Following last week’s genre-wide reviews of both chillwave and synthwave, today’s post completes the trifecta with an exploration of the strangest of the trio, the tip of the trident, the black sheep of the family, the ever-tardy third musketeer….vaporwave! (and all its attendant bastardizations).
Well, not really. Because the bastardizations are vaporwave, not a departure from it.
It’s a weird fucking genre. So we might as well start with the best.
That would be Ramona Xavier, a.k.a. Vektroid, who confusingly (but appropriately, given vaporwave’s anti-capitalist stance) took the name Macintosh Plus for her most popular release by far, the genre defining, genre defying Floral Shoppe. Xavier’s utter refusal to “cash in” on the popularity of the album means she walks it like she talks it. She could have gone on talk shows, done interviews with magazines both print and online, explaining over and over what she was doing, sorta like how my former partner has to explain, over and over, why women like horror, or sometimes even just the same question they’ve been asking Stephen King for half a century, why horror at all?
But instead of playing that exhausting game, Xavier stays home and makes her music. And it’s strange fucking music. You can often hear the sample she has picked played back at its original time, as @ 2:50 of the track below, the aural equivalent of looking into the infinite hall of mirrors at the barbershop.
Xavier is a transgender woman, a fact I mention only because she has claimed that it informs her worldview, and therefore her music, and I think it’s fitting that an artist who is on the cutting edge of what is considered “acceptable” or “legitimate” music would also be of an untraditional gender definition.
Everything Xavier has done has pulsed with the strong heartbeat of a human being, but her world is heavily processed, quantized, chopped, slowed down or sped up, or otherwise fucked with. Like the vaporwave subreddit states, it is
"Music optimized for abandoned shopping malls."
But despite being the flagship artist of the genre, she is pretty fuckin’ humble about the whole enterprise, telling Complex:
“The fact that there's an actual culture building around the scene is pretty amazing. I can’t take any credit for that,” she stresses, despite people crediting vaporwave’s prominence to her extensive work. “People have put in so much elbow grease and most of it happened while I was completely MIA.”
Strange, but refreshing, to hear how dismissive Xavier is about her own contribution. You don’t get that too often in today’s world, where everybody is a self-promotional huckster hawking their time on websites like Fiver, trying to monetize whatever they can because nobody pays us enough and we’re all slowly drowning in debt. Vaporwave can act as both anxiety balm and anxiety inducer, depending on which end of the sonic spectrum you land on.
Vektroid’s innumerable release dates can fly by, so that you’re still trying to figure out her last release when a new one comes out and you drop everything to listen to that one. Her newest release is really fucking hard to follow, essentially starting out with a bunch of digital farting with frequent breaks, followed by what sounds like air being let out of balloons. And then sudden sunblasts of gorgeous piano lounge music shine through the storm clouds, punctuated by deviant missile hits from ancient video games, and you find yourself asking “is Xavier making music or just fucking around? Or is she doing both?”
No. Yes. Prolly. Whatever.
How prescient can we consider this, a piece called “Sick & Panic,” released December 20 2019, about three months before the world was shutdown due to mass panic over the COVID sickness?
Her biggest “hit,” which is embedded at the very top of this post, track 2 on Floral Shoppe, is essentially just a slowed down rendition of Diana Ross’ “It’s Your Move,” yet there is clearly something else going on, a kind of non-quantized falling in and out of tune, the way Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine pulls at the vibrato bar of his Fender Jazzmaster to give the music an off-kilter, slightly seasick quality.
Writing for Tiny Mix Tapes, Paolo Scarpa characterized Xavier's music as an “exposé of late capitalism.”
I don’t see a whole lot of politicized content, though maybe it’s her sheer prolificacy that demonstrates an unwillingness to play the usual one-album-per-touring-cycle-formula that so many artists have been forced to stick to in the past? Such a scheme certainly has frustrated prolific artists like R. Stevie Moore and Robert Pollard, forcing them to create side projects to release their ever increasing pileups of new music.
Vaporwave’s visual aesthetic is less stringent than synthwave, synthwave emphasizing nightscapes and highways and moonlight and pink font and stuff like that.
Stylistically, vaporwave is seemingly only pinned down by aesthetic and the use of samples rather than a specific sound or feel. That signature retro-inspired look that quite often featured Japanese text, glitch art, renaissance sculptures, lo-fi cyberpunk visuals, video game sprites, early web design, outdated CGI, and a lot of pink and purple, isn’t as prominent as it once was.
Perhaps appropriately, given its name, vaporwave is by far the strangest and hardest to define of the three “wave” microgenres. It is difficult to describe exactly what vaporwave is, and equally difficult to describe what it isn’t but, like pornography, you know it when you see it. Or hear it. Check this one out, a song called “Cyber Imagination” by an artist called Bbrainz. Isn’t it just fuckin’ gorgeous?
Or Saint Pepsi’s landmark album Hit Vibes?
Or Cosmic Cycler’s “Night Beat?”
^ Man, that front cover looks familiar. Where have I seen that bef…ohhhh right! Luxury Elite! I can’t decide if her stuff is synthwave or vaporwave because both her visuals and her sonics straddle the divide. There’s the prominent saxophone of vaporwave, but the crystalline nightscapes of synthwave. Gahhhh.
Maybe it’s best to let other, smarter writers sort out just what the hell vaporwave is. The best article I’ve seen written on the subject comes from Joe Price @ Complex, one called “Vaporwave’s Second Life.”
With a history pre-dating its initial boom in 2011 through to 2013, the actual birth of vaporwave as a scene and a micro-genre isn’t entirely clear. Floral Shoppe, the seminal 2011 album from Ramona Andra Xavier under the alias of Macintosh Plus, is often the first thing that comes to mind when vaporwave is brought up, but in reality, the genre dates a bit further back. Stemming from the hypnagogic pop movement that DIY artists like James Ferraro and the vastly overlooked 18 Carat Affair birthed less than a decade ago, vaporwave took a long time to get where it is now.
“Devil’s Cove” by the abovementioned 18 Carat Affair is as strong a musical statement as any by vaporwave’s progenitors. Dig that sax, eh? But I can’t tell, did he just slow down The Cars’ “Who’s Gonna Drive You Home?” or is it his own musical creation?
So that’s one of the main beefs with vaporwave. It’s it all just plundering samples?
But the next track on 18 Carat Affair’s Pleasure Control, “Feature Presentation,” shows the dude obviously just fucking around with sound bites and fragments, more interested in creating a mood than a song, which tends to be the other main complaint where vaporwave is concerned; its detractors claim it’s more mood than music.
I say it’s mood music.
With influences and soundscapes coming from sources as disparate as free jazz, Muzak, ambient, dub, Bealearic, noise, trance, witch house and other genres I’m not well-versed enough in to name, you can never really be sure what you’re gonna hear when someone posts a link to a new “vaporwave” song on the web’s rallying point for such sonic vistas, the vaporwave subreddit.
The genre apparently took its name from Vaporware, which is a phenomenon from the 1980s in which a software product would be announced but never actually arrive. According to Wikipedia:
In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late or never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled.
I guess Vaporwave really is the soundtrack to late-capitalism, given that most of its releases come in severely limited physical quantities, if they exist in physical form at all. Then again, according to Vektroid/Xavier’s Bandcamp page, she is working on a proper follow up to Floral Shoppe, to be released under the name Macintosh Plus.
Perhaps the old rules regarding brand name recognition still apply then, even to a genre as slippery and indefinable as vaporwave?
For a genre that celebrates the intangible, it only makes sense that nothing stands, that there is so little to grab onto. How can we hold its artists to standards when we don’t even really know what they stand for? Unlike almost every other genre, we have only the music to guide us.
Vaporwave can be traced back to James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual (2011) which began as an experiment in trying to write ringtones, and is considered the beginning of vaporwave or hynagogic pop. Ferraro’s music isn't anywhere near as sample-heavy as the artists he's influenced, which might be why I don’t like Ferraro’s music anywhere near as much as Xavier’s, even if it has its moments: there’s no tug of nostalgia.
Honestly, trying to write a ringtone is something most 21st Century musicians have dabbled in. I’ve even done it, years ago, with a song called “Gigantic Onion” from my band’s 2009 record Complete Lung Champions. (If you’re bored by the monochrome chords at the beginning, wait for the main hook of the ringtone @ 0:28. I guarantee you might not hate it!)
I wouldn’t be mad if you hated it. Or if you hated vaporwave. After all, there is plenty to hate about the poorly written mission statement/bio on the Vaporwave sub-Reddit:
Global capitalism is nearly there. At the end of the world there will only be liquid advertisement and gaseous desire. Sublimated from our bodies, our untethered senses will endlessly ride escalators through pristine artificial environments, more and less than human, drugged-up and drugged down, catalysed, consuming and consumed by a relentlessly rich economy of sensory information, valued by the pixel.
“Global capitalism is nearly there?” Nearly where? Nearly global? Or nearly capitalistic? What the fuck are you talking about, man?
On the subreddit you can find yourself going down certain sonic rabbit holes, stuck in eternal canned loops, somebody slowing down “Somethin’ Stupid” to a ridiculous degree…or is it brilliant?
For example, I think this is one of the more beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard, a song called “p l a z a d r e a m s” by a group called CVLTVRE, I think? Or are they p l a z a d r e a m s and the song is called “CVLTVRE?”
But I know other people who say this kinda stuff puts them in a coma. Too boring. All texture and no melody. All sonics, no songs.
Ah, who the fuck knows. As the final line in Vaporwave’s subreddit says:
The Virtual Plaza welcomes you, and you will welcome it too.
It’s that sense of belonging that all great music gives to you. To us.
If you want to take a two-hour walk down the sidewalk of broken neon shards that is vaporwave, off you go. See you when you get back. Assuming you’re the same person, that is.
Despite Xavier/Vektroid’s plans to follow up her most popular record Floral Shoppe, and despite the fact that more and more Vaporwave is created every day, Wikipedia claims that those artists first associated with Vaporwave have “since drifted into other musical genres.”
Bullshit.
As Price @ Complex claims, “the scene is still going strong, despite the abandonment of its founders,” but I disagree that its founders have abandoned it.
Every few hours some new hopeful with bright eyes holds his creation up to the online world, quivering and tentative, and says “is this ok?”
Most noobs seem to be ignored completely. For example, here’s a post from 10 AM on February 1st 2021:
Hi everyone. Hope yr having a good day. My buddy made this track. Does it count as vaporwave or no?
Zero comments.
Most of the time it’s a mediocre sound experiment, or just some kid slowing down some 70s funk, but every once in a while you get a Luxury Elite’s World Class, or Windows 96’s Plume Valley, Bl00dwave’s Hotel Vibes, HOME’s Odyssey, or Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe.
Something about vaporwave makes me feel like it’s all made, or generated within one giant building reminiscent of Kowloon Walled City, or the Los Angeles of Steve Erickson’s Arc D’x where one hallway leads to another and you can never ever get out, trapped like Agent Dale Cooper in the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks.
^ Perhaps the physical manifestation of Vaporwave? A cluster of clutter, a murder of muttering and mumbled dreams, too much information, sensory overload, underwater cinematographer, lounge jazz, the blue screen of death, overexertion, dreams of Tokyo, memories of Kobe, books with titles like The Great War and Modern Memory and The Guns of August lying on the floor, opened but with candles atop them and wax leaking down onto their hardbacked covers...
You can sometimes go too far into the Future City that is Vaporwave, sometimes so far inside that you wish you’ll never hear it again, wish that we could all just gather up every single limited cassette release and rare 7” and throw it in a big fuckin bonfire, or maybe a gigantic coffin that we can all lift and carry down the street to the haunting strains of HOME’s “Decay” and say, “that was fun but let’s move on.”
It’d be nice to say that to any phase of life we wish to never see again. But that’s not how memory works. You’ll remember even the things you don’t want to.
For me, vaporwave helps to make remembering beautiful, not something that has to hurt.