The Top 10 Hypnagogic Pop Songs
repost because i accidentally deleted this somehow
Because I run a Substack I'm privy to other writing on Substack and I've come across a new kind of hackish writing that I call "fair-weather criticism."
On the most basic level a critic should be able to evaluate a given phenomenon and provide a perspective that finds the universal in this particularness of this particular. This is what "auteur theory" was born out of; French critics vivisected the onslaught of American beach movies and westerns engulfing their theaters looking for one kernel of the sublime between them all. Giving the likes of Nicholas Ray and John Ford the dual reputations of cowboys-cum-Lacanians. If nothing else criticism reappraises old stuff and makes it new, at least for the moment. Consider the time the guy who's seen more movies than anyone else you know convinced you to watch a Resident Evil sequel.
Anyway, fair-weather critics do the inverse, they check the pulse of the current moment and relate it to themselves. They say something like, everyone needs to connect with reality more, then they tie in a bullet point from their CV. Nothing new is ever learned but the readers come away feeling very reasonable. The fair-weather critic is celebrated for being so reasonable.
I also do this but I'm a Jesuit priest and not a critic and mythologizing daily life is my job. Regardless, it has taught me that writing does not have to be hard and that reappraising old things is notoriously easy. I'm reappraising the genre of the listicle here with the top 10 hypnagogic pop songs.
OK let's get into it.
Very smooth and cool track with just enough empty space to make it interesting. The whole album is also Donkey Kong Country vibes.
Cannibal Holocaust (Main Theme) by Riz Ortolani
Neither is this song really pop or "hypnagogic" in the sense of hypnagogic pop but it does clarify my definition of the genre. The feeling conveyed in this song reminds me of a time I did missionary work in East Los Angeles. Everyone that opened their door to me assumed I was some kind of nontrinitarian except for one, a single mother whose exposure to Christianity had been exclusively of other Catholics. I explained that I was not that kind of Catholic and that my Catholicism was strictly non-druidic. She said she had something on the stove but that I was welcome inside to continue our chat. While she was in the kitchen I watched her pudgy son Ramón play video games. The living room was dim, lit only by faint streaks of light peering through venetian blinds and Twisted Metal II. Ramón played as Axel, a black guy whose arms had been fused to giant wheels, and I watched as Axel drove around an arena launching rockets at other wacky vehicles. Ramón explained to me that Axel was given wheels for arms as punishment for his crimes. I asked him what Axel did to deserve it, he shrugged and kept on driving around launching rockets. Eventually Ramón won the game and the demiurge of Twisted Metal granted Axel a wish. Axel wished he didn't have giant wheels for arms. The cheeky demiurge granted Axel's wish by turning him into a clock. Ramón glared for a moment before clicking New Game.
Hontokana? (Really?) by Picky Picnic
Beneath the jumpy bass and melancholic chord progression is a loop of a synthetic chorus that's reminiscent of the Cannibal Holocaust Theme, to me. So it also gets to be on the list. Bridging the gap between sound collage and pop, Ha! Ha! Tarachine is a milestone record for the method of suture composition, but only once the stitching begins to heal does the music transcend its form. Pall-stretched, compressed, rendered vague and unintelligible, the backing track in Hontokana? comes off as desperately mournful where it has no right to be. By its supreme modesty it fades into the foreground and encompasses the mood of an otherwise extremely ditzy tune. What can be mused of here is true for Ortolani's piece as well; there is a sublime irony at play when diametrically opposing sounds are made to share a canvas. High and low culture are leveled out, boundaries are dissolved. The audience feels as though they were willfully asleep.
A Splash of Red by Trixie’s Big Red Motorbike
This song is as formally "poppy" as it comes but, again, was released way before the hypnagogic pop descriptor was invented. Or the lo-fi descriptor for that matter, though this is where Trixie's seems to diverge. The cheap, cold drum machine and involuntary reverb on the vocals are not built into the song intentionally, rather, the composition seems entirely accidental, owed in part to it being serially laid-back. All facets converging in the sweetness of the melody heard filtering through the hiss. This track paved the way for twee pop to come and was derived in substance from the material of punk—it's no accident. But there is something here that toes the line.
Breaking People by Voice Actor
This song takes formal leaps as pop goes and is hypnagogic also solely in form. It is from a long album of 109 tracks sorted alphabetically. So how these songs flow into one another is arbitrary, but listening to the entire thing speaks to the indeterminate quality between them all. Like this order was fated by some outside mechanism. Each song, a nugget of some musical idea, are similarly indeterminate but are also as complete as they can ever be. For each, vocals and instrument play out independent of one another, but with the concept of the track name in mind. How they retract or collide is based on chance, guided by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination manual.
The programming switches into different sequencing based on how the vocals interact with the music. If the amount of syllables spent within a meter is odd, the meter is counted as "tails." If it is even, the meter is counted as "heads." After three meters pass, a sequence is formed and stored away. A fourth meter passes as a rest and the sequence resets. After six such sequences, the first three are taken to form a character found on an upper axis and the last three form a character to be found on the corresponding lower axis. Within the hexagram composed of these two axes, the intersection between the two characters determines the next phase of instrumentation.
But this is where Voice Actor diverges from the I Ching. The number of the note on the microtonal scale that the final meter hinges on in has to be divisible with the number of the proposed next phase in order for the change to ensue. In the song Breaking People, the division is 12 by 12. Before the change, and by sheer coincidence, the fourth meter is spent with vocals and instrumentation in total silence. The ensuing phase is derived from the Chinese character "jie," meaning "boundary."
Movie Monster by James Ferraro
One time before I began my discipleship I was filling in at the seminary and got to talk to a young man suffering from depression and anxiety. He was in high school and spent a lot of time reading and failing to grasp Kierkegaard. He thought girls could read his mind and were gossiping about how philistine he was. I asked him why are you like this and he told me that one night when he was a boy his parents went out and left him with a babysitter. Whenever this babysitter was hired she would put a movie on for him and go talk on the phone until his parents came home. Because the young man as a boy was always kept so transfixed by the movie the babysitter figured she could sneak out for an hour or two and he wouldn't notice. So on this given night she called her boyfriend when the parents had left and told him to come by the house. Once she saw the headlights pull into the driveway she popped The Land Before Time into the VCR and quietly left.
The young man as a boy sat watching the movie alone in the house, accompanied only by sound from the speakers and the light from the screen. He reached the point in the film when Littlefoot the brontosaurus is stranded looking for his mother when a random electrical surge passed through the house. This caused all the lights in the house to flash on before shutting off and for the VCR to freeze on the image of Littlefoot alone in the ruins of an earthquake, faced away from the camera. The image stuck on the screen for so long that the phosphor burnt into the glass and permanently left the outline of the little brontosaurus standing in a degraded landscape. The young man as a boy sat watching this static image slowly fade into grey for what felt like an eternity. When the babysitter returned he had seemingly disappeared. It wasn't until the parents came home hours later that they found him curled up hiding in the crawlspace.
If you kept up with the Journal of Media Psychology during the early 2000s you may have read this particular study that I'm about to detail. Initially authored in response to sweeping national controversy over the teaching of sex ed, it sought to study what unintended psychological effects may arise from keeping sex out of the health curriculum in public schools. Researchers from the University of Toronto split one class of 8th graders at a middle school in Mississauga into a control group and an experimental group. The control would be receiving a traditional health class about healthy eating and saying no to drugs and the experimental group would be taught about safe sex and the new sensations of puberty, in addition to all the other stuff. The researchers planted an emphasis on "safe," wanting the children of the experimental group to remain pure in order to appease their pearl-clutching parents. Despite this, the interviews they conducted yielded results of equally wild measure for both groups. One girl in the control group confessed to feeling unprepared for anal sex, as though it were something high school boys would soon expect from her. The initial peer-review incited outrage and suspicion grew that some kind of pedophilic Trojan horse had infiltrated the school. After countless undue firings and even more students withdrawn, the editors considered it best to abandon the paper. No light was shed on the issue for years until a reviewer came into his office one day to find his son laughing while reading the crude transcripts strewn across his desk. After a swift "knock it off" the son caught his breath and put the papers away. Before leaving the room he said, "You wouldn't believe how many Mississaugans thought they were gonna grow up to be like the kids in Degrassi."
A Coconut's Shadow Thrown Across The Stem Of A Rose by Monopoly Child Star Searchers
If you've ever booked a massage you didn't enjoy you can find something to relate to in this song. Lots of hypnagogic pop exploits the new age idiom because of its ironic association with everything plastic and uncanny. In other words, it's kitschy, gesturing towards a higher power while tethered to the realm of the consumer-grade. To live in this boundary is to negate the irony therein and find some transgressive pleasure in it.
The way the chord progression—two bars long, looped and 'verbed—remains just out sync with the incessant conga drums gives this sense of a perennial disintegration that just never happens. Instead a more annoying progression takes its place so the solo synth jamming may begin. Your ears drift and just now notice the stupid chanting that has been there the whole time. I, personally, really like it, but as though I am trapped and have no choice but to. If you ever are in the situation in which you are staring at the floor, being forced to listen to flutes noodling over a Moog preset while a stranger rubs jojoba over the top of your ass and intermittently asks "is this OK?", you would hope that you would at least enjoy it.
If you have ever seen the films in Seijun Suzuki's Roman Trilogy, you'll know that the Japanese have a great deal of nostalgia for the Meiji era. Like Comanche on horseback or Mujahidin in sneakers, Emperor Meiji lifted his people out from their own feudal mudswamp and into three-piece suits, railways and synthetic dyes. A country's ghosts are sublimated into fetish.
Such as it is in Zigeunerweisen, the first film in the trilogy, whose title refers to a piece by Pablo de Sarasate, a Romantic pastiche of Hungarian folk music. A recording of it is played for the protagonist by his old colleague, who points out the indiscriminate murmuring audible at quiet points in the recording. The colleague later disappears and the record with him. Our hero takes his colleague's wife as his own and raises his child as his own. He learns his colleague had died in a landslide somewhere. The child begins to murmur in her sleep. His old mistress finds him and asks him to return the record. He never borrowed it. The child begins to dream about the father she never met. His wife finds the record in the house, hidden away.
Automatic Writing by Robert Ashley
Miran Csillag was a Hungarian translator who lived in Toronto and suffered from narcolepsy and derivative psychoses. He had translated early works by compatriot László Krasznahorkai and was exchanging letters with the author with regard to translating his debut novel, Sátántangó, up until Csillag’s disappearance in the late 1980s. The two kept up writing to one another consistently with a new address appearing for every few letters sent from Csillag. Jarbidge, Mazama, Mud Lake, Glenrio, Cataviña; to name a few; only ever sent to Budapest or Berlin. It isn't clear whether Csillag even read many of the letters sent by Krasznahorkai or if they still remain unopened in P.O. boxes in the endless towns he had skipped.
Csillag could never be issued a license but preferred not to drive "on principle." He made his way to Chile solely by hitchhiking, from where he continued his journey with a mistress, named Elita, that he recruited as a chauffeur. Only his final letter, addressed from Quilpué, has ever surfaced. It has also been translated into English, for this listicle, by me.
Dear László,
Have you ever been asleep and fallen asleep, while asleep? I am asleep right now as I write this. I am in a house with huge windows, overlooking the beach. She's taken me here. She is Mexican but of Lebanese descent, from Beirut. She speaks to me in French, I don't remember if I told you. Last night we were making love on the floor. She started whispering in my ear "mon esprit regarde mon esprit regarde mon esprit regarde" over and over until I slumped over. I could hear her repeating "mon esprit regarde mon esprit regarde" while I sank deeper into sleep. You've been to Paris, do you know what it means? Whether this was only the sensations of a dream, I don't know, but I must still have been awake because I felt her continue to straddle me. At once the murmurs stopped and she let a string of spit dangle from her mouth until it hit my face, I felt that too. Over and over, endless fractals of drool.
This morning we saw some kids, three boys and a girl with blue eyes, kicking a soccer ball out front. Elita was out there tending to the garden. I saw her talking to them then hand a boy some pesos for the ice cream truck. The girl with blue eyes watched me through the glass. I was typing something. I broke contact with her to return to my typing. I looked over my machine towards the shoreline, then my vision crossed and I saw myself reflected in the glass. You haven't seen me in a while, I am getting older. I'll sent you a photo, eventually.
I look forward to your letters László, but I have to get to work.
all my love,
Miran
