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By Colin Joyce
The summer of '09 feels like a long time ago thanks, in no small part, to the forces that dominated the blog rock of the day. A legion of 20-year-olds with moppy haircuts, a couple of synths and a pirated copy of Ableton live took the internet by storm. Or maybe it was just a drizzle. There was certainly something about it that felt torrential, but that could have easily been the reverb or the oversaturation of the field. It was known by at least a couple of aliases, hastily applied by trigger-happy music critics to neatly file away geographically and sonically disparate acts. Glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, these were names that came and went–slightly clumsy, if well-intentioned, attempts at collapsing all the nostalgic electro-pop as one quantifiable, marketable Thing. But the moniker that stuck still haunts the purveyors of this perceived scene to this day. Chillwave.
 The mildly pejorative jokey micro-genre coined by Carles of Hipster Runoff fame, carried the ranks of the side-chained post-Dilla explorations of Toro y Moi, the pseudo-Cocteaus dream pop of Ernest Greene's Washed Out project, the blown out Casio pop of the Brooklyn duo Small Black, Jamison's British Columbia-based reverb soaked beats, and the luminous synth rock of Denton, Texas resident Alan Palomo's solo project, Neon Indian.
These were projects for, by, and of the internet. After a renaissance of sound editing and arranging software in the early aughts, it was now possible to make a record with nothing more than a laptop and a pair of earbuds. Lay down some soft synths (stock on your stolen audio software of choice) and some blown out drums, coat the whole thing in reverb and you've got a certifiable Chillwave single. Export the wav to your desktop and upload it straight to Bandcamp and you are now a 'musician.' When an art-form that appears so easy comes along (abstract expressionism, experimental filmmaking) armchair aesthetes tend to lambast it with claims that, given the tools, they too could produce art of that quality. The problem with Chillwave is that they did.
A legion of 20-year-olds with moppy haircuts, a couple of synths and a pirated copy of Ableton live took the internet by storm. Or maybe it was just a drizzle. There was certainly something about it that felt torrential.
But it didn't take long for the warped VHS co-dreaming to shatter. For every technological advantage that Bandcamp provided in proliferating this newfound aesthetic, it didn't have much of a levee system in place for the resulting deluge. For every band of ex-chillwavers that remains an ongoing concern, there's five dead in the water after a couple of slopped together digital 12"s. Despite the omnivoreity that Bandcamp and Pirate-able audio programs promote, they stripped away some of the editing process that is part and parcel with the technical know-how that comes with traditional electronic production.
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These were kids—not carefully cultivated aesthetes—flooding the Internet airwaves with reverb coated tales of borrowed nostalgia. Their downfall was a product of critical exhaustion as much as it was the quality of the releases. Because so much of the material put out was watered down takes on acid house or '80s synth pop tropes, the critical community had no qualms tossing the scene out wholesale. No attention was paid to the babies tossed out with the neon-tinted bathwater.
A write-up in the Wall Street Journal, and a lukewarm appraisal by Jon Pareles in the New York Times rang a death knell for the scene at large. Those once infatuated with the haze, the whirr, and the milky distortion of cheaply recorded synth parts quickly realized that to stay in the game they'd have to shift their focus. But what this Times article didn't allow was that these acts, despite their haziness, had unique identities. It wasn't long before Chillwave became shorthand for a MOR version of the aesthetic far from the boundary pushing progenitors who were lumped into the fold.
On Causers of This, Toro y Moi established himself a master of the wooziness employed in these sidechain compression dance excursions that so many tried on for size. But Chaz Bundick's contemporaries (in terms of technical ability) were the hip hop minded button mashers of the similarly burgeoning LA beats scene. His take was a submerged version of the sound, and it was that aspect that music critics latched onto to cast him into this imaginary category. Famously prickly about the c-word, Bundick quickly ditched the obfuscation in favor of a couple of albums of '70s aping lite-funk. Bundick's deadpan delivery on 2011's Underneath the Pine and this year's Anything In Return suggests a certain disaffectedness in addition to the obviously aided sonics. It's a move that repositions himself entirely, from devout Dilla disciple to AM-radio-worshipper, a move that Bundick assumed would thrust his songwriting further into the forefront rather than the sound he'd been lumped into.
But what Bundick failed to see, and by extension all repentant Chillwavers failed to see in the wake of their imagined community's rapid dissolution, was that he already had for himself a fruitful sound worthy of exploring.
But what Bundick failed to see, and by extension all repentant Chillwavers failed to see in the wake of their imagined community's rapid dissolution, was that he already had for himself a fruitful sound worthy of exploring. Causers of This repurposed beat scene works within a nocturnal dream-pop context, Small Black's self-titled EP was synth-pop for the bedroom set, Washed Out's first EP was beat-heavy, but nevertheless prescient foreshadowing of his Slowdive-y work to come. Some might argue that this waffling was the result of youthful producers trying to settle into a sound, but given the critical malcontent surrounding all things nostalgic, it's no wonder that these acts were sent scrambling.
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Perhaps most telling was a chat that I had with Josh Kolenik for Spin regarding Small Black's sophomore album. All of the members (Small Black has since expanded to a quartet) were insistent that this forthcoming record, called Limits of Desire, would do away with the "haze" and "crud" of their early works in favor of a more streamlined synth-pop sound. But Kolenik asserts that Limits Of Desire is the album they were always trying to make, they were just incapable of it before due to limitations of technical know-how and the gear that they had at the time.
But such was the M.O. of the golden years of Chillwave. You didn't have to be able to achieve exactly the sound you wanted to, the important part is that you could do it now, and cheaply. Thanks to the innovations of Bandcamp and a boom of music blogs, there was a built in mechanism of delivery and a built in audience that perpetuated this out of nowhere microcraze.
Thanks to the innovations of Bandcamp and a boom of music blogs, there was a built in mechanism of delivery and a built in audience that perpetuated this out of nowhere microcraze.
Despite the fact that the aesthetic slowly faded from popularity (and those at the forefront of its initial popularity went to sow other fields), the mechanism that fueled it still manages to fuel descendent movements today. The popularity of Chillwave, in addition to providing a new wave of synth-pop artists, managed to legitimize often amateurish bedroom electronic recordings as a form of art to be paid attention to. With technical and technological prowess no longer a necessity for American-bred electronic music, the ensuing years have produced a crop of similarly minded producers. XXYYXX and Mister Lies lead the group of American youngsters trading in simple beat compositions, heavy on emoting and light on actual technical ability. It's moving stuff, but in the years previous to Chillwave's barrier breaking advances it would have been made in the bedroom and stayed in the bedroom. Instead, a 17-year-old armed only with a laptop can headline a tour across Europe and all based out of his parents house in suburban Orlando.
It's exciting times in a post-Chillwave world, where anything goes in an electronic music world. Kids in bedrooms on laptops are on the same plane as long established scene vets. Those who started the scene may have ditched their own sounds too soon in favor of clear sonics and an identity outside of what music critics assigned them to, but they opened up the floodgates of electronic music to come. The footprints of Chillwave's past are firmly filled by youngsters today in similar ideological positions, it's the music blog circle of life. Music journalists may have tried to eat their young, but they just changed shape and got way out of the way. In the meantime pour one out for Causers of This, for Small Black, for Life Of Leisure, for Ducktails II, for Psychic Chasms and imagine what life would've been like if those pesky critics hadn't gotten in the way.
