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

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

Ok, i take it back these are even better.

haha thanks

it feels p gross to have posted all this so i hope sum ppl at least like the youtubes

lamp, i am trapped in a hotel airport and i have no headphones,

ur killin me in other words

feel like missing xmas back home bc ur stuck in some poolside gilded hellhole is p chillwave tho

the computer magic song has a sarah records vibe goin on, i like it. only song i'd heard before is the CFCF, which i love. oh, i've also heard that strawberry skies song before, which is way better than a pseudo-80's nostalgia track should be at this point, i think i'd actually like it better if the video were less about reinforcing the whole hauntology angle, prety tired of that look at this point tbqh.

don't mean to be all anti-chillwave, tho, i really do love the song

yeah the computer magic song is cool, though it's more au revoir simone/burning hearts than sarah recs to me

feel like missing xmas back home bc ur stuck in some poolside gilded hellhole is p chillwave tho

are you still in los angeles?

the other day i was in a shop and the girl that worked there was flirting with this very tall dude, wearing boots and they had a conversation like:

BOY: what are you doing today? just working? *points vaguely at desk where the cash register sits*

GIRL: uh huh. are you painting?

BOY [with confidence]: you know it

hmmmm

ive told like twenty ppl about this conversation and it never ceases to amuse me

is the Games album a title a subtle Project Pat reference?

hey i know this is an actual video and not a bunch of stuff from everythingisterrible.com run through final cut so that means its probably not chillwave, but this was my joint in 2010:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnjwKAPCwbw

from the same LP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1iG0XannO4&feature=related

how do y'all feel abt KISSES?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MT63uaNMqA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP9ABWTfEWo

runner up for my chillwave track of the year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-CdixGLr2s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hgFlyNjtW8

And a definitely think the 'smooth music' textures are being deployed lovingly and somewhat 'authentically', rather than the lol80s cheeky irony that Pink or the chillwave crew might have.

― Davek (davek_00), Tuesday, January 25, 2011 2:21 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dont get 'cheeky irony' from pink & i thought chill wave was supposed to be seeped in nostalgia not irony

― challopian youtubes (deej), Tuesday, January 25, 2011 2:27 AM (10 hours ago)

I wanted to say something about chillwave. I think if you look through this thread and the mini-lectures that Lamp and I give there's two distinct approaches. Lamp is focussed on the specific emotional condition of chillwave whereas I've p much taken a more structuralist approach. Both have merit and compliment each other, but what is important to know about chillwave is that it is by nature a synthetic genre (lamp and I have both argued that it is to a large extent a curator-genre also) Its important to bear in mind that its structural synthesis and explicitly quotational use of signifiers is in essense a metonym for its emotional core.

most of us can agree on the stando genre hallmarks, electronic beats, fuzzy samples, drifting sad vocals. what i want to talk about tho is why i quote the little exchange above, that is, why the partic. nostalgia of chillwave is easily mistaken for coy irony.

chillwave as a genre is incredibly self conscious. it tends to focus on the its own surfaces: gauzy palimpsests like faded photographs, memories blurred and irretrievable. The sadness in chillwave is a product of how the past is invoked *as* something impenetrable. The 80s refs are not ubiquitous, there are plenty of bands that seem to invoke 60s girl groups or 90s fuzz pop or new age meditation tapes. some reference to the past is enevitable, some lost eden.

This is the internal paradox of chillwave, its most emotionally resonant features are also its most superficial. it speaks to a generation so immersed in the refractive lenses of pop-culture that every moment seems filtered and pre-encoded. like that melancholic feeling of listening to your headphones in a new city and seeing everything framed like in a movie. the space implied between your headphones is abstracted, surface rubbing against surface in dense layers, and the cracks that time is lost in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UM0RZ3C2oA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHuUzJfn9Ug

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

here's two of my favourite chillwave related tracks from 2010 that I don't remember being posted yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSeoeFoA7c0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs6dXrOvk8c

the part of me that was into scmaltzy early '00s electronica like casino vs japan is into some of this stuff but the vocals tend to ruin any enjoyment thats brewing

Love this thread despite somehow staying off. Thinking about r. stevie moore - more talk of him when ariel pink first appeared and gave interviews but I hear less now - and how his detachment from his sources as a strange house-bound rock star covering tv themes &c. are overt & form a big part of his appeal. it feels like the peculiar pleasures he taps into are underlining rather than glossing over the distance between him&his voice and the fertile colourful world of babes&stadiums. this is early true TV era pop in a way that someone like richard meltzer would hate/not get. I think this revelling in the gap between you & yr muse&content, enjoying the anaethecised feeling of never being able to make contact, is something he has in common w/ ppl posted in this thread. i cld build on this idea maybe.

appreciated plax's post a lot, some very apposite analogies - melancholic feeling of listening to your headphones in a new city and seeing everything framed like in a movie. but i'm not quite sure i know what's meant by structural synthesis or how that can be a metonym for anything.

i think what i meant is something like this: I've kindof talked a lot about the focus on the paratextual: samples *as* samples for eg. that is to say: dislocated fragments of sound like memories. Each element seems like something half forgotten, familiar but blurry. the tools used in the production recreate what the artists are trying to do emotionally: the impossible task of trying to recreate the past from these faded fragments. In this way the songs feel less like compositions and slightly more like the scene of some sort of ritual, the recasting of all this debris into something real and tangible.

btw that clive tanaka track that v79 posted is fn sweet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRqUJ2ivFh0

thread of missing lamp :-/

lamp has been amazing on this thread, the top 10 was great & we need ppl who are able to talk about this lucidly who also have shit like final fantasy in their vocab

the tools used in the production recreate what the artists are trying to do emotionally: the impossible task of trying to recreate the past from these faded fragments << this appeals to me in part, but i don't really think chillwave is an honest attempt to regress or recover or recreate the past, so much as a play on the unbridgable gap to the past as a way of moving round the seeming impossibility of making something new.

certain cultivated arseholes have decried chillwave as uninspired & 'creatively bankrupt' & presumably do not feel the weight of the presence of the entirety of recorded music, tv, articles &c. making new meaning impossible because all moves have been made so many times - the end of rock through over-exposure. i guess whiney et al wld say the self-conscious chillwave babe starts w/ if not a tabula rasa then at least possible routes forward. same sentiment is not shared by say, DUCKTAILS, who instead phrases his predicament: "you look to find direction, but all you see is your reflection".

it's not a retrograde attempt to reach back so much as an engagement w/ the current, present afterimages that are left from what's gone before. bookshops are starting 'memory' sections atm, memory as opposed to history i guess, memory of the past as opposed to the reality of the past which is only one youtube away so whats the point in spending energy on that. the fact that it's the past isn't particularly relevant (there's no particular mental distinction between past&present) so much as the engagement with that collective conscious - it's the same w/ lil b chanting ellen degeneres or playing the x-men theme. it's all muffled and incomplete, which makes it a lot more pliable but it's still resonant and can suddenly connect unexpectedly.

so you sit in yr EAGLES WORLD TOUR 1994 cap and create yr own spectral mythology ala james ferraro or w/e

i get what yr saying and i agree w/ u to a large extent except for "the fact that it's the past isn't particularly relevant" I like the bit about nothing being written onto a tabula rasa. instead there is a landscape strewn with shards of pop culture. social networking sites where people communicate emotion via youtube clips from old tv shows. The present is stitched together from the discarded remnants of the past. its kinda like walter benjamin and the angelus novus, the trash heap of history.

I love lamps line abt "how hard it is to feel things." I feel like this taps into the core of chillwaves disconnection. It's emotional music about not feeling anything. Its is simultan. anesthetised and yearning for a romanticised *past*. When I say past though I don't necc. mean a personal history, but an *idea* of the past. It is both idealised as a moment where you could feel something (i feel like this is always lyrically clear in lyrical motifs like teenagers, highschool, beaches, summer camp even the idea of summer and its fleeting temporality) and also like you said a kind of common language that people speak through now.

its like that andy warhol line abt how emotions always seem more real in movies. This seems to me to be the source of chillwaves nostalgia: not for a time *before* teen movies and youtube but for the source of those ~feelings~; smthng we can only barely piece together now.

the houses track that i recently posted has this line "when the colour starts fading in the video tape/ and the light burns holes in our eyes"

hmmm

thinking a lot about the way difficult times bring out the sense of foreboding & anxiety & that what ogmor's talking abt - the obv techno-historical dead end, trying to reconcile the past/present through art - is there but i wonder too abt the 'animal spirit' of the times & if that makes it seem harder to find 'new' or worthwhile things to say or ways of saying

like theres a quote from miss lonelyheart's: "at college and perhaps for a year afterwards they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty, and in personal expression as an absolute end. when they lost this belief they lost everything" which kinda haunts me & helps me see 'chillwave' as a determined attempt to avoid the bitterness & defeat of this - in an age pervasive w/ loss its looking for something to hold on to or a mode of ~being~ that reconciles now and then?

i mean i also wanted to start a new thread called 'none but nyarlathotep 2011' for this kind of music if only to escape the joke genre name but also because i was thinking abt lovecraft's "the past is real. it's all there is" and how that short story's vision of alienated modernity fit so tightly w/ the move from 'chillwave' to 'witchhouse' and the increasingly dark tones of the small subset of 'new music' that im concerned w/

anyway youtubes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYT99MVe_6E&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY_eY3M99Lg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj6uoyDfJgM

oh also i got this tape on breakfast of champs by milochondria its called EARREADINGS that i really, really like but he doesnt have any youtubes but this track is p good:

http://soundcloud.com/milochondria/ptbth

i guess again its like echoes of monstrous machines whos nameless parts decay and convluse instead of a still photograph of girl on a beach, her head turned away but its p beautiful still

welcome back
good posts, everyone. Reading intently here.

who is ogmor? His name sounds like a misunderstood monster from a comic book.

I like that idea of the artist searching for a direction to take and only seeing mirrors. It makes sense. Everything I know about Benjamin I know from gaddis, and that was mind hurting stuff like if Glenn Gould wishes he were the Steinway to be closer to Bach, what does Bach do to be closer to Bach? Like to what degree is there a perfect Bach in the sheet music and the mechanisms of the piano and tape and mixing deck, and is there some equivalent that Bach himself was looking for, as if he could also remove himself from the equation (which reminds me of Stein's what are masterpieces). And if the realm of transcendence is for art then this makes a kind of sense, but I don't know.

I can't think of chillwave without thinking about cognitive development in children. I think specifically of the way we've lost oral culture and a lot of speech modes and replaced them with technologically assisted communications and commercial entertainment, while chemically people have processed the happy meals and bbs door games and shit the way people processed their oral culture - which seems what everyone has said but whatever.
McLuhan says that global communications have brought in a new acoustic age so to him maybe it's like the indelible parts of digested pop and commercial culture are our folk culture and these musics are a natural way to celebrate and tell about them. See above whatever.

i kindof like holding on to the chillwave name, i sortof like that it as a reclaimed pejorative i guess.

i like what bam is saying about "the way we've lost oral culture and a lot of speech modes and replaced them with technologically assisted communications and commercial entertainment" and it def seems like a kind of corollary to what i was trying to say. That is that pop culture has become folk culture in a way bc of how ppl have become disconnected from folk traditions via popular entertainment, cosmopolitanism etc. I think you can see this in some of the critical reception chillwave has gotten, ppl talking about musicians using their laptops like acoustic guitars and piecing together something primitive and quiet in their bedrooms that speaks to something private and traditional.

valuable thread, no joke

there's a certain sensibility in this track by alpha that i feel fits in with this to some degree but certainly more along the lines of air's 'playground love' than most of the other music here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7gZ6J2GQvk

maybe stretching the definition with this and the last one, but this one as well, sort of that hazy jazzy nostalgia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb2HBDxqwIg

generally speaking i like any kind of music which has elements in the sound which explicitly hint at some kind of longing for the past or the haunted past kind of creeping into the present. this isn't chillwave but it's part and parcel of that general sort of sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fafEPuR1WUM

lol that groove armada is great but it also embarrassingly tests the legitimacy of my attempts at a chillwave master narrative and

bam's post really has me thinking but its all still p messy. "a new acoustic age" made me think of this tho:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g18sAmhFVI

i think its a little too long & crammed w/ ideas to be really effective but the way he layers the track is p neat

"if Glenn Gould wishes he were the Steinway to be closer to Bach, what does Bach do to be closer to Bach? Like to what degree is there a perfect Bach in the sheet music and the mechanisms of the piano and tape and mixing deck, and is there some equivalent that Bach himself was looking for, as if he could also remove himself from the equation"

do you mean in relation 2 their being some sort of built-in inevitable failure. like you have to admit that this kind of transcendence is impossible and in a way it becomes a kindof playing out of that inevitability or?

hey plax are you still around? have you listened to the ducktails 'killing the vibe' youtube? ive been listening to it a lot this month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELILsuB4LvU&feature=related

i came on this randomly while listening to drone songs on youtube (looking for a celer track for ilx i think). i like it a lot but it also an ex of how the 'curitorial' aspect of chillwave manages to reinterpret older sounds & modes w/in its own aesthetic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g8JHa8Sots

ive heard really good things abt the young athletes league ceremony ep but im not really sure what this is - its too menacing & plodding to really dance to - but i like the traxx control & echo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anUbut-22qA

this is just p fantastic - weird proto-witch house (ugh) but the vocals on this cld be p effectively repurposed for a sweeter chillwave track i think

ok idk its winter im doing the best i can!!!!

plax I just saw your post but I addressed the issue of the impossibility (nonsense) of transcendence in my email. I think the resolution of the body removal problem is the actual mechanics of the piano/machine that you can touch and play with. It gives the artist a backdoor. It seems like I've created a problem that isn't there - I have and I admitted as much. But when I get depressed and my life seems completely joyless I start doing things like denying authorship and I think that's sort of what I was doing with Bach a year ago october, as if "Bach" were a functional, communally agreed on term that isn't where the preludes and fugues exactly come from. feel like shit

although I do think there's a necessary obliteration of self in the creation of masterpieces.

bam on another level

just cobbling together words & images like a semi-literate

sublimation our

I think you're being nice and not sarcastic. That Emily Reo tape wasn't good at all - not chillwave, more like guitar strumming and singing and a really annoyingly low recording level. Would make you a tape maybe but that's sort of ocd, because I had this prefab thing that turned out to be disappointing and so I feel I have to replace it with something but I know I don't.

I kind of want the tip of the tongue/nostalgia/hypnagogia aspect of this to collectively run its course and see a new sharp premodern music come to fore.

just cobbling together words & images like a semi-literate

this was directed @ myself & not you btw

i like the emily reo stuff ive heard particularly witch mtn pt. 2 and the built to spill cover linxd itt there is something protean abt her stuff, for good & for ill

yeah i havent really listened to anything beyond that built to spill cover but its really beautiful, glassy eyed transcendence via banal cliche. it sounds like it is full of secrets.

theres a load of things you guys are talking about that i want to digest and return to. idk. my brain is stalling these days. sometimes i just want to think about nothing at all.

i've been playing the hell out of the ducktails - killing the vibe youtube lately. going through a p chillwave phase of life these days; it's the depths of cold winter here & my girlfriend of 2 years & i broke up early jan & although i do feel the snow (now over a foot deep) is wondrous a lot of my life now consists of a vague grasping for better times. it's such a perfect song. going to go walk the dog & listen to the album now but i am prepared for dissapointment

ive been p into hips like cinderella's 'it's what ev' lately & was thinking abt that kinda of listless slacker good time vibe & how great indie pop was @ it. also that kinda of in-the-know deep cut lyric referencing seems almost outre now, or at least pointless. cue the smiths nods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIwav0o7pQQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crolMD6gWao