Hypnagogic pop

Hypnagogic pop is a style of pop music[2][3] or general musical approach[4] that explores elements of cultural memory and nostalgia by drawing on the music, popular entertainment, and recording technology of the past, particularly the 1980s.[5] The genre developed in the mid to late 2000s as American lo-fi and noise musicians began reaching back to retro aesthetics remembered from childhood, such as 1980s radio rock, new age, MTV one-hit wonders, and Hollywood synthesizer soundtracks,[6] as well as analog technology and outdated pop culture.[7]

The term was coined by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 issue of The Wire to label the developing trend, which he characterized as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory."[8] It was used interchangeably with "chillwave" or "glo-fi" and would gain critical attention in the late 2000s through artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro.[2] Hypnagogic pop has been variously described as a 21st century update of psychedelia,[3][6] a reappropriation of media-saturated capitalist culture,[4] and an "American cousin" to the British hauntology scene.[7][9][10] The style partly inspired the 2010s Internet-based vaporwave movement, which amplified its experimental tendencies.[1]

Characteristics

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. Critic Adam Trainer wrote that it "exemplifies hypnagogic pop's format for cultural appropriation" and "sonic renegotiation."[11][nb 1]

Hypnagogic pop has a preoccupation with both decaying analog technology and bombastic representations of synthetic elements in 1980s and 1990s popular culture, according to critic Adam Trainer.[7] He wrote that the music is defined by a shared 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] As of 2011, the music was often issued in the form of limited-edition cassettes or vinyl records before reaching a wider audience through blogs and YouTube videos.[6]

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,[6] lounge music, easy-listening, corporate muzak, lite rock "schmaltz", video game music,[9] and 1980s synth-pop and R&B.[2][12] 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.[7]

History

Origins and etymology

In an August 2009 piece for The Wire, journalist David Keenan coined "hypnagogic pop"[5] while inspired by a comment made by James Ferraro.[13] Keenan referred to a developing trend of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise music in which artists began to engage with elements of cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology.[5] Around that time, a wave of retro-inspired home-recording artists had begun dominating underground indie scenes.[14] Among the artists discussed in Keenan's article were Ferraro, Spencer Clark, Ariel Pink, Zola Jesus, Ducktails, Emeralds, and Pocahaunted. He employed the 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] He alternately summarized hypnagogic pop as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory" and as "1980's-inspired psychedelia" that engages with capitalist detritus of the past in an attempt to "dream of the future."[5]

James Ferraro (pictured in 2012) was one "godfather" of hypnagogic music.[15]

Hypnagogic pop was later described as an American counterpart to Britain's hauntological music scene,[16][10] which also engaged with notions of nostalgia and memory.[9] While critic Simon Reynolds attributed hypnagogia to Southern California and its culture, Trainer said the style "arguably" emerged from numerous simultaneous scenes inhabited by artists working in a diverse form of "post-noise neo-psychedelia".[17] Reynolds identified Pink, Clark, and Ferraro as the "godparents of hypnagogic".[18] He also singled out Pink as the 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, an associate site for Pitchfork.[14] Pink gained recognition in the mid 2000s through a string of self-produced albums, pioneering a sound that Reynolds called "'70s radio-rock and '80s new wave as if heard through a defective transistor radio, glimmers of melody flickering in and out of the fog".[19] Tiny Mix Tapes' Jordan Redmond wrote that Pink's early collaborator John Maus was also placed "at the nexus of a number of recent popular movements" including hypnagogic pop, and that Maus was as "much of a progenitor of this sound as Pink, even though Pink has tended to be the headline-grabber."[20][nb 2]

Critic Adam Harper disputed Reynolds' arguments, writing that Pink's "largely rock-based" music lacked "the pop-art pastiche of hypnagogic pop," and that instead of "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."[14] Among Pink's predecessors, Harper lists R. Stevie Moore and Martin Newell as the most notable.[14][nb 3] Matthew Ingram of The Wire additionally recognized Moore's influence on Pink and hypnagogic pop: "through his disciple ... he has unwittingly provided the [genre's] template".[21][nb 4] Another precursor to the genre was Nick Nicely's 1982 single "Hilly Fields (1892)". Red Bull Music's J.R. Moore wrote that Nicely was "out there on his own, updating 60s psychedelic pop with newer technology while maintaining a uniquely haphazard DIY aesthetic. In doing so, Nicely basically invented the sound of the 2000s Hypnagogic Pop movement decades beforehand."[24] In 2008, Nicely returned to live performances after a long absence from the public, sharing concert billings with Pink and Maus.[24]

Chillwave and vaporwave

Once "hypnagogic pop" was coined, a variety of music blogs immediately wrote about the phenomenon.[26] By 2010, albums by Ariel Pink and Neon Indian were regularly hailed by publications like Pitchfork and The Wire, with "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] As the movement's popularity grew, the analogue lo-fi aspirations of Ferraro and Pink were taken up by "groups with names like Tape Deck Mountain, Memory Tapes, Memory Cassette – and turned into cliché."[15] In the 2010 Rewind issue of The Wire, Keenan described the year as "the year that H-pop migrated from a process designed to liberate desire from marketing formulas to a carrot in the mouth of a corpse that has proved irresistible to underground musicians looking for an easy route to mainstream acceptance."[27]

"Chillwave", a tag used to describe a similar trend[28] was coined one month before Keenan's 2009 article[29] and was originally used synonymously with "hypnagogic pop".[30] 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.[31] Keenan described chillwave as "one of the more meaningless sobriquets applied to the new future pop visions" and "a much more appropriate description of the mindless, deploiticised embracing of mainstream values that H-pop has come to be associated with."[27] A contemporary 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."[32] Writing for Vice, Morgan Poyau described the emerging style as "making awkward bedfellows out of experimental music enthusiasts and weird progressive pop theorists."[26] She described a typical manifestation of the style as featuring long tracks "saturated with echo, delay, smothered guitars and amputated synths."[26]

The experimental tendencies of hypnagogic pop artists like Pink and Ferraro were soon amplified by the Internet-centric genre dubbed "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] There are several differences and similarities between hypnagogic pop and vaporwave. According to Adam Harper, 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’.".[33] 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.[33]

Critical response

Simon Reynolds described hypnagogic pop as a "21st-century update of psychedelia" in which "lost innocence has been contaminated by pop culture" and hyper-reality.[6] 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."[6]

Adam Trainer suggested that the style allowed artists to engage with the products of media-saturated capitalist consumer culture in a way that focuses on affect rather than irony or cynicism.[7] Adam Harper noted among hypnagogic pop artists a tendency "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."[33] 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]

Some artists labeled with the "hypnagogic pop" tag, such as Neon Indian and Toro Y Moi, rejected the label or denied that such a unified style exists.[2] The Guardian's Dorian Lynskey called the hypnagogic tag "pretentious".[34] 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."[35]

Associated artists

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Notes

  1. ↑ The woman in the clip is Japanese idol Yukiko Okada, who committed suicide in 1986. Lopatin was reportedly unaware of her identity, but said that the observation adds "another layer of materiality within that piece—and that's totally how they're supposed to function".[7]
  2. ↑ Maus rejected the "hypnagogic pop" tag, as he did not intend his music to evoke 1980s nostalgia, but rather to explore the possibilities of "old synthesizers that can be mobilized today in interesting ways."[20]
  3. ↑ In the 1990s, Richie Unterberger compared Newell to Moore as he described Newell's band the Cleaners from Venus as "lo-fi, murkily recorded affairs that couldn't hide the power of the melodies, or a wit that could be both tender and savage". Harper adds: "The similarities don’t end there – both in his dress and in his music, Martin Newell adopted the (even then) retro, androgynous, psychedelic image that would mark Ariel Pink out in the 00s".[14]
  4. ↑ Specifically, Moore's 1976 debut album Phonography.[21] Pink was a devout fan of his work and shared the same musical approaches, although Moore denies that they sound similar. After the two collaborated in the 2000s, Moore's exposure increased as a result of Pink's solo success.[22] Pink believed that his own music, while heavily indebted to 1960s pop, is not classifiable in any genre.[23]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Bowe, Miles (July 26, 2013). "Band To Watch: Saint Pepsi". Stereogum. Retrieved 26 June 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Hinkes-Jones, Llewellyn (15 July 2010). "Downtempo Pop: When Good Music Gets a Bad Name". The Atlantic.
  3. 1 2 Sherburne, Phillip (October 20, 2015). "Songs in the Key of Zzz: The History of Sleep Music". Pitchfork.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Trainer 2016, p. 410.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Keenan, Dave (August 2009). "Childhood's End". The Wire (306).
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Reynolds, Simon (March 2011). "'Hypnagogic pop' and the landscape of Southern California". frieze (137). Retrieved 4 July 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Trainer 2016, p. 412.
  8. 1 2 3 Sherburne, Philip (May 22, 2012). "Last Step: Going to Sleep to Make Music to Sleep To". Spin Magazine. Retrieved 4 July 2016.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Stone Blue Editors (September 11, 2015). William Basinski: Musician Snapshots. SBE Media. pp. Chapter 3.
  10. 1 2 Bell, David (September 18, 2010). "Deserter's Songs – Looking Backwards: In Defence of Nostalgia". Ceasefire Mag. Retrieved August 17, 2016.
  11. ↑ Trainer 2016, pp. 412–413.
  12. ↑ Despres, Sean (July 18, 2010). "Whatever you do, don't call it 'chillwave'". The Japan Times. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  13. 1 2 Reynolds 2011, p. 345.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Harper, Adam (April 23, 2014). "Essay: Shades of Ariel Pink". Dummy Mag.
  15. 1 2 Reynolds 2011, p. 349.
  16. ↑ Reynolds 2011, p. 346.
  17. ↑ Trainer 2016, pp. 409–410.
  18. ↑ Reynolds 2011, p. 348.
  19. ↑ Reynolds, Simon (January 19, 2011). "Leave Chillwave Alone". The Village Voice.
  20. 1 2 Redmond, Jordan (March 30, 2012). "John Maus - We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved October 24, 2017.
  21. 1 2 Ingram, Matthew (June 2012). "Here Comes the Flood". The Wire. No. 340.
  22. ↑ Burrows, Tim (September 9, 2012). "R Stevie Moore". Dazed Digital.
  23. ↑ Viney, Steven (November 14, 2017). "Is Ariel Pink finally being sincere?". Double J.
  24. 1 2 Moores, J.R. (October 9, 2014). "Speaking to the cult king of psychedelia and influencer of Ariel Pink, Temples and more". Red Bull.
  25. ↑ Schreiber, Ryan. "Best New Track: "Round and Round" by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti". Pitchfork Media. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
  26. 1 2 3 Poyau, Morgan (July 13, 2011). "The 80s Nostalgia Aesthetic Of Music's Hottest New Subgenre: Hypnagogic Pop". Vice Media. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
  27. 1 2 Keenan, David (January 2011). "Wake Up Call". The Wire. No. 323. p. 43.
  28. ↑ Schilling, Dave (April 8, 2015). "That Was a Thing: The Brief History of the Totally Made-Up Chillwave Music Genre". Grantland.
  29. ↑ Trainer 2016, pp. 409, 416.
  30. ↑ Weiss, Dan (July 6, 2012). "Slutwave, Tumblr Rap, Rape Gaze: Obscure Musical Genres Explained". LA Weekly.
  31. ↑ Trainer 2016, p. 416.
  32. ↑ Pounds, Ross (June 30, 2010). "Why Glo-Fi's Future Is Not Ephemeral". The Quietus.
  33. 1 2 3 Harper, Adam (December 7, 2012). "Comment: Vaporwave and the pop-art of the virtual plaza". Dummy. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
  34. ↑ Lynskey, Dorian (February 25, 2010). "Chillwave or twee-fi? Pop's latest genre folly". The Guardian.
  35. ↑ Keith, Kawaii (November 24, 2009). "Oneohtrix Point Never interview". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved 15 August 2016.
  36. 1 2 Trainer 2016, p. 409.
  37. 1 2 3 Lindemann, Lodovico. "Cosa vuol dire "musica psichedelica" nel 2016?". Rockit (in Italian).
  38. 1 2 3 Blackwell, Matthew (June 23, 2010). "Oneohtrix Point Never Returnal". Prefix Mag. Archived from the original on September 14, 2016.
  39. ↑ David Laderman, Laurel Westrup (2014). Sampling Media. OPU USA. p. 109.
  40. ↑ "Sam Mehran of Outer Limits Recordings has died". The Wire. August 1, 2018.
  41. ↑ Aftandilians, Natasha. "Review: All Aboard Neon Indian's Time-Traveling Cruise Ship on 'VEGA INTL. Night School'". SPIN. Retrieved 29 January 2017.

Bibliography

  • Reynolds, Simon (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1-4299-6858-4.
  • Trainer, Adam (2016). "From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory". The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-932128-5.
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