Vaporwave

[Guest InfinityGhost]

Thank all of you fior explaining this phenomenon - I always wondered if any else in the world ever dwelled on public access T,.V,. vibes and such- I came across this topic a month ago and damn near cried how wonderful it is to know this is happening now

Edited June 13, 2013 by InfinityGhost

[joshuatxuk]

[Guest azzole]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Zp1lacvUmEk

[Uniret]

RIP Vaporwave etc.

 

What about just calling each track you make a new genre. Or each bar, each sound, whatever. Or like Davis said: "Call it anything".

 

We need to be post-genre now.

 

[Too unhip to be hip; Too hip to be unhip]

 

 

PLUS:

 

Untilted was pre-vapor-idm IMHO

 

post-swag, post-yolo, post-# etc

 

 

 

post post post post post etc pre post etc etc post-etc etc

[Guest vletrmx]

being kinda ok with genres is the new postgenre

[Uniret]

WGY IS GENRA

[gmanyo]

#SecondInternet

http://soundcloud.com/daytime-television/dawn-of-the-new_ugly

[Plarkreluke Banloboh]

Article on the current state of genre (Vaporwave is dead! Long live Vaporwave!):

 

http://www.dummymag.com/features/essay-invest-in-vaporwave-futures

[Guest Sublimiter]

Aw yeah. So glad I found this thread (even though its pretty old now)

[Cryptowen]

vaporwave has transcended, vaporwave is a text-based genre

vaporwave has transcended, vaporwave is a text-based genre

 

vaporwave ha-ha tran sssssssss, de-tec-wave, de-tec-wave

vapORwave ha-tech tra ssssssss, tra-ded gen, tr-tra-ded gen

 

*sound of a dog eating it's own feces slowed down & looped until it has become effectively percussive*

*coupled with the poignant echo of a once powerful pop single being played over the speakers at zellers*

*an american woman is talking about chicken strips*

[poblequadrat]

postmodernism blows

 

Finding the underside of pop culture artefacts through manipulation is interesting, but somehow Vaporware artists didn't give two shits about this, except maybe that Lopatin guy, which to be honest is the only one you can listen to for more than 5 minutes straight (Ferraro is not too bad, that track with the Wii noises was nice, but he's much more ambiguous and less entertaining.)

 

I dunno, I'm really interested in "background noise", so to speak, because as meaningless as it is you can find lots in it, but for me vaporwave kind of took it at face value a bit too much.

 

As for the Dummymag articles, accelerationism is a pretty poor politics which ultimately stems from some (actually interesting) people in France declaring that dialectics is unacceptable for philosophical reasons. Through many weird bounce-offs, this was repackaged as a palatable form of communism for those that don't really want to take the time to think through the failures of 20th century politics and prefer to dismiss it offhand.

 

The comment about "Marxist plunderphonics" really catches my attention, too: any Godard film of the watchable kind beats vaporwave any day , so at least Marxist plunderfilm was far more promising than... than what? "emotional response"? "musical sincerity"? is that bloke for real?

 

The microgenre splitting was a bit ridiculous, but I find it nice that some people get together with an agenda to push forward, and something like that needs a name. Although that wouldn't exactly be a "genre".

 

bottom line is: besides a few tracks, vaporwave was shite anyway, so fuck this

Edited July 29, 2013 by poblequadrat

[th555]

[poblequadrat]

Oh, and I love all this "have you truly looked into carpeted flooring" talk. Sometimes I've walked through generic concourses, halls and stations and thought it'd be nice to live there and roam about as much as I wanted. Like that time I was in an empty university campus late at night and wandering around I found where the vet students kept the horses and the cows, generic university buildings plus random horses and random sheds where moos come from.

 

I also remember this time my mom told me not to go to school by surprise because it was the birthday of this kid I didn't really know, and on the way there I was a bit anxious about how awkward it was going to be and then it turns out it was supposed to happen in this plasticine-looking ball pit place called Triffo (it looked kind of like what early Plaid sound like or something) and then it looked like it was going to be fun and then it was the wrong day and there was no birthday party and I was sort of very confused and I saw this sports pavillion from a distance and then I don't know what happened.

 

Or that time in the metro when I was like 6 and a train arrives and the platform is full of busy people and my mom says look it's dad and then i say hey dad and then it's this random stranger and i'm alone and confused amongst all the people and then i can't remember what happened after that either. but that's more of a boc story isn't it.

[Nebraska]

bottom line is: besides a few tracks, vaporwave was shite anyway, so fuck this

 

i agree. the thing that originally caught my attention was how vaporwave was seemed to be recreations of past sounds from distorted memories- like someone asked to describe what it was like being at home on a friday night in the mid 80s watching tv and they described a foggy image that you could only relate to a few details rather than the entire picture.

 

what really killed it for me though was the half ass presentation and production. it's like they said "hey, remember the sounds from tv commercials in the 80s?". and stopped there. i remember one guy just looped some pop song from the time and distorted the vocals.

add to the fact that there was a new vaporwaver popping up like daily (sometimes just the same guy using a different name) releasing yet another slowed down version of kenny g stuff looped with a japanese girl on the cover and a cdrom logo on the upper right corner and this stuff begins to look and sound more like spam than music.

 

if they had done this sound, taken a hard look at what made it unique then tried to cultivate it and let it mature into something more than just simple loops then it would've been something great. instead, it's like none of them could figure out what to do next except slow the samples down even more or do an even worse cut and paste job than before.

 

http://vimeo.com/25388542

[Salvatorin]

this is what you sound like ..the book is closed, the moment is over, too bad 'an aesthetic idea' failed, Time to wait to get the next 'new' sound/image spoonfed to us and then vehemently declare its shittiness. nothing slightly different than what I already like can ever be good, ever.

Oh, and I love all this "have you truly looked into carpeted flooring" talk. Sometimes I've walked through generic concourses, halls and stations and thought it'd be nice to live there and roam about as much as I wanted. Like that time I was in an empty university campus late at night and wandering around I found where the vet students kept the horses and the cows, generic university buildings plus random horses and random sheds where moos come from.

 

I also remember this time my mom told me not to go to school by surprise because it was the birthday of this kid I didn't really know, and on the way there I was a bit anxious about how awkward it was going to be and then it turns out it was supposed to happen in this plasticine-looking ball pit place called Triffo (it looked kind of like what early Plaid sound like or something) and then it looked like it was going to be fun and then it was the wrong day and there was no birthday party and I was sort of very confused and I saw this sports pavillion from a distance and then I don't know what happened.

 

Or that time in the metro when I was like 6 and a train arrives and the platform is full of busy people and my mom says look it's dad and then i say hey dad and then it's this random stranger and i'm alone and confused amongst all the people and then i can't remember what happened after that either. but that's more of a boc story isn't it.

I like it too

[Cryptowen]

add to the fact that there was a new vaporwaver popping up like daily (sometimes just the same guy using a different name) releasing yet another slowed down version of kenny g stuff looped with a japanese girl on the cover and a cdrom logo on the upper right corner and this stuff begins to look and sound more like spam than music.

 

yeah as i've said in previous threads over-saturation & releasing underdeveloped ideas is a thing that happens a lot on the internet. I mean it's really cool that anything can happen & you find exciting new content all the time, but going forward I would like to see more traditional distribution channels maintained - full-length, thematic albums developed over many months & not just "made this an hour ago gonna pop it on the cloud". Slow-moving, atmospheric feature films & not just jump-cut comedy youtube shorts. Books & not just blog posts.

 

Honestly now that I think about even with ridiculously prolific artists I like (Tonetta, Jandek, Lil B), I only bother to listen to a small portion of their discog. The good stuff just starts to seem a little less magical when I'm confronted with dozens of similar sounding experiments & missteps that led up to it

Edited July 30, 2013 by Cryptowen

[Salvatorin]

well

 

 

add to the fact that there was a new vaporwaver popping up like daily (sometimes just the same guy using a different name) releasing yet another slowed down version of kenny g stuff looped with a japanese girl on the cover and a cdrom logo on the upper right corner and this stuff begins to look and sound more like spam than music.

 

yeah as i've said in previous threads over-saturation & releasing underdeveloped ideas is a thing that happens a lot on the internet. I mean it's really cool that anything can happen & you find exciting new content all the time, but going forward I would like to see more traditional distribution channels maintained - full-length, thematic albums developed over many months & not just "made this an hour ago gonna pop it on the cloud". Slow-moving, atmospheric feature films & not just jump-cut comedy youtube shorts. Books & not just blog posts.

good news: the stage is set. I think over the last half a decade the growing context for experimental sounds has gained a large enough breadth that anything is worth making and putting out there. The soundclouds and blogs full of 2-minute wanks are just idea-food for what could come. Why not make a symphony?

[Salvatorin]

but lol at the fact that now we can call the shitty stuff 'broporwave'

fucking lol

http://anothercountyheard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-broporwave-tract-vaporwave-polemic.html

Edited July 30, 2013 by Salvatorin

[Cryptowen]

good news: the stage is set. I think over the last half a decade the growing context for experimental sounds has gained a large enough breadth that anything is worth making and putting out there. The soundclouds and blogs full of 2-minute wanks are just idea-food for what could come.

oh fer sure. I mean right now even there are people making enthralling music for actual albums on actual labels, using the same ideas floating around the net.

 

Really I'm half talking to myself with this stuff. I often catch myself wanting to send an idea off into the wild before it's had time to bloom, or even worse wasting far too much time absorbing cultural fluff that isn't even entertaining to me. The internet is a great boundary remover, but sometimes it feels like one big boundary in itself, turning us all into some sort of inanity spewing pop culture recycling self-destructive golem. Is this what the human hive-mind looks like? Reddit memes & Facebook?

Edited July 30, 2013 by Cryptowen

[joshuatxuk]

 

Honestly now that I think about even with ridiculously prolific artists I like (Tonetta, Jandek, Lil B), I only bother to listen to a small portion of their discog. The good stuff just starts to seem a little less magical when I'm confronted with dozens of similar sounding experiments & missteps that led up to it

 

 

I run into that problem too. There's often a mystique in a release that was labored over for a long time or an artist who put out very substantive but limited releases. Hell, I came to WATMM because I found releases like Universal Indicator and Analogue Bubblebath 3 and 4 fucking magical and esoteric as fuck, with sparse cultural references, and I wanted to know more about them, not because RDJ put out 35 acid house EPs for free with loud and overtly re-hashed images and song titles.

[Salvatorin]

I have to say I am still really attached to "LASERDISC VISIONS - NEW DREAMS LTD." it really has such an air of mystery to it.

[Guest vletrmx]

Has anyone listened to the new PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises albums (Home / ClearSkies)? Pretty much just straight-up muzak, not really interesting enough to enjoy (even ironically), IMO. Seems like a pisstake, really

[gmanyo]

I just want to say this:

A few years back, I think 2009 or 2010 and before I'd heard any vaporwave or eccojams, I turned my television with my friend to channel 21. This channel was 100% text slideshow and shitty MIDI music. And it only had two backgrounds and about 10 songs. We sat there watching it for hours, and I told him that we had to make this shit. Somehow we had to do this (I never did, of course; I don't really do things that I plan to). For ages I was obsessed with this, and people thought that it was just as a joke somehow, but I really loved it. Sitting there as the bland screen lit up the room to songs made on one $100 Casio keyboard was an incredible experience.

When I learned about "vaporwave", I fell in love. It started with Eccojams, and then as more things came out I loved the more muzak-ey stuff. It wasn't about being some online fad, and it wasn't really political. But it was hollow in a way that nothing else manages, cold and relentless and i hit me at a time where I was already very depressed.

All I'm trying to say here is that this music isn't just a fad for me. I really do like it that much. And it wasn't one person coming up with an idea that was latched onto. It was something many people felt on a core level, something bred by culture. I was always one for examining the philosophical, postmodern edge of things, the destruction of meaning through pop and the void left by technology, but it really did hit me on an emotional level, and I really do love it. poblequadrat mentioned something about carpeted flooring and generic concourses. I love that shit to death.

Idk what my point here is really, nor do I think people are at odds with me. But fuck, I love vaporwave.

PS Nebraska, Midnight Television, the person who made the song for that video, is the same as Vektroid, and she made that album while she was homeless.

 

edit: like when I listen to this shit, I'm not trying to like it even though I don't while thinking "This is making this sort of statement", I'm crying at the chorus because of how much I like it. Although I totally do like to think of all the pomo and political shit lol.

Edited July 30, 2013 by gmanyo

[peace 7]

Vaporwave... not vaporwave PER SE, but the general genre-bucket of vibes chillwave et al- clumping a mass of shit together, throwing in seapunk from the sidelines, but anyway- a lot of it is quite good. The past few years of electronic-ish music have been amazing in this regard (notice how "we" can no longer say "all electronic music is shit nowadays"?), thanks to post-post-post-retro + post-irony, and it's like somehow the mix of going back so far and then inside so far and then fake so far in such a real way, then trying to throw in something unexpected to make oneself laugh, has bred actual creativity and innovation. What the past few years has proven to me- with regards to this shiz- is that it's very difficult to be innovative and new by refining/polishing/re-painting something already established (the main problem with electronic music the past 13-ish years). This fault in innovative attemptage can analogously be seen in the low-brow art scene, where a handful of artists are sincerely expressing themselves solidly and uniquely; the majority of the rest are attempting to be "new" by copying established styles, which doesn't work, because the artists who do stand out have been crafting their style of years. It's naive to think that one can innovate immediately and catch speeding bandwagons, based on another's formula. Then there are people who draw/paint casually with generally no established technical skill, and they are outputting mindblowing shit, merely because they're not trying to be anything but themselves.

 

So this NUMUZAK WHATEVER IT IS STUFF--- due to trying to be somewhat funny and thematic/conceptual based instead of something aesthetically solidly established- and not giving a FUCK about criticism or much other than execution- a lot of artists are creating vibes that feel new, even though we're hearing a lot of familiar vibes from sampling (yah, some of the tracks make me feel like the living room lights are out late at night, glowing of tv screen, I'm in early elementary school, parents aren't home, I'm flipping through channels with the dial, sometimes putting my face up to the glass to see the rgb separation, with deep trippy ass emotions that emphasize the short-lived joyous moments of life; hence melancholy--- or just vibin' in a dance feel, cuz I was so young I accepted the pop vibes and shoulder pads and moosed hair and thick makeup and strong perfume and mustard yellow/green carpet, because I wasn't yet so up myself to think my opinion was more significant than another's).

 

Sooo, some of it is pretty boring and non-heartfelt, but some of it is extraordinarily good. I believe the thorough surfacing of such creations is noteworthy, marking the true next steps in electronic music. I can slooowly feel a new Orange Sunshine point in electronic music, where it's basically gonna be like, "Fuck everything, everything is great, old is nu, nothing is in the future, this is so hilarious let's move our bodies, what is going on?, what the FUCK?!, where am I?, lemme tweak the whatever, FUUUCK, nothing is sacred, so I will express without guilt"-- in that final expression, the sacred sounds of humanity will again be birthed; without attempting to create phuture-sound, true phuture-sound can be created.

 

*FREEEEEEEEDOM*

 

Aphex Twin will collab with Whoopi Goldberg to make skating kneepads, and it will make sense and be great.

 

As a somewhat related sidenote- it's weird how nobody really samples electronic tracks, IDM etc., and then make country/rock songs out of them. The other way seems natural; but sampling IDM etc. seems like plagiarism, even though it's exactly the same. Like if you sampled Milkman, Come On My Selector, We Have Explosive, and the acd line from Higher State Of Consciousness, then sang a US country western ballad over that, everyone would be like, "Hey you stole xxx, you fucking suck or whatever!" We will be firmly disconnected from our old selves (basement electronica superstars) in a positive manner, when we're comfortable with such music experiments.

Edited July 30, 2013 by peace 7

[joshuatxuk]

^good point, I always feel like there's sometimes such an arbitrary sense of what can and can't be sampled with merit.

 

http://www.dummymag.com/features/essay-invest-in-vaporwave-futures

 

 

 

http://anothercountyheard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-broporwave-tract-vaporwave-polemic.html

 

I like these articles because they seem like related ideas to what's been said in this thread.

 

To me it seems like the same futility of debating the merits of genres like witch house, dubstep, mash-up, or chillwave are being re-hashed again. Those are genres that went from small niche scenes and select productions into very hyped and often very misunderstood cultural phenomenons, where within years there would be 90% + of said "artists" producing nothing but derivative and inessential fodder.

 

At the end of the day, with vaporwave, as with the "genres" I mentioned above, there will always be a handful of good producers and a few random tracks of brilliance among the lesser artists. The importance and legacy will be in how much this influences works to come. It's just that vaporwave is so fucking dependent on very specific and arbitrary references, aesthetics, and ethos that it's ripe for criticism and dismissal. It's easy to be side-tracked by that, and I know I have in my thoughts on the genre.

 

For me at this point, I'm just bored with most of it. For instance, all this R&B stuff lately - Rhye, How To Dress Well, Autre Ne Veut or the UNO label stuff - Arca, Fatima Al Qadiri, Gobby (all the "Distroid" stuff), vaguely seapunk/net age stuff like LOL Boys and Unicorn Kid, Teams it's just most of it to me is so DULL. They're not bad, I have no valid criticism to lay on them, but my god, as I've mentioned in other rants, I really wonder sometimes how much of it is the masses of fans listening to such music not out of true, irrational fandom, but because everyone else is, including the artists themselves. It's like an echochamber effect I suppose. (I can't help but point out that the R&B groups are mostly Brooklyn based for example.) On the other hand, all the vaporwave is about as anonymous as it gets, but it's still very dependent on wildly flippant "press" and social media hype. I mean, if social media was still around we'd probably still be talking about very niche scenes like Illbient or even fucking speedbass.