Synthwave's 2012 came with a soundtrack that had a body count. Hotline Miami, a top-down shooter from the Swedish studio Dennaton Games, set its violence in 1980s Miami and played it over pulsing electronic music. It appeared in the same year the Frekvenci archive more than doubled.[1][2] We list 232 releases dated 2012, up 137% on the 98 of 2011, and 133 of them fall in the synthwave family.
A game, and what the data can say about it
Hotline Miami came out in October 2012, according to Wikipedia, and its developers have named the film Drive as an inspiration.[2] NME's retrospective lists M|O|O|N, Perturbator, Scattle, Carpenter Brut and El Huervo among the artists on the score.[1] Blogs like to say the game "introduced" a generation to synthwave. That is an opinion, and the archive cannot test it. What it shows is that Perturbator has 4 releases dated 2012, and that the dark end of the family was small: 14 releases in the darksynth family, against 133 for synthwave. For where that strand went, read the What is darksynth? The heavy, horror-lit side of synthwave; for the artist, If you like Perturbator: artists to try next.
Vaporwave was forming on another corner of the same internet. Bandcamp Daily's family tree puts its first landmarks in 2010 and 2011.[3] By 2012 the archive holds 32 vaporwave-family releases, among them Redefining the Workplace by INTERNET CLUB, an act with seven releases that year.
Counting 2012
The year has 160 artists on 80 labels, and 59 releases are self-released. Albums lead the formats: 99 LPs, 53 singles and 45 EPs, with the rest filed as compilations or other types.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 11 |
| 2009 | 33 |
| 2010 | 47 |
| 2011 | 46 |
| 2012 | 133 |
| 2013 | 191 |
| 2014 | 318 |
| 2015 | 441 |
| 2016 | 639 |
Frekvenci groups community tags into families, and one release can sit in more than one.
| Family | Releases in 2012 |
|---|---|
| Synthwave | 133 |
| Popwave (synth-pop, italo disco, nu-disco) | 44 |
| Vaporwave | 32 |
| Darksynth | 14 |
| Dreamwave | 9 |
Single tags are less tidy: plain synthwave on 114 records, synth-pop on 30, vaporwave on 21, darkwave on 14 and retrowave on 12. Darkwave here is mostly the older, gothic-leaning genre, so the 14 darkwave tags and the 14 in the darksynth row are different records that happen to share a number.
Why Greece is third
Country is known for about 60% of the year's releases. In that group the United States leads with 50, then France (20), Greece (17), the United Kingdom (10), Canada (8) and Sweden (7). Greece's place is one producer's doing: Arcade Metropolis has ten releases dated 2012, the most of any artist, and that is 10 of the 17 Greek releases.
Behind that act the table reads INTERNET CLUB (7), Tommy ’86 from France (6), Arcade High from the United States (5), then five acts with four each: Beatbox Machinery, Perturbator, Vincenzo Salvia, Plaisance and Zalza. Treat country counts as a guide to who was prolific, not a census of scenes.
Labels: one big, many small
Werkstatt Recordings was the busiest label with 16 releases, out of 136 listed overall. Then came Aphasia Records (8), Future City Records (7), Rosso Corsa Records (6) and Tommy '86's own imprint (5). With 80 labels sharing 232 releases, most put out one or two records. Blood Music, later a heavyweight of the dark side, has three here.
Who was new
Of the year's 160 artists, 127 are listed for the first time in 2012. That means first listed, not first ever: the archive is built from MusicBrainz and Discogs and only knows what those databases hold. It is still a clear sign of a scene filling up.
One border case deserves a sentence. Grimes' Visions, released on 4AD in 2012, carries a chillwave tag in the archive. It sits next to synthwave on the genre tree, but you would not play it between two outrun records. That is what "community tags" means in practice: neighbours get counted.
Ten records from 2012
Picked to cover the year's labels and moods, one record per artist, and mostly lesser known on purpose.
- Cartridge 1987 · 2012 · Pain Surprises Records · LPAn album from a name that first appears in the archive this year, tagged synthwave.
- Flash Arnold · 2012 · Aphasia Records · EPA short EP on Aphasia Records, one of the year's busiest labels.
- Dynatron · 2012 · Aphasia Records · LPAn album on Aphasia Records that taggers filed under spacesynth.
- Miami Nights 1984 · 2012 · Rosso Corsa Records · LPOne of Rosso Corsa Records' six releases that year.
- Vercetti Technicolor · 2012 · Giallo Disco Records · EPAn EP from Giallo Disco Records, a label whose name points at Italian horror cinema.
- Vincenzo Salvia · 2012 · Future City Records · EPAn EP on Future City Records from one of the year's most prolific artists.
The night-drive end of the year lives on the Night Drive station (92.0 FM). For how 2012 fits into the genre's longer timeline, A short history of synthwave, from French blogs to the charts has the wider view.
Sources
- Hotline Miami's soundtrack and the game's 80s Miami setting (Rock The Spacebar) · NME, 9 May 2022
- Hotline Miami (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016