The death of chillwave

Is chillwave dead? The rumours grow louder by the hour. It is rare to visit a website these days without someone reading the last rites.
Chillwave was the buzz genre of about 18 months ago, but has since fallen into abeyance as a critical term - even though some of the pioneers of the movement are still making music. Toro Y Moi has gone big time, Washed Out has a major new album on the way, Neon Indian is still around, and bands like Teen Daze, Memory Tapes and Memoryhouse remain in the game.
So, apart from having a silly name that I'm pretty sure Carles from Hipster Runoff invented for a joke, what's wrong with this movement?
It seems pretty healthy to me.
Exhibit number one is this glorious piece by Blackbird Blackbird.



According to discogs, this group (this artist?) has put out a whole string of music in the last year or so, often self-released and often, it seems, on cassette. This sort of approach is familiar with chillwavers - if that's what we're still calling them.
This piece, again by Blackbird Blackbird, demonstrates well the ethic of the movement - lo-fi, 80s in feel, with hazey electronics and inaudible vocals a common-place.



Is there a difference between chillwave and Hypnagogic Pop? If there is, I can't discern it. Wire critic David Keenan defined the latter as consisting of "hallucinatory landscapes", of a kind of music that "fetishes the outmoded media of its infancy". The only true difference I can spot is that Hypnagogic Pop is a clever term invented by the Wire, and chillwave isn't.
Keenan himself went into great detail to unearth the meaning of this new movement - call it what you will - by looking in the summer of 2009 at some of the artists involved in its production. At the time, he highlighted the work of James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, and quoted their views on the subject at length.



These artists seem to have paved the way for others, despite receiving only a modicum of attention in the mainstream press. Part of the problem may have been the mystic intellectualisation they sought in Keenan's piece to give to the then embryonic movement. At one point, Ferraro tries to explain his outlook on his music.
"I've always viewed my music as just sort of plugging into a matrix of human-alien culture, through plugging into a world broadcast of media entities that jump out of the screen and merge with life via people internalising them as soundtracks for life temples," he says, impenetrably, at one stage.
Keenan's piece dwells at length on such mysticisms, which alas serves to undermine the intellectual credibility of the movement he was then trying to profile.
He better articulates the music's meaning in his own words, when he talks of the sound occupying a netherworld of unexplored critical territory - namely, naff 80s synth pop - that is ripe for serious investigation by serious musicians:
"Without a serious critical agenda to dictate how it is 'supposed' to be interpreted or received, a decade's worth of 'worthless' art and culture is ripe for hallucinations, interpretations and the plundering of idiosyncratic personal canons."
His point seems legitimate in my eyes, although it's questionable how conscious any of the movement's artists would have been of this before Keenan pointed it out to them.
Others Keenan looked at have fared better than Ferraro and Clark in breaking into the critical mainstream, including Ducktails, Pocahaunted and Zola Jesus.



Indeed, some of these artists now seem to have moved away from the movement's origins, with one-time Pocahaunted member Bethany Cosentino now grinding out bubblegum surf pop as Best Coast, while Zola Jesus and Ducktails both seem to have moved away from their musical roots with recent releases.



But the movement still seems vibrant, as a quick trawl of Altered Zones will reveal. Today, as I write, music by How To Dress Well and Nite Jewel is in focus - both artists who exhibit many of the key tropes of Keenan's Hypnagogic Pop.
So perhaps talk of the music's death is exaggerated. Indeed, if we cast the net as widely as Keenan does in his article, there is every argument for saying that the movement is near apotheosis - with both Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds (each name-checked, presciently and percipiently, in his piece) among the major players in electronic music and, indeed, popular music being made today.
Keenan's article invited derision in part through the typically Wire-esque po-facedness with which it approaches its subject. The term itself - designed to highlight the music's dreamlike quality - is for many music fans a deadeningly wooden catchphrase almost designed to attract opprobrium. But the essay itself is important and appears to have fired the starting gun for a movement that has now seeped its way into the very heartlands of popular music.
As Keenan himself points out, its lineage is historic - and has helped give new meaning to forgotten pop records of the 1980s that had once seemed beyond critical redemption.
What this will mean for the royalties of Don Henley - whose Boys of Summer is extensively referenced in the article - is anyone's guess. But when you next hear the track at a wedding or on a jukebox, don't be totally surprised if a half-thought dimly tells you this is one of the most pioneering records of its generation.