creatively bankrupt newish chillwave/post-AnCo bands whose names are just '80s ephemera

Have we done shred savage?

wk, i think you're lookin for this thread

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shred savage is kinda lol

took me a moment to get that one

this thundercat (lol) song isn't bad.

a friend's band is playing a gig with a band called Polly Darton

not sure what kinda bands these are, but just saw the names: Dananananaykroyd and Ringo Deathstarr

noisy British twee rock and shoegaze o rama respectively

more '90s/'00s ephemera but the futurama band names are coming thick and fast lately

today's: 'death by snoo snoo' and 'robot house'. really like the name robot house tbh

Hudson Mohawke

What better way to kick off where we left off than with a producer we've been keeping our eye on all summer, MORD FUSTANG! Flying in from native Estonia, it's nothing but sick, upbeat, synth heavy tracks with his sound being compared to Deadmau5, Feed Me and Skrillex combining electro drops with a little bit of dubstep to produce a mesmerising sound which has become his trademark.

http://f.bandcamp.com/z/16/01/1601180188-1.jpg

you utter wanker

You Utter Wanker is a great name for a band.

i read that like Too $hort saying it

xp http://www.discogs.com/artist/Utter+Bastard

*^*^*^ TOMORROW ^*^*^*

ASSS
MEDDICINE
PEPSI MAXX
Friday 5 August
Power Lunches Arts Cafe, 446 Kingsland Road, Dalston, E8
8pm | 4.00 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/124896

ASSS is the collaboration between Alex Smith and Sean Sumler based on the idea of working with instruments they knew nothing about. The two get lost in their own bombed-out desolation, bashing away heavily on tin-can drums and frazzled electronics as they blister the frayed soft edges of their compositions with buzzsaw distortion and globs of astral glue. This experimentation has resulted in many stylistic and formal variations that take the listener from shelling of falling-apart percussion and howled, woozy chants blasting off into a tribal fury, only too be washed over in a thick, goopy membrane of drain pipe reverberation and krautdrone weirdness. The band have a self-released split tape as well as a cassette on Hobo Cult Records in the past and will be launching their new split LP with Meddicine at this show!

MEDDICINE is London's one-woman psychedelic noise phenomenon! Using some tantalizing harsh synth tones, chasing drum machine beats and above all Monika's distorted vocals. The sounds are dark, electronic and brutal, like the edges of HEALTH and Crystal Castles songs that people don't often remember, a series of violent experiments in noise filled with foreboding. Far from accessible, but that's probably the point. Meddicine has releases on Clan Destine Records and a future 12" split / tour with Portland, Oregon's ASSS planned for the summer.

PEPSI MAXX is a one man deep-pop extravaganza, consisting of alluring samples, radiant guitar fuzz and textural vocals. Pepsi MAXX creates grand melodies and slow soul jams that take place in an infinite time continuum of American accents, 1930s Biarritz and 2030s night time Nevada.

literally just came here to post the last one of those

one thing i wonder about chillwave artists (and maybe lamp or MFB can help here) is do they sit around and actually listen to like Steve Winwood and Chris DeBurgh all day?

when your art is like "creating faded memories of pop culture ephemera" or whatev, is that what what you listen to for fun? Like if Memory Tapes picks me up at the airport, is he gonna be blasting an Air Supply tape in his car, or is he just gonna be playing Fleet Foxes or whatever like any other white person?

well the wall street journal hasnt appointed me an authority on hipsters or anything but yeah, id say lots of ~these people~ listen to air supply or thrifted cassettes of 80s pop or youtubes of childrens tv show themes or w/e for pleasure. i personally am more likely to listen to that stuff than fleet foxes (which im never going to listen to) but i cant vouch for memory tapes bro there

i dunno, i guess a lot of my hatred of chillwave probably comes from my inability to relate to the emotions that propel it.

Like, I love to fondly remember the old HBO logo as much as the next guy, but I don't want to LIVE in that feeling, you know? Part of what makes nostalgia work for me is that initial feel-good rush of "Wow, I remember that," like when I saw the Gummi Bears or Rude Dog opening credits for the first time in 25 years or whatever.

But like, living on the internet, these low-hanging fruit of Legends Of The Hidden Temple or Duck Tales a woo ooh or OMG THE SAVED BY THE BELL WHERE WHATSHERNAME TAKES PILLS or like every Nintendo game ever made get repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated until they're not nostalgia but the actual TEXT of a particular subset of plugged-in ppl.

I'm saying that if I spent like even a week watching bumpers I would lose the actual nostalgic emotion until it was just another boring text to deal with. I couldn't imagine making that a CAREER. y'know?

like i lived through TWENTY FIVE YEARS of Top Gun jokes on cable and the internet, non-stop. It's not novel or interesting to base your aesthetic on Top Gun.

I feel like there was already trenchant critique of the 'chillwave' tendency in a Why? song from like 2002 or 2003 — "creepy wide-eyed youngsters looping 4 notes from some TV jingle / the entire afternoon"

whoa

oh yeah btw I saw a flier recently for a (local?) band named LASER TAG

either that or this club was hosting a laser tag night but I'm not really sure how that would work

whiney would you rather go A. play laser tag B. see a band named laser tag

I don't really like chillwave. I'm trying to think of things that would be described as "chillwave" I actually enjoying listening to. Probs the early Ducktails material, had a nice amateurish vibe to it that I was into for a while. Some people see Excepter as an early chillwave thing, and I'm not on-board with that but I have enjoyed some Excepter over the years. When James Ferraro hits, he's great, but that's more damaged sound-art than "chillwave." I mean I LOL just as hard at some of these band names/album covers, but that aesthetic (although not necessarily the music) is derived from mid-00s Not Not Fun aesthetic stuff which was more noise/drone/experimental than "chillwave." Orthodox overground chillwave - Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, Washed Out - does absolutely nothing for me and the most recent material by all three of those acts is a direct ripoff of like 80s MOTR Air Supply/yacht rock type stuff. The big elephant in the room for most of the stuff I hear described as chillwave is Arthur Russell. Most of the chillwave I hear is just a shitty version of some aspect of his catalog.

Orthodox overground chillwave

The big elephant in the room for most of the stuff I hear described as chillwave is Arthur Russell. Most of the chillwave I hear is just a shitty version of some aspect of his catalog.

i think what you're trying to say is "most of the chillwave i hear is just a shitty version of some aspect of panda bear ripping off his catalog."

I quite like Panda Bear but I see what you're saying. I think Panda Bear puts many different influences into a nice stew that works for me, and Arthur Russell would definitely figure heavily into that.

Orthodox overground chillwave

I mean this is a real thing right? Did that not make sense in the context in what I wrote it.

As much as you hate it (and I don't rate most of it) chillwave is "a thing."

this whole chillwave is kind of all new to me, actually.

Toro Y Moi guy hit on my sister a couple of years ago

she had some funny story but i can't remember it now :-/

ha i'm sure it is a real thing mfb, it's just vaguely amusing that chillwave has such an extensive taxonomy

It's like any subculture really, once you get down to brass tacks the tiny characteristics that differentiate one version of it from another can be incredibly amusing to outsiders. That's how I feel about modern dance music/techno. Like it's hilarious to me there is a "techno thread" for the real heads and then a "partisans" thread for like the hipster dance enthusiasts on ILM.

LOL MUSIC

What Why? song was that Bernard Snowy?

on further investigation, it was not a Why? song, but "Pretty Colors (Smile Your Brains Out)" on the Hymie's Basement record

not why but hymie's basement - pretty colors

i like that hymie's basement record

oops xpost

Hymie's Basement record is prolly the most slept-on Anticon thing ever.

it's okay zvookster I like that record too, and I like you for liking it, and frankly I would rather talk about dis shit than chillwave

(Reaching Quiet, on the other hand...)

but that aesthetic (although not necessarily the music) is derived from mid-00s Not Not Fun aesthetic stuff which was more noise/drone/experimental than "chillwave."

yeah you/me/others have posted a lot about this on the chillwave thread plax started but this is generally the entrance point for me w/r/t to chillwave. & with the more art-damaged end of chillwave i think its less about specific nostalgia for any particular cultural artifacts than about using a more generalized idea of ~pop culture~ to communicate a sense of alienation or displacement + communicate the impossibility of time & distance or w/e

like i dont want to repeat a bunch of stupid posts ive already made but something like brainwave rerun's luke perry cassette which is a improvised pysch noodling mixed with snippets of 90210 or simpsons dialogue or tv show themes is less about LOL REMEMBER DONNA MARTIN than it is about a longing for the brief moment when there was a shared cultural touchstone & about the loneliness and distance of existing in the internet age. its also 'about' growing older too, i think, & the way the samples are distorted and fragmented are interesting ways of representing some of these ideas...

i mean i guess i partly find chillwave interesting when its doing this stuff because unlike say 80s/90s hardcore/indie appropriation of pop cultural its not being setting up the music as oppositional or 'underground' but its also not really strictly winking 00s family guy-style nostalgia as gesture either.

Toro Y Moi guy played a house show where i lived a few years ago, and I remember it was a cool electronic dance set but the thing that stood out was that the first song was based on the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back and it was way cool. Does he have anything released with that on it?

i mean i guess i partly find chillwave interesting when its doing this stuff because unlike say 80s/90s hardcore/indie appropriation of pop cultural its not being setting up the music as oppositional or 'underground' but its also not really strictly winking 00s family guy-style nostalgia as gesture either.

Legit. When chillwave, as such, "works" for me it evokes an extremely powerful/relevant emotion which I will poorly state as: longing for an imagined monocultural past with the awareness that it didn't really exist at the time (although the sheltered worldview of growing up middle-class suburban style did a good job of convincing you it did at the time) but - more deeply - it will NEVER have the chance to exist again. I.E. "Things have changed and they will never, ever be the same again." I think this is a huge human emotion/motivator for most people my age/generation/class whatever. Most "chillwave" does a piss poor job of expressing this, and it can be expressed in other forms like a beatles song or w/e but when it hits, it hits hard. Mark McGuire is absolutely destroying on this front, Living With Yourself is the contemporary record to beat in this regard.

@ bernard, zvookster: oh!

I can't remember if I've read through this thread before...

That's all fine and good if chillwave is built around nostalgia, but it seems that all these bands know how to do is produce records that sound sorta/almost authentic towards the era they're going for... which wouldn't be that bad of a thing of any of them had the songwriting chops to back up their ambitions. During the eras that these hipsters are nostalgic for, people cared about content and not just pretty packaging.

Has this been mentioned yet? It probably has and I'm just being redundant... Sorry, I just don't care enough to read through this thread.

I think there is a "sincere" chillwave thread somewhere, this is the "trolling chillwave" thread but w/e.

Totally OTM billstevejim, a lot of these people are just straight up INEPT at the most basics of making listenable music, and I'll toot my own horn and say that my definition of "listenable" is pretty fluid.

My definition of grammar is pretty fluid as well!

see thats what i get... i'm sure there's A+ trolling on here. ignore me.