The music of dreams: how noise evolved into 'hypnagogic pop'
In short: Imagine music that feels like a half-remembered dream or a distorted memory of a 1980s commercial. This is post-noise. It moves away from the aggressive, 'macho' tactics of traditional noise music to embrace a ghostly, lo-fi psychedelia that worships the aesthetics of the past.
Coined in 2009 by writer David Keenan, 'post-noise' describes a 21st-century musical movement that breaks away from the orthodoxies of traditional noise. While noise music often rejects consonance and contemporary discourse, post-noise incorporates popular culture, 'dyschronic' affects, and even commercial appeal. It is characterized by a 'logic of deformation'—disfiguring samples and timbres from a musical past that never actually existed, creating a spectral identity rooted in 'wasteland 1980s cultural signifiers.'
The movement is inextricably linked to 'hypnagogic pop,' a term Keenan used to describe music that explores the liminal state between waking and sleeping. This style 'fetishizes' outmoded media, such as cassette tapes, photocopied art, and the 'reality-scrambling' potential of old technology. It draws heavily from New Age music, viewing its 'punk' simplicity as a DIY form of devotional process. Key influences include German progressive electronic music (kosmische musik) and the 'viscous sounds' of 1980s pop and 1990s advertising soundtracks.
The scene flourished primarily through internet-based tape trading and small-run physical releases, sometimes as few as 30 copies. Artists like James Ferraro and Spencer Clark (the Skaters) were instrumental in catalyzing this international network. While some practitioners, like Daniel Lopatin, were initially viewed as outcasts for introducing '70s cosmic trance' into the noise scene, the movement eventually signaled a collective 'boredom with noise' and a desire for a more emotive, atmospheric, and 'lo-fi' sonic landscape.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Post-noise
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