Steingar
Traveler
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2021
- Messages
- 57
- Reaction score
- 93
- Awards
- 25
As someone who "got in" to vaporwave through albums like 'Birth of a New Day' and who has enjoyed listening to artists like 'Golden Living Room' and 'Desert sand feels warm at night' it's interesting to go back to some of seminal releases in the genre like 'Eccojams', 'Floral shoppe' and even 'sunsetcorp' which have such a different feel to a lot of what came later, mostly in the way that sampling is such a core (maybe even the core) aspect to it.
In a lot of the old vaporwave classics, the extent of sampling is at once recognisable and evocative; a re-contextualisation of both old hits and all kinds of muzak flotsam and jetsam, chopped and screwed into an eerie pulp that often walks the line between straight up noise and, well, gorgeous music.
A lot of this can play on nostalgia, and we're all aware that that is a big part of the vibe behind the music. This makes sense in a way. The writer Grafton Tanner makes the point that vaporwave is essentially "haunted" by the collage like structure and references baked into the tracks. But it's clear that there is more to vaporwave then just the "feel" it gives you, haunted or otherwise: after all, a lot of the works of the Caretaker and Oneohtrix Point Never (i.e. sunsetcorp, go figure) are "haunted" in a similar fashion, but no one is calling 'R plus seven' vaporwave.
So what gives? Laura Glistos, in easily my favourite quote about vaporwave other than maybe a certain something about being drugged up in virtual plazas, contends that vaporwave in its rawest, most subversive, and intellectual form, is the recharacterisation of "shit", i.e. the unwanted or forgotten refuse heard in the background of elevators and whatever generic trite is served up on the radio for vapid consumption. Quote: "Experimental music calls forth these obsolete sounds in order to 'fertilise the wide field of listening with a farrago of attentional spores that sprout gnarled shoots of interest to see new aesthetic sensibilities'". I think this, this bricolage of kmart tape sounds and news-at-11 and diana ross singles frankensteined into a post-modern amorphous blob lies at the heart of vaporwave at its most daring, its most bold, and its most innovative. 'Eccojams' may be, what 10 years old, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound punk as hell even after all this time.
Which brings me back to the albums and artists I mentioned at the start. It's interesting listening to something like 'Birth of a New Day' because in all honesty, if I heard that in a vacuum, I would think that had its musical origins more in something like Eno's 'Thursday Afternoon' than something by Vektroid. That's not an insult: I love 'Thursday Afternoon' and I love 'Birth of a New Day', but robbed of the dissonance and heavily sampled core of old-school vaporwave the album is more clearly ambient both in tone and style. Same with 'Desert sand feels warm at night' and other ones of its ilk; it's damn nice to listen to and it can give me a pleasant melancholy like nothing else, but that's about the extent of it.
So what's the upshot of all this? I'll start by stressing that I absolutely aren't trying to do anything cringe like "gatekeep" vaporwave or contend that these works are bad or lesser; as I've noted, many of these works are among the most accessible and enjoyable to listen-to works flying the vaporwave banner, and honestly using a bunch of samples is not a predicator of good quality either. But it does raise an interesting question I wanted to put to the community, which is this:
What is, to you, the vaporwave minimum? Does such a thing even exist? Are these kind of works linked conceptually or sonically enough with the old school stuff to be tagged as vaporwave front and centre, or are they at best vaporwave adjacent through such sub-genre titles as "slushwave" or "dreamwave"? Does making an ambient album and putting a roman statue on the cover make it viable? And if some things that don't sound like what the classical interpretation of vaporwave is can still be called such, at what point do enough planks from the Theseus' vaporwave ship change over that it becomes no longer recognisable as, well, vaporwave?
In a lot of the old vaporwave classics, the extent of sampling is at once recognisable and evocative; a re-contextualisation of both old hits and all kinds of muzak flotsam and jetsam, chopped and screwed into an eerie pulp that often walks the line between straight up noise and, well, gorgeous music.
A lot of this can play on nostalgia, and we're all aware that that is a big part of the vibe behind the music. This makes sense in a way. The writer Grafton Tanner makes the point that vaporwave is essentially "haunted" by the collage like structure and references baked into the tracks. But it's clear that there is more to vaporwave then just the "feel" it gives you, haunted or otherwise: after all, a lot of the works of the Caretaker and Oneohtrix Point Never (i.e. sunsetcorp, go figure) are "haunted" in a similar fashion, but no one is calling 'R plus seven' vaporwave.
So what gives? Laura Glistos, in easily my favourite quote about vaporwave other than maybe a certain something about being drugged up in virtual plazas, contends that vaporwave in its rawest, most subversive, and intellectual form, is the recharacterisation of "shit", i.e. the unwanted or forgotten refuse heard in the background of elevators and whatever generic trite is served up on the radio for vapid consumption. Quote: "Experimental music calls forth these obsolete sounds in order to 'fertilise the wide field of listening with a farrago of attentional spores that sprout gnarled shoots of interest to see new aesthetic sensibilities'". I think this, this bricolage of kmart tape sounds and news-at-11 and diana ross singles frankensteined into a post-modern amorphous blob lies at the heart of vaporwave at its most daring, its most bold, and its most innovative. 'Eccojams' may be, what 10 years old, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound punk as hell even after all this time.
Which brings me back to the albums and artists I mentioned at the start. It's interesting listening to something like 'Birth of a New Day' because in all honesty, if I heard that in a vacuum, I would think that had its musical origins more in something like Eno's 'Thursday Afternoon' than something by Vektroid. That's not an insult: I love 'Thursday Afternoon' and I love 'Birth of a New Day', but robbed of the dissonance and heavily sampled core of old-school vaporwave the album is more clearly ambient both in tone and style. Same with 'Desert sand feels warm at night' and other ones of its ilk; it's damn nice to listen to and it can give me a pleasant melancholy like nothing else, but that's about the extent of it.
So what's the upshot of all this? I'll start by stressing that I absolutely aren't trying to do anything cringe like "gatekeep" vaporwave or contend that these works are bad or lesser; as I've noted, many of these works are among the most accessible and enjoyable to listen-to works flying the vaporwave banner, and honestly using a bunch of samples is not a predicator of good quality either. But it does raise an interesting question I wanted to put to the community, which is this:
What is, to you, the vaporwave minimum? Does such a thing even exist? Are these kind of works linked conceptually or sonically enough with the old school stuff to be tagged as vaporwave front and centre, or are they at best vaporwave adjacent through such sub-genre titles as "slushwave" or "dreamwave"? Does making an ambient album and putting a roman statue on the cover make it viable? And if some things that don't sound like what the classical interpretation of vaporwave is can still be called such, at what point do enough planks from the Theseus' vaporwave ship change over that it becomes no longer recognisable as, well, vaporwave?