If I were going to compare it to anything in the past, I’d compare it to the acts I was talking about here, who had the same kind of sound, light trippiness, warmth, whimsy, nostalgia, the same digging through the past for hazy sounds to pair up with pleasant rolling beats: Casino Versus Japan, Flowchart, Darla’s “Bliss Out” series, etc. That’s always how I hear them, anyway.
That’s Nitsuh responding to a question about shoegaze vs. chillwave, and yes, I know what he is talking about, and I hear this music in that way, too.
Something that’s been on my mind is how there was music in the mid/late 90s that was in some ways related to chillwave but it existed for a very small audience, and how that level of exposure seemed organic to what the music was about and how it was created.
There is something slightly weird when this music gets “big” and fans pack shows in New York or Austin or wherever else to see people bring their bedroom projects to the stage. Some music, it seems to me, works best with not too many people watching. Not that you don’t wish every artist success, and hope that they will gain as large an audience as they hope for. But sometimes the aesthetic would seem to dictate a more modest scale, and a lot of this recent hazy bedroom pop feels that way to me.
This is something I’ve talked about a bit with Marc, and I’ve shared with him some of the music in this vein I listened to in the late-90s—esp. artists on the Slabco label, like Land of the Loops. The track above, “Multi-Family Garage Sale” (I think Marc posted it at one point), doesn’t sound “chillwave,” but it does share some of the same concerns, including those Nitsuh articulated—warmth, whimsy, nostalgia—along with a focus on childhood and, through its title, an emphasis on middle class suburban life. It came out in 1996, it was great, not that many people heard it but some of them loved it (it was even used in a beer commercial I’ve never seen), and all of that worked out OK. Maybe Alan Sutherland would think differently.
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