Slow remix of Zedd - Clarity by HAVEN

I really enjoyed the pitch-shifted, slowed version of Zedd - Clarity produced by HAVEN in their track "White Noise".




Until I Googled the lyrics, I had no idea what the original song was. It felt like a slowed down 80's ballad in the style of Rick Astley. The original source was anything but:



I'd mistaken the female pitch-shifted/slowed vocals for an emotional male singer instead. Interesting.  I might take a crack and mixing the original down myself sometime into an atmospheric witchhouse set.

Haven - You Should Know_

gℓo ( glo )

https://soundcloud.com/gloneiric

Tobacco - Friends Music DVDs 1 and 2

Years ago, I came across the music artist Tobacco at a tiny Toronto record store. I bought the last copy of a CD of his (right out of the CD player), but haven't heard it in a while.

I was pleased to find out some vintage footage was mixed into 30 minute long mixes of some of his music. It's well worth watching, and unlike anything except Apex Twin:


Image source.

Ulrich Schnauss - Stars

A Gap Between

I came across an excellent artist based in Portland called A Gap Between thanks to Tycho's Dazed Mix.

The title track is also available for free download an on Bandcamp compilation, Midnight Cassette.






Check out A Gap Bettween's Soundcloud for more hazy, chilled out synthwave with an 80's sound.

http://soundcloud.com/a-gap-between

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/

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.

Mirror Kisses - Kameron

Memorex : Video Remix of your memories

Came across this through Boing-Boing.net:   Memorex from Smash TV.

The music is a mix of vintage audio, expertly mixed with modern retrowave/synthwave/chillwave tracks, with found footage from the 1980s/1990s edited to match.

 "The audio provides a perfect accompaniment to the warped and weirdly nostalgic footage, like finding your favorite cassette from childhood after it’s been baking in the sun for 25 years. An authentic audio/visual package, Memorex was designed to look and feel like the real deal. The ultimate VHS tape.
Is it a lost cultural relic, melted to the dash of an '83 Nissan Sentra? Is it a sinister government experiment, designed to brainwash children into becoming consumer slaves?
Is it the pinnacle of blipverts, sent back in time from 20 minutes into the future? Is it the holy grail of unlabeled VHS tapes, tucked away in the back room of an abandoned Blockbuster?
Is it live, or is it Memorex?
We didn't create your childhood, we just organized it for you. How to brainwash an entire generation. OBEY. CONSUME. THIS IS YOUR GOD."

Watching this super-cut presentation pop culture detritus, and knowing that it (subliminally) structured my childhood causes both nostalgia and horror.

Displaced mix by Memory Tapes [update]

[Update:] This is odd - the original mix, titled "Displaced Mix" was removed by Memory Tapes, and replaced with a similar mix, same artwork, but titled 'Replacement Mix'. No idea why, but it's equally good, if not better:

[Update 2:] Got a reply from the artist, and he removed the original 'Displaced Mix' because one of his remixes was of another artists work whose album was still unreleased. All the same, I wish I'd had the foresight to save that mix. It worked really well together.

Still, 'Replaced mix' is a nice combination of of rarities, B-sides, remixes, and unreleased tracks by Memory Tapes. Check out his music blog that has a surprising amount of free music.

COM TRUISE - Yxes (No Sexy Edit by Blayne)

COM TRUISE's IN DECAY album is excellent. However, one track 'Yxes' ('Sexy', backwards) has  particularly jarring breaks with a retro sounding "Sex-eeeee!" soundclip. I also wasn't a fan of the funky break it has near the end - so I chopped the song up, looped, reordered, re-EQ'd, and filtered it.

Remix and custom track art by Blayne Scott. Enjoy. :-)

Here's the original, for comparison:

Glo-Fi / Chillwave

When you set aside the distilled, almost sterile '80's synth sound, you get more into a slower, hazy and reflective territory sometimes labaled as "Glo-Fi" or "Chillwave".

The artist who performs as Washed Out clarified what his music sound like in an interview with AdultSwim: "It's like dance music made by people who grew up never listening to dance music." That's an idea I feel applies to most glofi/chillwave styled music.

Washed Out - Feel it all around

Washed Out - Eyes Be Closed



Casa Del Mirto is another artist I came across that captures that hazy, reflective sound, but keeps it from falling down the rabbit hole of memory with a good beat. It also has a nice tropical flavor.


I found these tracks/albums particularly good:
http://casadelmirto.bandcamp.com/track/the-ease
http://casadelmirto.bandcamp.com/track/the-haste
http://casadelmirto.bandcamp.com/album/acafulcro




Casa Del Mirto - The Ease


Pepepiano's whole album is also worth checking out: http://pepepiano.bandcamp.com/album/babes

Pepepiano - Babes

Occasionally, Glo-Fi artists use of sampling audio-cues from old TV/Movies/Radio references even earlier eras than the 80's. For example, take the fascinating artist Belbury Poly found on the 'Ghostbox' label.

Belbury Poly - Summer Round



Belbury Poly - The hidden door

Chillwave: In Video

For other interesting examples of (what can loosely be defined as) Chillwave, visit the Videopage of Jamie Harley.

I discovered his (her?) work while browsing VIMO from an edited video they did mixed to a Weird Tapes track recently.

(S?)he's like the ideal art director of your imagined memories: using found footage/retro documentaries/arthouse footage combined with dreamy/chilled out songs by various artists I've never heard of - they craft something amazing.

Memoryhouse - Lately (Deuxième) from Jamie Harley on Vimeo.



Twin Shadow - "Castles In The Snow" from Jamie Harley on Vimeo.



Memory Tapes : "Today Is Our Life" from Jamie Harley on Vimeo.