College - Synthwave

“When David approached me for this project, I was thrilled. Listening to Auto-Pilot, I envisioned a distant world with 1980’s American mall aesthetics. I wanted the video to resemble a fever dream, drifting through empty corridors and spaces that have long lost their luster. The dozens of hours of footage I have collected of dead malls in America paired with the track was a perfect, harmonious fit. It was a fantastic collaboration to be a part of. We both knew exactly what we wanted with this project..” - Dan Bell

Related: [1] [2]

Rise of the Synths - Documentary

The Rise of the Synths, sounding like '50s B-movie that never was is actually an crowd funding effort to by director Ivan Castell to create a documentary about the very music genre I've focused on the past few years: 'Sythwave', 'Retrowave', or just '80s sounding stuff' to some,
 

“... At least for me, it’s a reinterpretation of a retro sound that taps into somewhere in your brain and brings back memories from your childhood,” he told Vehlinggo recently. Basically, he’s saying that what these artists are doing isn’t always retro, or always 80s, but they’re using the pastiche and modern production to evoke particular moods. I tend to agree." [link]

I've written about the topic early on in this blog, mainly because it was something that I never saw articulated anywhere else. It was music that just emerged online without a physical touring or mainstream presence and tapped directly into how I imagined the future would sound as a child in the late 80's and early '90s.

I'm very interested to see what comes of this documentary, particularly given the lineup currently listed:

College, Electric Youth, Maethelvin, Com Truise, Miami Nights 1984, Kristine, Lazerhawk, Mitch Murder, Power Glove, Futurecop!, OGRE, Dance with the Dead, Night Crawler, Vincenzo Salvia, Stellar Dreams, The Midnight, Jordan F, Betamaxx, 80s Stallone, Dynatron, Darkest, Carpenter Brut, Timecop1983, Waveshaper, and MPM Soundtracks.

The whole interview is worth reading, and I'd hope anyone with a love of this musical genre pledges some kind of support to the documentary maker. It would certainly create a nice musical touchstone to show people unfamiliar with this style of music - and to help delineate it from actual 80's synthpop.

 

C (299,792 km/s) - Retrofuturistic 80s Synthwave Short Sci-Fi film

C (299,792 km/s) from Seaquark Films on Vimeo.


To stop time, and live in a memory of a memory. The present's vision of what the past's vision of the future was. Filters within filters.

C (299,792 km/s) was a crowfunded independent short SF film that seems to combine a late 70s, early 80s Carl Sagan/Cosmos vibe with a futuristic tale of humanity, topped off with synthwave music by Sellorekt.

Trevor Something - Death Dream

 I enjoy the VHS electro haze of Trevor Something's releases. Some tracks also blur into a "High Tides" style of distortion which are dreamily pleasant too:

Streeeams

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/streeeams

PAWWS

Mirror Mirror - Raindrops and other synthpop

Mild Peril - Ape Real

Trevorsomething - Trevor Something Does Not Exist Synthwave Album

An amazing, amazing synthwave album by "Trevorsomething" titled "Trevor Somethign Does Not Exist".

In particular, a mashup/cover/original track called "Come back down", which mixes the beat and samples from New Order - Blue Monday with Animotion - Obsession phenomenally well. There's even some aspects of Gary Numan - Cars thrown in there for good measure.



I can't recommend this guys work enough. The full album is also available for FREE download on his BandCamp.

Track 3 contains a sample and interpolation of "Blue Monday" by New Order. Also contains samples from "Don't You Want Me" by The Human League, "Cars" by Gary Numan, "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell, "Da Da Da" by Trio, and "Close To The Edit" by Art of Noise. Track 6 is a remix of "The Inner Voice" by DJ Ten. Track 8 is a remix of "So Far Away" by Lazerhawk. Track 9 is a remix of "Hyperlips" by Com Truise. Track 10 is a remix of "Genesis" by Grimes. Track 12 is a remix of "Miami" by Jasper Byrne. Track 15 contains a sample from "What I Like About You" by The Romantics. Track 16 is a cover of "Enjoy The Silence" by Depeche Mode. 

GAMES - Heaven Can Wait Mixtapes - Vol. 1-3

Noir Deco

Also, while embeding is disabled - check out Noir Deco's track "Cyberpolis".

Timecop1983 - Journeys

An excellent album from Timecop1983, including some collaborative tracks with guest vocals.





For more tracks by Timecop1983, see my last post on his EPs here.

Future Unlimited

Amazingly catchy retrowave synthpop by FUTURE UNLIMITED:










Future Unlimited Remix:



Future Unlimited Cover of Don't You (Forget About Me):


http://soundcloud.com/future-unlimited
http://www.afutureunlimited.com

Stratford Ct. : Amicus Curiae 2014 Retrowave Compilation

The Stratford Ct. bandcamp page also provides a helpful listing of all the artists' SoundCloud pages.

These are some particularly nice tracks from this compilation:
Sazabio - Monki,
SHY WOŁVE - coincé à nouveau,
HOME- - Bohemian Grove,
DINOSAURUS REX x AZTC - Brassier,
and『Tora Tora』 - Skyline

Com Truise Remixes Mix

A fellow on YouTube posted a mix that compiles 24 different Com Truise remixes. 



It'd be great to hear some of these spun before Com Truise plays live at his Toronto gig (Feb 12th @ Wrongbar) this year.

Also worth listening to are two Com Truise tracks originally released in his 6th mixtape series Komputer Cast ("Surf" and "Subsonic"). Polished/redone versions of Subsonic can be found in Com Truise's next EP.

Nostalga

An short film titled "Nostalga" was posted on VIMEO recently that explores the different tangible expressions /representations of longing for the past.

It's interesting to note that even the visual presentation and editing emulates a VHS cassette - a piece of technology that simply isn't used any longer, but evokes deep feelings in those who wistfully remember them.

NOSTALGIES from PARACHUTES.TV on Vimeo.

During the video a word is mentioned, but without description: Saudade.

Saudade is a fascinating term, as it described an emotional state I've felt, but never had a word for until recently. "Nostalga", "Longing", or "wistful remembrance"  come close, but are still lacking. Saudade describes a deep emotional state of longing for something or someone that is absent - either in present or the past. This also applies to the sadness of future loss where the object of affection is present now but will be gone later.

A key difference between nostalga and saudade-seeped remembrance is the realization that the object(s) of your affection may never have existed in the way you remember them. It isn't simply the absence of a toy from your childhood, or a specific album you had long ago - it's the sadness that comes from realizing that you can never recapture the same set of circumstances and perception you once had. 

I've experienced this frequently as I listen to music and television - certain chords or sound  sets remind me of childhood listening experiences. However, I know those experiences are like dreams: think about them for too long, and they disappear like morning dew. All we're left with are the tangible pop culture detritus that triggered these feelings. 

The first time I encountered the term "Saudade" was in the comments section of an article which described a "lost cultural decade": what we view as "80s" or "retro" today. The article shouldn't be read literally (i.e: there's a 10 year span people stopped counting sometime between 1979 and 1992 called the "19A0s"). Instead, the article describes in a very strange way how the expression of nostalgic longing take on particular forms during this era. These expressions (triangles, particular patterns, imagery, colors, etc.) are sampled, recycled, and made new and familiar by writers, artists, and designers in their constant callbacks and pastiche. For current music and visual aesthetics, the 'warmth' of analogue technology (photos, video & music) is often cited as more attractive than the bleak stillness of our present digital environment. 

For individuals born in the 1980s, we experienced the cultural output of that decade in aftermath: reruns, rebroadcasts, and taped VHS recording showed us a window into a world we wanted to be apart of, but never really could.




As one commenter articulated, this caused "nostalgia for something that you never really knew [...] like something on the top of your tongue that you can't fully realize, and makes you sad."

"I always had the sense that there was a giant party going on without me.  It didn’t help to see A-ha cavorting about on MTV in a comic book world where I desperately hoped to join them, and knew I never could; Jem made me hunger for a brave new holographic world I knew didn’t exist, no matter how hard I wished it did.  Even today, I harbor some regret that my life doesn’t look like a John Foxx video [... It was an era spent] trying to catch the phantoms of a pop culture that both he and I were too young to understand yet still desperately wanted to internalize[.]"

For the consumer culture of the 1980s, I experienced a heavy dose of this feeling when watching television in the late 1980s, and early 1990s. Before the connectivity of the internet, North America had a shared multi-channel television culture. With limited viewing options, it had a one-sided homogenizing effect on those watching it. We passively watched and internalized what we were shown without response. The repetitive nature of the analogue edited sound and visuals of pre-internet cable TV was reassuring and comfortable to many.



SMASHTV's Video mix sets are a supercut of '80s/'90s commercials set over top of similar music. The repetitive expressions of VHF-broadcast culture: station idents, clumsy advertisements, and cartoons carry heavily nostalgic cache. They were all sandwedged between television's assurance that they'd be back after "these messages". Decades later, I believe those "messages" aren't the ones they intended. The products and shows advertised are long gone - but the feelings they communicated remain.

For earlier decades, modern music like Belbury Poly on the label "GhostBox" mimics "the electronic avant garde of the 60's-80's period to generate a sense of disquieting nostalgia." BoingBoing.net is an avid fan of framing this style of music as haunting tunes from a "parallel world". The description is appropriate: Much of this music sounds like it comes from a hazy, half-remembered memory that occurred between 1970 and 1992 - an era I've heard  wistfully called "The Long Eighties".







All of this nostalgia comes with a flip-side:  Do we spend our years revelling in what was, rather than what will be?

An interesting post on 'The Golden Age syndrome' is worth reading. It looks at the wider implications of (western) culture and it's reliance on recycled pastiche of it's own past. The author rightly asks "What other generation spent its youth, money, energy, and talents denying its own time?"

I feel that our nostalgic longings for representations of the past come from a similarity of expression: our own memories have no clean edges. The way we store experiences and emotion are imperfect, and subject to unanticipated change over time.  To those who grew up with the warmth of CRT-tube static, the still sharpness of a high-definition television's blue screen unintentionally alienates us.

Time will tell if musical and aesthetic interests of future generations will continue to look back and reinterpret memories of our analogue past - or embrace the singularity-like world to be.

For more saudade-inducing content, I'd suggest:

A discussion on the original term @ NPR:
Saudade: An Untranslatable, Undeniably Potent Word

Imagery:

http://ffffound.com/
http://vhsdreamz.tumblr.com/archive

Music:
http://arawa.fm/

http://weirdtapes.blogspot.com/

Maserati - Psych Post Rock

Given my interest in artists identified as psychedelic rock like Weird / Memory tapes:

 

- it makes sense I'd enjoy Maserati:





More information here on the group's website. There's a scattering of tracks available on their label's Soundcloud, but a better selection can be found on Youtube.

Sources of Dreamwave

One of the few uses I have for Facebook is to access an RSS feed-like updates to various graphic artists and music groups.

One of the best gateways to what's available in the genre of 80's-esk modern music is "The Future Sound of the Past":
https://www.facebook.com/TheFutureSoundofthePast

It's well worth subscribing to if you're interested in seeing Dreamwave / Space Synth-wave / Electronic Dreams / Gold Funk / and Film Soundtrack posts in your news feed, and less into photos of what people had for dinner.

Latest Tracks

 Soundcloud is a great site. Taking the best elements from the old myspace, last.fm, and other music-related websites, it's created an amazing resource for finding new music.

For an every growing array of synthwave, chillwave, and other music that sounds like it came from an alternate universe circa 1980, visit the 'ThisStuffIsWonderful' Soundcloud 'like' page.

Synthetix's Top 80's Inspired Synth tracks of 2012

Track listing from Synthetix's post: