What Is Chillwave, Anyway?

This month, the city of Austin TX played host to around 2,000 bands at the annual SXSW festival. Easily the most important/fun festival of the year for music lovers. Once again, to his regret, this particular music lover was in absentia.

So on this particular Friday evening I was listening to a show on NPR, the topic of which was this year's festival highlights. I knew it was coming: inevitably the host and his critic cronies broached the topic of "chillwave" music and the slew of new "buzz bands" at this year's SXSW.

It took me back to last summer-- I am aware of how cliche that sounds-- after the "chillwave" floodgates had seemingly ruptured, spewing forth into the vast expanse of waste called the internet an onslaught of new "chill" bands. Chances are you probably have too much of a life/were too high/don't care enough to have noticed this particular trend. That's alright. For those of us who, for whatever reason, actually pay attention to this type of thing (read: new music in general), the chillwave explosion was unavoidable. Even if you don't like the music, in its own right this is a rather interesting phenomenon you should care about. I aim to tell you why.

The following paragraph is not the interesting part.

A reading from the book of Wikipedia reveals that chillwave is "also referred to as glo-fi," and is "a response to 2008's day-glo scene." Having trouble deciphering that? Not to worry, it is not only irrelevant but, in my opinion, an essentially flawed assertion.

"Chillwave," as it has been superfluously labeled, is basically mellowed-out electronic music, often containing simple, gently looped melodies, samples, and almost always utilizing a series of filters and effects peddles to create a muddied, lo-fi sound of varying degree and intensity. This can, in many cases, create an eerie but not inherently dark textural effect that compliments a track marvelously. Other times, it can turn an otherwise decent track into absolute rubbish. Sometimes you don't really even notice it. Some chillwavers like Ducktails (who I didn't realize until recently was even labeled as such, but is nonetheless a great artist) make use of guitars and non-electronic instruments and arrangements as well.

Here is example of a great chillwave song:

Washed out - "New Theory"
Here is an example of a great Ducktails song, "Landrunner"

So you have a feel for what a majority of this music sounds like. Now for the interesting part, the part that you, as a 21st Century media consumer and internet user, ought to take notice of if not actually care about: chillwave is purely a product of the internet itself. An emerging sub-genre, one of the first of its kind, that owes its very existence to the internet-- specifically the Web 2.0, social networking side of the internet. Chillwave: created by and for internet users.

Many people will tell you the term "chillwave" was essentially coined by whomever the psycho is behind the blog Hipster Runoff. Whether or not this is entirely true, (speculation abounds) as a viable sub-genre label it was thence spread and adopted by internet users to describe a growing trend in independent electronic music.

A critical aspect of all chillwave music is that it is widely perceived to originate primarily from lonely, twenty-somethings in their bedrooms, nostalgic for their 1980's childhood. This is important to a carefully maintained image or aesthetic of the genre. Low budget music created on computers by the most independent of bros, made available to other bros via the internet. The image, aesthetic, culture and most importantly the music of chillwave were all founded, spread, adopted, upheld and perpetuated through various Web 2.0 channels of media consumption, information sharing and social networking. Think about it:

Some (by no means all) chillwave acts can't even play shows because of the constraints of their music, a fact which should not deter one from listening. There have always been great bands who could never really play shows (see: East River Pipe). At any rate these are real independent musicians with, initially, little in the way of means of playing out. Many labels won't pick them up at first, so how are they going to spread their tunes around? The internet. Who then will consume their tunes? People who use the internet to look for music. Where are consumers going to talk to their friends/contacts/followers about these tunes? The internet. Blogs and now institutional music sites like Pitchfork generate massive hype, on the internet, for these bros and their one-man sound projects, and soon enough they are being thrust into the internet spotlight and asked to play actual shows. For the better chillwavers this works out fine, they adapt and often the show goes off without a hitch. Washed Out are touring right now with another chillwave outfit called Small Black (tongue-in-cheek reference to the band Big Black?) as their backing band, and by all accounts this has been working out well. But for the lesser artists the resulting show can be disastrous, like when Salem got booed off stage this year at SXSW.

So for many chillwave artists now and to come, the internet is the primary means of diffusion. This is important because, to be clear, the essential sounds of chillwave music have always been around, in whatever quantities and mixtures. Going back as far as the band Suicide, through scores of 80's groups like Tears For Fears, arguably even Brian Eno, to 90's groups like Nine Inch Nails, (forgot about them already, have you?) the roots of the musical seed that is chillwave run deep through the strata of electronic music accumulating since the 1970's. The global proliferation and widespread democratization of Web 2.0 applications to the masses are the sun, the soil, and the nutrients that allowed for the germination of that very chillest of seeds. It is exactly these web-based channels and modes of rapid diffusion that allowed for a seemingly obscure sub-genre like chillwave to arise, because through these channels a community with a sense of identity can foster and grow among a wide and eager audience of media consumers.

If Web 2.0 and its media channels had existed in the 80's, chillwave would now be almost 30 years old. Admittedly, one can presume the name would be much less foolish, but we live in an age of terrible sub-genre classifications, and I would rather be listening to chillwave then anything called "jamtronica." So with that in mind, I submit to you, the reader, that chillwave is in fact not, as claimed by some, a "reaction to 2008's day-glo scene," whatever the hell that means. Rather I would argue that chillwave is around today, at precisely this moment in time, because of Web 2.0's course of evolution-- thereby making it a more important sub-genre than it would be were it a mere "response to some other BS sub-genre." It took six years, from 2004-10, for Web 2.0 to produce its first very own sordid lovechild of a musical sub-genre. I think we will see many more spontaneous sub-genre outbursts like this in the coming years.

On a side note, is Delorean a "day-glo" band? If they are I don't care, I am down. They are so good. I can't wait for their new album this June.

Here are a few more choice chillwave tracks. Decide for yourself whether or not you enjoy them, but don't pass them by. Frame them within the context of our age of constant information-sharing. And lo, for I am reminded of a phrase I heard recently somewhere on the internet: "When they're not selling a product, but they're still making money, the product is YOU!"

Toro Y Moi - "Master of None" (this song is awesome)
Small Black - "Despicable Dogs"
Memory Cassette - "Sleep On The Roof"