New Directions in Music: The Miracle of Light, or What is Hypnagogic Pop?

You may have gathered from the title that this post is something of a tribute to the miracle of light. You know, that annual eight day long holiday where we, or some of us anyway, revel in the stunning mystery of fire, from where it originates and to where it goes–a threshold onto the netherworld of the known–and marvel in the story of a how a few rebel soldiers may triumph over hordes of oppressors. To celebrate, I’ve been listening to too much music drenched in the miasma of the sun, filtered and fragmented through a flux of current right into my static television screen from plugged memories of 1988. What I’m talking about is hypnagogic pop, another ingeniously clunky yet quite poignant sub genre title, fixed up by UK journalist David Keenan and recently rehashed through the guise of hiphop by Derek Walmsley, to pinpoint a new direction in music. A dreamy fog of light and percussion. Squiggling lo-fi psychedelia flows through Nyquil intoxicated beat tapes. Gazing vocals swing over humming synth melodies and ride the bass into oblivion.

There’s a few different narratives at work here. The New York based blog and upstart Olde English Spelling Bee has helped curate a range of inversions of the hypnagogic sound. Beach soaked guitar riffs fizzle into the rhythm, looped and manipulated, bloated in the melodic gusts of synth chords, which rise and fall like lemonade.

OESB also managed to deduce the perfect visual stimulation to match the degenerated sonic patterns of noise and synth melody. A range of music videos, pastiche from bygone 1980s and early 90s trash television and home video documentary, expose a nostalgia for melancholy that plagues the best of us last angels of history. Take the video for James Ferraro’s Last American Hero, an Ambien pooled clinking on the edges of. . . .

It’s all dayglo palm tree paradise plastered onto the sort of fissured melodrama narratives that for whatever reason still stimulate a semblance of unshakable desire. This Matrix Metals video finally let me know what seven-year-old blood shot eyes sound like after frothing at the Nintendo and late-night television programming for weeks on end.

What about this hilarious freaked amateur-porn video of “OMG” from Autre Ne Veut?

But I’m more of a fiend for Forest Swords, a group on the boundaries of dub, R&B, techno, and rock that pushes any attempt at classification to its absurdity. This year’s record, Dagger Paths, recently reissued on No Pain In Pop with some bonus tunes, is a soundtrack for shattered romantics that flutters somewhere between the decaying light of Burial and Ennio Morricone’s solipsistic western mythologies.

Forest Swords warped beat science points to another whole dimension of base heavy hypnagogia. South Carolina’s combination of Washed Out and Toro Y Moi drown programmed bass lines in the harmony of the sun’s daily motions. Games, a duo production team based in Brooklyn, squeeze analog 16-bit pinball bleeps into futuristic bass-driven pop. “Strawberry Skies” off their just released EP, That We Can Play, swelters around a boogie bounce while earlier singles like “Everything is Working” sinks into a gushing vertigo of somnambulence. On the West Coast, Baths’ “Animals” and “Maximalist” radiate through a guzzling of manipulated percussion and synthetic melody.

I’m also still quite thrilled by Los Angeles’ Nite Jewel who spins the Latin Freestyle of Lisa Lisa Cult Jam into a syrupy analog funk.

Does anyone else get the feeling that all of this music channels the impossible moral romanticism of  James from David Lynch’s soap saga Twin Peaks? Why does pop music prefaced on loss work so well? Is Simon Reynolds onto something with his idea of sonic hauntology and this spectral demand for musicians nurtured or bombarded by pop culture to work through their recent-past? How strange and fascinating and maybe even miraculous is it that light makes things visible while remaining invisible itself?