'chillwave continuum'?

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
it's talking not to the physiology of dematerialisation, but rather its effects on our cognitive processes. music that has to compete with all the stimuli human history has to offer at your fingertibs. music that's just one of 17 tabs competing to grasp your attention against the incest porn on the next tab, the behaeding video a few tabs over, ian dunt live tweeting parliament in the next tab, etc.

it's music attuned to the garishness of vine humour. of youtube vloger''s constant jump cuts, etc.

adhd music for an adhd society

Mechanical spider limbs.

refracted consciousness

https://cdn.britannica.com/78/14917...color-angle-colors-wavelength-wavelengths.jpg
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
the 2010's has also offered a whole counterpoint to the chill aesthetic too; music that's garishly attention seeking. music that's all foreground, rather than all background.

dancehall's piercing, shenai-like squealing auto-tuned vocals. traps hissing 808 hi hat pyrotechnics. lex lugar midi-brass. music that's all treble rather than the mushy, swampy midrange of this chillwave lineage.

you also have the adhd little-kid-pulling-different-faces-for-attention of a lot of music. your young thug's and tommy lee sparta's constant persona shifts, ad lib raps constant yelps and skrrras and all that. before that there was the skrillex thing where the instrumental was constantly chopping and changing. loads of different bass sounds intersecting one another. all that in stark contrast to the intently wallpaperish nature of chillwave

this was the side that won, and I'm only now coming to terms with it. you're a convincing proponent of it though.
 
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luka

Well-known member
a lot of the numbness, anomie and alienation (from the self as much as from society) the painkillers and depression meds present in otherlife's chillwave continuum found its way into mainstream rap and r&b.
Modifying the cartoon trap of Luger and Waka. Everything gets woozy.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
this was the side that won, and I'm only now coming to terms with it. you're a convincing proponent of it though.

it's struck me recently how much it resembles an addiction more than an aesthetic taste.

the other week i had it with the hyper fragmented, whack a mole style of rapping. i couldn't listen to anything else. it was like when people are just glued to candy crush or something. when little children get addicted to games and have tantrum when mum takes the phone off them for bed time.

at the moment it's that snake charming-autotune dancehall. it's the only frequency i'm registering. i physically crave it; i heard about this severely autistic bloke who needed white noise constantly playing and it's like that.
 

version

Well-known member
i heard about this severely autistic bloke who needed white noise constantly playing and it's like that.

A lot of people seem to be like that with TV. They have it on in the background because they can't bear the silence. It's in waiting rooms, lobbies, toilets. Everywhere. TV or muzak.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
A lot of people seem to be like that with TV. They have it on in the background because they can't bear the silence. It's in waiting rooms, lobbies, toilets. Everywhere. TV or muzak.

it's something i find really creepy in other people, but at the moment if i don't have some cybotronic jamaican imp squealing in my ear i start getting cold turkey.
 

version

Well-known member
The cover for that Jam City album is brilliant, imo. It communicates so many things. The corporate lobby, the glass, the plants contained by the marble, the crashed but immaculate motorcycle with no rider in sight. It might have appeared in 2012, but it feels very 'now'.

jam city .jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
The cover for that Jam City album is brilliant, imo. It communicates so many things. The corporate lobby, the glass, the plants contained by the marble, the crashed but immaculate motorcycle with no rider in sight. It might have appeared in 2012, but it feels very 'now'.

View attachment 1493

It does but it's also deliberately pastiching very similar staged high gloss photography from the '80s.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
really like this line from Retromania:

Yet these two talents are responding to similar macro-cultural shifts: the emergence of the Internet as a landscape of the sublime, occupying a roughly equivalent place to Nature in the imagination of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century com*poser, and to the city for the twentieth-century composer.

this was the side of the chillwave continuum that seemed to lose momentum/relevance pretty quickly in the 2010s. not so much the alienation side of things.
 
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