Like most artists whose music has been called “chillwave,” Dexter Tortoriello chafes at the term—unsurprising, given that it was coined by Carles, the brutally sarcastic persona of an anonymous blogger at Hipster Runoff. Even the critics who rushed to cover the style in the wake of last year’s South by Southwest seemed to enjoy predicting that it would be a flash in the pan.
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All the same, Tortoriello’s music lacks the overt nostalgia that gives so much chillwave its characteristic feel—it doesn’t sound like a heavily effected fourth-generation tape dub of the Breakfast Club soundtrack, in other words. And there are other departures: most of the Houses long-player, All Night, isn’t catchy pop but Eno-influenced ambience, and Tortoriello’s solo project Dawn Golden & Rosy Cross is more beat-based than most chillwave. Dawn Golden’s debut EP, Blow, is narcotically mellow pop at heart, but its propulsive percussion twitches and shimmies like a Dirty South hip-hop beat or the polyrhythms of the dance-music microstyles grouped under the umbrella “tropical.”
Tortoriello posted Blow online in August 2010, not expecting much to come of it. But in October he heard from Grammy-nominated DJ and producer Diplo, who runs the tastemaking label Mad Decent. “I didn’t get it,” Tortoriello says. “He came to me. He messaged me on MySpace and said, ‘I love your stuff, who’s putting it out?’ And I was like, I already put it out on a Bandcamp page and made a couple hundred dollars, and it dropped off.”
Maybe it’s because Tortoriello’s enjoying a bit of freedom from his self-imposed restraints, or maybe it’s just all those death-metal records he’s been listening to, but Blow sounds more vital and exciting than Houses. “Blacks,” the song Goggins says persuaded him and Diplo to seriously consider Dawn Golden, floats a catchy vocal part over a throbbing, druggy synth line that would fit fine in a dubstep track. The melody to “White Sun” is carried by bummed-out vocals and ghostly piano, but behind it bumps a strip-club beat and what sounds like a sample of Lil Jon shouting “Yeah!”—a combination that provides a bit of intellectual frisson on top of just sounding really, really good.
