Chillwave, sometimes also referred to as Glo-Fi, is a genre of music where 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. The term is said to have been originated on the Hipster Runoff blog.
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.
The genre is also a prime example of shifting the idea from defining a musical movement’s birth in part by a specific geographic location, as is historically done, to focusing instead on how the groups became linked and defined through various outlets on the Internet. The Wall Street Journal quoted Alan Palomo of Neon Indian on genre, ‘Whereas musical movements were once determined by a city or venue where the bands congregated, now it’s just a blogger or some journalist that can find three or four random bands around the country and tie together a few commonalities between them and call it a genre.’
Despite the stylistic similarities, Palomo and other artists have questioned whether chillwave really constitutes a discrete genre. Observers have noted that Panda Bear, especially his 2007 album ‘Person Pitch,’ foreshadowed the movement proper. Ariel Pink is also a related pioneer with his psychedelic pop style. Often noted and associated bands and artists of the genre include Washed Out, Neon Indian, Memory Tapes, and Com Truise. Given that the majority of the chillwave bands are ‘bedroom acts’ without label contracts, they sell, stream, or most usually give away for free their music via Bandcamp.
The Daily Omnivore 
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