Chill-out music

Origins and definition#

There is no exact definition of chill-out music. Chill-out typically has slow rhythms, sampling, a “trance-like nature”, “drop-out beats”, and a mixture of electronic instruments with acoustic instruments. In the “Ambient/Chill Out” chapter of Rick Snoman’s 2013 book Dance Music Manual, he writes, “it could be said that as long as the tempo remains below 120 BPM and it employs a laid-back groove, it could be classed as chill out.” The term originated from an area called “The White Room” at the Heaven nightclub in London in 1989. Its DJs were Jimmy Cauty and Alex Paterson, later of the Orb. They created ambient mixes from sources such as Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, Eagles (band), Mike Oldfield, 10cc, and War. The room’s purpose was to allow dancers a chance to “chill out” from the more emphatic and fast-tempo music played usually in the discos. This also coincided with the short-lived fad of ambient house, also known as “New Age house”. Cauty’s KLF subsequently released an album called Chill Out (February 1990), featuring uncredited contributions from Paterson. Ambient house declined after the mid-1990s due to market saturation. In the early 2000s, DJs in Ibiza’s Café del Mar began creating ambient house mixes that drew on jazz, classical, Hispanic, and new age sources. They called their product “chill-out music”, and it sparked a revived interest in ambient house from the public and record labels. The popularity of chill-out subsequently expanded to dedicated satellite radio channels, outdoor festivals, and the release of thousands of compilation albums offering ambient sounds and “muffled” beats. Consequently, the popular understanding of “chill-out music” shifted away from “ambient” into its own distinct genre. Music critics to that point were generally dismissive of the music.

Streaming#

Streaming became the dominant source of music industry revenue in 2016. During that decade, Spotify engendered a trend that became known among the industry as “lean back listening”, which refers to a listener who “thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods, and activities”. As of 2017, the front page of the service’s “browse” screen included many algorithmically-selected playlists with names such as “Chilled Folk”, “Chill Hits”, “Evening Chill”, “Chilled R&B”, “Indie Chillout”, and “Chill Tracks”. In an editorial piece for The Baffler titled “The Problem with Muzak”, writer Liz Pelly criticized the “chill” playlists as “the purest distillation of Spotify’s ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper”.

Chillwave#

In 2009, a genre called “chillwave” was invented by the satirical blog Hipster Runoff for music that could already be described with existing labels such as dream pop. The pseudonymous author, known as “Carles”, later explained that he was only " throwing a bunch of pretty silly names on a blog post and saw which one stuck." Chillwave became one of the first genres to acquire an identity online, although the term did not gain mainstream currency until early 2010, when it was the subject of serious, analytical articles by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In 2011, Carles said it was “ridiculous that any sort of press took it seriously” and that although the bands he spoke to “get annoyed” by the tag, “they understand that it’s been a good thing. What about iTunes making it an official genre? It’s now theoretically a marketable indie sound.”

Lofi hip hop#

In 2013, YouTube began allowing its users to host live streams, which resulted in a host of 24-hour “radio stations” dedicated to microgenres such as vaporwave, a derivation of chillwave. Music streaming platform Spotify added to the popular “lo-fi beats” wave by generating “Spotified genres”, including “Chill Hits”, “Bedroom Pop” playlists, and promoting numerous “chill pop” artists. and Spotify’s “Chill Hits” playlist had 5.4 million listeners.

See also#

• Chillout Sessions
• The White Room