A synth band got the best-known TV job of 2016 without knowing how the producers had found it. Stranger Things reached Netflix in July,[4] scored by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the Austin band Survive, and the same year the Frekvenci archive reached 1,878 listed releases, up 43% on 2015. Behind that total are 526 labels, nearly double the 290 of the year before.
How Survive got the job
Bandcamp Daily's interview has Dixon saying he does not know how the creators first found the band. The Duffer brothers ended their pitch with a short mock trailer built on a Survive track, the pitch worked, and a request for more music followed. The band answered with about 50 unreleased tracks the next day.[1] NME fills in the calendar: first contact on 3 July 2015, then about six weeks of after-work demos while other composers competed for the job.[2] The band's album RR7349 arrived on Relapse Records as the show took off.[1]
You can hear that record as RR7349. For the band and what sits near it, read If you like Survive: artists to try next; for the broader move of synth music into screens and charts, How synthwave went mainstream: Drive, Stranger Things and Blinding Lights, against the release numbers.
Why the label count doubled
The label table is about volume. DMT Records released 78 records in 2016 out of 123 listed overall. Verbatim Consciousness Recordings has 56 of 114, and Elemental 95 has 44 of 78. Then come B O G U S // COLLECTIVE with 27, Werkstatt Recordings with 18 and Sunset Grid with 17. Latinwave Records has 19 of its 27 listed releases in this one year, Cyber Dream Records 13 of 14.
Werkstatt has been near the top every year since 2012, but the 2012 pattern, a few synthwave labels leading a long tail, is gone. In 2016 the leaders are collectives putting out dozens of records a year, several of them on the vaporwave side.
The darksynth jump, read with care
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 3 |
| 2011 | 9 |
| 2012 | 14 |
| 2013 | 22 |
| 2014 | 44 |
| 2015 | 78 |
| 2016 | 165 |
| 2017 | 165 |
| 2018 | 222 |
| 2019 | 209 |
| 2020 | 243 |
The darksynth family has 165 releases, more than double 2015's 78 and almost four times 2014's 44. But the family collects the tags darksynth and darkwave, and darkwave is a separate, older genre of gloomy new-wave-descended music. The darkwave tag alone sits on 147 releases in 2016, so a good part of this growth is the older genre being counted beside the newer one. For the real darksynth story, see the What is darksynth? The heavy, horror-lit side of synthwave.
Vaporwave still led, and branched
Vaporwave (796) kept its lead over synthwave (639), though synthwave grew faster, about 45% against 30%. Other families: popwave 244 and dreamwave 34. Among single tags: synthwave 586, vaporwave 447, synth-pop 145, future funk 135, nu-disco 64 and vaportrap 50.
Bandcamp Daily's November 2016 family tree already needed ten branches and noted that new ones keep appearing.[3] The archive tags KATCHOW! by Lightning McQueen on Pritch Records as hardvapour, a style that article called barely a year old.[3] Read about it in the What is hardvapour? Vaporwave's loud, fast backlash.
Numbers and names
The year has 1,215 artists, and 882 are listed for the first time. 400 releases are self-released. Formats: 945 LPs, 483 EPs, 260 singles and 68 compilations. Country is known for 57% of the year: the United States has 364 releases, the United Kingdom 83, France 81, Canada 54 and Sweden 45.
The busiest artists are Fatal Friction from Ireland and cramped skunkman from the United States, with 14 each. Then comes 仮想夢プラザ with 13, haircuts for men with 12 and three acts with 11: PZA, Desired from Russia and Zadig the Jasp from France. Haircuts for Men has 109 listed releases overall, so 2016 is one active year among many.
Debuts in our sample include Black Pond (an EP on Bodyvolt), Felicidad and Cosmic Highness. "Debut" means first listed in the archive, not first ever.
Ten records from 2016
- Survive · 2016 · Relapse Records · LPThe album by the Stranger Things composers' band, out in the show's first autumn.
- Morgan Willis · 2016 · TimeSlaves · LPA synthwave-tagged LP on TimeSlaves from the year.
- Midnight Mantics · 2016 · Future 80’s Records · EPAn EP on Future 80's Records, filed under synth-pop.
- Papillon Rising · 2016 · Future 80’s Records · EPAn EP on Future 80's Records, tagged nu-disco.
- Hante. · 2016 · Synth Religion · LPA darkwave-tagged LP on Synth Religion; the older dark genre rather than darksynth.
- Felicidad · 2016 · Dark Industry Lab · LPAnother darkwave-tagged album, from a name new to the archive.
- Lightning McQueen · 2016 · Pritch Records · LPTagged hardvapour, the newest branch of vaporwave in 2016.
- Office · 2016 · Aloe City Wrld · LPTagged barber beats, a vaporwave offshoot with 22 releases in the year.
- タナトスLeFunksky · 2016 · Latinwave Records · LPA future funk LP on Latinwave Records.
- Sega Dreamcastle コンピュータ天国 · 2016 · Latinwave Records · LPA vaporwave LP on Latinwave Records, from the label with 19 releases this year.
For the heavier end of the year, the Dark station (94.6 FM) is the place to tune in.
Sources
- S U R V I V E, Synths, and the Music of 'Stranger Things' · Bandcamp Daily, 5 Aug 2016
- An Interview With S U R V I V E: The Mysterious Band Behind The Epic Stranger Things Score · NME, 2 Aug 2016
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Stranger Things (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia