Post-noise
Offshoot of noise music associated with hypnagogic pop and hauntology

Post-noise
Stylistic origins
Cultural origins21st century[1]
Derivative forms
Other topics

Post-noise (also known as post-noise psychedelia) is a music genre and scene related to hypnagogic pop, new-age and hauntology. The term was featured in writer David Keenan's 2009 article Childhood's End in issue 306 of the British music magazine The Wire where he described hypnagogic pop as a "questing post-Noise network that worships New Age music and uses half-remembered hits as portals to the subconscious".

The style mostly propagated on the Internet, primarily through tape trading. Post-noise musician James Ferraro released work through CD-R and cassette on self-owned independent record labels such as New Age Tapes. Several writers have made use of the terms "post-noise psychedelia", "post-noise underground" and "post-noise pop", with "glo-fi" being referred to as a post-noise microscene by music critic Simon Reynolds.

Artists such as James Ferraro and Spencer Clark of The Skaters, Oneohtrix Point Never, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, and Emeralds have been described as post-noise.

Etymology and characteristics

In August 2009, writer David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop" in the article Childhood's End in issue 306 of the British music magazine The Wire.[7][8][9][10][3] The blurb of the article described hypnagogic pop as a "questing post-Noise network that worships New Age music and uses half-remembered hits as portals to the subconscious."[3] In the article, Keenan discussed artists such as James Ferraro, Spencer Clark, Ariel Pink, Ducktails, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, and Emeralds as hypnagogic pop acts.[3] Keenan also noted the commonalities between hypnagogic pop and noise music, stating that "Like Noise before it, Hypnagogic pop fetishises the outmoded media of its infancy, releasing albums on cassette, celebrating the video era and obsessing over the reality-scrambling potential of photocopied art."[3][11]

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 of consonance 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)".[12]

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]”.

— Eldritch Priest (2013)[13]

In Boring 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."[13] 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 that Michael Nyman compiled and categorized as 'indeterminacy,' 'process,' 'ephemerality,' and the 'non-identity' of a work. But we can also hear the debt to conceptual art and free jazz that helped evolve experimental music in the 1970s into sound art, something that Hauntology and Hypnagogic Pop don’t exhibit owing to the rock and dance background of their practitioners."[13]

In Sounds 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 of noise 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 encompasses hauntology and hypnagogic 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, and Moon Wiring Club.[1][14] 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,[15] psychedelia,[2] and new age,[3][16] alongside German progressive electronic and kosmische musik artists such as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Vangelis and Edgar Froese.[4] In 2010, The Guardian published an article by music critic Simon Reynolds where he stated "post-noise microscenes like glo-fi" were maintaining "the tape trade tradition, releasing music in small-run editions as low as 30 copies and wrapping them in surreal photocopy-collage artwork".[11]

History

Origins

James Ferraro (pictured in 2012) and Spencer Clark's noise group the Skaters formed in 2004.[17]

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, artists James Ferraro and Spencer Clark formed the group The Skaters in 2004.[18][19][20] After a year of recording, they began touring around the country.[21] Writer Stephen Graham referred to Ferraro as a "post-noise musician".[1] Other acts associated with the post-noise scene included Oneohtrix Point Never,[17][4][22] Pocahaunted,[23] Dolphins into the Future, Sun Araw, Yellow Swans,[24] Stellar Om Source,[4][25] Ducktails,[19] Zola Jesus,[19] Xiphiidae,[17] and Emeralds.[17][26][27] Independent record labels such as California-based Not Not Fun proved influential.[28][29]

The style primarily proliferated on the Internet, especially through cassette tape and CD-R sharing.[30][31][32] Some artists also owned netlabels that published music coming from the scene, such as Spencer Clark's Pacific City Sound Visions, James Ferraro's New Age Tapes and Muscleworks Inc., along with Xiphiidae's Housecraft Recordings.[15][14][33] 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",[17][34][2] "post-noise underground"[35][36] and "post-noise pop".[37][38] Graham used the phrase "post-noise fringe pop",[39] while writers Emilie Friedland and Eldritch Priest used the phrase "lo-fi post-noise psychedelia".[13][12]

A close relationship existed between New Age Tapes and David Keenan and Heather Leigh Murray's Glasgow, Scotland-based record shop, distribution company, and record label Volcanic 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]

Hypnagogic pop and new-age music

Ariel Pink performing in 2007

David Keenan's Childhood'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."[40] In December 2010, writer Ed Jupp acknowledged the article and a debate surrounding it in a review of Twin Shadow's Forget:[41]

[...] the advent of artists like Neon Indian, Emeralds, and Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti (the latter labelmates of Twin Shadow) have started a seachange in thinking about 80s AOR, particularly when filtered through a post-noise and shoegazing 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 the NME.

According to Keenan, hypnagogic pop "takes New Age at its word, as legitimate devotional music filtered through the particular ethos of the time."[3] Keenan acknowledges that "it's vaguely serendipitous that the post-Noise underground would finally find its spiritual side in New Age music and 1980s pop culture," but argues that they allow for "true creative freedom."[3] In Keenan's view, new-age music's "punk" simplicity makes it a "readymade DIY form of devotional process."[3]

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."[16] These "post-noise converts" to new-age included Emeralds, Stellar Om Source, and Oneohtrix Point Never.[16]

Vaporwave and Daniel Lopatin

Daniel Lopatin contributed to the development of vaporwave

Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) has been cited as emerging from the post-noise scene.[1] In 2010, he released the album Chuck 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 larger vaporwave microgenre and movement.[42] In 2025, Pitchfork stated in a retrospective review:[42]

[Lopatin] was at the vanguard of the American noise scene in the hazy years when it retreated from feedback-soaked harshness into an unkanny kosmische. Alongside artists like Emeralds, Yellow Swans, Skaters, and Carlos Giffoni, noise music was starting to sound less like Texas Chain Saw massacre and more like Tarkovsky's Stalker—and Lopatin was quietly training to become the house DJ for the "Zone."

On September 15, 2009, Keenan published an email interview with Lopatin entitled "This Beat is Hypnagogic", wherein Lopatin argues that the dichotomy between post-noise and noise music shared similarities to that of post-punk and punk, stating "30 years after post punk, doesnt it feel like the spirit is linked? a sorta revaluation and broadening of a stifling, didactic and kinda trad style?".[43] He further stated, "ppunk got a lot of guff from regular punk cuz it was too black and too gay for first gen punks, who it turns out were really just rockers with trashier aesthetix (punk rock-rock inertia undiluted). I draw a contemporary parallel which posits regular noise against post-noise — the no-rules noise which emasculates the former macho man noise by means of sensual pan flutes and other things in bad taste". Lopatin cites artist Spencer Longo's statement on noise music as a "rock spectacle in disguise" in reference to Hanatarash making use of a bulldozer and slicing a dead cat in half.[43]

Lopatin would also state that "Hpop operates as a function of 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 ageian pan 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, but also consider Kanye's emasculation of rap via emo aesthetics — kinda hpop huh? I call it OVERPOP".[43]

Legacy

Nashville, Tennessee artist River Everett's ambient and new age project New Mexican Stargazers is heavily inspired by hypnagogic artists such as James Ferraro and Spencer Clark.[44] Her work has been characterized as spanning "post-noise pastiches and dense braindance."[45][46] She is the founder of Retrac Recordings,[45] 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 and vinyl.[44][47]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Graham, Stephen (2019). Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (4th ed.). United States of America: University of Michigan Press. pp. 8, 170, 185, 207, 212. ISBN 978-0-472-12164-9.
  2. ^ a b c Trainer 2016, pp. 409–410.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Keenan, David (August 2009). "Childhood's end". The Wire.
  4. ^ a b c d e Quietus, The (3 December 2009). "Oneohtrix Point Never — Rifts". The Quietus. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  5. ^ Gabriele, Timothy (22 August 2010). "Chilled to Spill: How the Oil Spill Ruined Chillwave's Summer Vacation » PopMatters". www.popmatters.com. Retrieved 12 November 2025.
  6. ^ Reynolds, Simon (22 January 2010). "The 1980s revival that lasted an entire decade". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
  7. ^ Spicer, Daniel. ""Breathless yea-saying": David Keenan's Volcanic Tongue collection reviewed – The Wire". The Wire Magazine – Adventures in Modern Music. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  8. ^ "Dolphins Into The Future – I cherish my insecurity | skug MUSIKKULTUR". Skug (in German). Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  9. ^ Quietus, The (14 December 2011). "Wreath Lectures 2011: Club Beats From The Digital Ether". The Quietus. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  10. ^ Quietus, The (15 December 2011). "Adventures On The Far Side: An Interview With James Ferraro". The Quietus. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  11. ^ a b Reynolds, Simon (22 January 2010). "The 1980s revival that lasted an entire decade". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
  12. ^ a b "Horizons: What, if any, are the Politics of Hypnagogic Pop? «  Visitation Rites". www.visitation-rites.com. Archived from the original on 15 December 2009. Retrieved 13 January 2026.
  13. ^ a b c d Priest 2013, p. 159.
  14. ^ a b Graham 2016, pp. 185–186.
  15. ^ a b Graham 2016, p. 8.
  16. ^ a b c Bychawski, Adam (16 August 2016). "The new wave of new age: How a maligned genre finally became cool". Fact Magazine. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  17. ^ a b c d e Whiteley & Rambarran 2016, p. 409.
  18. ^ "Interview: James Ferraro And His Music Multiverse", Red Bull Music Academy, 6 March 2012, archived from the original on 28 June 2013, retrieved 10 March 2013
  19. ^ a b c Masters, Marc (14 September 2009). "The Decade in Noise". Pitchfork. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  20. ^ Staff, SPIN (25 October 2011). "James Ferraro, 'Far Side Virtual' (Hippos in Tanks) – SPIN". SPIN. Archived from the original on 24 January 2025. Retrieved 14 November 2025.
  21. ^ "Interview: James Ferraro And His Music Multiverse", Red Bull Music Academy, 6 March 2012, archived from the original on 28 June 2013, retrieved 10 March 2013
  22. ^ Gabriele, Timothy (8 February 2010). "Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts » PopMatters". www.popmatters.com. Retrieved 13 January 2026.
  23. ^ Trainer 2016, p. 416.
  24. ^ Byrne, Michael (24 December 2011). "MB Mixtape 2011 .06: Pete Swanson, "Remote View"". VICE. Retrieved 13 November 2025.
  25. ^ Quietus, The (11 June 2013). "There Are Other Worlds: Stellar OM Source Interviewed". The Quietus. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
  26. ^ Gabriele, Timothy (16 September 2010). "Emeralds: Does It Look Like I'm Here? » PopMatters". www.popmatters.com. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  27. ^ Quietus, The (6 June 2014). "Sonar Festival 2014: A Quietus Preview". The Quietus. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
  28. ^ Graham 2016, p. 139.
  29. ^ Reynolds, Simon (May 2011b). "NOT NOT FUN label". The Wire.
  30. ^ Reynolds 2011a, p. 416.
  31. ^ Harvell, Jess. "Woebot: Automat EP / East Central One EP". Pitchfork. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  32. ^ "Matt Shoemaker | Erosion of the Analogous Eye". www.helenscarsdale.com. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  33. ^ Reynolds, Simon (29 May 2010). "Dolphins Into the Future: The Music of Belief (Director's Cut)". The Wire.
  34. ^ Priest 2013, p. 158.
  35. ^ Neyland, Nick. "Dolphins Into the Future: Canto Arquipélago". Pitchfork. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  36. ^ Quietus, The (28 February 2012). "The Month's Electronic Music: Alive In The Sea Of Information". The Quietus. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
  37. ^ Quietus, The (21 December 2011). "Hyperspecific's Electronic/Dance 12"s Of 2011 In Words & A Mix". The Quietus. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
  38. ^ "John Maus on his Audacious Younger Self". The Journal of Music | Music in Ireland: News, Reviews and Opinion. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
  39. ^ Graham 2016, p. 186.
  40. ^ Keenan, Dave (August 2009). "Childhood's End". The Wire. No. 306.
  41. ^ Jupp, Ed (10 December 2010). "Twin Shadow Forget 4AD". Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  42. ^ a b Weingarten, Christopher R. "Oneohtrix Point Never: Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1". Pitchfork. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  43. ^ a b c "The Hidden Reverse: This Beat Is Hypnagogic". thehiddenreverse.blogspot.com. Archived from the original on 6 October 2009. Retrieved 13 January 2026.
  44. ^ a b Records, Hiraeth (1 May 2025). "Retrac Recordings & Hiraeth Records – EU Distro". Hiraeth Records. Retrieved 12 November 2025.
  45. ^ a b "bagel fanclub Find A New Type of God While I Try To Interview Them". trickyStoop. 11 June 2025. Retrieved 2 December 2025.
  46. ^ "bagel fanclub". bagel fanclub. Retrieved 2 December 2025.
  47. ^ "Retrac Recordings". Retrac Recordings. Retrieved 2 December 2025.

Bibliography

  • Graham, Stephen (2016). Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-11975-2.
  • Reynolds, Simon (2011a). Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Macmillan + ORM. ISBN 978-1-4299-6858-4.
  • Whiteley, Sheila; Rambarran, Shara (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-932128-5.
  • Trainer, Adam (2016). "From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory". The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-932128-5.
  • Priest, Eldritch (2013). Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1441124753.
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