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Comment by teroshan | Hacker News Reader

He's rightly credited as having participated in the popularization of the musical and visual "Synthwave" aesthetic:

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Synthwave

There’s a while sub genre of synthwave named after his album OutRun. Which, by the way, is best experienced while driving on the highway at night.

https://www.reddit.com/r/outrun/

Synthwave genre named after the video game Out Run.

Is it possible that both the album and the genre are named after the video game? or it could be some kind of chain (genre->album->video game)

Now i just want to play outrun. I wonder if there's an arcade nearby...

The videogame is from the '80s; it became iconic partially because it allowed players to choose the music to listen to "in the car", all of them synths (obviously), and one of the songs you could choose was called "Splash Wave".

Folks like Kavinsky later (re)popularized synths and made explicit throwbacks to the game, like the album name. I don't know where the term "Synthwave" came from, but it does look like one of those throwbacks.

Synthwave name is more likely to be related various "wave" genres, like Darkwave or Coldwave.

Maybe most recognizable: New Wave

Certainly we should celebrate Morodor here too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpW3C_k0WMY

I'm only just now realizing that Beach House [1] might also have picked up on that synth aesthetic because the lead singer's father is French and she was in Paris for school in the early 2000s before coming back to the states to go to Vassar (she went to school with some of my friends). It probably was percolating around Paris at that time.

But also 80s synths were just really cheap around then. I picked up a Juno 60 with a flight case for around $400, including shipping, in about 2002.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_House

Interesting theory, but fwiw synths were quite popular among the Baltimore music scene throughout the 00s. Besides Beach House, there was Dan Deacon, Future Islands, Celebration, among others. Lake Trout was another example, although a few years earlier / different scene. Ditto with Cex.

Oh yeah, absolutely. There were tons here in Brooklyn as well, probably because you could pick up a DX7 or a Juno for a few hundred dollars. No one wanted them. I remember one guy gave me a Wurlitzer 200 for free when I went to pickup a Rhodes from him because he just didn't want it.

But yeah, I still wonder if she was aware of that scene when she was in Paris or not.

Yes, especially his work own the movie 'Drive' was hugely influential on the popularisation of this genre. I think he was featured in the documentary "The Rise of the Synths" also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Synths)

RIP

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