The history of music on paper form
looks just like a family tree. Genres are born just like the magical eloping
after a party of too much substance. The schism between the two act as the
elusive qualities that bring them together, so sultry they are to combine,
though never with the intention to produce an offspring, the child goes off to
make both parents proud. Blues and country saw rock n’ roll, and with rock n’
roll being such a promiscuous entity, it spawned an ensemble of notable genres
and about enough sub-genres to fill a New York phone book. These genre’s never
forget their roots: psychobilly being an over-extended tilt of the hat to its
grandfather rockabilly. Big-beat dotting it’s family line all the way back to Chicago-house,
even black-metal raising its horns to its spiritually drunken uncle Black
Sabbath. Enter the newest leave from the maternity ward: Chillwave, as the
father and mother are still yet to be seen, the groovy new kid on the block
forcing the nurses to say “Congratulations, it’s a man.”
The roots of this new genre are
rich, deep in tilled soil from so many musical trees. Borrowing the low-fi
beats of early indie, to extensively using dated Korg keyboards mimicking romanticized
eighties fuzzy treble-heavy melodies. All the while, filling the parabola between
electronic, indie, avant-garde and glo-pop genres, it can be intense,
danceable, or simply idled too. Chillwave sounds like the background music to a
commercial in the seventies, or a soundtrack to a movie in the eighties. The
watery backdrops rhythms coupled with the fuzzy, almost obscure vocals add a
sense of nostalgia, an homage to the early electronic, as if popping in a VHS.
Notwithstanding, the music is immersive with an apature of lyrical content,
that if any available on the track, making for the most androngynous of genres.
Who is Chillwave? Alan Palomo of
critically acclaimed electro-pop band cited indirectly to Chillwave: "Whereas musical movements were once determined by a
city or venue where the bands congregated, 'now it's just a blogger or some
journalist that can find three or four random bands around the country and tie
together a few commonalities between them and call it a genre,'."
Despite being designated as Chillwave, Palomo maintains that both his bands are
simply electro-pop. Meanwhile, Jon Pareles cites Chillwave as "They're solo acts or minimal
bands, often with a laptop at their core, and they trade on memories of
electropop from the 1980s, with bouncing, blipping dance-music hooks (and often
weaker lead voices). It's recession-era music: low-budget and danceable."
The genre is has been mined out, being played out at music festivals, such as All
Tomorrow’s Parties, and Pitchfork Music Festival (of which Chillwave receives major
backing). Yet artists are resistant to the niche, to be named in it as such.
The first use of the word came from Charles on his blog ‘Hipster Runoff’ to
describe the sound of Gold Panda’s first release in 2007, “You.” Since then, bands like Ariel Pink’s Haunted
Graffiti, Best Coast, Washed Out, Cassius, Krupp, and Toro Y Moi have all
adopted the pseudonym. Then again, all these bands sound very different in
their own right, borrowing similar fashions but varying in style.
Chillwave comes from the original moniker “Glo-fi.” It was a
mash-up of genres IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) that emerged in the early 90’s
along with Down-tempo. IDM made use of extremely sparse synth that meshed into
a song with a vex of beats. Down-tempo, similar to Chillwave, is a very
ambiguous genre, uses ambience at its core. Both of which build on a slow-tempo
platform, often described as “chill-out” music, how appropriate! Clubs adored
it: people could dance on the floor, or sit in the back and sip their drinks,
playing it Bogart. Bands like Aphex Twin, Thievery Corporation, or Air were the
main belligerents in the club/bar/chill scene. Chillwave also makes good use of
the psychedelic aspect, the heavy influence of drugs, mixed with the opaque
synth fills the brain with fuzz as if on a trip. Though, with the pop influence
in mind, Chillwave seems stronger than wood in its rhythm, but more delicate
than a smoke ring in its vocal and treble lines.
