Toro Y Moi w/ Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Ava Luna
Webster Hall
Wednesday, September 14

Better than: Getting my phone stolen on the way to the show.

In the age of the wireless router, traces of our recent cultural past ('80s pop videos, '90s Reading Rainbow episodes, Aughts Geocities pages, and so on) remain with us almost indefinitely, but the lives of the many continuously forming and re-forming microgenres are—if not nasty and brutal—almost always short. Perhaps this explains the Hobbesian mentality that pervades the work of pigfuck revivalists. A few bands within that bludgeoning genre were profiled in a recent issue of the Voice, and the piece ends with members of two of the featured bands distilling two years of the chillwave backlash into a single paragraph:

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Coinciding with the release of Era Extraña, his follow-up to 2009's Psychic Chasms, Neon Indian (a/k/a Alan Palomo) has released a video, directed by The Creators Project, for "Polish Girl." The video shows Palomo in his retrofuturist wheelhouse, its robot-man-meets-human-girl love story apparently taking a place in some sort of alternate present where blue plasma comes out of iPads but the flatscreen TV has yet to be invented. If nothing else, these visuals are paired well with the track's glitchy, 8-bit sound.

And if you want to catch Neon Indian outside of the videodrome that the clip at some points seems to reference, he'll be DJing a free record-release party at Other Music tonight from 6 to 8 p.m.; on October 21, he'll play a proper set with Purity Ring at Webster Hall. Video below.

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Credit our friend, Stereogum's Brandon Stosuy, with starting this particular hashtag yesterday. Mashing up the world's most important genre with the world's most important literature seemed like an idea with legs, but alas, things done on the internet toward the end of the day on the one of the two or three slowest weeks of the year are more likely to die than prosper, and so it was with #literarychillwave--an idea with much potential, and little follow through. Perhaps we can revive it today? Because, I mean, look at these:

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Gotta feel sorry for Javelin's roadies, if they have any

​So the Whitney has prepared a quartet of free-admission Friday-night shows in July and August. Is it fair to say that the lineup is pretty... chill?

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​Listen: I find daffy, nigh-incomprehensible NYT indie-rock chart-maker Andrew Kuo an actually welcome addition to the Paper of Record, a nice undercurrent of candy-colored ludicrous surreality amid all the stuffiness. But this glo-fi thing today is a bridge too far: mass confusion, lame jokes ("Slowdive's lawyer left a message: 'You say tomato, we say shoegaze'"), totally uncalled-for Sleigh Bells japes, and... wait, Sleigh Bells are glo-fi? Not to get into a genre pissing match here, but as the publication that currently employs (as an intern) our nation's foremost chillwave/glo-fi scholar, we call bullshit. Verily, this is the Lost finale of charticles.

​"Glo-fi" or "chil-wave", that sub-sub-sub genre of electronic indie pop, was kind of a big deal at SXSW this year. Well, as big of a deal as something solely focused on trying to sound like Christopher Cross on muscle relaxers can be in 2010 at a constantly internet-streaming, forever re-tweeted music festival. Big enough though that New York Times' Jon Pareles dropped this awesomely brutal piece about why the scene is well, bullshit.

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