Who was the first chillwave artist?
The 2000s were a truly fruitful period for birthing several new genres with outlandish and obtuse monikers. With the rapid development of the Internet age, the entire landscape of the music industry was shifting, and people were beginning to discover new styles of music outside of their usual fare with a greater sense of ease, thanks to the boom of illegal downloading, and later, streaming.
This post-Y2K optimism led to a significant blurring of genre boundaries, and technology was being embraced in a manner that demonstrated a desire to push music forward in new directions. However, at the same time, there was a sense of retro-futurism being employed in certain emerging styles, with an ‘80s aesthetic becoming a prevalent feature in these nascent genres.
While vaporwave was the style that managed to catch on and survive in the long term, one of the other preeminent genres from the late 2000s was ‘chillwave’ – a synth-heavy take on pop music that hammered home a desire to be perceived as cool, carefree, and escapist in its themes. Every music video had a grainy VHS filter slapped on top of it, everyone was wearing gaudy colour combinations, and ending every sentence with ‘man’ started to become the norm again.
As if fashion trends weren’t already cyclical enough, it appeared that the ‘80s worship of chillwave was going to make a significant impression on the cultural landscape, and while it did for a brief period, it was eventually subsumed by a handful of other similar genres that had been birthed synchronously, making the heyday of chillwave a brief one. But where did it all begin?
Who was the true pioneer of chillwave?
2009 is often perceived as being the ‘Summer of Chillwave’, where early pioneers like Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Toro Y Moi established themselves in the blogosphere, but the successes of the supposed triumvirate of chillwave weren’t the first instances of the style they’d adopted. Sure, Psychic Chasms and Causers of This were landmark albums within the brief history of the genre, but we have to go back to the origins of the neologism itself to establish where chillwave began.
It has to be acknowledged that the term ‘chillwave’ was originally a pejorative term coined to describe this style of music, which had begun to emerge in the late 2000s without a name attached to it. Satirical blog Hipster Runoff published an article asking, “Is Washed Out the next Neon Indian/Memory Cassette?”, and began proposing several piss-take names to be attached to this emergent style. Of course, ‘forkshit’ – a not-so-subtle jab at Pitchfork – and ‘cumwave’ weren’t ever going to catch on, but ‘chillwave’ had a ring to it that seemed to summarise the exact vibe that its originators had been aiming to procure.
But the question remained – was Washed Out the next Neon Indian or Memory Cassette? And who was Memory Cassette? While the first two one-man projects of Ernest Greene and Alan Palomo were regarded as the vanguard of chillwave alongside Chaz Bundick’s Toro Y Moi, there was significantly less attention given to Memory Cassette, another one-man project belonging to New Jersey native Dayve Hawk.
Hawk was, in fact, producing music in this style a brief time before Palomo, Greene and Bundick, and had released numerous records under a variety of pseudonyms, Memory Cassette, Memory Tapes, and, firstly, Weird Tapes. Awash with analogue synths, electro drum beats and warping filtered vocals, every key element of chillwave as we came to know it was present on Get Religion, the debut EP from Hawk under the Weird Tapes name, which was released in 2007.
Of course, chillwave ended up only being a brief flash in the pan, and is now regarded as a minor branch off of hypnagogic pop and vaporwave that typified a specific movement where the indie kids were becoming obsessed with an aesthetic from at least 25 years prior. However, such was its significance for four years that people still reflect on it with a reasonable amount of nostalgia, which could lead to us getting second-wave chillwave in a decade’s time. Thank god we never settled on ‘cumwave’, eh?
