Post-noise

In August 2009, writer David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop" in the article ''Childhood's End in issue 306 of the British music magazine The Wire''. Keenan also noted the commonalities between hypnagogic pop and noise music, stating that "Like Noise before it, Hypnagogic pop fetishises the outmoded media of its infancy, releasing albums on cassette, celebrating the video era and obsessing over the reality-scrambling potential of photocopied art." In 2009, musician Daniel Lopatin described post-noise as a move away from "macho" noise music. Hypnagogic pop has been cited as growing out of post-noise music. On September 28, 2009, writer Emilie Friedlander would post an article on hypnagogic pop stating, "I commend Keenan a hundred times over for putting into words something that was on the tip of many a critical tongue over the past year but that no one had the guts articulate as something so sweeping as a cultural movement: the rise of a lo-fi post-noise psychedelia that moves past noise's rejection of consonance and sort of unconscious adherence to the 20th century high modernist ideal of autonomous art (art that engages in discourse with contemporary culture precisely by refusing such a discourse, though noise typically refuses a discourse with academic constructs of this kind as well)". In Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (2013), author Eldritch Priest describes "lo-fi post-noise psychedelia" as "often drone-heavy and noise-inclined, this music is characterized by a logic of deformation that aims to disfigure without obliterating samples, timbres, and impressions noticeably culled from a musical past that never was." Priest refers to what writer David Keenan labelled "wasteland 1980s cultural signifiers" to describe how "Indulgence in these warped signifiers is what gives the music its spectral identity." Additionally, Priest stated that the style blends "outmoded media's high noise to signal ratio with an affected anti-virtuosity", and elaborated "Rather than sampling 1980s pop culture with contemporary technology, one can hear composers recycling the tropes of experimental art music from the 1950s and 1970s, tropes that Michael Nyman compiled and categorized as 'indeterminacy,' 'process,' 'ephemerality,' and the 'non-identity' of a work. But we can also hear the debt to conceptual art and free jazz that helped evolve experimental music in the 1970s into sound art, something that Hauntology and Hypnagogic Pop don't exhibit owing to the rock and dance background of their practitioners." In Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (2016), author Stephen Graham defines post-noise as a wide subgenre of noise music which breaks apart noise music's orthodoxies, "inserting newer influences and references from popular culture alongside dyschronic affects [...] and subliminal modalities." It can even add "some commercial appeal." alongside German progressive electronic and kosmische musik artists such as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Vangelis and Edgar Froese. 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". == History ==

Origins (pictured in 2012) and Spencer Clark's noise group the Skaters formed in 2004.Writer Stephen Graham traces "the wide genre(s) of post-noise music" to a hybridization of the noise music scene which took place from the 1990s onwards. After a year of recording, they began touring around the country. Graham referred to Ferraro as a "post-noise musician". Pocahaunted, Dolphins into the Future, Stellar Om Source, Xiphiidae, Laurel Halo, and Emeralds. Independent record labels such as California-based Not Not Fun proved influential. The style primarily proliferated on the Internet, especially through cassette tape and CD-R sharing. Some artists also owned netlabels that published music coming from the scene, such as Spencer Clark's Pacific City Sound Visions, James Ferraro's New Age Tapes and Muscleworks Inc., Ferraro used New Age Tapes primarily for small-run releases of his own work on CD-R and cassette. Graham used the phrase "post-noise fringe pop", while writers Emilie Friedland and Eldritch Priest used the phrase "lo-fi post-noise psychedelia". Simon Reynolds credited a comment made by James Ferraro with inspiring the use of the term "hypnagogic". In December 2010, writer Ed Jupp acknowledged the article and a debate surrounding it in a review of Twin Shadow's Forget: According to Keenan, hypnagogic pop "takes New Age at its word, as legitimate devotional music filtered through the particular ethos of the time." Further adding that the album was one of the best representatives of hypnagogic pop which was described as a "mysterious post-noise persuasion". The group were described as "warm nostalgic experiments in post-noise drone and shimmering pop." Other artists who have been associated with the style include James Ferraro and Dolphins Into the Future. Independent record label Leaving Records was labelled a "bastion" of the movement. groups such as Emeralds, who "prompted a wave of millennial interest in kosmische Musik (Deuter, Klaus Schulze, Cluster et al)". The term was also used by Pitchfork to label Brooklyn band Titan. According to the Village Voice, around 2006, Lopatin stated that the Brooklyn noise scene began to discuss the work of Klaus Schulze. Initially Lopatin was considered an outcast in the scene for introducing "'70s cosmic trance music and '80s new age" into noise music. That same year, Canadian magazine Exclaim! referred to Daniel Lopatin on the collaborative album Instrumental Tourist as "neo-kosmische noodling". By December, The Quietus published a review of Bee Mask's When We Were Eating Unripe Pears by Rory Gibb, where he associated the term "neo-kosmische" with post-noise, stating "Of all the neo-kosmische/post-noise explorers whose balmy currents have lapped at our shores over the past few years, Chris Madak is among the few who seem hellbent on mapping out genuinely new territory." Pitchfork stated that Lopatin "was at the vanguard of the American noise scene in the hazy years when it retreated from feedback-soaked harshness into an unkanny kosmische". Vaporwave and development contributed to the development of vaporwave Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) has been cited as emerging from the post-noise scene. That same year, Lopatin stated "I've got more in common with the American noise scene, to be honest." On December 4, 2018, University of California Press published a research paper which stated that vaporwave shared "ties to the trends of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise music, such as 'hypnagogic pop'". In 2025, Pitchfork stated in a retrospective review: He suggested that post-punk faced criticism from early punk scenes due to its associations with Black and queer cultures, and characterized first-generation punk as " just rockers with trashier aesthetix (punk rock-rock inertia undiluted)". In 2011, Tiny Mix Tapes reviewed James Ferraro's album Inhale C-4 $$$$$ which was released as BEBETUNE$, writer Jonathan Dean highlighted audience perception of Ferraro's music from his early work through Far Side Virtual, stating that there was "a growing rank of malcontents who have greeted Ferraro's sudden leap from the lo-fi post-noise underground to lurid HD postmodernity with skepticism or contempt." That same year, writing for Drowned in Sound in a review of Laurel Halo's album Hour Logic released on the independent record label Hippos in Tanks, Rory Gibb stated: Her ambient and new age project New Mexican Stargazers drew heavy inspiration from the work of James Ferraro and Spencer Clark. Her work under Bagel Fanclub, a musical duo between Everett and Caybee Calabash, has been characterized as spanning "post-noise pastiches and dense braindance." == See also ==