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[Photos] Snowden @ Glasslands Gallery (7/9/10) & Mercury Lounge (7/10/10)

[Diatribe] Riding The Chillwave In The Year Of Indiebore

“Chillwave is the pinnacle of the snoozification of indie music…”

Six months ago, I wrote off the chillwave hype as just a passing fad, but as this year has progressed, I’ve realized the phenomenon is much more than a anomalous blip. I don’t find the music encompassing chillwave particularly impressive, though some of it is very nice when I’m in the right mood, but in terms of discerning the current state of music, chillwave turns out to be pretty damn fascinating.

First of all, the nature of the genre is rather unique. Typically in the history of pop music, genres emerge either from a single artist inventing a new style and others copycatting, or due to various people in one geographic location or scene co-inventing an aesthetic together. With chillwave, various artists in completely different locations having no ties to one another coincidentally developed respective sounds that were similar enough to be grouped together by people observing them on the Internet. Certainly these artists have some common bonds in terms of influences, but for an entire genre to come into existence and predominance this quickly from this sort of origin is previously unheard of and it marks the beginning of a new, “post-blog” era in music.

Welcome To The Post-Blog Era

Before this music blog/Internet/Indie revolution happened, a very small handful of people decided what most people would get to hear. Label execs and old school music journalists guessed what would be in fashion and fed it to listeners who only had few options in terms of sources to discover new music. Once the Internet changed that, there was promise of more freedom for music listeners, and with the barriers to entry tumbling down in journalism, it seemed there would be endless voices and opinions to aid people in finding the music they enjoyed most. All of that came to pass, but with an ever-growing amount of voices and options out there, the problem has shifted from not enough choice to an over-abundance. Which of the five billion blogs does a random person go to for finding new music they like?

With an overload of information, people have migrated towards the sources that could make sense of all of that data best, or the ones they recognize most. So in the last few years, even though a new blog is born every second, the amount of people with influence in the world of indie has coalesced into fewer and fewer hands. Power has been consolidated into three general groups: you have aggregators like Hypemachine and Elbows, you have the sites with the most comprehensive and quickest press releases, like Largehearted Boy, Brooklyn Vegan, and Pitchfork, and then you have tastemakers who have been the most successful at chasing down the zeitgeist of indie, like Hipster Runoff, Gorilla Vs Bear, and again Pitchfork. But that’s pretty much it, because if an artist isn’t doing well in those three spheres of influence, then most people won’t ever hear of them.

Looking back, the blog era didn’t end up changing music journalism as fundamentally as some thought, it more forced a changing of the guard. What is happening is a solidification and amplification of the most successful of the blog-era journalists. The trend will now shift towards conglomeration. Case and point, for a while I have thought there has been an enormous opportunity to create a viable alternative to compete with Pitchfork, if someone with the resources and understanding went out and just drafted all of the best music bloggers, putting them together on one website. It seems so simple, but it appears the only other person who thought of it was Pitchfork, who made another brilliant move in creating their potential competition themselves. Next week, Pitchfork will unveil Altered Zones, which is exactly what I just described: a central-website with a staff of hand-picked bloggers.

Back to chillwave…

It is the first example of a genre popularized by this new, post-blog regime. Hipster Runoff, Gorilla Vs Bear, and Pitchfork all but colluded in coming together and creating a successful music fashion by themselves. A musician’s career in the indie world can be made overnight by one of these three websites, and chillwave’s ascension is empirically irrefutable evidence to that effect.

But chillwave wasn’t simply an arbitrary occurrence. It isn’t a case of those with influence shoving something down everyone else’s throats. Those websites have become the primary tastemakers because they know what they are doing. As indie music has continually become more popular, these sites have backed records that they believed would have the broadest coalition of indie music fans. The music they endorse may not be mainstream in popular culture on the whole, but they rarely give their blessing to music that couldn’t at least become popular among indie fans. And chillwave appeals to so many different cross sections of indie listeners. The lo-fi kids can get into it, but so can electronic and electro peeps. It’s got that fashionable beachy vibe. It’s psychedelic, but nice and melodic, even containing a strong ’80s thread. It’s as if the genre was put together purposely to be the most commercially viable indie genre ever.

Of course, this race to the lowest common denominator is nothing new. And if chillwave is the worst of it, than indie may never die. I mean, think about what grunge morphed into six or seven years down the line. Indie music is still not as mainstream as previous major pop music movements, and it’s in the nature of indie listeners to enjoy a much wider range of styles than mainstream listeners, so there are limitations to how watered down things can get.

In addition, it’s not just a matter of indie getting too popular either. There are also fundamental changes in the way people listen to music and the way people make music that has driven us to this chillwave era.

Before everyone could steal whatever record they wanted, most people could only afford to buy so many, and they spent a lot more time with their music. These days kids are blowing through as much music as quickly as possible to find the next buzzband, and if a record doesn’t have a track that can catch someone’s attention right away, it can easily get overlooked. The successful music websites understand this and play to it, thus forcing musicians to play to it as well in order to break out from the other 5 billion musicians.

The audience is now the entertainer. Reality music has arrived.

And that’s the other side of the coin. The barrier to entry has faded away to become a musician just the same as it has to become a journalist, making chillwave the first confluence of these parallel shifts. Everyone is trying to stand out in an extremely saturated market, and that situation dictates the nature of what emerges. Any retard can download a cracked version of Ableton Live and be a chillwave-star. Talent is less a prerequisite to becoming a musician now than it ever has before. There is a dumbing down happening simultaneously in both indie music listeners and indie music makers, so the indie music journalists succeeding are simply giving people exactly what they want.

I’m not sure if that mostly accounts for how boring mainstream indie releases have become lately or not, but things have definitely gotten mundane. And that gives chillwave even more momentum: lack of competition. Chillwave is the pinnacle of the snoozification of indie music, and there aren’t many other major trends happening at the moment.

Ultimately though, I find all of these developments to be natural, not necessarily negative. Music works in cyclical ways, and when a lull in interesting sounds happens, it usually leads to something completely new breaking out. Either indie will find a way to renew itself or something different and better will come along. And as far as boring music goes, again, we could do a lot worse.

The Summer Generation

There is something more cultural than musical that helps sustain chillwave as well. With everything in the news so dramatically full of conflict, a cultural backlash of people who are apathetic to those events has emerged. Unlike the ’90’s generation, kids today just want to chill out and be happy. This generation doesn’t care about protest songs, they want something to casually listen to while they are hanging by the pool.

So in absence of popular indie trends that I prefer, I’m just going to go ahead and ride the chillwave for the rest of the summer. Hopefully by autumn there will be some more compelling national releases than the bulk of what has come out so far this year, and if not, there’s still plenty of good stuff out there if you dig deep enough, but there sure is a lot of junk to sift through as well.

Here are a couple of my fave chillwave jams, coincidentally from relatively local acts:

Toro Y Moi : “Blessa”
Washed Out : “You & I”

I touched on a lot of different subjects above, so I thought I would post of a few references that I recommend you check out to dig deeper into these topics. First, if you are clueless about the genre of chillwave, this is a piece to give you a primer, though I’m not sure I agree with all of their characterizations:

“In Defense of Chillwave” by Brandon Soderberg @ Village Voice

Carles of Hipster Runoff popularized the “chillwave” term, and here is his most recent piece discussing it and the state of indie music:

“CHILLWAVE OIL SPILL: When Natural and Man-Made Forces Collide To Form an Indie Disaster” by Carles @ Hipster Runoff

Here’s a little something further explaining the “post-blog era” with a more thorough examination of why this has happened:

“Dizzy Polari: music blogs are dead, long live music blogs!” by Matt Tyson @ Earfarm

On the subject of what the barrier to entry collapsing for musicians has done to music, Atlanta’s own Eric Guenther (From Exile) dropped a rant on Metalsucks a few months ago addressing that very subject:

“MUSIC IS DEAD.” by Eric Guenther @ Metalsucks

Finally, I want to thank Kill Your Darlings ATL for helping me edit this piece.

Ohmpark’s Top 40 Albums of The Decade

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I wouldn’t claim this is the most comprehensive list of the ’00’s best albums, but everything on here I consider part of the canon. I spent months and months obsessed with each and every record on this list. These albums helped shape my music taste. They define a generation that might have produced the best art in pop music history. Here’s one last list:

Click here to read the entire post…

Ohmpark’s Top 50 Albums of 2009

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As this decade comes to a close, there is no doubt it will be remembered for the rise of Indie music and the enormous influence the Internet has had on the course of music history. 10 years ago the independent music scenes of the United States were fragmented by location and genre. But thanks to technology, they have all coalesced into one huge melting pot phenomenon unlike any other before it. There was no giant explosion as with underground scenes of the past. It was a slow, steady crawl that still goes unnoticed today by a large portion of pop culture despite unlikely widespread commercial success from weirdos like Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear. And thus 2009 marks the high point so far in this golden age of music. The money may be draining out of the industry faster and faster, but the art is getting better, and there’s a whole lot more of it.

Last year I felt other Blogelites’ end of year lists were rewarding commercial viability over music quality and I was worried that Indie music as whole may have been moving towards the mainstream a little too much. It turns out my slight pessimism may have been unfounded, at least for now. This year I agree with the hipster consensus picks for the most part, and my list lines up with others’ lists much more so than in the past two years. I still think things are moving in a poppier direction overall, but that may not be all that bad of a thing if it results in albums like Merriweather Post Pavilion, Veckatimest, and Bitte Orca, all of which were the most accessible efforts to date from their respective artists. You have to figure this Indie thing is going to eventually burn out and something else is going to come along, but so far there is no sign of it slowing. I continue to suspect that there is something fundamentally different about this music movement than its predecessors.

Up until this year, one phenomenon that was prevalent in former scenes that was not a primary characteristic of the Indie world was artists collaborating and teaming up with one another. But in 2009, that seemed to change. Two of the greatest compilations of all time came out this year, Dark Night of The Soul & Dark Was The Night. Both Dark comps featured a vast cast of Indie stars all working together in new configurations, and the music world began to fell a little smaller and more tightly knit together. You had My Brightest Diamond joining The Decemberists and Beach House joining Grizzly Bear. There was Karen O’s Kids, there was the Monsters of Folk, there was Zach Hill working with as many artists as he can. Certainly there have been plenty of team-ups before, but this year it just felt different to me.

Last year’s trend was the No Agey distortion lo-fi sound, and that bled into 2009 for a bit helping propel Wavves into Indie celebrity. This year’s trend would be “chill-wave”, characterized by bands like Real Estate, Neon Indian, and Washed Out. This stuff sounds nice, but for the most part it is way too boring to amount to anything more than a passing fad.

Even though I agree with the P4kish lists more this year, I still think there are plenty of overrated records getting way too much love. Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Fever Ray bored me to death. Girls was good for a crappy punk record, but that’s like winning the Special Olympics. The new Baroness was weak, and I think people were overcompensating for overlooking the stellar 2007 Red Album. And you’ll find my list absent of any hip-hop records for the first time, as I could not find a single one that felt special. I absolutely hate that I cannot find anything worthwhile in a genre I used to love, but all I hear is unimaginative garbage or borrowed styles done better 15 years ago. One thing that always appealed to me about hip-hop was how one beat and one rhyme could express so much, but now I feel this style is overwrought with limitations and constricting expectations. Innovators could always come along and revive this thing, but right now I don’t hear a heartbeat.

In years past, I flexed my writing muscles by doing individual write-ups for all 50 albums on my list, but this year I decided to spare you readers the overkill. For the most part, I’ve already said everything I want to about these records, and if I haven’t the other 5 billion bloggers sure have. Enjoy the final product of a year’s worth of research:

Click here to read the entire post…

2009 In Pictures – Part 2: Photos by Kevin Griggs

Abby Go Go:
Abby GO GO-7790

A Fight To The Death:
AFightToTheDeath-6167

Atlas Moth:
Atlas Moth-3377

Attention System:
ATTENTION SYSTEM-5023

Book of Colors:
Book Of Colors-6515

Click here to read the entire post…

2009 In Pictures – Part 1: Photos by Clint Miller

Baroness:

Boris:

Hawks:

Dan Deacon:

Wilco:

Click here to read the entire post…

Ohmpark’s Top 10 EPs of 2009

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10. Deastro: Grower

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9. Washed Out: Life Of Leisure

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8. Bibio: The Apple & The Tooth

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7. Tealights: Take Us By Sea

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6. No Age: Losing Feeling

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5. Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange

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4. Destroyer: Bay of Pigs

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3. Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind

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2. Au: Versions

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1. The Octopus Project: Golden Beds

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Ohmpark’s Top 10 Favourite Concerts of 2009

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I try my best to be as objective as possible on all of my other lists, but this one is completely about my subjective experience. Of the roughly 70 days I caught a show this year, here are my ten faves:




10. Animal Collective @ State Theater

This show set a new personal record in distance driven to see a single show all by myself. Driving to St. Pete, Florida, waiting outside in the line for hours, and hating the opener made this a steep price for a concert. But when Animal Collective came out and put on the best show I’ve seen them do, it was all well worth it.

Videos, Photos, and Review Here




9. Saturday @ SXSW


Photos by Clint Miller

I spent the final day of South By Southwest this year hustling as hard as I could to take in the last moments of the festival. After I caught a great Crystal Antlers set, I sprinted across Austin to see The Dirty Projectors for the first time. Then, Clint and I both jogged across the river to see Explosions In The Sky’s 10th anniversary show, capped off by a huge fireworks display. It was the exclamation point on an amazing spring break.

Videos, Photos, and Review Here




8. The Other Sound


Photos by Kevin Griggs

This was Atlanta’s best single day lineup of local acts of the year, plus it had Yo La Tengo. It seemed like all the superstars made it out to represent at this one despite the terrible weather, and I had an absolute blast getting blasted.


Photos and Review Here




7. St. Vincent @ Ambient Studios

The setting for this show was so weird. It was sponsored by a car company, located in a classy warehouse space in a horrible part of town, and there were as many police and security people as there were audience members. This was my third time catching St. Vinny live over the course of the year, and it was still totally mind-blowing.




6. Ponytail @ 529


Photos by Clint Miller

I didn’t really know what to expect from this show, as I only sort of liked their album. But they were one of the most thrilling live acts I’ve seen in a long time. Just crazy intensity. It was also one of my first times at 529, which has since become one of my favourite bars, so this was completely good times.

Photos Here




5. Evangelicals, This Piano Plays Itself, Sound On Film @ Drunken Unicorn


Photos by Kevin Griggs

Evangelicals might be the most underrated band in the world right now. In the five times I have caught them live, this was the best I’ve seen, plus both local acts on the bill were wholly impressive. As a bonus, the Evangelicals kids came and hung out at an after-show house party, so it was a legendary night of ‘09.

Photos Here




4. Friday @ Harvest Of Hope

Harvest Of Hope featured some great sets, like Summerbirds In The Cellar, Deerhunter, and Health, but what made this festival special to me was the overall experience. I went by myself and ended up meeting a ton of fun of people. The biggest highlight of the weekend for me was the chaotic, insane party in the campgrounds the first night, of which I’ve never seen anything like.

Photos and Review Here




3. Wednesday @ SXSW


Photos by Clint Miller

We started Tuesday, St. Patrick’s Day drinking beer and watching the parade in Savannah and then hit the road that afternoon without stopping until we hit South By. We ended up making it within minutes of catching Anathallo kick off the fest for us at noon Wednesday. That night we got to see wonderful sets from M Ward, Department of Eagles, St. Vincent, and Camera Obscura in a church while sitting next to Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear. Such an Indiegasm!

Photos, Videos, and Review Here




2. This Piano Plays Itself @ Detroit House Party

Just about every night of the three weeks I tagged along on This Piano Plays Itself’s summer tour was memorable, but the best show was definitely a Saturday night house party in Detroit. The set was rough and every person in the room was wasted out of their minds, but the crowd and the band were feeding off each others’ energy, and the entire night was just a total rager. This little tour run will probably go down as one of the funnest experiences of my entire life.

TPPI Tour Coverage Here




1. Friday @ Bonnaroo

The best day of music all year came on Friday of Bonnaroo. In only a matter of hours, I saw the three best live indie acts of 2009: The Dirty Projectors, St. Vincent, and Grizzly Bear. I was up close and under the proper amount of intoxication for all three. To close out such a perfect day, that night Phish played the one song I had been wanting to hear live for 10 years.

Photos and Review Here

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