One of those strange cases in life: Don Henley, drummer and singer of one of the most commercially successful bands of the '70s (the Eagles), decides in the following decade to churn out songs fully steeped in the Reaganite zeitgeist. A case that's certainly not unique, but emblematic enough of commercial savvy and managerial acumen pushed to the highest level, in what was then still the thriving valley of the music business.

After nearly two decades in the wilderness – the '90s and almost all of the first decade of the 2000s – people are talking again about Don Henley (and his "The Boys Of Summer") as one of the key inspirations behind one of the most disorienting musical benders of recent times: hypnagogic pop. Now, according to Wikipedia, hypnagogic hallucinations or illusions are defined as "...intense and vivid experiences that occur at the onset of a period of sleep...". And in describing the phenomenon further, Wiki tells us: "This phase lasts anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes, in which some or all of the senses – but particularly sight, hearing and touch – may be involved...". Keep that last part in mind, we'll come back to it later.

The whole affair dates back to August of this year. David Keenan, one of the most "influential" music critics writing in English, coined this new pseudo-genre in the pages of "The Wire", setting off the usual flurry of reflections, criticism and recriminations online. While Simon Reynolds tried to piece together some kind of considered response to Keenan's article, part of the blogosphere instead focused on the weaker points of the definition. On a couple of websites, some users went so far as to brand hypnagogic pop the worst genre ever invented by a music critic.

What's certain is that the Scottish journalist's article, more polemical than analytical by design, and for all its flaws, has one undeniable merit: it offers a way of making sense of a whole strain of bedroom/basement music that has developed in the American underground over the last two years. Music that draws on sounds rooted in kosmische/new age and in 80s blockbuster soundtracks, and that no one had managed to frame critically until now. Watching "hardline" noise artists like James Ferraro of Skaters try their hand at twilight-hued sounds is certainly a sign of a break, of a different way of approaching music that falls under the New Weird America umbrella. And how? By co-opting sounds that until then had been considered little short of taboo.

David Keenan has managed to build a common home for a fairly disparate set of acts. Incidentally, it's Keenan himself who loosens the argument's reins when he lumps in the same pot figures like James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never, who – especially on "Zones Without People" – actually sound closer to acts like Neon Indian and Memory Tapes than to Ferraro himself.

So what exactly is this hypnagogic sound? It's the sound of an imaginary world – or rather of several (or fewer), the sound that recontextualizes the frayed, worn, blurred memory of an imaginary, specifically the eighties imaginary. It's music that bears witness to memories of teenage summers spent around evening bonfires, blazing sunsets, and episodes of "Miami Vice" on TV. And in many cases these sounds, at once so familiar and so saccharine, turn out to be almost irresistible.

Among the acknowledged inspirations for the hypnagogic sound are the aforementioned Don Henley, the soundtracks of certain 80s blockbusters, and new age music of the Windham Hill school.

So it's not simply a calligraphic revival of the eighties – the kind of process that shaped 2000s nu wave – but something different, something that engages with memory itself. Many of the acts that get labelled hypnagogic are made up of people who never actually lived through that era first-hand.

The first thing that strikes the ear is precisely the legitimizing of certain sounds within contexts otherwise marked by strong integrity, or at least by a fairly rigid sense of genre identity. American underground music in particular has thrived for decades on the birth and growth of closed, sectarian communities. Hardcore, for instance, at least in its early phase, was built around a system of recognizable, accepted codes.

The same goes for the weird community, which certainly doesn't rest on any precise ideological structure, but which does rely on a fairly shared internal system of recognizability and self-legitimization.

So one has to wonder why these communities started legitimizing Don Henley and Windham Hill.

We could put forward some hypotheses involving a broader shift in climate, one that for several years now has been separating music from ideological positions and from certain topoi that until recently the rock intelligentsia considered essential markers of quality. It's no coincidence that starting from the second half of the '90s a gradual process of revisionism began, leading to the reappraisal of phenomena – Library Music, for instance – once dismissed as inferior by a heavily ideologized rock intelligentsia. That, however, isn't enough to explain the reasons behind this obsession with the 80s – dissected every which way – which has now lasted since the start of the decade.

The Eighties are the nearest decade ripe for revival (the '90s are still too fresh). Those who lived through them as children obviously have more tools today to rekindle the memory. Just think of the hundreds of websites devoted to that era. And beyond that, those years undoubtedly marked an important period in the evolution of music in general, and so are rich with interesting material to draw inspiration from.

But perhaps there's more to it. In the 1980s, the relentlessness of communication – the extreme codification of advertising language, for example – pushed the society of the spectacle theorized by Debord toward its irreversible drift, toward hyperreality, toward the final replacement of objects with their communicative simulacra (today we've gone even further). This undoubtedly affected the way an entire generation processed memory, and even more so the generations that followed, trapped in a perpetual imaginary. It's in the 1980s, for instance, that the Star Strategy devised by French advertising guru Jacques Séguéla began to be applied on a massive scale. A communication strategy that shifted focus away from the product itself and onto the spectacle of communication, understood as a synesthetic, all-encompassing experience. Hence the memories, the hypnagogic illusion that "involves all the senses", to go back to Wikipedia's definition.

Coming back to the music itself, another point worth discussing might be whether this so-called hypnagogic pop is really just the latest disguise of an ongoing transitional phase, of an endless musical postmodernism that has now reached the point of recycling the outputs of a previous recycling. In the sense that this process seems to have truly reached a point of no return, even if no strong new languages are yet visible on the horizon.

As we said at the start, Keenan's insight was undoubtedly illuminating in finding a common denominator capable of linking acts with wildly different sounds who nonetheless trade in the same imaginary. And the fact that the good Scottish critic happens to run a mail order business where he sells plenty of this very same material is not a minor detail, though it takes nothing away from the sharpness of his insight.

So where can we actually spot the first signs of this new trend? It's hard to say for certain, but it's not far-fetched, from this angle, to look at the latest records by the Animal Collective, for instance, or the breakout success of Mgmt the year before. Then again, the true progenitor of hypnagogic pop could rightly be considered the early Ariel Pink. Even Gala Drop could arguably be filed under hypnagogic, if not for a rather rigorous handling of the material that leads them to drink straight from the source. The Lisbon band, in fact, recontextualizes the sounds of 70s cosmic music, which, alongside Library Music, is one of the founding elements of the 80s synthetic sound that hypnagogic artists engage with. So what exactly is this hypnagogic pop? What if it were the indie offshoot of New Weird America, just as Windham Hill-style new age and its ilk were the offshoot of kraut electronics and 60s folk-primitivist guitar playing?

With that question, let's wrap up the contextual musings and move on to talk about the bands themselves - bearing in mind that there are dozens of acts working in this vein, and that here we'll mostly cover those we've already given space to in our reviews section.

The Lopatin Family

The figure who best embodies the drift of American underground music towards gleaming, neon-plastic analog gadgetry and 80s synthetic flavors is undoubtedly Daniel Lopatin. Championed by New Weird America's deus ex machina David Keenan, who a few months ago crowned "Zones Without People" his "Tip Of The Tongue", and himself an occasional critic for the underground webzine Foxy Digitalis, Daniel Lopatin is a musician who seems to harbor a genuine nostalgic obsession. His synthetic music is enchanting, steeped in a romantic saudade that manages to stop just short of tipping into kitsch. The most fascinating creature born from Lopatin's mind goes by the name Oneohtrix Point Never, which with his latest album, the excellent "Zones Without People", has reached full maturity - or rather, the most vivid revelation yet of a rigorous vision that borders on the obsessive.

His earlier records - especially "A Pact Beetween Strangers" and "Young Beidnahga" - despite their almost exhausting rehashing of 80s imagery, knew how to get their hands dirty with deviant noise. "A Pact Beetween Strangers" in particular, at times, even seems to flirt with an analog noise that, through strange short-circuits of influence and lineage, harks back to the Early Gurus Of Electronic Music.

"Zones Without People", on the other hand, is a jukebox drunk on sonic regurgitations of a thousand flavors, drugged shimmers and melancholy synthetic breezes. At times epic, at times sulfurous, but overall disorienting in its sugary transcendence, this sound is one of the ripest fruits of the hypnagogic wave. A sound balanced on the tip of the synth that, despite an apparent flatness, manages to convey a whole tide of nostalgic feelings. Just immerse yourself in the listening experience to travel, in your mind, through memories of a Frank Zappa guest spot on an episode of "Miami Vice" (go listen to that scene's soundtrack...), or a Michael Hedges playing the gorgeous "Aerial Boundaries" in the middle of a forest - and you can imagine the rest.

Lopatin's hypnagogic obsession lives on in the Skyramps project, formed with Mark McGuire of Emeralds, who is likewise hypnotized by eighties imagery - more so in his solo records than in his main band, whose sonic grain betrays loftier ambitions.

Skyramps are a retro-futurist version of Oneohtrix Point Never. Amid echoes of Vangelis and Alan Parsons Project, the sound here turns epic and powerful, taking on a far more lashing quality than a nostalgic or comforting one. Just one album to their name so far, "Days Of Thunder", whose closing track - the splendid "Last Time I Saw You" - manages to recover a breath of melancholy after three sonic assaults reminiscent of the disorienting soundtrack to Ridley Scott's "Alien".

Another Lopatin project is Infinity Window. On the sulfurous "Artificial Midnight", the Massachusetts musician steps away from the hypnagogic reclamation of the Eighties, recontextualizing the cosmic music of Cluster and Tangerine Dream within a drone framework. The album's three tracks conjure an old-school interstellar voyage that, thanks to barely identifiable noises and a (quite) low-fidelity production, ends up feeling more like a sleepwalk through a toxic waste dump.

Somewhere between the early Ariel Pink, the latest Animal Collective and Oneohtrix Point Never sit Universal Studio Florida, a duo made up of Jason Baxter and Kyle Hargus. A couple of releases to their name so far, the self-titled Ep and above all the mesmerizing "Ocean Sunbirds", which manages to blend eighties nostalgia with rainforest tribalism. One to keep an eye on.

Lunatic Contortions

She's got style. She's italo-disco synthesized under the hot Los Angeles sun. A metastasis of crossovers and sounds that runs through the colors of a synth's keys, abandoned under the stairs and dusted off like an old rifle. Ramona Gonzales, aka Nite Jewel, makes electronic music, builds futuristic set designs and projects multimedia videos along the beaches of the West Coast. Hers is music that pumps and seduces, anchored in robotic electronic anagrams mixed with an innate sense of temporal displacement. The die is cast through an elegant pop transfiguration, zigzagging through a slow catharsis of stifled moans, propelled largely by a plasticky, stinging beat. The usual hulking Casio keyboard calls the shots, while a jagged rhythm and a far-off vocal, inscrutable in its dazed flow, gradually sketch out the contours and various shades of grey. There's little that's truly hypnagogic here, though her knack for shaping hazy melodies wrapped in a loosely defined gait occasionally suggests a hypothetical point of contact. Rather, Gonzales seems to steer towards retro rhythms thick with italo-disco veins and synthetic fluorescence worthy of the best jukeboxes in Rimini, seasoning them with dreamy atmospheres, blistering rarefactions and sudden bursts of pure voltaic candor ("What Did He Say").

In the States it's been dubbed "poppy balearic disco". Then again, "Lover" is an exotic hyper ballad that leans on a chord progression tinged with sea salt. Elsewhere, several melodic passages even recall the nostalgic modulations trademarked by Ernest Greene (Washed Out). "Good Evening" is all a hum of booming electric beats in echo ("Weak For Me"), of artificial synapses framed by lunar lullabies ("Bottom Rung").

A dazzling debut, propelled by a wholly original compositional attitude that has drawn plenty of attention on the other side of the Atlantic. Not to be missed.

Gary War

On Holiday in Hyperspace

Greg Dalton (New York City), aka Gary War, is definitely among the most oddball glo-fi producers out there. The flanger effect on bass and guitars shapes the skeleton of a constantly neurotic sound. Two albums to his name, "New Raytheonport" (2008) and "Horribles Parade" (2009), wildly different in approach, sound and compositional intent, both apt to throw off the entire crowd of insatiable weirdness-obsessed fetishists scattered around the globe.

The debut is a collection of spacey psychedelic fragments, held together by a Barrett-esque vocal approach ("Please Don't Die"). War projects his soul into a surrealistic tangle of toxic arrangements, synthetic retching and perennially devil-may-care vocalizing. It's the disfigured singing, paradoxically stylish yet distorted at the same time, proto-punk, of a new glam champion ("Obscure Preferences"). It's the strangled delirium of a cybernetic predator ("Cyclops Eye"), of a juggler tired of the usual circus. "New Raytheonport" gives you no points of reference. The songs (?) ("Healthy Living" and "Grown In Shell" above all) can seem as brilliant as they are unhealthy sketches of pop psychedelia long since gone rotten. Listening to Gary War's cosmic offal is a bit like playing blind man's bluff with ghosts.

The New York musician's second effort, "Horribles Parade", heads toward very different shores. The album is even more jagged and mutant, with no specific glue holding it together. It's an abstract flight with no reference points, in its own way curious and even enchanting. In that sense, "No Payoff" could contain the likely future solutions/devolutions (!) to come. It sounds like beloved Add N to (X) shot even further out of Earth's orbit. There's none of the pop approach (?) of the early work, and largely missing are those evocative synth-pop-leaning goof-offs meant to lighten the load. A solution of intent capable of piquing curiosity, despite its partial "volatility". On "Horribles Parade" War flies like a butterfly set loose in the post-modern glo-fi expanse, dense with cosmic fuzz, feedback and Kubrickian drum machines. An adorable slap in the face.

Ecstatic Lounge

Dayve Hawk, aka Memory Tapes, is an unusual American nerd (go figure) who plays with synths like a kid messing around with his first remote-control track. His art lies in composing melodies by fishing out the simplest elements of the electro-pop imagination, obviously the Eighties kind, with a creativity and an electronic vision well above the norm. Add to that a conceptual leaning toward analyzing childhood memory, reworked through the "stagecraft" of homemade equipment, and you'll have a rough idea of "Seek Magic", the first full-length by this young man from New Jersey, after a whole series of little cassettes and CD-Rs already cult objects online. We're in the territory of the most imaginative downtempo (don't be scared), the most childlike art-pop, and the most refined electronic Frenchness. Let it be clear right away: nothing to do with little blazers and skinny ties at some aperitivo, the ideal setting here never goes further than one's own comfy bedroom.

This is music that makes peace with the spirit, that soothes the senses, propelled by a shyly triumphant drumming, seasoned with a circular beat and blurred by blinding little keyboards (adoptive children of synth-pop), now artful in the tail end, now projected into shadowy territory. "Seek Magic" is without doubt one of the best downtempo-leaning glo-fi productions around. A true tonic.

Hawk's other project, Memory Cassette, veers in semi-parallel directions, where an almost always heavenly and harmonious lounge pop, framed by feminine vocals, dominates the scene. Two EPs to its name, "Rewind While Sleeply" and "Call & Response", both from 2009, structured in much the same way, easily summed up as a single work given the shared stylistic attitude and ideas on the table.

"Call & Response" offers ambient pauses and little laptop tricks that largely reveal his more visionary side, hinted at in the anesthetic stop-and-go of "Body In The Water". Likewise, on "Asleep At The Party" all you need to do is close your eyes and let yourself be rocked by the ecstatic rhythm to virtually escape reality, immersed in a brightly lit party of joyful pulses. The crystalline movements of "Last One Awake" stretch things out and relax further, before you're finally overtaken by imperceptible giggles and lysergic lounge rarefactions.

Opening "Rewind While Sleeply" are two hazy little gallops dense with chill-out excess. Dreamy climaxes, impalpable little keyboards and synthetic vortices spinning in celestial rotation mark out "Ghost In The Boombox". While closing this second brief "Memory Cassette" parenthesis is the elusive "Surfin", an electro-floral gem that would make the best Maxwell Implosion and the least mathematical Air jealous. A gem curiously placed at the opening of the previous "Call & Response", confirming just how inseparable the two works really are.

A Videogame Déjà Vu

Alan Palomo (Austin, Texas) is the pop "hypnagogue" hiding behind the moniker Neon Indian, a musical project visually backed by the creative art of Alicia Scardetta, a Brooklyn video artist.

The Austin videogamer's first album, "Psychic Chasms", is one big party of toy-like manipulations, dancey rubbish, stellar samples and Sega recordings (!). It's no coincidence that Palomo's side project, called "Vega", takes its cue from the famous Japanese company. An idolatry rooted in early adolescence that still wreaks havoc on the young Texan tinkerer's imagination today. In that sense, the spacey little keyboards of "Mind, Drips" call back to the magnetic vibrations of the earliest holographic games. Gradually, rubbery little melodies are extracted, set to perfection by a sunny, blindingly bright beat.

The phantasmagoric evolution of "Deadbeat Summer" strikes straight at the heart: off-kilter rhythm, a tangle of atrophied synth-pop pulsations, muffled basslines. "Laughing Gas" goes even further, poking fun at everything and everyone with its childish giggles and proudly mischievous swagger. "6669" recalls the mellower side of Underworld, perhaps set up to play in a basement and stripped of their trademark production fussiness. Closing things out, the dance-rock cataclysm of "Ephemeral Artery" would make Guy Manuel De Homem-Christo the producer jealous, and effectively confirms the still-untapped potential of this brilliant electronic contortionist. "Psychic Chasms" is a blinding flash of light in the hypnagogic universe.

Sun-drenched beaches, bikinis and hypnagogic waves define the fantasized dance underpinnings of Palomo's side project, simply named Vega, in honor of none other than the famous Japanese video game company Sega. "Well Know Pleasure" packs in four tracks of ballsy, proudly tacky synth-pop. The sun-drenched emphasis of the opening title track serves as a prelude to the space-house flashes of the following "No Reasons", which sounds like it could have come off an old David Morales record. Too bad the remaining two versions of "All To Vivid" are markedly inferior to that opening pair, coming across as a bit bland and far too "trashy".

Hawaiian Blackout

And also from New Jersey, Matthew Mondanile, aka Ducktails, already known for Predator Vision, Real Estate, or his duo with Ben Daly in Traum Ecke, closes the circle of psychotic experimenters devoted to an unusual, weird-flavored tropical trance. Having set aside the rawness of his early days, made up of cassette tapes and rambling releases, it's with "Backyard" that he starts getting serious, bundling together in one go his whole theater of unclassifiable pseudo-acoustic layers, staged with absolute Dadaism and an indescribable leaning toward freak settings and spacey little games. These are, if nothing else, brief atonal sketches and scattered dissonances. Compositions ("Vanaselian") that flaunt pop allusions, industrial-strength detours into cosmic transcendence ("Why I Am Here") aimed at deciphering a sense of bewilderment and loss.

It's a parade of distorted, nonsensical cataclysms ("Extending Self"), of ramshackle lysergic digressions ("Chill Jam"). Still utterly undefinable, the sound Mondanile produces is something that doesn't sit between waking and sleep, but rather represents a void in dreaming memory, an unspecified image swaying among morning thoughts, abruptly faded by the first cup of coffee.

The following "Landscapes" deserves far more credit, as Ducktails sets in motion an asymmetrical mechanism of psych rarefactions placed on a Hawaiian postcard. Indeed, it's on the Pacific Ocean archipelago that he relocates his compositional imagination, hamming it up in a stellar garage rock ("Landrunner"), or, worst case scenario, conjuring up a lopsided, drunken groove ("Welcome Home").

The result is at times not entirely convincing, and it almost seems as though our good Matthew is lacking a few ideas and a certain strength in how the tracks are put together (?). Either way, the future could well deliver something more substantial and less fragmented.

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