| Post-noise | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | 2000s[1][5] |
| Derivative forms | |
| Other topics | |
Post-noise is a 21st centurymusic genre and scene related tohypnagogic pop,new-age andhauntology. The term was featured in writerDavid Keenan's 2009 articleChildhood's End in issue 306 of the British music magazineThe Wire where he coined the term hypnagogic pop, describing it as a "questing post-Noise network that worships New Age music and uses half-remembered hits as portals to the subconscious". Music criticSimon Reynolds referred to "glo-fi" as a post-noise microscene.
The style mostly propagated on theInternet, primarily throughtape trading. Artists associated with the post-noise scene includeJames Ferraro and Spencer Clark ofthe Skaters,Oneohtrix Point Never,Pocahaunted,Laurel Halo,Sun Araw,Yellow Swans, Stellar Om Source, Dolphins into the Future, Xiphiidae andEmeralds. Ferraro released work throughCD-R andcassette on self-ownedindependent record labels such as New Age Tapes. Several writers have used the terms "post-noise psychedelia", "post-noise underground" and "post-noise pop", while several musical styles such asneo-kosmische andvaporwave have been associated with the 2000s post-noise trend.
In August 2009, writerDavid Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop" in the articleChildhood's End in issue 306 of the British music magazineThe Wire.[10][11][12][13][4] Theblurb of the article described hypnagogic pop as a "questing post-Noise network that worshipsNew Age music and uses half-remembered hits as portals to the subconscious."[4] In the article, Keenan discussed artists such asJames Ferraro, Spencer Clark,Ariel Pink,Ducktails,Pocahaunted,Zola Jesus, andEmeralds as hypnagogic pop acts.[4] Keenan also noted the commonalities between hypnagogic pop andnoise music, stating that "Like Noise before it, Hypnagogic pop fetishises the outmoded media of its infancy, releasing albums oncassette, celebrating the video era and obsessing over the reality-scrambling potential of photocopied art."[4][14] In 2009, musicianDaniel Lopatin described post-noise as a move away from "macho" noise music.[15]
On September 28, 2009, writer Emilie Friedlander would post an article on hypnagogic pop stating, "I commend Keenan a hundred times over for putting into words something that was on the tip of many a critical tongue over the past year but that no one had the guts articulate as something so sweeping as a cultural movement: the rise of a lo-fi post-noise psychedelia that moves past noise's rejection ofconsonance and sort of unconscious adherence to the 20th century high modernist ideal of autonomous art (art that engages in discourse with contemporary culture precisely by refusing such a discourse, though noise typically refuses a discourse with academic constructs of this kind as well)".[16]
Although their aesthetic sensibilities diverge in many ways, this kind of composition shares with Hauntology and Hypnagogic Pop a kind of sadness or melancholy and a desire to construct an alternative reality by abstracting the affects from expressions past and showering the listener with their unclosed charm. Turning attention away from the historical depths in which a musical signifier is sunk, and scrambling the customary relationship between a work’s formal object and aural symptoms, produces a strange, alluring apparition that “brings objects directly into play by invoking them as dark agents at work beneath those qualities [that express it]”.
InBoring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (2013), author Eldritch Priest describes "lo-fi post-noise psychedelia" as "often drone-heavy and noise-inclined, this music is characterized by a logic of deformation that aims to disfigure without obliterating samples, timbres, and impressions noticeably culled from a musical past that never was." Priest refers to what writer David Keenan labelled "wasteland 1980s cultural signifiers" to describe how "Indulgence in these warped signifiers is what gives the music its spectral identity."[2] Additionally, Priest stated that the style blends "outmoded media's high noise to signal ratio with an affected anti-virtuosity", and elaborated "Rather than sampling 1980s pop culture with contemporary technology, one can hear composers recycling the tropes of experimental art music from the 1950s and 1970s, tropes thatMichael Nyman compiled and categorized as 'indeterminacy,' 'process,' 'ephemerality,' and the 'non-identity' of a work. But we can also hear the debt toconceptual art andfree jazz that helped evolveexperimental music in the 1970s intosound art, something that Hauntology and Hypnagogic Pop don’t exhibit owing to therock anddance background of their practitioners."[2]
InSounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (2016), author Stephen Graham defines post-noise as a wide subgenre ofnoise music which breaks apart noise music's orthodoxies, "inserting newer influences and references from popular culture alongside dyschronic affects [...] and subliminal modalities."[1] It can even add "some commercial appeal."[1] For Graham, post-noise encompasseshauntology andhypnagogic pop.[1] Throughout the book, he uses the term "post-noise" to refer to artists such as James Ferraro, LA Vampires,the Advisory Circle,Fatima Al Qadiri,Daniel Lopatin,Broadcast,Sun Araw, andMoon Wiring Club.[1][17] Additionally, Graham states:
"Post-noise" refers to twenty-first-century music building off the viscous sounds, loose gestures, and anti-mainstream contexts of noise, while adding pop influences and even some commercial appeal [...] uses popular culture, from 1980s films and the proto-digital soundtracks of 1990s advertising to popular musical sounds themselves, as bedrock influences. But they aren’t simply pop artists at the extremes; their work demands some kind of other home. These would be examples of horizontally overlapping fringe practices.[1]
Post-noise artists were influenced by noise music,[18]psychedelia,[3] and new age,[4][19] alongside Germanprogressive electronic andkosmische musik artists such asTangerine Dream,Klaus Schulze,Vangelis andEdgar Froese.[6] In 2010,The Guardian published an article by music criticSimon Reynolds where he stated "post-noise microscenes likeglo-fi" were maintaining "thetape trade tradition, releasing music in small-run editions as low as 30 copies and wrapping them in surreal photocopy-collage artwork".[14]
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Writer Stephen Graham traces "the wide genre(s) of post-noise music" to a hybridization of the noise music scene which took place from the 1990s onwards.[1] Coming from several noise scenes in the United States, artistsJames Ferraro and Spencer Clark formed the groupthe Skaters in 2004.[21][22][23] After a year of recording, they began touring around the country.[24] Graham referred to Ferraro as a "post-noise musician".[1] Other acts associated with the post-noise scene includedOneohtrix Point Never,[25][1][6][26]Pocahaunted,[27] Dolphins into the Future,[28]Sun Araw,[1]Yellow Swans,[29] Stellar Om Source,[30][6][31] Xiphiidae,[20] Laurel Halo,[32] andEmeralds.[20][33][34] Independent record labels such as California-based Not Not Fun proved influential.[35][36]
The style primarily proliferated on the Internet, especially throughcassette tape andCD-R sharing.[37][38][39] Some artists also ownednetlabels that published music coming from the scene, such as Spencer Clark's Pacific City Sound Visions,[citation needed] James Ferraro's New Age Tapes and Muscleworks Inc., along with Xiphiidae's Housecraft Recordings.[18][17][28] Ferraro used New Age Tapes primarily for small-run releases of his own work on CD-R and cassette.[1] Additionally, several writers have used terms such as "post-noise psychedelia",[20][40][3] "post-noise underground,"[41][42][4] "lo-fi post-noise underground,"[43] "post-noise drone,"[44] "post-noise music,"[45][1] and "post-noise pop".[46][47][30] Graham used the phrase "post-noise fringe pop",[48] while writers Emilie Friedland and Eldritch Priest used the phrase "lo-fi post-noise psychedelia".[2][16]
In 2010, music criticSimon Reynolds referred to Lieven Martens as a "a prominent figure in the international post-noise network catalysed by the Skaters."[28] A close relationship existed between New Age Tapes andDavid Keenan and Heather Leigh Murray'sGlasgow, Scotland-based record shop,distribution company, and record labelVolcanic Tongue.[1] The Volcanic Tongue shop enabled James Ferraro's UK and European audience to obtain physical copies of his music.[1] The relationship between New Age Tapes and Volcanic Tongue was facilitated by the Internet.[1]
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David Keenan'sChildhood's End article from 2009 coined the term "hypnagogic pop" referring to "hypnagogia", the psychological state "between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams."[49] In December 2010, writer Ed Jupp acknowledged the article and a debate surrounding it in a review ofTwin Shadow'sForget:[50]
[...] the advent of artists likeNeon Indian, Emeralds, andAriel Pink's Haunted Graffiti (the latter labelmates of Twin Shadow) have started a seachange in thinking about 80sAOR, particularly when filtered through a post-noise andshoegazing filter. David Keenan wrote an article in The Wire last year that examined the concept and lead to a whole lot of discussion of whether the term is fair or not, and whether totally different bands are being shoehorned into the type of movement-making more commonly associated with theNME.
According to Keenan, hypnagogic pop "takes New Age at its word, as legitimatedevotional music filtered through the particular ethos of the time."[4] Keenan acknowledges that "it's vaguely serendipitous that the post-Noise underground would finally find itsspiritual side in New Age music and 1980spop culture," but argues that they allow for "true creative freedom."[4] In Keenan's view, new-age music's "punk" simplicity makes it a "readymadeDIY form of devotional process."[4]
In 2009, writing forTiny Mix Tapes, writer Elliott Sharp reviewed the albumCrowded Out Memory by Caboladies, stating that the group "navigate post-Skaters all-night pizza club and arcade terrains".[51] Further adding that the album was one of the best representatives of hypnagogic pop which was described as a "mysterious post-noise persuasion".[51] That same year,The New Yorker highlighted "glo-fi," "chillwave" and "hypnagogic pop" as new terms, while citing the groupSmall Black as standing out as one of the "talented gems".[44] The group were described as "warm nostalgic experiments in post-noise drone and shimmering pop."[44]
In 2010,PopMatters stated that "hypnagogic pop grew out of a kind of post-noise music diaspora".[45] In 2016,Fact magazine published an article written by Adam Bychawski regarding an emerging revival of new-age music. Bychawski noted that by the end of the twentieth century, "listeners’ appetite for the genre had waned," but it had an "afterlife" among some artists, including from the post-noise scene, "not long after [new-age] faded from public consciousness."[19] These "post-noise converts" to new-age included Emeralds, Stellar Om Source, and Oneohtrix Point Never.[19]
Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) has been cited as emerging from the post-noise scene.[1] In 2010, he released the albumChuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 under the pseudonym Chuck Person. The album would coin a style of music known as "eccojams" which would later develop into the largervaporwave microgenre and movement.[52] That same year, Lopatin stated "I've got more in common with the American noise scene, to be honest."[53]
On December 4, 2018,University of California Press published a research paper which stated thatvaporwave shared "ties to the trends of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise music, such as 'hypnagogic pop'".[5][54] In 2025,Pitchfork stated in a retrospective review:[52]
[Lopatin] was at the vanguard of the American noise scene in the hazy years when it retreated fromfeedback-soaked harshness into an unkannykosmische. Alongside artists like Emeralds, Yellow Swans, Skaters, and Carlos Giffoni, noise music was starting to sound less likeTexas Chain Saw massacre and more likeTarkovsky'sStalker—and Lopatin was quietly training to become the house DJ for the "Zone."
On September 15, 2009, Keenan published an email interview with Lopatin titledThis Beat Is Hypnagogic. In the interview, Lopatin drew a parallel between the relationship of post-noise andnoise music and that ofpost-punk andpunk rock, arguing that both involved a re-evaluation and expansion of styles he viewed as "stifling, didactic and kinda trad".[55] He suggested that post-punk faced criticism from early punk scenes due to its associations with Black andqueer cultures, and characterized first-generation punk as " justrockers with trashier aesthetix (punk rock-rock inertia undiluted)".[55] Lopatin applied this framework to noise and post-noise, contrasting what he described as a "macho" strain of noise with post-noise practices that subverted it.[55] While citing Spencer Longo's description of noise as a form of rock spectacle (referencingHanatarash's use of abulldozer and the slicing of a dead cat in half).[55] Lopatin argued that post-noise represented a move away from masculinist conventions in the genre, stating "Goodbye macho sigs, goodbye noise for dudes only."[55] He would also state that "Hpop operates as a function of [post-noise] pnoise and pop both — and deals acutely with nostalgia as a medium by which we generate present day variety. It's postmodern as fuck and its been happening for a long while now. Sonically, a new ageianpan flute preset with chorus function-ON presented as a method by which one might deliver a sublime no-mind drone situation works in a pnoise context".[55]
In 2010, Lopatin stated in reference to the group Double Leopards, that "It was droning put into the context of extended jamming. But it was really un-macho – they used to sit down and play. We called it floorcore. It was super-reverby, gauzy and dark."[53] At the time, Lopatin had coined the term "floorcore" to describe a previous group he was in and style of music he performed.[56][57]
In 2011,Tiny Mix Tapes reviewed James Ferraro's albumInhale C-4 $$$$$ which was released asBEBETUNE$, writer Jonathan Dean highlighted audience perception of Ferraro's music from his early work throughFar Side Virtual, stating that there was "a growing rank of malcontents who have greeted Ferraro's sudden leap from the lo-fi post-noise underground to lurid HD postmodernity with skepticism or contempt."[43]
That same year, writing forDrowned in Sound in a review ofLaurel Halo's albumHour Logic released on the independent record labelHippos in Tanks, Rory Gibb stated:[30]
2011 was a year when the formless stews of US post-noise pop began to crystallise out into warped proto dance music. Not Not Fun's 100% Silk label put out a series of dancefloor 12"s with mixed results, Olde English Spelling Bee's Stellar OM Source has started making droney acid-flecked house - and Laurel Halo put out Hour Logic, a stunning six tracker that nodded equally towards eightiessynth-pop, earlyDetroit techno and Oneohtrix-styled synthesiser music. But it was anything but retro - in the vocal-driven swoon of 'Constant Index', and the electric blue crackles of the title track, far more modern concerns were expressed: web age connectivity vs. bedroom-locked loneliness, the rapid-fire advance of modern technology, the utopian promises ushered in by the digital age.
In 2019,Nashville, Tennessee artist River Everett founded Retrac Recordings,[58] a DIY label active between 2019 and 2025 which released and reissued "past, present, and future internet cult classics," described as ranging from "analog bliss to digital psychedelia," on cassette tape, CD andvinyl.[59][60] Her ambient and new age project New Mexican Stargazers drew heavy inspiration from the work of James Ferraro and Spencer Clark.[59] Her work has been characterized as spanning "post-noisepastiches and densebraindance."[58][61]
| Neo-kosmische | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | 2000s, United States |
| Other topics | |
Neo-kosmische is a style of music used to refer to post-noise[33][20] groupEmeralds,[62] who "prompted a wave of millennial interest inkosmische music (Deuter,Klaus Schulze,Cluster et al)".[63] The term was also used byPitchfork in 2007 to label Brooklyn band Titan.[64] In 2009, Emeralds gave a guide to "kosmische" that was published byself-titled magazine.[65] Their 2010 albumDoes It Look Like I'm Here? was noted as "far more interested in the pastoral daydreams of kosmische".[66]
In 2012, neo-kosmische would be used as a term by British magazineFact.[67] That same year, Canadian magazineExclaim! referred toDaniel Lopatin on the collaborative albumInstrumental Tourist as "neo-kosmische noodling".[68] By December,The Quietus published a review of Bee Mask'sWhen We Were Eating Unripe Pears by Rory Gibb, where he associated the term "neo-kosmische" with post-noise, stating "Of all the neo-kosmische/post-noise explorers whose balmy currents have lapped at our shores over the past few years, Chris Madak is among the few who seem hellbent on mapping out genuinely new territory."[69][70] In 2025,Pitchfork stated that Lopatin "was at the vanguard of the American noise scene in the hazy years when it retreated fromfeedback-soaked harshness into an unkanny kosmische".[52]
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