Chillwave

Chillwave has been classified as psychedelia,[8] bedroom pop,[2][3] or electropop.[13] Before the term was invented, chillwave music was described as shoegaze, dream pop,[26][25] ambient, or indietronica.[25] Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe writes that, since at least 1992, the style has existed for the same principal reason: "stoned, happy college kids listening to records while they fall asleep." Abebe cites Slowdive, Darla Records' Blissed Out ambient compilations, and Casino Versus Japan's eponymous 1998 album as examples.[25] One of the earliest known manifestations of the genre is the Beach Boys' song "All I Wanna Do" from their 1970 album Sunflower.[27][28] Boards of Canada, whom Abebe says pre-chillwave music was often compared to,[25] were also influential,[29][17] as were J Dilla's 2006 album Donuts and Fennesz.[21][17]

Ariel Pink is frequently cited as "the godfather of chillwave".[30] He gained recognition in the mid 2000s through a string of home-recorded albums that reconfigured 1970s radio-rock and 1980s new wave in a lo-fi setting.[31] The Paw Tracks record label, which distributed Pink's albums, was run by Animal Collective, who signed Pink after being impressed by a CD of his home recordings, starting with The Doldrums (2000).[30] Uncut's Sam Richard profiled Pink as "a lo-fi legend" whose "ghostly pop sound" proved influential to chillwave acts such as Ducktails and Toro y Moi.[32] Dummy Mag's Adam Harper disputed Pink's "godfather of chillwave" status, writing that his influence on lo-fi scenes has been somewhat overstated, explaining that his music lacks "the mirror-shades-cool synth groove of chillwave ... Pink's albums are zany, personal, largely rock-based and dressed in awkward glam".[33] Discussing chillwave's bedroom pop precursors, Allene Norton of Cellars opined that Pink is "definitely not chillwave but that kind of stuff influenced a lot of the artists making it, like Washed Out."[34]

In March 2007, Animal Collective's Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) released the album Person Pitch, which is credited with launching the chillwave style.[36][35][13] The album influenced a wide range of subsequent indie music,[37] with its sound serving as the major inspiration for chillwave and a number of soundalikes.[35] Animal Collective's music also contributed to the movement.[38] Their album Merriweather Post Pavilion, released in January 2009, was particularly influential for its ambient sounds and repetitive melodies, but was not as tightly associated with the "hazy" psychedelia that chillwave was identified with.[39] According to Flavorwire's Tom Hawking, chillwave acts extrapolated "the sort of ill-defined pastoral nostalgia" from Animal Collective's early work "and spun it into an entire genre."[38] However, "Animal Collective were never really part of that scene, such as it was — they were more like its spiritual overlords".[38]

In February 2008, Atlas Sound (Bradford Cox) debuted with the album Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel. According to music journalist Larry Fitzmaurice, "it’s impossible to overstate Cox’s influence on [chillwave]" and he added that the album's "ice-sculpture ambient pop ... was streaked with themes of impermanence and memory, which would soon come to define chillwave as a whole."[40] Lennox later contributed guest vocals to Cox's 2009 song "Walkabout", referred to as an "early chillwave totem" by Fitzmaurice.[40]

Chillwave flourished throughout 2008 and 2009,[36] culminating with the 2009 "Summer of Chillwave", which was marked by an inundation of artists with names and song titles referencing summertime, the beach, or surfing.[41] Songs were generally of low-to-moderate tempo[42] and incorporated vintage, analog instrumentation that evoked the popular music of the late 1970s and early 1980s.[43] Initially, the "chillwave" tag was subsumed under the "glo-fi" and "hypnagogic pop" labels.[4] Journalist David Keenan coined "hypnagogic pop" a few weeks after "chillwave" was invented to describe a 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.[44] While chillwave and hypnagogic pop both evoke 1980s–90s imagery, chillwave has a more commercial sound that emphasizes "cheesy" hooks and reverb effects.[45] "Glo-fi" soon fell out of popular usage.[17]

Neon Indian (Alan Palomo), Washed Out (Ernest Greene), and Toro y Moi (Chaz Bundick) were considered to be the vanguard of the chillwave movement.[39][13][50] All three were one-man acts from the Southern U.S, while Greene and Bundick were acquaintances and collaborators.[51] Greene's "Feel It All Around" (July 2009) became the best known song of the genre, later to be employed as a backdrop for the opening sequence of the television series Portlandia (2011–2018).[19] Neon Indian's debut Psychic Chasms (October 2009) was another early album that typified the genre,[34] particularly the tracks "Deadbeat Summer", "Terminally Chill", and "Should've Taken Acid With You".[52] Bundick's debut Causers of This (January 2010) drew similar attention for its style of old-fashioned, lo-fi pop.[53] The album was acclaimed by critics and given an early endorsement by Kanye West, which lent the work significantly more popularity. Rolling Stone additionally dubbed Bundick the "godfather of chillwave".[54]

Writing in 2019, Ian Cohen of Stereogum argued Dayve Hawke (variously known as Memory Tapes, Memory Cassette, and Weird Tapes) to be the fourth leading chillwave act of the era. Cohen identified Hawke's output as "quintessential chillwave documents", namely the 2009 album Seek Magic, "probably the best album of the bunch that dropped in 2009 — and, by definition, probably the greatest chillwave album of all time."[17]

Although it had no specific geographical sourcepoint, chillwave was concentrated in the south and east coast of the US,[9] with Brooklyn, New York figuring the most prominently.[36] Hawking notes that the "fact this was such beach-centric music makes it interesting ... chillwave also strikes me as hugely middle class music. ... whereas punk reacted with anger and a desire for change, chillwave was the sound of escapism and resignation. ... it's surely no coincidence that chillwave's rise coincided with the aftermath of the 2007 sub-prime economic meltdown."[36] Eric Grandy of The Stranger said that the genre's practitioners shared "a kind of fond nostalgia for some vague, idealized childhood. Its posture is a sonic shoulder shrug, a languorous, musical 'whatevs'."[16] Another attempt at identifying the common threads of the scene was offered by Jon Pareles in The New York Times: "They're solo acts or minimal bands, often with a laptop at their core, and they trade on memories of electropop from the 1980s, with bouncing, blipping dance-music hooks (and often weaker lead voices). It's recession-era music: low-budget and danceable."[12]

In November 2009, Pitchfork ran an editorial feature on the "summer of chillwave". The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, who had been compared to Animal Collective, was mentioned as a "looming figure" throughout that summer's indie music. An unnamed editor argued that the similarities were more abstract than musical, and that Wilson's influence stems from his legend as an "emotionally fragile dude with mental health problems who coped by taking drugs. Summertime now is about disorientation: 'Should Have Taken Acid With You'; 'The Sun Was High (And So Am I)'; You take the fantasy of his music-- the cars, the sand, the surf-- add a dollop of melancholy and a smudge of druggy haze, and you have some good music for being alone in a room with only a computer to keep you company."[41] Vulture's Frank Guan writes that the evocation of summer is not "as a season of deprivation and loss of control, but [as] a summer spent in suburban quiet and prosperity, chilling indoors alone with central A/C, watching daytime TV or listening to music."[51]

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music that originated as an ironic variant of chillwave.[55] It was loosely derived from the work of hypnagogic artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, and was characterized by the invocation of retro popular culture[45] as well as the "analog nostalgia" of the chillwave scene.[48] Amplifying the experimental tendencies of hypnagogic pop,[56] vaporwave is cleanly produced and composed almost entirely from samples.[57] Early incarnations of the genre relied on sources such as smooth jazz, retro elevator music, R&B, and dance music from the 1980s and 1990s,[48] along with the application of slowed-down chopped and screwed techniques, looping, and other effects.[57][58] One of its many descriptions that were levied by online forums was "chillwave for Marxists",[18] as it is often associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and popular culture.[18] Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit, and 4chan.[59] A wealth of its own subgenres and offshoots—some of which deliberately gesture at the genre's non-seriousness—soon followed.[60]