Vaporwave

[Salvatorin]

"back in 06", lol

 

a simpler time

when electronic music was still 'wtf techno?'

and we all were listening to trans canada highway

boc clones amass

super compressed french electro-house was 'the bleeding edge'

[gmanyo]

imo most of the music in these subgenres is no better than stuff posted in ylc.

seriously, back in '06, college kids with laptops had to beg for people to listen to their shitty music, now they got a way to make people listen to it—give it a hip new title and make everyone wonder what it means.

I dunno man; have you heard Vekdroid's stuff under his own name, or as Shader (Sacred Tapestry)? Sometimes when an artist gets big off of really simple stuff they have other music that is very well produced but not as in vogue. I've always felt that the more popular people in any given sub-genre are clearly better in many ways than your average joe. This even applies to mainstream genres; the only thing worse than Lil' Wayne is someone trying to sound like Lil' Wayne who has no idea what they are doing.

 

I mean, you can even see it with Eccojams; Daniel Lopatin did something stupid easy, but he did it way better than most people could. If you only heard Eccojams you'd be tempted to think that DL was just a hack, but then you listen to Rifts or Replica and holy shit.

[Guest pachubatinath]

I think it's all progress. Either we stay with the 'artist-centric' industry (small number of auteurs defining/shaping/guiding genres or styles through annual releases sanctioned by record labels) or explore this new method of, as you say, 'bouncing' styles between many producers. I think it's a wonderful development -and a natural, evolutionary one -for music.

 

I think vaporwave will expand out into other genres/styles or the artists who began here will become the auteurs of the future.

[gmanyo]

[joshuatxuk]

Vaporwave isn't always slowed down old stuff, you know. Fatima Al Qadiri is considered vaporwave I think, and she's all about new and flashy:

 

 

Desert Strike is pretty good - interesting backstory as well.

[Dale]

This channel is a good one for this sort of stuff: http://www.youtube.com/user/StergiosINred/

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwbLX55KE_s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYM_AOPUajA

Edited December 5, 2012 by Bread

[Guest pachubatinath]

 

Vaporwave isn't always slowed down old stuff, you know. Fatima Al Qadiri is considered vaporwave I think, and she's all about new and flashy:

 

 

Desert Strike is pretty good - interesting backstory as well.

 

Yeah, I never understood how Fatima was included in that. She's seems...well, different -I would say she was straight up electronic music, the arty end p'raps, but not especially similar to the work on Sunup Recordings or something like Internet Club.

 

Y'see, James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual was very vaporwave but Sushi sounds closer to Fatima's EPs.

 

Ohhh yes, Desert Strike is a fine EP. Can't quite beat that Hip-Hop Spa track, but a good blast anyways.

[gmanyo]

wait a second it's not vaporwave apparently its distroid. my bad.

http://www.dummymag.com/features/2012/07/13/distroid-gatekeeper-fatima-al-qadiri-adam-harper/

Edited December 5, 2012 by gmanyo

[joshuatxuk]

wait a second it's not vaporwave apparently its distroid. my bad.

http://www.dummymag.com/features/2012/07/13/distroid-gatekeeper-fatima-al-qadiri-adam-harper/

 

I suppose my Command And Conquer Nod vs GDI EP is going to be Distroid then :/

 

also...

 

Edited December 5, 2012 by joshuatx

[baph]

The thing that bothers me about this is the trust fund kiddies making this really easy, minimally composed/altered stuff have so much free time they could actually learn how to be musicians first. (The preceding statement was a joke)

 

It's like picking up a sax and making some noise because you don't know how to play yet and claiming that it's free jazz. Well, not really, but fuck off.

 

At least with musically retarded punk bands you still had to build up a few callouses.

 

I demand sacrifices from musicians. SLAKE MY BLOODLUST. I HUNGER

 

As much as Lopatin's echojams are pure nostalgia mining, they are not pretending to anything higher, and Lopatin can and does make other music, although I'm not a huge fan. VHS Head's stuff is frequently painstaking and controlled and as a result it sounds as free and transformative as it does nostalgic. That's what can happen with some effort.

 

But the stuff in the OP... man. I can appreciate it on a simple nostalgic level but it does nothing else. The problem is, it could. It doesn't earn its hype. It's "basically the same" as a Lopatin echojam but without Lopatin's talent for honing in on hidden emotional content (which basically highlights the source material rather than merely appropriates it). The result is it's just not very interesting.

 

It's not necessarily the amount of work that makes music interesting, obviously; but if you're essentially rolling over and saying it's all been done before, I can't take you seriously until you've diligently exhausted your own intellectual and musical capabilities. Basically it just looks like you don't want to work for it. Nobody wants to work for it. Fucking babies.

 

I say this as a guy who also enjoys slowing music way the fuck down. I am fucking enamored of the textural possibilities of this kind of thing. The aesthetics are appealing to me even if I wish that they weren't.

 

Do you guys know Wallace Steven's poem Anectode of the Jar?

 

 

 

 

 

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

 

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

 

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

 

 

 

Sort of on the cusp of Modernism/Post-Modernism with respect to the ideology of what art is and what it takes to make it. Stevens knew what was up... in 1919.

 

I'm not anti-sampling, and I'm not opposed to using the fragments of other peoples production, re-arranged, to create something new, like taking a mason jar and composing it on a hill. This is watmm, and everyone here knows it, loves it, and has probably lived with it for decades. We've all grown up with post-modernism.

 

It doesn't take much! If you know what you're doing, it can look effortless. That's ok!

 

But man, some of this is moving beyond nostalgia and becoming tiring and impossibly empty. It can't always be this easy.

Edited December 5, 2012 by baph

[joshuatxuk]

^Well put, hit on a lot of my thoughts.

 

I also suppose the ease of not only making this stuff, but finding source material, finding related cultural concepts and ideas and developing a meta-discussion around it all is what I find "dangerous" about something like vaporwave, or the ease of it to be pass over soon. There's an ironic lack of personality and identity behind it: it's extraordinarily anonymous. The Fatima release at least has a real backstory. Guys like Lopatin or Ferraro, as mentioned already, have a separate body of work with more musical dimension. Related groups (imo) like BoC, VHS Head, or Burial have a distinct sound and aesthetic that in spirit is similar to others but are aesthetically incomparable. There's more depth to it, the samples they use and re-use give a glimpse into them as individuals. That's why I like this vaporwave stuff as incubator of ideas, but it's not going to develop into anything more - nor should it be heralded any further in terms of innovation or novelty.

[gmanyo]

The thing that bothers me about this is the trust fund kiddies making this really easy, minimally composed/altered stuff have so much free time they could actually learn how to be musicians first. (The preceding statement was a joke)

 

It's like picking up a sax and making some noise because you don't know how to play yet and claiming that it's free jazz. Well, not really, but fuck off.

 

At least with musically retarded punk bands you still had to build up a few callouses.

 

I demand sacrifices from musicians. SLAKE MY BLOODLUST. I HUNGER

 

As much as Lopatin's echojams are pure nostalgia mining, they are not pretending to anything higher, and Lopatin can and does make other music, although I'm not a huge fan. VHS Head's stuff is frequently painstaking and controlled and as a result it sounds as free and transformative as it does nostalgic. That's what can happen with some effort.

 

But the stuff in the OP... man. I can appreciate it on a simple nostalgic level but it does nothing else. The problem is, it could. It doesn't earn its hype. It's "basically the same" as a Lopatin echojam but without Lopatin's talent for honing in on hidden emotional content (which basically highlights the source material rather than merely appropriates it). The result is it's just not very interesting.

 

It's not necessarily the amount of work that makes music interesting, obviously; but if you're essentially rolling over and saying it's all been done before, I can't take you seriously until you've diligently exhausted your own intellectual and musical capabilities. Basically it just looks like you don't want to work for it. Nobody wants to work for it. Fucking babies.

 

I say this as a guy who also enjoys slowing music way the fuck down. I am fucking enamored of the textural possibilities of this kind of thing. The aesthetics are appealing to me even if I wish that they weren't.

 

Do you guys know Wallace Steven's poem Anectode of the Jar?

 

 

 

 

 

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

 

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

 

It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

 

 

 

Sort of on the cusp of Modernism/Post-Modernism with respect to the ideology of what art is and what it takes to make it. Stevens knew what was up... in 1919.

 

I'm not anti-sampling, and I'm not opposed to using the fragments of other peoples production, re-arranged, to create something new, like taking a mason jar and composing it on a hill. This is watmm, and everyone here knows it, loves it, and has probably lived with it for decades. We've all grown up with post-modernism.

 

It doesn't take much! If you know what you're doing, it can look effortless. That's ok!

 

But man, some of this is moving beyond nostalgia and becoming tiring and impossibly empty. It can't always be this easy.

 

I see what you're saying, and I agree with the idea that people who know what they're doing/are actually good at making other music can make "effortless" music sound better than the people who don't know what they're doing. I also think that Vektroid very much knows what he's doing. I don't agree that the point is just nostalgia. The nostalgia helps, but it's got a similar aesthetic to this distroid stuff which has zero nostalgia. It's empty and corporate. I think a good way to describe it is "vapid", especially some of the more hip-hop/witch house oriented stuff.

 

Eccojams, for example, is emotion through cheesy pop. It's stupid, consumer lyrics with lots of connotation but no real value, repeated a million times until it loses all meaning, leaving only a the cultural essence of what was said with no life. It's dead cultural emotions, and the nostalgia works well because the past is what has built our current culture. Some music, like

, is much more direct about it; "fuck/eat expensive/sleep at dawn/get money/"; it's the message of a generation taken to it's nihilistic endpoint.

[Dale]

Eccojams, for example, is emotion through cheesy pop. It's stupid, consumer lyrics with lots of connotation but no real value, repeated a million times until it loses all meaning, leaving only a the cultural essence of what was said with no life. It's dead cultural emotions, and the nostalgia works well because the past is what has built our current culture.

 

interesting analysis

 

by the way gmanyo, have you checked out this channel?: http://www.youtube.com/user/StergiosINred/

I think it is right up your street

Edited December 5, 2012 by Bread

[gmanyo]

never heard of it, awesome channel

[Salvatorin]

yeah you know I've given all that shit a chance over the years, and rarely is there anything in that big soup of soundcloud bullshit that doesn't sound like someone's shit noodlings on frootyloops. I even like shitty, amateurish music too. But my ears can only take so much disposable, utterly uninspired crap.

 

addendum: shit

 

also: nothing isn't co-opt-able these days. in fact, these multimedia microgenre communities are doing the work for the major consumer providers. Trends and content are rehashed and churned out and while we stroke our chins congradulating ourselves for being on the bleeding edge, give it several months and this will seem lame and trite and SO OVER. and really these microgenres are selling themselves from the get go. #blech

Edited December 5, 2012 by Salvatorin

[ganus]

 

i think that's the way music's gonna go - less one artist or album becoming popular, & more one particular sound that gets bounced around for a while by thousands of amateur producers with some tracks going kinda viral on the net & a select few *show playing* artists getting indie label attention

 

I sincerely hope you are wrong. I don't really see the point in making music if you're just going to make stuff within genres... To me, all of the very best musicians are people who defy genre or redefine genres, just by doing their own thing. That's the sort of stuff that is timeless, and artistic, because it's not just conforming to a trend. I mean, look how quickly Salem went from being considered genius, to being a fucking joke.

If I felt that I had to make my music based on popular sounds in order to get recognition, I would probably quit altogether

[Salvatorin]

don't get me wrong either, I like the stuff and keep a close eye on it, I find these developments fascinating. I'm just really cynical of anything that requires having to jump on some kind of ship.

[Cryptowen]

I sincerely hope you are wrong. I don't really see the point in making music if you're just going to make stuff within genres...

I don't mean to suggest that everyone will be forced to adhere to the current genre of the month, just that genres will continue to emerge & mutate long after the idea of big name artists has faded

 

just make music yo, don't be all like "oh i gotta sound like this genre" or "oh i gotta make something that sounds different & unique" (because that's just as bad), it really doesn't matter who ends up getting popular for what, most people & most music will all be part of the same soil in less than 100 years, & only the 10th dimensional super-consciousness will live on detached from time (spoiler 10th dimensional super-consciousnesses don't give a shit about what was aoty in 2013)

[luke viia]

I dunno why everyone is balking about microgenres so much. People bounce sounds and new ideas off of each other all the time; these microgenres are just an acknowledgement of that team effort to create a new 'sound.' Recall decades past: Small creative wellsprings crop up, but they were geographic, centered in cities or neighborhoods ("scenes"). A scene gets big enough, and the media latches onto it, everyone would get excited, have the same conversation we're having now, and then it would fade away, its creative vision dissected by new subgenres and scenes, until something "new" popped up again, in some other place. Two things have happened since then. 1. The scene's need for a central geographic location is gone. The internet has replaced it. 2. Scenes do not need to grow to a big enough size for the media to care before they spread. They spread almost immediately now. We - the listeners - interpret this as oversaturation. Really, though, the reach of the amateur has extended, that's all. Blooming scenes like "witch house" or "vaporwave" come and go much quicker now; they are the scenes that probably wouldn't have gained the sort of mainstream attention that grunge or (god help us) "nu-metal" did in the 90s. Those genres largely sucked too, btw. Nu metal always sucks.

 

As for ganus' issue (that people will simply make music within genre confines instead of being creative) -- that has more to do with people themselves and their creative confidence than it does with whatever microgenres are happening around them. Derivative music is easy and often really fun to make - you know what you're aiming for, you know how to do it (or at least how other people do it), and you know what people like - the only thing left is to put your personal mark on it. Acid music is a blast to make but it's not very creatively inspired at this point, same with most long-standing electronic genres.

 

 

tldr - imo the microgenres aren't prohibiting creativity; we're all just getting a closer look at how music scenes (now virtual, previously local) develop, and it's not always very attractive. It's all hipster garbage until time sorts it out; either sift through it yourself or wait for the verdict to come in later.

I don't think there's an intrinsic belief of any 'microgenre artists' that they need to trend-hop in order to be heard, though of course some artists believe that. Some artists believe they'll be discovered if only they sound like aphex twin, too. Riding the hype train is just what uncreative people do; that doesn't mean that new, still-emerging sounds are bad.

Vaporwave is an interesting sound imo, and there's definitely a good chunk of it I find unappealing... but some of it is great, and like nothing I would have come up with if left to my own devices. I got nothing against that.

[Cryptowen]

once again luke viia comes into a thread & says pretty much exactly what i was thinking

[baph]

I think microgenres should get totally meta and consolidate around a macrogenre called microwave

[gmanyo]

I really think that the way these genres are set up is playing out to match exactly the point of the genres. Pop culture nonsense. It's gonna be short lived and it's all stupid as hell, but if it weren't then it wouldn't be what it is. It's kind of the point.

 

kind of related:

 

 

http://youtu.be/l8AUPSfgk18

 

 

Edited December 5, 2012 by gmanyo

[luke viia]

I think microgenres should get totally meta and consolidate around a macrogenre called microwave

 

w/e you'd totally just cite a poem about how uninspired it was later

[baph]

 

I think microgenres should get totally meta and consolidate around a macrogenre called microwave

 

w/e you'd totally just cite a poem about how uninspired it was later

 

 

you're probably right

[Guest jacqueschristo]

So can someone explain how just taking other tracks (80s funk/japanese jazz/90s PC games) and slowing

them down or even just appropriating them as is has been rationalized into a creative movement/culture?

This isn't even in the stratosphere of other sample based genres I mean this is just curating and taking credit for what

you curate, no? Genuinely curious about this whole concept.