Chillwave

Chillwave, sometimes also referred to as glo-fi or downtempo pop, is a genre of music whose artists are often characterized by their heavy use of effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines.

The genre combines the larger 2000s trends towards 80s retro music and (in indie music) use of ambient sound, with modern pop, as in electropop, post-punk revival, psych-folk, nu gaze, and witch house. It is often described as "summer music."

Defining the genre

The term "chillwave" originated on the Hipster Runoff blog by Carles (the pseudonym used by the blog's author), on his accompanying 'blog radio' show of the same name.

Kevin Liedel of Slant Magazine listed the genre's characteristics as "faded soundscapes, dreamy lyrical reflections, and warm, anachronous instrumentation meant to invoke the analog glow of late-'70s/early-'80s slow jams." The New York Times' Jon Pareles described the music thus: "They're solo acts or minimal bands, often with a laptop at their core, and they trade on memories of electropop from the 1980s, with bouncing, blipping dance-music hooks (and often weaker lead voices). It's recession-era music: low-budget and danceable." Its musical predecessors are diverse and include the synthpop of the 1980s, shoegaze,ambient, musique concrète and various types of music outside of the Western World.