Discoteca Imaginaria is an audio docu-series covering the people, places and sounds that have shaped popular music. Each episode transports listeners through history to the greatest club on earth – the disco of our imagination.

What’s in a genre’s name? 

In the summer of 2009, a loose cluster of artists, far from the usual urban centers of culture, were independently creating music in their bedrooms and uploading it to Tumblr for an audience of internet-native millennials. Toro y Moi, Washed Out, and Neon Indian would soon after become the faces of what blogs like Hipster Runoff and Hype Machine termed “chillwave” – a label that became almost as important as the music itself. 

While not a movement in any formal sense, “chillwave” is often marked by a distorted, nostalgia-heavy sound built through early DAW production and sampling, made far outside the commercial record label system. The music slowly spread from blogs into wider circulation, most notably with Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around” becoming the theme song for the television show Portlandia. By the early 2010s, many artists had distanced themselves from the term, and the moment faded as quickly as it arrived — but for a brief time, when music blogs still the purveyors of taste, you could feel it all around.