Over the last 15 years, I've gotten more and more into electronic chill music. It's often a superb chill background sound to give ambience for work, homework, or creative projects. Some is pretty upbeat which makes for fun driving or even sweeping in an epic fantasy type of way, and other times you just ride the chill wave. In fact, that's the name of one of the subgenres of this electronic music style. There are many, and no one artist necessarily goes solely into one subgenre. Still, here are some basic definitions and a few artists that I listen to in each:

Chillwave | Poolside, Washed Out, Keep Shelly in Athens, Odesza, Toro Y Moi

Synthwave | Mitch Murder, Silverhawk, Starcadian, Kavinsky, Gunship

Ambient | Aphex Twin, Moby, Sigur Rós, Brian Eno, Vangelis

Downtempo | Tycho, Zero 7, Blue States, Thievery Corporation, Morcheeba

And many more.

Use this thread to share your favorites, make recommendations, post concert memories and tour info, and all things related to electronic music.

My current favorite electronic music artist is Tycho. I saw him in concert in 2019 and he was phenomenal, with Poolside as the opener. He tours frequently and his album art is cool, I picked up an Awake tour poster and have it displayed in my office at work.

Sure, I listened to tons of Moby in the 90s and early 2000s. But it was Washed Out who really got me into this chill electronic genre in a deeper way in the early 2010s. Of course, it helps that one of his singles became the theme song for Portlandia. I've played "Feel It All Around" so much in our home that the kids groan when it comes on now. Guess I shouldn't have made it one of my phone alarms while getting them out the door in the morning before school for a couple years!

Back when I subscribed to eMusic and used credits to buy albums, I found a ton of great music in the whole "If you like this, you may want to try that" type of listing. That's how I found Blue States. He's a British electronic music guy and while listening to his amazing music I realized I'd heard one of his songs before: "Season Song" plays over the final scene and end credits of 28 Days Later!

It's been fun going back and forth with one of my friends recently introducting each other to new electronic artists that we think the other will like.

He introduced me to Mitch Murder.


I returned the favor with Silverhawk...

and Starcadian.

During the pandemic, Poolside did some amazing livestreaming DJ sets from his home and I listened to those a ton. I'd seen him open for Tycho in 2019 and had a great conversation with him at the merch table as he hung out and just chilled with the crowd. Great guy, missed his last show in my neighborhood, but looking forward to his next tour.

Some pretty good suggestions from candyrocket786 over in the TRON: ARES thread, too.

Dynatron


Waveshaper


Jim Yosef (kind of that epic, fantasy sci-fi vibe)

That "synthwave" section appears to be "retrowave" groups.

Are those genres considered to be the same thing?

I love me some retrowave and listen to it quite a bit.

Eh, it all seems to blend in together. When one wave crashes out of style, just tweak your sound and call yourself part of the new wave and RIDE THE WAVE, BABY!

Oh yes, you can pump electronic music into my veins. Arguably the best genre of genres of music for listening with a good pair of headphones or IEMs (fancy earphones).

Let's go off the beaten path a little, shall we? First, one of my favourite duos of all time with one of their most divisive tracks:
Gantz Graf
(Truly the definition of organized noise, while still generally maintaining a standard 4/4 beat.)

Or, one of my favourite of their earlier tracks for what they do best:
Slip
(stolen from a Reddit post: The central melody is something like 29/8, but the beat is in 4. That's why the melody always starts in a different part of the measure.)
And here's a neat guitar cover of that melody, because it's cool:

But... we can't talk about THE BEST electronic music without talking about video games!
Fun fact about retro video game music... the songs on console games were often programmed into the game code and executed in real time via the sound chip, and weren't just playback MP3 or WAV files. That meant that depending on the sound chip inside your console, you might get slightly different sounding versions of the songs.

The Revenge of Shinobi is great.
(I have a copy of this vinyl, signed by Yuzo Koshiro, so I'm a bit biased )

Also, the Scott Pilgrim game from 2010 wasn't anything special to a lot of folks, but the chiptune soundtrack was phenomenal!


But as far as modern video game electronic music goes, one of my favourites is Streets of Rage 4. It's perfect, and this song was a very unsubtle homage to Aphex Twin, mentioned by Story in post #1

Cool Thread! I'm going to check out some of the stuff you guys listed. I fell into Synthwave a couple years ago and have been enjoying the Genre. I believe Timecop1983 is the artist that 1st really got my attention. His stuff gives a very nice 80's film soundtrack vibe.

I don't know how to classify them, but I do like me some electronic music. Tangerine Dream (the pioneers of electronica), John Serrie, Wahnfried, Harold Budd, Spacecraft, Daft Punk, Mux Mool. Always like to find new stuff though. Thanks for the YT stuff to check out.

I like a fair amount of electronic music, as long as it's without vocals. Synthwave has been a nice find in the last few years. My more recent interest has been with atmospheric breaks.

I plan to go through and listen to all of these. I haven't gotten far yet but that 30-minute video performance of Purple Noon by Washed Out that story posted is sublime.

That is my shit right there.

I love this song. The slow, long build-up. It is very repetitive but just slowly increases in intensity. Give me chill bumps almost every time I listen to it. I have no idea why.



One of my favorite Starcadian songs.



Very cinematic below. It is basically an 80's sci-fi movie in a song.

Com Truise is good

I just learned that though not a a Synthwave artist, John Carpenter... yes that John Carpenter, is apparently someone that has been a major influence on the Synthwave genre. I knew something was up because his stuff comes up on my Synthwave Station on Pandora.

Kavinsky

As I wrote earlier in this thread, I'm a huge fan of Poolside and I like his song, "Strange Undertones."


Funny enough, I'm also a huge fan of Talking Heads, and in anticipation of the upcoming David Byrne concert, I made a playlist based on his tour at setlist.fm. Turns out I never realized this, but "Strange Undertones" is a cover! It was originally written and performed by Brian Eno and David Byrne!


I think one of the fun aspects of electronic music is that artists do a lot of creative work with covers. Even in this case, when I had no clue!

I’m not sure what genre these are (retrowave?), but I really like Miami Nights 1984, Mega Drive, and Lazerhawk.

Not sure where dub step falls in this conversation, but this trailer featung "Doomsday" by Nero coupled with amazing visuals got me to buy and play the heck out of Borderlands 2 back in the day. Good song.

https://youtu.be/kKVf5feSMEg?si=wOfXZA7PRDvXhg6Z

I've also been listening to more synthwave (and similar) music recently. One of my guilty pleasure movies, Shadow in the Cloud, has a great synthwave score.

I'm a huge Talking Heads fan, but didn't fanatically follow the solo career of David Byrne as much. I've liked what I've heard, but I don't know that music as well. I had another commitment when his American Utopia tour came to town, so I'm not missing his Who Is the Sky? tour this fall.

When prepping for a concert, especially if it's an artists where I know some songs but not many songs, I check out setlist.fm to see what they're playing. Then, I'll recreate that setlist as a playlist (we use Amazon Music, though wow, it is a clunky interface sometimes), and listen to that a bit to familiarize myself with the music I don't know as well. Hey, I like to sing along when I can!)

These days, many artists are offering essentially the same setlist everywhere they stop on the tour due to the tight production and presentation that goes with the music. Not a complaint, I actually think that's pretty brilliant. Hey, this is what I want to play, let's build the show on these 20 songs. I love Pearl Jam, but I sometimes wonder how do the band mates truly feel about Eddie Vedder changing the setlist every single night of a tour.

For the What Is the Sky? tour, indeed, it appears David Byrne is doing essentially the same setlist at each show. I'm listening to the setlist playlist and am really enjoying a song near the middle, "Strange Undertones," a song he did with Brian Eno in the 90s.


I feel like I've heard this before and shrug, just enjoying it. I think, well, I was around in the 90s, I probably heard it, of course. But as the song goes on, I realize no, I've heard this song much more recently. But not this performance. As Matt exclaimed in the final episode of The Joe Schmo Show, "What is going on?!"

Then it hit me: I do know this song... as a cover!

Electronic music artist Poolside has an excellent cover of the song:


I've already written in this thread about how I found Poolside as the opener for Tycho a few years ago (see above). This was a fun moment, to have a new artist I like cover an old artist I like!

Oh! Hahaha! I already wrote about that!

And here I was, trying to think of a weekly Thursday post I could add to this thread to drum up some engagement!

Oh well, I'll see you all here next week when I write about David Byrne and Poolside again!