i know everybody else has already forgotten abt it but can we have one chillwave thread that isnt entirely ¡LOLwave! or w/e

"i associate "chillwave" with "balearic." is that totally off-base?"

im glad someone brought this up. they share a very similar dna. hazy dreamy music that is made for comedowns or chilling out.
the ocean is a prominent metaphor that drives both genres. they also both share a love of nostalgia. "smooth" sounds are also operative for both genres. the only difference is that balearic is meant for dancing at 4 am as you are coming down, chillwave doesnt seem to have much dancing in the cards.
altho conceivably one can dance to washed out. i think thats where the difference lies, one genres is driven to dancers, while the others is geared towards rockers, but sonically i hear tons of overlap.

am considering getting into sun araw on the basis of this on patrol thing which is excellent. it is exactly what i think chillwave is supposed to be about, ideally (or was supposed to be about, back when it was pure and before hipsters came and ruined it). anyway, i understand from this thread that the categorization of sun araw as chillwave is somehow controversial and part of a contested zone. so am i out of step with consensus in thinking that sun araw is totally chillwave? or how do i get into other stuff that is like this, if maybe there is a thread for that instead?

to think that this music has anything to do w/people that aren't hipsters is just crazy talk

i mean, have you even seen what sun araw looks like?!

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/22960365/Sun+Araw+CASIOSUN.jpg

no hipsters they are the enemy of all that is pure and true. have you not heard?

guy on left is a train engineer (clearly) and woman has temple of the spirit concerns in mind. hipsters care only about the ways that cocaine can be hidden in shoes.

xposts no

I am sure someone will tell me I'm doing it wrong but I'm going to pretend chillwave = slightly sad slightly repetitive basic-timbre synth music.

but it does make me think of those microphones records (i may be the only person alive wholl still cop to liking those...)

I still dig them a bunch, not so much the Mt. Eerie material. Wouldn't call "The Moon" chillwave though.

i think of chillwave as spreading out from those sad repetitive vibes to include all the stuff that would sound good on the same playlist and also that those vibes issue forth from. like obviously some anco and black dice, but lots of guitar stuff too because ducktails come on essential to my comprehension. sad, evocative, nostalgic, basic, blurry, homemade, hissy, repetitive, washed out, beachy, summery, chill. not necessarily synths tho. it's not about being narrow.

Wouldn't call "The Moon" chillwave though.

i linked it because i think it fits really well into this idea of proto-chillwave i have - mb not sonically although the intro is p close - particularly the way he portrays nature/the ocean as both isolating & freeing ("the roar of waves, the pounding surf, two bodies on the earth/ it was intense just getting to be there next to you") + the yearning for escape into the past ("i drove up to the city at night and found the place where you grew up") and the wilderness ("i finally felt like I was breathing free").

also i mean a song about love + chilling on a roof & watching the moon + death?

to think that this music has anything to do w/people that aren't hipsters is just crazy talk

lol

i think thats where the difference lies, one genres is driven to dancers, while the others is geared towards rockers, but sonically i hear tons of overlap.

imm 'chillwave' is kinda hard to define 'sonically' since its a little all over the map although repetition + distortion + synths + space are all important. what makes chillwave stuff different from balearic is the pronounced melancholy streak that chillwave has it wears it anxieties a lot more openly

n e way heres a vid about what chillwave means to me:

http://vimeo.com/12381217

Plaxico is the John Peel of chillwave.

totally feeling these layered/screwed audio/visual experiments

http://muzak.arawa.fm/wordpress/wordpress/?p=1457

Yeah those were nice. I especially liked "don't ask me" and "save a prayer"

damn, if me and my bros had owned recording equipment throughout undergrad we would've been a chillwave band :( regrets...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCQOluwl5aA

proto-chillwave?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBgWNWZQhgo

so i'm slowly working my way through sun araw, have not yet heard any of the magic lantern stuff, but HOLY SHIT heavy deeds is incredible. this and on patrol = some of the best and most immediately enjoyable psychedelic guitar music i've heard in ages, up there with back dice, oneida and grouper for quality 21st century production of stretchy head tones.

does previous sun araw come anywhere close to this level of effortless free-form drip & drool?

Most things with the label attached don't grab me at all, but I really love this ditty I came across yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0gh1oLOpGU

Is this conceivably chillwave? I may have to reassess all the pointers I've pointedly ignored over the past year...

Heavy Deeds is probably my favorite of his. A total monster. You should try to find a copy of Beach Head asap.

have not yet heard any of the magic lantern stuff

you need to get on that too - have it

Proto-chillwave:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=leonard+cohen+democracy&aq=f

yeah how to dress well are also great, i <3 that video for decisions

i've had this how-to-dress-well disc on almost constant repeat for a few days now. i had zero interest in it, then -- totally on a whim -- downloaded it and was blown-away. it sounds nothing like my image of "chillwave," though. it sounds like HTDW are doing for late-80s r&b what burial did for late 90s/early 00 uk electronic dance genres.

give me "ghostly-reimaginations" of almost any genre; ghostly grunge; ghostly teenpop; ghostly hair metal.

http://chillwitchnamemagic.com/

hipster neil young jumping the bandwagon

Featuring eight simplistic “state of the world” songs performed alone by Young on his untamed guitar, Le Noise has been fashioned (via producer Daniel Lanois) into a chillwave record

five chillwave classics ive been thinking about lately:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnIfgITYzuY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Gxy7idkXA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if-57mBUi7g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_WBAlp69bU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzLPV18ZxiU

i was at noise show a couple of weaks ago and there was a band that had a dude playing a nintendo ds korg synth over some feedback, a disco loop and a minor threat record.

it wasnt v chill but i made me glad to be alive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS513FRfbwE

lamp those chillwave things u posted are pretty aggro is this a seasonal thing or are u detecting an aesthetic wind change?

also u know where i am likely to see some of this stuff in bkln?

tagged my music on bandcamp as chillwave as a joke and got some ridiculous amount of hits from it

idk i guess i didnt think of them as all that 'aggro'? probably is a thing tho - slightly harder/dirtier/meaner sounds seem prevelant in new-ish 'yung kids make cheap music 4 themselves & their friends' genre musixxx.

ive been obsessed w/ C V L T S lately - dude has a tape thats sold out (black hole, hi 5) but u can hear a bunch of it on his myspace: http://www.myspace.com/cvlts

cant think of any place that does reg chillwave nites i mostly just went to shows in bklyn? mb like brookyln bowl? loll

OMG I want someone to do a regular chillwave night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGnLga7U2FI&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeTiWlITVcY&feature=related

have you heard this record plax? i think its too 'clean' and 'upbeat' to really be chillwave but its sort of beautiful in its empty sincerity

it weirdly makes it clear how hard it is to feel things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVK-rUDru_k&feature=related

feel like this is a better way of doing an 'upbeat' and 'ethereal' chillwave lost summer track

i literally have not heard any new music since i last posted on this thread, but that active child track u posted came on my ipod today and it was kindof overwhelming

its kindof a perfect time for me to hear this stuff. i mean, being a tourist and the nostalgia that for a tourist seems to glaze everything. like u absorb everything as an img that repeats the imgu already had in ur head. idk its late.

nyc is (paradoxically) a p great place to listen to chillwave i think bcuz so often things feel sped up or out of focus or incessantly now. if you get a chance try listening to 'minutes to silence' again...

i will maintain that what makes chillwave really interesting is how ultimately anxious it is

its really abt how u wasted ur youth

if a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time

you can watch the bottom fall out of a life, a scene, a city, anything and it only takes a second. you sense that it has happened before it actually has and whatever force held now spirals outward and inward at the same time impossible fast, consuming itself and everything around it

it's a magical world, hobbes. let's start exploring

i will maintain that what makes chillwave really interesting is how ultimately anxious it is

― .gif of the magi (Lamp),

What do you mean by this?

you cant take a photo unless its already gone

@mark: feels like sonically/lyrically/aesthetically 'chillwave' songs are beset by anxiety abt the future - theyre resolutely backwards-looking, towards an idealized self/place/time that youve already lost. plax's feris bueller nod is otm its music for ppl that are blowing off finals bcuz you were never going to pass anyway so why not go to the beach and get blitzed on bud w/ lime & just float in the ocean and watch the sun set

lots of these tracks are even structurally uncertain - they meander or burst to life and then fade or simply ride a groove for a few minutes and stutter out - the repetition of/motifs incl. childhood, youth, summer, vacation, escape, nature are all ways of ignoring reality. its fearful music made at a p fearful time but it deals with that by pushing those elements down in the mix - theres an 'undertow' of darkness the delays, distortion, echoes that speaks of the always present now.

also the loss that haunts the depictions of the various edens also gets doubled back into the future - youve lost your future before you even had it - so all thats left is a sunny beach or glade or p girl on a bike now now now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMLQ4FRsepg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXGhpUAHP1c

really digging the run dmt/happy family split cassette. certainly par for the genre, but it hits it just right imo

bored cant sleep thought id do a top 10 chillwave trax of 2k10 rundown. well see how far i get b4 i get 2 bored to keep going

10 Computer Magic - Teenage Ballad (High School)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79xL0iW2UCk

i guess the idea of a song abt being a bored young girl in suburbia 'who just wants to be free' is typically a sentiment for songs by lames like arcade fire or taylor swift but danz puts all the focus on the limits of her own yearning & uncertainty. the woozy frustration of the repeated 'no, no, no' part makes whats a kinda boilerplate chillwave synth track something deeply felt.

09 Emily Reo - Car

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INa_6vHuAwo

'distance' is the name of the game in reo's cover of built to spill's 'car'. it uses some fairly cheap delay/distortion effects to separate reo from the listener her montone barely ranging above the song's general drone. but its such a beautiful song that when the cracks appear in reo's facade it makes the desire for escape and renewal that much more urgent. 'i wanna see movies of my dreams' is a p rad chillwave epitaph

08 Beautiful Unicorn - Let's Kick It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hBQaxqI7cY

one of the best tracks from the pastiche obsessed 80s dance end of chillwave i dont really have a lot to say abt this song just think it str8 kills for every single minute its on

07 C V L T S - Luck Surf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBhrH6Qz5Po

there's something unfinished abt this track i keep expecting it to range beyond the three simple parts it has. at times it seems like the undertone of disonance will overcome the track sprawling out into true noise at other times it feels like the song might tighten up into a 'real' pop song. instead it kinda just hangs there running that groove raw, keeping you guessing.

06 Motion Sickness of Time Travel - Everything Must Die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDdjpTJB9Lc

not a very chill sentiment! & while the chilly, processed vocals & the skittering synths glide over a track thats probably abt as ambient as 'chillwave' gets the glassy, distant, anxious music feels like a good encapsulation of what i get from the genre. its pretty but lonely, i can never make out what the girl is supposed to be saying, or telling me, or singing, & the whole thing seems afraid of itself. its music that feels uncertain of its place in the world, or at least thats how it feels to me.

those are nice, hadn't heard any of those... they don't really sell the genre though, if I had no idea what chillwave was and this was my introduction I'd be certainly disinterested.

cont'd

05 Beach Fossils - The Horse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4oko3Hj9r4

there are a bunch of great bands making sunny, jangley guitar pop with distorted vocals and some 'weird' flourishes & i like quite a few of them. & there are a bunch of great vidz linked itt along a similar line from toro y moi, wild nothing, pearl harbour, seapony probably others. but this is the song that i would play on repeat walking home from parties in the summer, the one where i know all the words, the one that i love the most

04 Games - Strawberry Skies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5scYXIvAr7w

it feels impossible that this song isnt longer like there should be 5 minutes more of the midtrack build or just more in general idk. really not much to say about this its just a great 80s dance track with just enough melancholy to still feel like chillwave

03 Teen Inc. - Friend of the Night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n27MTAPoy2A

smoothly chill rnb groove sounds hollow and ominous on closer inspection. god this song is so lonely, that whistle sounds like the mournful wind of winter, who the fuck is friends here, everyone dies alone. too cool to think about it i guess.

02 Tennis - Baltimore/South Carolina

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkg3PhN0xpo&feature=related

i had hard time choosing btw these two so just cheated and put the whole 7". its yknow, chillwave, lo-fi, golden summer songs abt aimless and mostly unhappy seeming ppl. its gorgeous and obvious and wonderful. also when i saw them live they played for like twenty minutes, which is sort of perfect & right abt what i always aim for.

01 CFCF - Before and After Light

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsvC0iTxok8

the very beginning of this song sounds a lot like the music from final fantasty when you 1st cross the bridge north of coneria. i dont think thats why i like this song so much - its delicate and pretty and relaxed - but it helps. i had this whole idea about how this track has this interplay btw the nostalgic, chill, simple sounds of chillwaves and these anxious, dark-sounding stabs that keep intruding & what a great example of what drives chillwave &c &c. its p stupid but i do think theres something 'representative' about this track, maybe just how unrepresentative it feels on 1st blush