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

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.

Like honestly difference between trolling/sincerely enjoying chillwave negligible.

all chillwave is trolling. we've been feeding the troll this whole time.

it's interesting how chillwave has kinda risen alongside the increased popularity of tape saturation/degradation plug-ins. for better or worse it's becoming/become as much of a 00s/10s signifier as autotune and side-chain compression imo

perhaps the inept songwriting that you guys are reporting is in part a result of the ease and convenience of attaining chillwave sonics inside a daw? i dunno

yeah certainly although the 'anyone can do it' sloppiness and lack of quality of control does help give the scene something of his momentum and charm too

this: i know everybody else has already forgotten abt it but can we have one chillwave thread that isnt entirely ¡LOLwave! or w/e is the 'sincere' chillwave thread fwiw

in their defense i know the dudes in ASSS and they are very nice dudes that play noise rock and have nothing to do w/chillwave

yeah don't sully the good name of ASSS w/ this chillwave slander

lol, I totally misremembered this thread. I knew that Whiney posted a lot on it but I thought he was a defender of chillwave. I guess because being enthusiastically pro-chillwave or vehemently anti both strike me as just giving way too much of a shit over nothing.

i think most of what the other thread was about was about trying to create a context for chillwave, that is finding aesthetic precedents like the PiL track I posted for example. but also in like re-presenting these decontextualised snippets and anomalous tracks, trying to slyly "do" chillwave. its not really "sincere" either but its not just whiney raging against the chill or w/e. i feel like another unacknowledged joke on that thread was that chillwave doesn't *really* have a context. i mean, HRO coined the name ffs. its completely not a scene at all in an entirely new post-internet way that the aesthetic just sortof spreads though the web (tho yeah obv there's the joke that every chillwave project used to be a noise band and i do realise that there *are* local scenes etc). and so its fun to like piece together these artificial histories which in some way mimics the process by which these bands reappropriate particular signifiers of pop-culture to make these alternate histories of the artifact. also i just like a lot of these bands.

obv there's the joke that every chillwave project used to be a noise band

like some of the ones that Whiney likes?

i just like lo fi reverby synth music :(

I'd call my band The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert

The ZaaSuu Pitts Memorial Arkestra

damn, I shoulda said Orkustra for the Beausoleil reference and additional SF connection

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?

― james blood ulver (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, August 4, 2011 9:43 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

stupid question maybe but would it be a 'faded memory' if they were still jamming that stuff daily? i imagine all those guys listening mainly to their own art wank contemporaries while tripping out on the vague childhood memory of once caring about catchy well produced pop songs.

it's not really about any specific music is it? It's about a background atmosphere that you can't escape. "once caring about catchy well produced pop songs" seems totally off the mark, since it's less about stuff you care about and more about stuff that worms it's way into your subconscious whether you like it or not.

It really can be traced back to a lot of specific music though!