Hypnagogic pop (or simply h-pop) is a loosely defined style of pop and psychedelic music that evokes cultural memory and nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past (principally the 1980s and early 1990s). It emerged in the 2000s through a wave of American Millennial home recording artists in the lo-fi and post-noise scene, who adopted retro aesthetics from their childhood, such as radio and soft rock, new wave, video game music, synth-pop, R&B, film soundtracks, new-age and early Internet aesthetics. Recordings were typically marked by the use of outmoded analog equipment and DIY experimentation, while distributed on cassettes and CD-R's with circulation primarily based on the Internet through blog sites.
The genre's name was coined by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 issue of The Wire to label the developing trend, the term was inspired by a comment made by musician James Ferraro about the notion that 1980s sounds had seeped into the unconscious of contemporary musicians while they were toddlers falling asleep. Keenan characterized the concept as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory." It was used interchangeably with "chillwave" or "glo-fi" and gained critical attention through artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro. The music has been variously described as a 21st-century update of psychedelia, a reappropriation of media-saturated capitalist culture, and an "American cousin" to British hauntology.
In response to Keenan's article, The Wire received a "slew of semi-hate mail" that derided hypnagogic pop as the "worst genre created by a journalist". Some of the tagged artists rejected the label or denied that such a unified style exists. During the 2010s, the style's "revisionist nostalgia" sublimated into various youth-oriented cultural zeitgeists. The scene influenced the rise of bedroom pop, while elements evolved into vaporwave, with which it is sometimes conflated.
Etymology In August 2009, journalist David Keenan, who was known as a reporter of noise, freak folk, and drone music scenes, coined the term "hypnagogic pop" in issue 306 of British music magazine The Wire. His article was entitled Childhood's End. Keenan applied the label to a developing trend of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise music in which artists engaged with elements of cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology. Inspired by comments by James Ferraro and Spencer Clark of the Skaters, and while invoking a similar concept discussed by Russian esotericist P.D. Ouspensky, Keenan employed the term "hypnagogic" as referring to the psychological state "between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams." The term reportedly originated with a comment by James Ferraro about the notion that 1980s sounds had seeped into the unconscious of contemporary musicians while they were toddlers falling asleep and their parents played music in another room.
Among the artists discussed in Keenan's article were Ariel Pink, Daniel Lopatin, the Skaters, the Savage Young Taterbug, Gary War, Zola Jesus, Ducktails, Emeralds, and Pocahaunted. According to Keenan, these artists drew on cultural sources subconsciously remembered from their 1980s and early 1990s adolescence while freeing them from their historical contexts and "hom[ing] in on the futuristic signifiers" of the period. He alternately summarized hypnagogic pop as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory" and as "1980's-inspired psychedelia" that engages with capitalist detritus of the past in an attempt to "dream of the future." In a later article, Keenan identified Lopatin, Ferraro, Clark, and ex-Test Icicles member Sam Mehran as hypnagogic pop's "most adventurous proponents".
Characteristics
Hypnagogic pop is pop or psychedelic music that draws heavily from the popular music and culture of the 1980s – also ranging from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The genre reflects a preoccupation with outmoded analog technology and bombastic representations of synthetic elements from these epochs of pop culture, with its creators informed by collective memory as well as their personal histories. Per the imprecise nature of memory, the genre does not faithfully recreate the sounds and styles popular in those periods. In this way, hypnagogic pop distinguishes itself from revivalist movements. As authors Maël Guesdon and Philippe Le Guern write, the genre can be described as "revisionist nostalgia, not in the sense that 'everything used to be better' but because it rewrites collective memory with a view to being more faithful to an idea or a memory of the original than to the original itself."
Examples of specific sounds evoked by hypnagogic pop artists range from "ecstatically blurry and irradiated lo-fi pop" to "seventies cosmic-synth-rock" and "tripped-out, tribal exotica". Writing for Vice in 2011, Morgan Poyau described the genre as "making awkward bedfellows out of experimental music enthusiasts and weird progressive pop theorists." He described a typical manifestation of the style as featuring long tracks "saturated with echo, delay, smothered guitars and amputated synths." Critic Adam Trainer writes that, rather than a particular sound, the music was defined by a collection of artists who shared the same approaches and cultural experiences. He observed that their music drew from "the collective unconscious of late 1980s and early 1990s popular culture" while being "indebted stylistically to various traditions of experimentalism such as noise, drone, repetition, and improvisation."
Common reference points include various forms of 1980s music, including radio rock, new wave pop, MTV one-hit wonders, New Age music, synth-driven Hollywood blockbuster soundtracks, lounge music, easy-listening, corporate muzak, lite rock "schmaltz", video game music, and 1980s synth-pop and R&B. Recordings are often deliberately degraded, produced with analog equipment, and exhibit recording idiosyncrasies such as tape hiss. It employs sounds that were considered "futuristic" during the 1980s which, due to their outmoded nature, appear psychedelic out of context. Also common was the use of outmoded audiovisual technology and DIY digital imagery, such as compact cassettes, VHS, CD-R discs, and early Internet aesthetics.
Background
In the 2000s, a wave of retro-inspired home recording artists began dominating underground indie scenes. The emergence of Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, in particular, prompted journalistic discussion of the philosophical concept of hauntology, most prominently among the writers Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. Later, the term "hauntology" was described as a British synonym for hypnagogic pop, while hypnagogic pop was described as an "American cousin" to Britain's hauntological music scene.
Todd Ledford, owner of the music label Olde English Spelling Bee (OESB), attributed a correlation between the proliferation of hypnagogic pop and the rise of YouTube. Reynolds attributed the origins of hypnagogic pop to Southern California and its culture. Trainer disagreed with Reynolds' assertion and said the style "arguably" emerged from numerous simultaneous scenes inhabited by artists working in a diverse form of "post-noise psychedelia". Pitchforks Marc Masters offered that it may have originated "less [as] a movement than a coincidence". The music was often issued in the form of limited-edition cassettes or vinyl records before reaching a wider audience through blogs and YouTube videos.
The Skaters were a noise duo consisting of James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, and like Pink, were based in California. In the mid-2000s, they released dozens of CD-Rs and cassettes of psychedelic drone music, after which Ferraro and Clark each pursued solo outings. They have been regarded as part of the "post-noise psychedelia" movement. From 2009 to 2010, Ferraro's music evolved to be increasingly rhythmic and melodic, as Trainer describes, "an oversaturated sonic palette of cheesy pop reminiscent of early video game soundtracks and 1980s Saturday morning cartoons."
Ariel Pink gained recognition in the mid-2000s through a string of self-produced albums, pioneering a sound that Reynolds called 70s radio-rock and '80s new wave as if heard through a defective transistor radio, glimmers of melody flickering in and out of the fog". He identified Pink and the Skaters as the "godparents of hypnagogic", and credited a comment made by Ferraro with inspiring the use of the term "hypnagogic". However, Reynolds singled out Pink as the central figure to what he calls the "Altered Zones Generation", an umbrella term he designed for lo-fi, retro-inspired indie artists who were commonly featured on Altered Zones, an associate site for Pitchfork. Tiny Mix Tapes Jordan Redmond wrote that Pink's early collaborator John Maus was also placed "at the nexus of a number of recent popular movements" including hypnagogic pop, and that Maus was as "much of a progenitor of this sound as Pink, even though Pink has tended to be the headline-grabber."
R. Stevie Moore, Gary Wilson and Martin Newell's the Cleaners from Venus were earlier artists who anticipated Pink's sound. Matthew Ingram of The Wire recognized Moore's influence on Pink and hypnagogic pop: "through his disciple ... he has unwittingly provided the [genre's] template".
Another precursor to the genre was Nick Nicely and his 1982 single "Hilly Fields (1892)". Red Bull Musics J.R. Moore wrote that Nicely's "uniquely haphazard DIY aesthetic" and contemporary take on 1960s psychedelic pop "basically invented the sound of the 2000s Hypnagogic Pop movement decades beforehand." Others include Robert Truman's "Way Down" (1987).
Complex contributor Joe Price felt that the h-pop movement was "birthed" by Ferraro and "the vastly overlooked [Missouri artist] 18 Carat Affair". In Reynolds' description, "other rising figures" from the original California scene included Sun Araw, LA Vampires and Puro Instinct. He added: "Other key hypnagogues such as Matrix Metals and Rangers reside elsewhere but seem SoCal in spirit." In a 2009 interview, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) stated that Salvador Dalí and Danny Wolfers were the "godfathers of hpop". He identified other progenitors to be DJ Screw, "retro kids", Joe Wenderoth, Autre Ne Veut, Church In Moon and DJ Dog Dick.
History
In 2009, David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop", which led to a variety of music blogs writing about the phenomenon. By 2010, albums by Ariel Pink and Neon Indian were regularly hailed by publications like Pitchfork and The Wire, with "hypnagogic pop", "chillwave", and "glo-fi" employed to describe the evolving sounds of such artists, a number of which had songs of considerable success within independent music circles. Pink was frequently called "godfather" of h-pop, chillwave or glo-fi as new acts that were associated with him (aesthetically, personally, geographically, or professionally) attracted notice from critics. Some of his contemporaries, such as Ferraro, Clark, and War, failed to match his mainstream success. When this point was raised to Clark in a 2013 interview, he replied that Pink was simply "an ambassador of California, like the Beach Boys."