Chillwave

{{quote box|text=[S]omething that could pass for today's "chillwave" has existed, in wide and steady circulation, at just about every moment for 20 years, and mostly as such a rote and staple sound that nobody would even think to name it specifically. Chillwave has been classified as psychedelia, Boards of Canada, whom Abebe says pre-chillwave music was often compared to, 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). Uncuts 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. Critic 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". 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." The album influenced a wide range of subsequent indie music, with its sound serving as the major inspiration for chillwave and a number of soundalikes. Animal Collective itself also contributed to the movement. 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. According to Flavorwires 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." ==Etymology and hypnagogic pop==

performing in 2010 Most accounts attribute "chillwave" to a July 2009 post written by "Carles", the pseudonymous manager of the blog Hipster Runoff. Carles used the term to describe a host of emerging bands that appeared similar to each other. The post concludes: A few weeks later, in August, The Wire journalist David Keenan coined "hypnagogic pop" to describe a trend of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise in which indie acts began to engage with elements of cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology. Chillwave initially became subsumed under the "hypnagogic pop" and "glo-fi" labels, While chillwave and hypnagogic pop both evoke the cultural aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s, chillwave espoused a more commercial sound that emphasized "cheesy" hooks and reverb effects. According to Pitchforks Miles Bowe, chillwave came to constitute a pejorative referencing the "cynical" rebranding of hypnagogic pop acts who had "streamlined [their] style to find genuine pop success." Keenan, who had previously championed hypnagogic pop, became disenchanted with many such artists, writing in 2011 that "in the reductive glare of mainstream media", chillwave had become "shorthand for a cheap form of revivalism and a valorising of bad taste". The term did not gain mainstream currency until early 2010, when it was the subject of articles by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. ==Peak popularity==

Summer of Chillwave and early vanguard , pictured in 2012) Chillwave flourished throughout 2008 and 2009, and incorporated vintage, analog instrumentation that evoked the popular music of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although it had no specific geographical source point, chillwave was concentrated in the southern and eastern coasts of the U.S., All three were one-man acts from the Southern U.S., while Greene and Bundick were acquaintances and collaborators. 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). Neon Indian's debut Psychic Chasms (October 2009) was another early album that typified the genre, particularly the tracks "Deadbeat Summer", "Terminally Chill", and "Should've Taken Acid With You". 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". 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." 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 as well as the "analog nostalgia" of the chillwave scene. Amplifying the experimental tendencies of hypnagogic pop, vaporwave is cleanly produced and composed almost entirely from samples. It relied on sources such as smooth jazz, retro elevator music, R&B, and dance music from the 1980s and 1990s, One of the descriptions of the genre that were levied by online forums was "chillwave for Marxists". Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit, and 4chan. A wealth of its own subgenres and offshoots—some of which deliberately gesture at the genre's non-seriousness—soon followed. ==Decline==

Chillwave reached its peak in mid-2010, The Village Voices Christopher Weingarten remarked in December 2009 that "90 percent of writing about glo-fi mentions 'the summer' in some fashion. And summer's been over for, like, four months now." The chillwave scene ultimately "withered and died". One major reason was a sudden oversaturation of artists, which came as a consequence of its simple production process. Explaining why the genre fell out of public favor, Bundick surmised that chillwave "did its thing, and once it became a thing, people stopped caring about it, even the artists [making it]." In 2015, Fitzmaurice reflected that the "holy triumvirate" of Washed Out, Toro y Moi, and Neon Indian had maintained their careers in spite of the genre's decline. Tom Hawking predicted that the "chillwave era will most likely be a footnote to musical history, a faint flaring of middle-class angst in a frightening time for everyone. But that doesn't mean it's not worth examining regardless, because its simple existence says far more about a generation than the music itself ever did." ==Legacy and critical perspective==

2008 financial crisis, summertime, and escapism Referencing the genre's Brooklyn-centric origins, Hawking noted 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." 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'." 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." Vultures 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." Internet music genres and validity Chillwave was one of the first genres to acquire an identity online Chillwave and other offshoots of it such as vaporwave gained popularity on YouTube, often as songs that were ironic or made to be memes. Grantlands Dave Schilling argued that the term was created to reveal "how arbitrary and meaningless" existing labels such as "shoegaze" and "dream pop" were. George McIntire of the San Francisco Bay Guardian described chillwave's origin as in the "throes of the blogosphere" and called the term a "cheap, slap-on label used to describe grainy, dancey, lo-fi, 1980s inspired music" and a "disservice to any band associated with it." In 2011, Carles said it was "ridiculous that any sort of press took it seriously" and that although the bands he spoke to "get annoyed" by the tag, "they understand that it's been a good thing. What about iTunes making it an official genre? It's now theoretically a marketable indie sound." By 2015, the majority consensus was that chillwave was a fabricated non-genre. In 2016, Palomo described labels like "chillwave" and "vaporwave" as "arbitrary" and that he "couldn't have been more happy" about the "chillwave" descriptor falling out of favor. Toro y Moi's Chaz Bundick publicly expressed the following about the genre, saying, "I like the fact that I'm associated with it. It's cool. Not a lot of artists get a chance to be a part of some sort of movement, so I guess in a way I'm super flattered to be considered a part of that." == Related terms ==

Glo-fi Glo-fi is a term for a musical style that was initially used synonymously with hypnagogic pop and chillwave. In 2010, The Guardian published an article by music critic Simon Reynolds where he stated "post-noise microscenes like glo-fi" were maintaining "the tape trade tradition, releasing music in small-run editions as low as 30 copies and wrapping them in surreal photocopy-collage artwork". While The New York Times equated the term to chillwave. ==References==