Wave music

Musical qualities and influences#

Wave conveys feelings and qualities of melancholy similarly to witch house and emo rap, dreaminess, sci-fi akin to grime, drill, vaporwave, cloud rap, video game music and sound design, ambient, house, techno, and jungle.

Production style#

A genre of bass music, while using a filtered Reese style bass timbre. The percussion features trap-style drums with fast hi-hats, with other elements like snare and pan-hits further processed using reverb. The percussive styles used can vary owing to the music’s broad range of influences and producers’ willingness to experiment. The beats per minute typically varies between 120 and 140, but wave DJ sets may range from 100 to 200. Vocals used are generally chopped samples, with the pitch decreased and increased in conjunction with reverb and delay.

Visual aesthetics#

Wave’s visual aesthetics incorporates digital art such as computer-generated imagery and animation. In the scene’s origins, these artworks were combined with wave music on Tumblr, and later become used as visuals for physical events. Wave can also display imagery taken from video games and cartoons.

History#

The development and spread of wave music as an independent genre began in the early 2010s Also in 2013, Plastician became an early promoter of the wave scene radio shows on Rinse FM, and by releases on his label Terrorhythm Recordings, for instance Klimeks’s remix of “Born in the Cold” on the compilation album Turquoise. In December 2015, Plastician released The Wave Pool MMXV mix featuring a selection of wave music and collective to promote wave music. Since 2016, the wave scene—originally an online phenomenon—has experienced an increase in physical events such as in London, primarily Dalston. The ongoing Los Angeles based wave showcase event Tears In The Club also emerged in 2022 and currently represents the largest recurrent and exclusively wave focused event in the western hemisphere. Further local scenes include Poland, Russia, and Canada. The music video for the song also won the Best Alternative Video at the MTV Video Music Awards Japan. In 2021, he released the song “Plan B” as the “latest evolution of wave”.

Reception#

In May 2017, Vice published an article by Ezra Marcus arguing that the wave community and bloggers were categorizing a wide range of music within the sonically undefined “constructed microgenre” of wave, in order to strategically influence algorithms on streaming platforms such as YouTube. Plastician responded to Marcus’s article, arguing that most wave producers were generally younger people who lack marketing skills and are unfamiliar with YouTube algorithms.

External links#

• WavePool on Reddit