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Hypnagogic pop

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Hypnagogic pop
A compact cassette
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 21st-century style of pop music[2][3] or general musical approach[4] which explores elements of cultural memory and nostalgia by drawing on the music, popular entertainment, and recording technology of past decades, particularly the 1980s.[5] The term was coined by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 issue of The Wire to label a developing trend which he characterized as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory."[6] It has been described as a contemporary update of psychedelia[3][7] and as an "American cousin" to the British hauntology scene.[8][9][10]

The genre grew out of mid-2000s American underground and lo-fi scenes as artists began reaching back to retro cultural aesthetics such as 1980s radio rock, New Age music, MTV one-hit wonders, and Hollywood synthesizer soundtracks,[7] as well as analog technology and outdated pop culture.[8] It would gain prominence in the late 2000s through artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, with the term receiving some criticism from artists and journalists.[2] The style partly inspired the 2010s Internet-based vaporwave movement, which amplified the experimental tendencies of the genre.[1]

Development and characteristics

Origins

See also: Lo-fi music, Psychedelic music, and Hauntology
James Ferraro (pictured in 2012) was one "godfather" of hypnagogic music.[11]

In an August 2009 piece for The Wire, journalist David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop"[5] inspired from a comment made by James Ferraro.[12] 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and post-noise music in which varied artists began to engage with elements of cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology.[5] Among these artists were Ferraro, Spencer Clark, Ariel Pink, Zola Jesus, Ducktails, Emeralds, and Pocahaunted.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."[5] 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.[5] Keenan alternately summarized hypnagogic pop as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory" and as "1980's-inspired psychedelia" which engages with capitalist detritus of the past in an attempt to "dream of the future."[5]

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,[7] 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.[5] Also common was the use of outmoded audio/visual technology and DIY digital imagery, such as compact cassettes, VHS, CD-R discs, and early Internet aesthetics.[8] The music is often issued in the form of limited-edition cassettes or vinyl records before reaching a wider audience through blogs and YouTube videos.[7] Critic Adam Trainer notes its preoccupation with both decaying analog technology and the bombastic representations of synthetic elements in 1980s and '90s popular culture.[8]

File:Angel - Daniel Lopatin.webm
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".[14]

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] While critic Simon 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".[15] The genre has been described as an American counterpart to Britain's hauntological music scene,[16][10] which also engages with notions of nostalgia and memory.[9]

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] Reynolds identifies Pink and Ferraro as the "godparents of hypnagogic," and characterized Pink as a central figure to what he calls the "Altered Zones Generation", an umbrella term he designed for lo-fi, retro-inspired indie artists who were commonly featured on Altered Zones, a sister site for Pitchfork.[18][nb 1] "Chillwave," a tag used to describe a similar trend[19] was coined one month before Keenan's article[20] and was originally used synonymously with "hypnagogic pop".[21] 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.[22]

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – "Round and Round" (2010)
The Atlantic highlighted "Round and Round" as a "perfect" representation of the style's "breathless simplicity,"[2] while Pitchfork wrote that it "evokes the sort of dusty 80s radio pop singles you find on defunct regional labels in thrift store bins."[23]
Problems playing this file? See media help.

The analogue lo-fi aspirations of Ferraro and Pink would be taken up by "groups with names like Tape Deck Mountain, Memory Tapes, Memory Cassette – and turned into cliché."[11] 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."[24] 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.[25]

Critical response

Critic Simon Reynolds describes hypnagogic pop as a "21st-century update of psychedelia" in which "lost innocence has been contaminated by pop culture" and hyper-reality.[7] 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."[7] Writer Adam Trainer suggested that the style allowed artists to engage with the products of capitalist consumer culture in a way that focuses on affect rather than irony or cynicism.[8] 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."[25] 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".[26]

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".[27] 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."[28]

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.

Notes

  1. ^ Harper, responding to his assertions, wrote: "Pink’s albums are zany, personal, largely rock-based and dressed in awkward glam, ... [and lack] the pop-art pastiche of hypnagogic pop ... Rather than being the progenitor or the AZ Generation, Pink can easily be understood as the youngest member of this mid-80s Cassette Culture Generation. ... 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 predecessors, Harper lists R. Stevie Moore and Martin Newell as the most notable.[18]

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 g 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. ^ 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)
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Reynolds, Simon (March 2011). "'Hypnagogic pop' and the landscape of Southern California". frieze. No. 137. Retrieved 4 July 2016.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h 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 Bell, David (September 18, 2010). "Deserter's Songs – Looking Backwards: In Defence of Nostalgia". Ceasefire Mag. Retrieved August 17, 2016.
  11. ^ a b Reynolds 2011, p. 349. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFReynolds2011 (help)
  12. ^ a b Reynolds 2011, p. 345. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFReynolds2011 (help)
  13. ^ Despres, Sean (July 18, 2010). "Whatever you do, don't call it 'chillwave'". The Japan Times. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  14. ^ Trainer 2016, pp. 412–413.
  15. ^ Trainer 2016, pp. 409–410.
  16. ^ Reynolds 2011, p. 346. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFReynolds2011 (help)
  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. ^ a b Harper, Adam (April 23, 2014). "Essay: Shades of Ariel Pink". Dummy Mag.
  19. ^ Schilling, Dave (April 8, 2015). "That Was a Thing: The Brief History of the Totally Made-Up Chillwave Music Genre".
  20. ^ Trainer 2016, pp. 409, 416.
  21. ^ Weiss, Dan (July 6, 2012). "Slutwave, Tumblr Rap, Rape Gaze: Obscure Musical Genres Explained". LA Weekly.
  22. ^ Trainer 2016, p. 416.
  23. ^ Schreiber, Ryan. "Best New Track: "Round and Round" by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti". Pitchfork Media. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
  24. ^ Pounds, Ross (June 30, 2010). "Why Glo-Fi's Future Is Not Ephemeral". The Quietus.
  25. ^ a b Harper, Adam (December 7, 2012). "Comment: Vaporwave and the pop-art of the virtual plaza". Dummy. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
  26. ^ Luna (November 3, 2011). "Hypnagogic Pop and the New Pop Culture Mutations". Luna vega. Retrieved 29 January 2017.
  27. ^ Lynskey, Dorian (February 25, 2010). "Chillwave or twee-fi? Pop's latest genre folly". The Guardian.
  28. ^ Keith, Kawaii (November 24, 2009). "Oneohtrix Point Never interview". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved 15 August 2016.
  29. ^ a b Trainer 2016, p. 409.
  30. ^ a b c Lindemann, Lodovico. "Cosa vuol dire "musica psichedelica" nel 2016?". Rockit (in Italian).
  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. ^ 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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