Vaporwave Music

[Retail Fan+ (Justin Hill)]

Vaporwave is a music micro-genre and art movement that emerged in the early 2010s among Internet communities. It is characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist fascination with retro cultural aesthetics (typically of the 1980s, 1990s, and early-mid 2000s), video games, technology, postmodernism, Japanese culture and advertising, and styles of commercial and popular music such as lounge, smooth jazz and elevator music. Musical sampling is prevalent within the genre, with samples often pitched, layered or altered in classic chopped and screwed style.

Central to the style is often a critical or satirical preoccupation with consumer capitalism, popular culture, and new-age tropes. The visual style of vaporwave, as seen on album covers and in art videos accompanied by the music, is commonly referred to as "aesthetics" (often stylized as "ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ").



History

Vaporwave emerged as an internet-birthed style loosely derived from the work of "hypnagogic pop" artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro in previous years. Daniel Lopatin's 2010 release Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 and Ferraro's own Far Side Virtual are often credited for sparking vaporwave's development, as is Macintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe. In subsequent years, the genre has found wider appeal through websites such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Last.fm and 4chan. It continued to evolve in 2013 with acts like Blank Banshee adopting sounds that "have a hint of virtual plaza but significantly transcend it". Subgenres have also appeared, including mallsoft, which "conjures the muzak played in shopping malls".

In 2015, MTV revealed a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk. Inversely, Tumblr launched Tumblr TV, with an explicitly 1990s MTV-style visual spin. According to Jordan Pearson of Motherboard, Vice's technology website, this change would mean the death of the genre, as the "cynical impulse that animated vaporwave and its associated Tumblr-based aesthetics is co-opted and erased on both sidesâ€"where its source material originates, and where it lives." Artists often embrace classical sculpture, 1990s web design, computer renderings, glitch art, VHS, Cassette Tape, East Asian Artwork, and cyberpunk.

In November 2015, according to a Rolling Stone "10 artists you need to know" list, 2814's album 新しã,,日の誕ç"Ÿ (Birth of a New Day) found success within a "small, passionate pocket of the internet." 2814 cited Boards of Canada, Steve Roach, Vangelis, Burial and Sigur Rós as influences. Since the realase of this album, a lot of the new releases in the genre have moved towards a more atmospheric and ambient-heavy style. In the same year the album I'll Try Living Like This, by Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv, was featured at number fifteen on the Fact list of "The 50 Best Albums of 2015".



Interpretations

Vaporwave has been described as "a degrading of commercial music" in an attempt to reveal the "false promises" of capitalism. Music writer Adam Harper of Dummy Mag describes Vaporwave as "ironic and satirical or truly accelerationist"; noting that the name "Vaporwave" itself is both a nod to vaporware, and the idea of libidinal energy being subjected to relentless sublimation under capitalism.

Critic Simon Reynolds has characterized Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person project as "relat[ing] to cultural memory and the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities, especially those related to consumer technology in the computing and audio/video entertainment area".

æƒ...報デã,¹ã,¯VIRTUAL (Jouhou Desuku VIRTUAL), the alias of Vektroid, describes her album 札幌ã,³ãƒ³ãƒ†ãƒ³ãƒãƒ©ãƒªãƒ¼ (Sapporo Contemporary) as "a brief glimpse into the new possibilities of international communication" and "a parody of American hypercontextualization of e-Asia circa 1995."

Music educator Grafton Tanner argued in his 2016 book Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts that vaporwave is a rebellion against rampant, uncontrolled capitalism, particularly surrounding its treatment of nostalgia.



Subgenres

Future Funk
Mallsoft
Vaportrap
Eccojams
Utopian Virtual
Faux-Utopian
Hypnagogic Drift
Broken Transmission
Futurevisions
Late Night Lo-Fi
VHS Pop
Vapormeme



Stylistic Origins

Hypnagogic pop
chillwave
plunderphonics
new-age
lounge
elevator music
chopped and screwed
city pop
dance-pop
smooth jazz
funk
nu-disco
ambient
cyberpunk
R&B
punk



Cultural Origins

Early 2010s
Cyberculture



Typical Instruments

Audio editing software
Ableton Live
FL Studio
programming sampler

[Chuck E. Cheese]

I've never really liked it but it's okay.