5 Records with Washed Out

Listening to Washed Out’s new record, Notes from a Quiet Life, it’s not readily apparent that this is the same musician who helped birth the chillwave movement that had a stranglehold on 2010s alternative music.

The psychedelic synths and slow grooving beats of Ernest Greene’s sophomore EP, Life of Leisure, were everywhere in 2009. The movement grew even more when the EP’s single, “Feel It Around,” became synonymous with the hipster movement after it became the opening song for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s television show, Portlandia.

In the ensuing years, Greene released four studio albums — Within and Without,  Paracosm, Mister Mellow, and Purple Noon. During that time, chillwave’s rapid popularity slowly dropped — although, it can be argued that chillwave was one of the many factors that led to vaporwave and hyperpop’s eventual rise. The pioneers of the genre, Greene and his peers Neon Indian and Toro Y Moi, kept the DNA of the sound alive while branching out into other directions. However, Notes from a Quiet Life is Greene’s most dramatic step yet.

“I’ve been a fan of Bullion for a long time. I just randomly discovered a handful of projects that he produced. There was a great one by Westerman, a recent one by Orlando Weeks, and another by Avalon Emerson, all of which were interesting sounding.

“He just has this very unique style and sensibility. I love how you can only listen to five or 10 seconds and know it’s his song. It’s all equally catchy and strange, and that’s what I aspire to in my music. I mean not necessarily the strangeness factor, but having that unique feel.

“I really like the song ‘Rare.’ That was my favorite one. It has Carly Rae Jepsen on it. The title track, ‘Affection,’ is also great.”

“I’m a fan of all of Kacy Hill’s albums, but this one is my favorite. It was an inspiration for my new album. 

“This record is very much modern pop music, but there’s a simplicity and minimalism to the production, which I like. There’s a nice balance where there’s not much going on, so every little sound has its place in the mix. And it also leaves a lot of space for her vocals to shine. 

“I’m also a big fan of everyone that worked on it. Jim-E Stack is the main producer for the album, and I’ve been a fan of his for years. And again, he has this sort of sound and sensibility that shines through. Ethan Gruska also worked on a few songs. He’s one of my favorite producers out there at the moment.“The guy that mixed my album, Nathan Boddy, mixed this, which is why I reached out to him specifically. He said [Simple, Sweet, and Smiling] was the least compression that he’s ever used on a master. In modern music, you try to squeeze every bit of energy and life out of it. I think that shows with her vocal performance.”

“I don’t know a lot about this project. Dominique Dumont, I think they lean into the ambiguous thing. I’m always one of those people who hears an album like this and wants to dig in, figure out what they’re using, or how they did it. 

“As far as I can tell, it seems like People On Sunday was made specifically to soundtrack a 1930s silent film. It uses a lot of vintage synthesizers and vintage drum machines, and the chord progressions have an old-timey feel. It feels to me like an old sci-fi film where they’re imagining what the future is like.

“It also serves as ambient music. I’m a homebody, and often when I’m listening to music outside of whatever I’m working on, it’s very functional. I’m just turning something on in the background and setting a mood. It’s like the concept of Erik Satie’s furniture music. 

“Not to take away from any of these records, but they’re also well crafted, and you can listen to them with a lot of intent and get a lot of it out of it, but they are so great as mood music.”

“Again, this is more in the furniture music zone. There are a couple of more ambient tracks, wandering synthesizer music. Other songs have a bit more going on, like simple drum loops. My favorite song from Talk from Home is ‘Renee is Sleeping.’ It’s just this simple drum loop and keyboard kind of thing. And again, it’s just busy enough to keep your attention. It really can shape the mood. 

“I have these headphones that you can wear when you’re swimming, and they can connect to an Apple Watch. That feeling of being underwater suits the music well. I get lost in it.”

“I can’t think of an album that floored me in the past couple of years the same way as Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba did. The only other one that stumped my head was DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., which I heard when I was a freshman in college and was into sample-based music.

“At this point in my career, I’ve been making music for 20 years, and it’s so rare that I hear something, and I have no idea how it was made. It sounded like some alien landing on Earth and putting this music together.  

“Again, there’s not much information about the album, but from what I’ve read, it was all made on this sampler keyboard. That blows my mind because there are so many textures swimming around at any one time.

“It’s not ambient music, it’s more like a noise album. On YouTube, someone commented that it sounds like a malfunctioning printer. Yeah, but the beauty in it is that it takes you on a journey. There are these big chunks of songs where it’s printer noise, but then it has a way of setting up a handful of melodic moments.

“[This record] led me on a journey into exploring more of that style of music and incorporating randomness into my work. I made a whole series of songs in the style of this album that I don’t plan on releasing anytime soon.”