History of Dream pop

About this page.

Having being raised in a small town in the outskirts of Rome, I had no chance to be aware of the extremely beautiful musical scene that flourished up between the beginning of the Eighties and the early Nineties. It took me till the middle of the Noughties to start actually digging into the ethereal and expanded world of sound whose name I eventually knew to be dream pop.

Dream pop as a term is as wide as the acoustical space occupied by the music it tries to define: it goes from the lovely yet haunting textures of Cocteau Twins to the naive melancholy of all the Sarah Records roster, from petite Hope Sandoval to all shoegaze universe, from the brightest ends of the post-punk movement to its more gothic rock extents. Lots of electronic and metal acts are dream pop under the hood too.

I cannot really decide, whether this or that record or artist belongs to the genre, and I leave the boring exercise to those who enjoy judging more than listening. My intention is to tell you about that tiny bit of the whole music history that began with a well-known label.

Though I am not very fond of social media overall, I consider the necessary evil of setting up some update channel in order to keep you posted about any progress updates. In the meantime, I would really appreciate if you would accept this little page as appetizer for the main course, whose preparation time is still to be estimated.

About the data.

Curating a compendium that covers a thirty years timespan is a considerable aim: while I will be putting my best effort in order to achieve it, I delegate the choice to the gemstone mine that is rateyourmusic and its amazing user base.

I took the data the best top and esoteric album lists of the dream pop genre for every single year, and I displayed the top-20-ish of the results. Albums are rated by users on a 0-5 stars scale, and are tagged as this or that genre on a community consense/arbitrary basis thus; don't be amazed then if you see records you consider completely off the spot, or even worse you cannot find one of your milestones (take Loveless for instance, or Bark Psychosis, or The Chameleons!).

Once more, please keep in mind that this is an intent to share and display gorgeous art, and not to stuff item in boxes!

Disclaimer

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For all the beautiful music,
to all the people I love and care for.

Diego Caponera