page_title: Hypnagogic pop
section_title: Origins and hauntology
hierarchical_section_title: Hypnagogic pop / Origins and hauntology
caption_attribution_description: ariel pink
context_page_description: Hypnagogic pop is pop or psychedelic music that evokes cultural memory and nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past. It emerged in the first decade of the 21st century as American lo-fi and noise musicians began adopting retro aesthetics remembered from their childhood, such as radio rock, new wave pop, lite rock, video game music, synth-pop, and R&B. Recordings circulated on cassette or Internet blogs and were typically marked by the use of outmoded analog equipment and do it yourself experimentation.
  The genre's name was coined by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 issue of The Wire to label the developing trend, which he characterized as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory." It was used interchangeably with "chillwave" or "glo-fi" and gained critical attention through artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro. The music has been variously described as a 21st century update of psychedelia, a reappropriation of media-saturated capitalist culture, and an "American cousin" to British hauntology.
  In response to Keenan's article, The Wire received a slew of hate mail that derided hypnagogic pop as the "worst genre created by a journalist".
context_section_description: In the 2000s, a wave of retro-inspired home-recording artists begun dominating underground indie scenes. The emergence of Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, in particular, prompted journalistic discussion of the philosophical concept of hauntology, most prominently among the writers Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher.  Later, the term "hauntology" was described as a British synonym for hypnagogic pop, while hypnagogic pop was described as an "American cousin" to Britain's hauntological music scene, Todd Ledford, owner of the music label Olde English Spelling Bee (OESB), attributed a correlation between the proliferation of hypnagogic pop and the rise of YouTube. Reynolds attributed the origins of hypnagogic pop to Southern California and its culture. Trainer disagreed with Reynolds' assertion and said the style "arguably" emerged from numerous simultaneous scenes inhabited by artists working in a diverse form of "post-noise neo-psychedelia". Pitchfork's Marc Masters offered that it may have originated "less [as] a movement than a coincidence". The music was often issued in the form of limited-edition cassettes or vinyl records before reaching a wider audience through blogs and YouTube videos.
  Ariel Pink gained recognition in the mid 2000s through a string of self-produced albums, pioneering a sound that Reynolds called "'70s radio-rock and '80s new wave as if heard through a defective transistor radio, glimmers of melody flickering in and out of the fog".  He identified Pink and the Skaters as the "godparents of hypnagogic", but singled out Pink as the central figure to what he calls the "Altered Zones Generation", an umbrella term he designed for lo-fi, retro-inspired indie artists who were commonly featured on Altered Zones, an associate site for Pitchfork. Tiny Mix Tapes' Jordan Redmond wrote that Pink's early collaborator John Maus was also placed "at the nexus of a number of recent popular movements" including hypnagogic pop, and that Maus was as "much of a progenitor of this sound as Pink, even though Pink has tended to be the headline-grabber."
  The Skaters were a noise duo consisting of James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, and like Pink, were based in California. In the mid-2000s, they released dozens of CD-Rs and cassettes of psychedelic drone music, after which Ferraro and Clark each pursued solo outings. From 2009 to 2010, Ferraro's music evolved to be increasingly rhythmic and melodic, as Trainer describes, "an oversaturated sonic palette of cheesy pop reminiscent of early video game soundtracks and 1980s Saturday morning cartoons." Complex contributor Joe Price felt that the h-pop movement was "birthed" by Ferraro and "the vastly overlooked [Missouri artist] 18 Carat Affair". In Reynolds' description, "other rising figures" from the original California scene included Sun Araw, LA Vampires and Puro Instinct. He added: "Other key hypnagogues such as Matrix Metals and Rangers reside elsewhere but seem SoCal in spirit."
  R. Stevie Moore and Martin Newell were earlier artists who anticipated Pink's sound. Matthew Ingram of The Wire recognized Moore's influence on Pink and hypnagogic pop: "through his disciple ... he has unwittingly provided the [genre's] template". Another precursor to the genre was Nick Nicely and his 1982 single "Hilly Fields (1892)". Red Bull Music's J.R. Moore wrote that Nicely's "uniquely haphazard DIY aesthetic" and contemporary take on 1960s psychedelic pop "basically invented the sound of the 2000s Hypnagogic Pop movement decades beforehand." In a 2009 interview, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) stated that Salvador Dali and Danny Wolfers were the "godfathers of hpop". He identified other progenitors to be DJ Screw, "retro kids", Joe Wenderoth, Autre Ne Veut, Church In Moon and DJ Dog Dick.
caption: Ariel Pink performing in 2007
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