Post-noise
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| Cultural origins | 2000s[1][3] |
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Post-noise is a 21st century music genre and scene related to hypnagogic pop, new-age and hauntology. The term was featured in writer David Keenan's 2009 article "Childhood's End" in issue 306 of the British music magazine The Wire where he coined the term hypnagogic pop, describing it as a "questing post-Noise network that worships New Age music and uses half-remembered hits as portals to the subconscious". Music critic Simon Reynolds referred to "glo-fi" as a post-noise microscene.
The style mostly propagated on the Internet, primarily through tape trading. Reynolds credited the Skaters, a group formed by James Ferraro and Spencer Clark in 2004, with catalyzing an "international post-noise network". Other associated artists included Oneohtrix Point Never, Pocahaunted, Laurel Halo, Sun Araw, Yellow Swans, Stellar Om Source, Dolphins into the Future, Xiphiidae and Emeralds. Ferraro released work through CD-R and cassette on his self-owned independent record labels New Age Tapes and Muscleworks Inc. Musical styles such as neo-kosmische, nu-new age, chillwave and vaporwave have been associated with the post-noise scene.
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Etymology and characteristics
[edit]In August 2009, writer David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop" in the article "Childhood's End" in issue 306 of the British music magazine The Wire.[11][12][13][14][6] He also used the terms "post-noise" and "post-noise underground". The blurb of the article described hypnagogic pop as a "questing post-Noise network that worships New Age music and uses half-remembered hits as portals to the subconscious."[6] In the article, Keenan discussed artists such as James Ferraro, Spencer Clark, Ariel Pink, Ducktails, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, and Emeralds as hypnagogic pop acts.[6] Keenan also noted the commonalities between hypnagogic pop and noise music, stating that "Like Noise before it, Hypnagogic pop fetishises the outmoded media of its infancy, releasing albums on cassette, celebrating the video era and obsessing over the reality-scrambling potential of photocopied art."[6][8] In 2009, musician Daniel Lopatin described post-noise as a move away from "macho" noise music.[15] Hypnagogic pop has been cited as growing out of post-noise music.[7]
On September 28, 2009, writer Emilie Friedlander would post an article on hypnagogic pop stating, "I commend Keenan a hundred times over for putting into words something that was on the tip of many a critical tongue over the past year but that no one had the guts articulate as something so sweeping as a cultural movement: the rise of a lo-fi post-noise psychedelia that moves past noise's rejection of consonance and sort of unconscious adherence to the 20th century high modernist ideal of autonomous art (art that engages in discourse with contemporary culture precisely by refusing such a discourse, though noise typically refuses a discourse with academic constructs of this kind as well)".[16]
Although their aesthetic sensibilities diverge in many ways, this kind of composition shares with Hauntology and Hypnagogic Pop a kind of sadness or melancholy and a desire to construct an alternative reality by abstracting the affects from expressions past and showering the listener with their unclosed charm. Turning attention away from the historical depths in which a musical signifier is sunk, and scrambling the customary relationship between a work's formal object and aural symptoms, produces a strange, alluring apparition that "brings objects directly into play by invoking them as dark agents at work beneath those qualities [that express it]".
In Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (2013), author Eldritch Priest describes "lo-fi post-noise psychedelia" as "often drone-heavy and noise-inclined, this music is characterized by a logic of deformation that aims to disfigure without obliterating samples, timbres, and impressions noticeably culled from a musical past that never was." Priest refers to what writer David Keenan labelled "wasteland 1980s cultural signifiers" to describe how "Indulgence in these warped signifiers is what gives the music its spectral identity."[2] Additionally, Priest stated that the style blends "outmoded media's high noise to signal ratio with an affected anti-virtuosity", and elaborated "Rather than sampling 1980s pop culture with contemporary technology, one can hear composers recycling the tropes of experimental art music from the 1950s and 1970s, tropes that Michael Nyman compiled and categorized as 'indeterminacy,' 'process,' 'ephemerality,' and the 'non-identity' of a work. But we can also hear the debt to conceptual art and free jazz that helped evolve experimental music in the 1970s into sound art, something that Hauntology and Hypnagogic Pop don't exhibit owing to the rock and dance background of their practitioners."[2]
In Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (2016), author Stephen Graham defines post-noise as a wide subgenre of noise music which breaks apart noise music's orthodoxies, "inserting newer influences and references from popular culture alongside dyschronic affects [...] and subliminal modalities."[1] It can even add "some commercial appeal."[1] For Graham, post-noise encompasses hauntology and hypnagogic pop.[1] Throughout the book, he uses the term "post-noise" to refer to artists such as James Ferraro, LA Vampires, the Advisory Circle, Fatima Al Qadiri, Daniel Lopatin, Broadcast, Sun Araw, and Moon Wiring Club.[1][17] Additionally, Graham states:
"Post-noise" refers to twenty-first-century music building off the viscous sounds, loose gestures, and anti-mainstream contexts of noise, while adding pop influences and even some commercial appeal [...] uses popular culture, from 1980s films and the proto-digital soundtracks of 1990s advertising to popular musical sounds themselves, as bedrock influences. But they aren't simply pop artists at the extremes; their work demands some kind of other home. These would be examples of horizontally overlapping fringe practices.[1]
Post-noise artists were influenced by noise music,[18] psychedelia,[5] and new age,[6][10] alongside German progressive electronic and kosmische musik artists such as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Vangelis and Edgar Froese.[4] In 2010, The Guardian published an article by music critic Simon Reynolds where he stated "post-noise microscenes like glo-fi" were maintaining "the tape trade tradition, releasing music in small-run editions as low as 30 copies and wrapping them in surreal photocopy-collage artwork".[8]
History
[edit]Origins
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Writer Stephen Graham traces "the wide genre(s) of post-noise music" to a hybridization of the noise music scene which took place from the 1990s onwards.[1] Coming from several noise scenes in the United States, artists James Ferraro and Spencer Clark formed the group the Skaters in 2004.[20][21][22] After a year of recording, they began touring around the country.[20] Graham referred to Ferraro as a "post-noise musician".[1] Other acts associated with the post-noise scene included Oneohtrix Point Never,[23][1][4] Pocahaunted,[24] Dolphins into the Future,[25] Sun Araw,[1] Yellow Swans,[26] Stellar Om Source,[27][4][28] Xiphiidae,[19] Laurel Halo,[27] and Emeralds.[19][23][29] Independent record labels such as California-based Not Not Fun proved influential.[30][31]
The style primarily proliferated on the Internet, especially through cassette tape and CD-R sharing.[32][33][34] Some artists also owned netlabels that published music coming from the scene, such as Spencer Clark's Pacific City Sound Visions,[citation needed] James Ferraro's New Age Tapes and Muscleworks Inc.,[1] along with Xiphiidae's Housecraft Recordings.[18][17][25] Ferraro used New Age Tapes primarily for small-run releases of his own work on CD-R and cassette.[1] Additionally, several writers have used terms such as "post-noise psychedelia",[19][35][5] "post-noise underground,"[36][37][38][6] "lo-fi post-noise underground,"[39] "post-noise drone,"[40] "post-noise music,"[7][1] and "post-noise pop".[41][42][27] Graham used the phrase "post-noise fringe pop",[43] while writers Emilie Friedland and Eldritch Priest used the phrase "lo-fi post-noise psychedelia".[2][16]
In 2010, music critic Simon Reynolds referred to Lieven Martens as a "a prominent figure in the international post-noise network catalysed by the Skaters."[25] A close relationship existed between New Age Tapes and David Keenan and Heather Leigh Murray's Glasgow, Scotland-based record shop, distribution company, and record label Volcanic Tongue.[1] The Volcanic Tongue shop enabled James Ferraro's UK and European audience to obtain physical copies of his music.[1] The relationship between New Age Tapes and Volcanic Tongue was facilitated by the Internet.[1]
Hypnagogic pop and new-age music
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David Keenan's "Childhood's End" article from 2009 coined the term "hypnagogic pop" referring to "hypnagogia", the psychological state "between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams."[6] Simon Reynolds credited a comment made by James Ferraro with inspiring the use of the term "hypnagogic".[44] In December 2010, writer Ed Jupp acknowledged the article and a debate surrounding it in a review of Twin Shadow's Forget:[45]
[...] the advent of artists like Neon Indian, Emeralds, and Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti (the latter labelmates of Twin Shadow) have started a seachange in thinking about 80s AOR, particularly when filtered through a post-noise and shoegazing filter. David Keenan wrote an article in The Wire last year that examined the concept and lead to a whole lot of discussion of whether the term is fair or not, and whether totally different bands are being shoehorned into the type of movement-making more commonly associated with the NME.
According to Keenan, hypnagogic pop "takes New Age at its word, as legitimate devotional music filtered through the particular ethos of the time."[6] Keenan acknowledges that "it's vaguely serendipitous that the post-Noise underground would finally find its spiritual side in New Age music and 1980s pop culture," but argues that they allow for "true creative freedom."[6] In Keenan's view, new-age music's "punk" simplicity makes it a "readymade DIY form of devotional process."[6] Hypnagogic pop has been described as growing out of post-noise music or the post-noise underground.[7][36]
In 2009, writing for Tiny Mix Tapes, writer Elliott Sharp reviewed the album Crowded Out Memory by Caboladies, stating that the group "navigate post-Skaters all-night pizza club and arcade terrains".[46] Further adding that the album was one of the best representatives of hypnagogic pop which was described as a "mysterious post-noise persuasion".[46] That same year, The New Yorker highlighted "glo-fi," "chillwave" and "hypnagogic pop" as new terms, while citing the group Small Black as standing out as one of the "talented gems".[40] The group were described as "warm nostalgic experiments in post-noise drone and shimmering pop."[40]
Nu-new age and neo-kosmische
[edit]In 2016, Fact magazine published an article written by Adam Bychawski regarding an emerging revival of new-age music. Bychawski noted that by the end of the twentieth century, "listeners' appetite for the genre had waned", but it had an "afterlife" among some artists, including from the post-noise scene, "not long after [new-age] faded from public consciousness."[10] These "post-noise converts" to new-age included Emeralds, Stellar Om Source, and Oneohtrix Point Never.[10] The style has been referred to as "nu-new age".[47] Other artists who have been associated with the style include James Ferraro and Dolphins Into the Future.[25][48][49] Independent record label Leaving Records was labelled a "bastion" of the movement.[47]
Additionally, neo-kosmische emerged as a style of music used to refer to post-noise[23][19] groups such as Emeralds,[50] who "prompted a wave of millennial interest in kosmische Musik (Deuter, Klaus Schulze, Cluster et al)".[51] The term was also used by