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

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!

sure, but that's not what it's "about". It's not like "hey let's make some music that sounds like Steve Winwood, Chris DeBurgh, and Air Supply" so much as "let's tap into some vague feeling of '80s movie soundtracks or soft rock radio playing softly at the dentist's office."

That's kind of what rubs me the wrong way about it. In the same why it bugs me when people say "i really like 80s music."

something really depressing about a scene with people so young so steeped in wistful nostalgia. none of the music has ever rubbed me the right way so i'm not prepared to be charitable, but it seems indicative of something really out of joint.

Nah, just the latest incarnation of the 20-year nostalgia cycle.

I came up with a half-baked theory the other day that chillwave is really a response to global warming anxiety.

Intense longing for some past (illusory) wholeness is the very stuff that pop built its castle out of.

Best thing about chillwave = its essential warbly formlessness/hooklessness. Its like the nostalgia cycle producing music more & more deformed, as if the base genetic material that nostalgia has to draw from is getting thinner and thinner. Points towards the innate incestuousness of the whole endeavour...

see i definitely GET the appeal of the 20 year nostalgia cycle. I grew up watching Gen X jack off all over their Quisp cereal boxes and whatever and for sure have an appreciation of recontextualizing the junk of your youth. I love those Missy songs built on quirked-out 80s nostalgiajams; one of my favorite bands is Zombi who is basically a fake version of 70s Italian horroe movies.

But both Missy and Zombi are in love with a TEXT, not the vague feeling of nostalgia itself. Chillwave is the first artistic form I've ever encountered where the goal is to CREATE nostalgia as opposed to nostalgia being a happy by-product of an recycling/recontectualizing of ideas.

I think its really dishonest coming from a generation who's already overloaded with websites like RetroJunk and X-Entertainment; with TV shows like VH1's I Love The 80s; with more unrestricted access to ACTUAL music and video artifacts than any generation before.

something really depressing about a scene with people so young so steeped in wistful nostalgia.

I'm struggling to see how it's any different than the '60s folk revival, blues revival, yardbirds, beatles, stones, dylan, punk rock, hip hop, or most of the other interesting movements in pop music over the past 50 years.

Chillwave is the first artistic form I've ever encountered where the goal is to CREATE nostalgia as opposed to nostalgia being a happy by-product of an recycling/recontectualizing of ideas.

not really getting the distinction, but I don't think it makes sense to think of chillwave as an "artistic form" so much as a bunch of people ripping off Ariel Pink.

I came up with a half-baked theory the other day that chillwave is really a response to global warming anxiety.

lol last year i wrote a long post about how 'chillwave' was essential a genre that exists as an expression of generational anxiety...

whiney i kinda think u dont 'get it' the point emphatically is not to create nostalgia but to confront it... i always thought this post from plax was p good @ getting @ what i mean:

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.

also heres something i wrote about this:

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"

plax's point is pretty much the most clear-headed defense of chillwave i've ever read.

having a weird nostalgia/life moment watching MTV30 where I got major nostalgia chills from seeing an old episode of Remote Control, but watched like 7 minutes of the TRL finale before I realized that I WAS IN THE FUCKING ROOM WHEN THEY TAPED IT and didnt remember half those ppl even being there.

I kind of feel like if you get major nostalgia chills watching a non-musical mtv show, you have a lot of nerve criticizing other people's musical nostalgia.

i said i got a chill watching it, i'm not going to start a fucking band around it

lol, fair enough

man, there was really some shit called "the pudding pops"??? the fuck are people doing

not 100% sure this is the same band but

http://cache0.bigcartel.com/product_images/31206963/POPSfront.jpg

Pudding pops is punk-variety pop culture reference. Another termbo band.

what about the "white"

The Worthless VHS Idiots

i just like lo fi reverby synth music :(

― Johnmau5 (electricsound), Thursday, August 4, 2011 8:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.avclub.com/chicago/articles/its-true-the-band-of-horses-dude-has-a-will-smithr,59974/

band of horse's ass more like

The Underground Railroad to Candyland

how did band of horses end up in the post-anco thread

I just got sent an EP which is (a) a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-based conceptual work and (b) on a cartridge for the 'Zhiliton' which was apparently a Super Nintendo pirate machine only available in Lithuania in the early 90s.

can any of your readers beat this?