in the mid 2000s[5] among underground artists who drew on the music, popular entertainment, and recording technology of past decades (particularly the 1980s) to explore elements of cultural memory and nostalgia.[6] The term was coined by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 issue of The Wire to label what he characterized as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory."[7]

The genre grew out of American lo-fi scenes, and would receive critical attention in the late 2000s through artists such as Ariel Pink, James Ferraro, and Neon Indian. It has been described as a contemporary update of psychedelia steeped in popular culture[3] and as an "American cousin" to the British hauntology scene.[8][9] Hypnagogic pop partly inspired the Internet-based vaporwave movement, which amplified the experimental tendencies of the genre.[1]

Development and characteristics

Origins

See also: Psychedelic music and Hauntology

In an August 2009 piece for the The Wire, journalist David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop"[6] inspired from a comment made by James Ferraro.[10] Keenan referred to a developing trend of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise music in which varied artists began to engage with elements of cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology.[6] Among these artists were Ferraro, Spencer Clark, Ariel Pink, Zola Jesus, Ducktails, and Pocahaunted. He employed the psychological term hypnagogic as referring to the psychological state "between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams."[6] According to Keenan, these artists began to draw on cultural sources subconsciously remembered from their 1980s and early 1990s adolescence while freeing them from their historical contexts and "hom[ing] in on the futuristic signifiers" of the period.[6] Keenan alternately summarized hypnagogic pop as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory" and as "1980's-inspired psychedelia" which engages with forgotten capitalist detritus of the past in an attempt to "dream of the future."[6]

Daniel Lopatin's self-described "eccojam" video "angel" (2009) juxtaposes a looped and echoed sample of Fleetwood Mac's 1982 song "Only Over You" with footage taken from 1980s TV ads. Trainer says it "exemplifies hypnagogic pop's format for cultural appropriation" and the "sonic renegotiation of a temporally specific aesthetic".[11]

Common reference points include various forms of 1980s music, including radio rock, new wave pop, MTV one-hit wonders, New Age music, synth-driven Hollywood blockbuster soundtracks,[12] lounge music and easy-listening, corporate muzak, lite rock "schmaltz," video game music,[9] '80s synthpop and R&B.[2][13] Recordings often used "deliberately degraded" or analog instruments and techniques, including tape hiss and FX.[6] Also common was the use of outmoded audio/visual technology and DIY digital imagery, such as VHS cassettes, CD-R discs, and early Internet aesthetics.[8] Critic Simon Reynolds wrote that the music is often "released as limited-edition cassettes and vinyl [before reaching] a larger audience through blogs and YouTube videos."[12]

The genre is an American counterpart to Britain's hauntological music scene,[14][15] which also engages with notions of nostalgia and memory.[9] Critic Adam Trainer wrote that hypnagogic pop was defined by a shared "musical approach" rather than a particular sound, and that it draws from "the collective unconscious of late 1980s and early 1990s popular culture" while being "indebted stylistically to various traditions of experimentalism such as noise, drone, repetition, and improvisation."[4] He notes its preoccupation with both decaying analog technology and the bombastic representations of synthetic elements in 1980s and '90s popular culture.[8] While Reynolds says the style was tied to Southern California and its culture, Trainer says the style "arguably" emerged from numerous simultaneous scenes inhabited by artists working in a diverse form of "post-noise neo-psychedelia".[16]

Popularity and related media

See also: Chillwave and Vaporwave

Hypnagogic pop was quickly taken up by a variety of music blogs.[17] By 2010, albums by Ariel Pink and Neon Indian were regularly hailed by publications like Pitchfork and The Wire, with the terms "hypnagogic pop", "chillwave", and "glo-fi" employed to describe the evolving sounds of such artists, a number of which had songs of considerable success within independent music circles.[2] "Chillwave" was termed for a type of music characterized by summertime imagery, analog production, and sampling, existing mainly between mid 2009 and early 2011 before experiencing a major decline.[18] The tag, whose coinage predates Keenan's article by one month,[19] was originally used synonymously with "hypnagogic pop".[20] While the two styles are similar in that they both evoke 1980s–90s imagery, chillwave has a more commercial sound with an emphasis on "cheesy" hooks and reverb effects.[21]

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – "Round and Round" (2010)
The Atlantic highlighted "Round and Round" as a "perfect" representation of the genre's "breathless simplicity".[2] It was later crowned by Pitchfork as their 2010 "Track of the Year".[22]
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Pink was looked upon as chillwave's "godfather", and his work was commonly referenced in early discussions of hauntology.[23] Reynolds also identifies Pink and Ferraro as the "godparents of hypnagogic", and that their analogue lo-fi aspirations would be taken up by "groups with names like Tape Deck Mountain, Memory Tapes, Memory Cassette – and turned into cliché."[24] Another review by Marc Hogan for Neon Indian's Psychic Chasms (2009) listed "dream-beat", "chillwave", "glo-fi", "hypnagogic pop", and "hipster-gogic pop" as interchangeable terms for "psychedelic music that's generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus."[25] Writing for Vice, Morgan Poyau described the emerging style as "making awkward bedfellows out of experimental music enthusiasts and weird progressive pop theorists."[17] She described a typical manifestation of the style as featuring long tracks "saturated with echo, delay, smothered guitars and amputated synths."[17]

The experimental tendencies of hypnagogic pop artists like Pink and Ferraro were soon amplified by the Internet-centric genre known as vaporwave. Although the name shares the "-wave" suffix, it is only loosely connected to chillwave. Stereogum's Miles Bowe summarized vaporwave as a combination of "the chopped and screwed plunderphonics of Dan Lopatin ... with the nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro’s Muzak-hellscapes on [the 2011 album] Far Side Virtual".[1] Critic Adam Harper identified several differences and similarities between hypnagogic pop and vaporwave; the two genres share an affinity for "trash music", both are "dreamy" and "chirpy", and both "manipulate their material to defamiliarise it and give it a sense of the uncanny, such as slowing it down and/or lowering the pitch, making it, as the term goes, ‘screwed’." Of differences, vaporwave does not typically engage in long tracks, lo-fi productions, or non-sampled material, and it draws more from the early 1990s than it does the 1970s and 1980s.[26]

Critical response

Reynolds described hypnagogic pop as an engagement with hyper-reality and a "21st-century update of psychedelia" in which "lost innocence has been contaminated by pop culture".[12] He notes a particular concern with the "scrambling of pop time", suggesting that "perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the '80s never ended. That we're still living there, subject to that decade's endless end of History."[12] Critic Adam Harper noted among hypnagogic pop artists a tendency to "to turn trash, something shallow and determinedly throwaway, into something sacred or mystical" and to "manipulate their material to defamiliarise it and give it a sense of the uncanny."[26] Writer Adam Trainer suggested that the style allowed artists to engage with the detritus of capitalist consumer culture in a way that focuses on affect rather than irony or cynicism.[8] The genre has been likened to "sonic fictions or intentional forgeries, creating half-baked memories of things that never were—approximating the imprecise nature of memory itself".[9] Luna Vega described it as "tak[ing] aspects of modern culture and nostalgia and transform[ing] them into new collective memories".[27]

Some artists labeled with the "hypnagogic pop" tag, such as Neon Indian and Toro Y Moi, have rejected the label or denied that such a unified style exists.[2] The Guardian called the hypnagogic tag "pretentious".[28] New York Times writer Jon Pareles criticized the style as "annoyingly noncommittal music."[2] In 2009, producer Daniel Lopatin (AKA Oneohtrix Point Never) said: "I don't think the hpop tag is representative of a movement or constituted by a select group of artists. I see it more as a discussion about nostalgia and its subliminal effects on culture. I don't see anything wrong with the tag—it's just a way of engaging with a phenomenon."[29]

Harper, responding to assertions by Reynolds, wrote: "The reductive tendency to pre-judge contemporary underground pop as ‘nostalgic’ (again with the Pink-tinted-spectacles), while not entirely or always unsubstantiated, has been all too prevalent in recent years, and it’s undermining the unique contributions made by its artists. ... It hopefully doesn’t need emphasising that Ariel Pink didn’t invent home-recording, or lo-fi, or even retro-lo-fi. In fact, if we look at the history of home-recording and lo-fi, Pink can begin to look like the end of an era rather than the beginning of one." Among Pink's precedents, Harper notes R. Stevie Moore and Martin Newell.[30]

Associated artists

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

References

  1. ^ a b c Bowe, Miles (July 26, 2013). "Band To Watch: Saint Pepsi". Stereogum. Retrieved 26 June 2016.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Hinkes-Jones, Llewellyn (15 July 2010). "Downtempo Pop: When Good Music Gets a Bad Name". The Atlantic.
  3. ^ a b Sherburne, Phillip (October 20, 2015). "Songs in the Key of Zzz: The History of Sleep Music". Pitchfork.
  4. ^ a b c d e Trainer 2016, p. 410.
  5. ^ Burnett, Joseph (October 16, 2014). "Mirage". The Quietus.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Keenan, Dave (August 2009). "Childhood's End". The Wire. No. 306. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  7. ^ a b c Sherburne, Philip (May 22, 2012). "Last Step: Going to Sleep to Make Music to Sleep To". Spin Magazine. Retrieved 4 July 2016.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g Trainer 2016, p. 412.
  9. ^ a b c d Stone Blue Editors (September 11, 2015). William Basinski: Musician Snapshots. SBE Media. pp. Chapter 3. {{cite book}}: |last1= has generic name (help)
  10. ^ a b Reynolds 2011, p. 345. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFReynolds2011 (help)
  11. ^ Trainer 2016, pp. 412–413.
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h Reynolds, Simon (March 2011). "'Hypnagogic pop' and the landscape of Southern California". frieze. No. 137. Retrieved 4 July 2016.
  13. ^ Despres, Sean (July 18, 2010). "Whatever you do, don't call it 'chillwave'". The Japan Times. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  14. ^ Reynolds 2011, p. 346. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFReynolds2011 (help)
  15. ^ Bell, David (September 18, 2010). "Deserter's Songs – Looking Backwards: In Defence of Nostalgia". Ceasefire Mag. Retrieved August 17, 2016.
  16. ^ Trainer 2016, pp. 409–410.
  17. ^ a b c Poyau, Morgan (July 13, 2011). "The 80s Nostalgia Aesthetic Of Music's Hottest New Subgenre: Hypnagogic Pop". Vice Media. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
  18. ^ Schilling, Dave (April 8, 2015). "That Was a Thing: The Brief History of the Totally Made-Up Chillwave Music Genre".
  19. ^ Trainer 2016, pp. 409, 416.
  20. ^ Weiss, Dan (July 6, 2012). "Slutwave, Tumblr Rap, Rape Gaze: Obscure Musical Genres Explained". LA Weekly.
  21. ^ Trainer 2016, p. 416.
  22. ^ "The Top 100 Tracks of 2010". Pitchfork. 2010. Retrieved June 30, 2012.
  23. ^ Gabriele, Timothy (June 8, 2010). "Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti Before Today". PopMatters.
  24. ^ Reynolds 2011, p. 349. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFReynolds2011 (help)
  25. ^ Pounds, Ross (June 30, 2010). "Why Glo-Fi's Future Is Not Ephemeral". The Quietus.
  26. ^ a b Harper, Adam (December 7, 2012). "Comment: Vaporwave and the pop-art of the virtual plaza". Dummy. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
  27. ^ Luna (November 3, 2011). "Hypnagogic Pop and the New Pop Culture Mutations". Luna vega. Retrieved 29 January 2017.
  28. ^ Lynskey, Dorian (February 25, 2010). "Chillwave or twee-fi? Pop's latest genre folly". The Guardian.
  29. ^ Keith, Kawaii (November 24, 2009). "Oneohtrix Point Never interview". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved 15 August 2016.
  30. ^ Harper, Adam (April 23, 2014). "Essay: Shades of Ariel Pink". Dummy Mag.
  31. ^ a b c Blackwell, Matthew (June 23, 2010). "Oneohtrix Point Never Returnal". Prefix Mag.
  32. ^ David Laderman, Laurel Westrup (2014). Sampling Media. OPU USA. p. 109.
  33. ^ a b Trainer 2016, p. 409.
  34. ^ Aftandilians, Natasha. "Review: All Aboard Neon Indian's Time-Traveling Cruise Ship on 'VEGA INTL. Night School'". SPIN. Retrieved 29 January 2017.

Bibliography

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