Hypnagogic pop

In August 2009, journalist David Keenan, who was known as a reporter of noise, freak folk, and drone music scenes, coined the term "hypnagogic pop" in issue 306 of British music magazine The Wire. His article was entitled ''Childhood's End.'' Keenan applied the label to a developing trend of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise music in which artists engaged with elements of cultural nostalgia, The term reportedly originated with a comment by James Ferraro about the notion that 1980s sounds had seeped into the unconscious of contemporary musicians while they were toddlers falling asleep and their parents played music in another room. Among the artists discussed in Keenan's article were Ariel Pink, Daniel Lopatin, the Skaters, the Savage Young Taterbug, Gary War, Zola Jesus, Ducktails, Emeralds, and Pocahaunted. According to Keenan, these artists drew 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. 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." In a later article, Keenan identified Lopatin, Ferraro, Clark, and ex-Test Icicles member Sam Mehran as hypnagogic pop's "most adventurous proponents". ==Characteristics==

Hypnagogic pop is pop or psychedelic music that draws heavily from the popular music and culture of the 1980s to the early 1990s. In this way, hypnagogic pop distinguishes itself from revivalist movements. As authors Maël Guesdon and Philippe Le Guern write, the genre can be described as "revisionist nostalgia, not in the sense that 'everything used to be better' but because it rewrites collective memory with a view to being more faithful to an idea or a memory of the original than to the original itself." . Hypnagogic pop artists often use or emulate outdated cassette recording technology. Examples of specific sounds evoked by hypnagogic pop artists range from "ecstatically blurry and irradiated lo-fi pop" to "seventies cosmic-synth-rock" and "tripped-out, tribal exotica". Writing for Vice in 2011, Morgan Poyau described the genre as "making awkward bedfellows out of experimental music enthusiasts and weird progressive pop theorists." He described a typical manifestation of the style as featuring long tracks "saturated with echo, delay, smothered guitars and amputated synths." Recordings are often deliberately degraded, produced with analog equipment, and exhibit recording idiosyncrasies such as tape hiss. It employs sounds that were considered "futuristic" during the 1980s which, due to their outmoded nature, appear psychedelic out of context. Also common was the use of outmoded audiovisual technology and DIY digital imagery, such as compact cassettes, VHS, CD-R discs, and early Internet aesthetics. == Background ==

In the 2000s, a wave of retro-inspired home recording artists began dominating underground indie scenes. The emergence of Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, in particular, prompted journalistic discussion of the philosophical concept of hauntology, most prominently among the writers Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. Later, the term "hauntology" was described as a British synonym for hypnagogic pop, while hypnagogic pop was described as an "American cousin" to Britain's hauntological music scene. (pictured in 2012). Todd Ledford, owner of the music label Olde English Spelling Bee (OESB), attributed a correlation between the proliferation of hypnagogic pop and the rise of YouTube. Reynolds attributed the origins of hypnagogic pop to Southern California and its culture. Trainer disagreed with Reynolds' assertion and said the style "arguably" emerged from numerous simultaneous scenes inhabited by artists working in a diverse form of "post-noise psychedelia". Pitchforks Marc Masters offered that it may have originated "less [as] a movement than a coincidence". 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. The Skaters were a noise duo consisting of James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, and like Pink, were based in California. In the mid-2000s, they released dozens of CD-Rs and cassettes of psychedelic drone music, after which Ferraro and Clark each pursued solo outings. He identified Pink and the Skaters as the "godparents of hypnagogic", and credited a comment made by Ferraro with inspiring the use of the term "hypnagogic". However, Reynolds 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. R. Stevie Moore, Gary Wilson and Martin Newell's the Cleaners from Venus were earlier artists who anticipated Pink's sound. Another precursor to the genre was Nick Nicely and his 1982 single "Hilly Fields (1892)". Red Bull Musics J.R. Moore wrote that Nicely's "uniquely haphazard DIY aesthetic" and contemporary take on 1960s psychedelic pop "basically invented the sound of the 2000s Hypnagogic Pop movement decades beforehand." Complex contributor Joe Price felt that the h-pop movement was "birthed" by Ferraro and "the vastly overlooked [Missouri artist] 18 Carat Affair". In Reynolds' description, "other rising figures" from the original California scene included Sun Araw, LA Vampires and Puro Instinct. He added: "Other key hypnagogues such as Matrix Metals and Rangers reside elsewhere but seem SoCal in spirit." == History ==

In 2009, David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop", which led to a variety of music blogs writing about the phenomenon. Some of his contemporaries, such as Ferraro, Clark, and War, failed to match his mainstream success. When this point was raised to Clark in a 2013 interview, he replied that Pink was simply "an ambassador of California, like the Beach Boys." In 2010, Pitchfork launched Altered Zones, effectively an online newsletter for hypnagogic acts. was coined one month before Keenan's 2009 article and was adopted synonymously with "hypnagogic pop". 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. 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." amplified notions of self-referential irony and satire in hypnagogic pop. Sam Mehran was one of the earliest hypnagogic acts to anticipate vaporwave, with his project Matrix Metals and the 2009 album Flamingo Breeze, which was built on synthesizer loops. That same year, Lopatin uploaded a collection of plunderphonics loops to YouTube inconspicuously under the alias sunsetcorp. These clips were later assembled for the album ''Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1'' (2010). Adam Harper surmised that the author cited the work as "vaporwave" instead of "hypnagogic pop" possibly because they were unfamiliar with the latter term. He jokingly remarked of "a special place in hell" for those who attempt to separate the three genres: "it's a back room where Satan forever explains the differences between death metal, black metal and doom metal." Writer Emilie Friedlander stated that the message board "Terminal Boredom" was where the debate on Keenan's article began. Keenan became disenchanted with artists of the movement who streamlined their sound In the 2010 Rewind issue of The Wire, Keenan said that h-pop had "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." He invoked chillwave as "one of the more meaningless sobriquets applied to the new future pop visions" and "a much more appropriate description of the mindless, depoliticised embracing of mainstream values that H-pop has come to be associated with." while New York Times writer Jon Pareles criticized the style as "annoyingly noncommittal music". The latter described a showcase of such bands at the 2010 South by Southwest festival as "a hedged, hipster imitation of the pop they're not brash enough to make". However, like Keenan, she later wrote of her disenchantment with the movement, after hearing Ferraro's ''Far Side Virtual's "reclamation of the laptop" which made her "realise how out-of-hand the whole lo-fi conceit had become"''. Likewise, an affinity for the retro proved itself as a hallmark of 2010s youth culture. Cultural interpretations 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. 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." Guesdon and Le Guern posit that "the hypnagogic movement can be seen as an aesthetic response to the growing feeling that time is speeding up: a feeling that often proves to be one of the fundamental components of advanced modernity." On September 28, 2009, Writer Emilie Frielander would post an article in response to David Keenan's Childhood's End article on hypnagogic pop, stating: "So is hypnagogic pop political, in the sense of engaging in some way in the fight against capitalism and capitalist culture? Or does it signify a kind of dying gasp on the part of experimental music, a becoming-consensual of a noise now ready to throw down its hands and to concede that–at the end of the day–people just want to listen to Fleetwood Mac? My personal belief is that, sure, this new music may be somewhat 'nostalgic' or 'reactionary' in its return to outmoded recording technologies and the pop cultural idioms we grew up with as kids. But in this movement backwards I think there is the implicit recognition that these tropes actually form the fabric of our musical consciousness, and that they present building blocks for us to use as we move forward and try to create art that is true to our experience as members of the Y generation: coming of age with a remote control in one hand and an Ipod in the other, listening to our parents tell us that every good song in the universe has already been written". 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. 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." Writer Eldritch Priest stated in 2013, that hypnagogic pop and hauntology were "manifest examples of how music expresses a cultural lull. Both styles refer chiefly to a retro-electronic music steeped in a sensibility for the fictional, or (keeping with the apparitional signifiers) the spectral nature of nostalgia. Specifically, groups like Mordant Music and Pocahaunted mine the past for sounds that act the way Fredric Jameson suggests signifiers in a postmodern age do: they serve as codes for the affections of an era’s style that can be 'cannibalized' and made into 'a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm'". == Related terms ==

Crimson Wave Crimson Wave is a music genre and scene associated with female artists in the hypnagogic pop scene such as U.S. Girls, Zola Jesus, LA Vampires, In 2008, Die Stasi’s XXperiments559 compilation album gathered several female musicians such as Buckets Of Bile, Cro Magnon and their solo projects Bird and Circuit Des Yeux, Luxury Prevention, U.S. Girls, Wolf Eyes-related projects and Zola Jesus. These artists became known as part of a shortlived music genre known as "Crimson Wave". ==See also==