on the new OPN video

Your Internet Needs YOU

I guess I sort of missed the comment window on this one, but there's been a couple of things people have said, and a couple of things I've read on a similar theme lately. I have some reservations about the video that came out of Oneohtrix Point Never's new album, R Plus 7, the video for 'Still Life (Betamale)'. Watch it, if you must, here. I've never had the chance to address OPN's work directly, but I'm still a big fan, I think R Plus 7 is brilliant, full of previously unimaginable forms and abstractions, really good music, and hopefully I'll get into that on another occasion (and the 'Still Life (Excerpt)' video? one of the best things I've seen all year). I also know other work by Jon Rafman, and think it's often pretty cool (though not everyone likes the way he does it). This video is a more or less separate issue. To begin with, it's important to emphasise that the people who made this video and the people who really liked it probably had good intentions, are not scoundrels, and probably were not conscious of the wider contexts, and that's understandable.

Yeah so people really liked this video. Someone on Facebook said about it 'The truth is...things are grim, and people DON'T feel things, so feeling drawn to and repulsed by media like this says a lot about our state and less about our tastes.' A friend of mine called it 'provocative in a modern way.' Sean DeLanty on Ad Hoc said:

In the incredible clip... we see flashes of disgustingly dirty computers and keyboards, screenshots of anime pornography, live-action shots of furries and other online fetishists, and a variety of other NSFW, internet-enabled manifestations of human sexuality, violence, and general carnality-- all presented through a hallucinatory digital aesthetic.

The Warp website says:

'Still Life (Betamale)’ draws images from a range of online fetish sites, engaging with the theme of obsessive desire. The narrated version of the album track is immersed in the simultaneously captivating and disturbing world of internet subcultures.

Let's get something out the way - don't take this response as a sign that the video is controversial, shocking or envelope-pushing. I'm not critiquing this video because I'm too 'challenged' by it, because I think it's in poor taste or pornographic, because I can't handle the 'truth'. It's precisely because it reflects pre-conceived notions of taste in a sham-realist, sham-sociological exposé that it doesn't challenge me or frighten me enough.

I thought the beginning was atmospheric, and I liked its retro graphics. Then there are the images of computers in a state of physical neglect, portrayed in a forensic photography, crime-scene style, absent of people, like we've wandered into a house where someone's recently died. These are images of environments occupied by people who may or may not need some sort of help. Then there are images and videos from various alternative sexual subcultures. We're being invited to make the association, loud and clear, between the electronic world of these alternative sexualities and these sites of physical neglect. People have been praising it for this aspect, because it revels in the binary of the virtual and the physical, and the true alienation of the digital aesthetic and these modern times.

There's the heavy implication that these dirty computers are sites where dirty people have been practicing their dirty sexualities. Ew. You know the type. Ugh. Overweight, probably old, disgusting, wallowing in decomposing pizza, beating off to something fucked up. Yknow, internet-users. Cos, like, this is us. Well, not really, but basically. That's what's going happen to us when we use the internet too much. It's going to stop us being healthy and normal. Shit. Baudrillard or something. Koyaanisqatsi. Sad.

Nah. The video is policing sexuality and computer use, mapping them onto heightened constructions of a physical world ('IRL') vs an electronic world, unnatural excess in the one driving unnatural excess in the other and the whole thing turning into a cautionary tale of horror and disaster. Constructions? I mean to say that many of us have come to believe in a separation between 'real life' and 'electronic life,' and we constrain and tame the 'internet life' and all the troublingly relativising potential it represents by framing it as unimportant, trivial, unnatural, unreal, excessive, inauthentic, shameful, threatening, and often, as in this video, fearful.

If you survive the video, find it meaningful and feel the frisson, you're the lucky winner of a sort of 'reality patrol support officer' badge. The training was difficult (which enhances the sense of psychological reward and newfound cultural capital), but you've negotiated with genuine images (never mind the way they were framed) and discovered in them the valuable truth about The Way Things Are, that excessive internet usage, the inability to properly maintain that all-important boundary between 'real life' and 'the electronic world,' and 'normal sexuality' and 'fucked up sexuality' accordingly, is bad and a real problem with grave consequences. These ideas are generated somewhere between the video itself and the audience reaction.

('But all that stuff you said was true, there really IS a separation like that with all those characteristics.' If you believe in that, that's my point. It's like the separation between mind and body. It's not like your mind, your hard drive and the internet is floating beyond the boundary of some transcendental limbo dimension that's in some sort of hierarchy of existences whereby it doesn't properly exist or is situated above or beneath the physical somehow. In terms of 'existence,' the electronic world is ultimately nothing more or less than an extension of paper and pencil.)

(And if you think that the sexualities and other images represented in the video are uniquely contemporary, 'internet-enabled' and 'digital-aesthetic' try visiting a fanzine archive, or this exhibition at the admittedly culturally marginal British Museum, or a cave painting. If you think the position or the argument about grim, icky, contemporary alienation is uniquely Internet Age, look at Videodrome, Alban Berg, Egon Schiele, William Dean Howells, dark satanic mills etc. I have an academic friend who argues that the monstrous Caliban in The Tempest, for example, represents seventeenth-century anxieties about the new environments and possibilities of oceans, which trade and exploration were opening up at the time. If you want some contemporary-times / new-electronic-world satire that actually might be complex, illuminating and thought-provoking, watch Black Mirror.)

'Modern,' 'internet-enabled,' 'digital aesthetic.'

Now there's definitely a case to be made that some of the sexual images in the video are or were harmful to people / animals and harmful representations of people / animals, and that this does need to be brought to wider attention via for example this video. Strangling, distress, etc. (nb, BDSM is a lifestyle which observes rules and safety procedures, but yeah), there is certainly room for debate here, the same way that pornography has been debated in feminism, I won't go into that here. Is there an element of misogyny in the pictures worth being genuinely concerned about? Definitely, yes. Rape culture? Non-consenting sexual violence? Absolutely - big, big potential danger being hinted at in the video. But does the video make a clear, unambiguous argument about how these images function harmfully (other than to make the stupid association with hygienic neglect) and what we might do about it? No. Does it differentiate between a whole bunch of alternative sexualities? No. There is at least one element in there - furry fandom and other costumes - that probably needn't be included in the parade as harmful or worryingly freakish. I don't see how people doing that is inherently dodgy. But the multifaceted bucket o' freaky perversions it goes through before your appalled normative eyes is not unlike its equivalent a hundred years ago which included, yes, paedophilia, but also, of course, homosexuality and inter-racial sex taboos. Fifty years from now will we look back and think 'yeah, that that drowning furry-costumed person someone found on the internet really nailed the dark, fucked-up, unnatural place we were at as a culture?' Or will we feel an uncomfortable sense of phobia, gaze and exploitation about the whole thing?

If you were under the impression that furries are freaks or digital-age deviations, PLEASE watch this video. Not so weird and dark, huh.

(And a side-point here, as I can't count myself as a card-carrying representative of any of the alternative sexualities in the video, but I do know we don't have to worry about the ethics of using the images and videos and what these communities think about they way they've been represented and their potentially sensitive material used in the video. Because I know that whoever made the 'Still Life (Betamale)' video has long been involved with alternative sexual communities and knew that the representation in the video was appropriate. I know that whoever made the video was in an open and equal dialogue with the people who made and use those images and videos and got their consent and input. And during this dialogue, there must have been the conclusion that it was fine that those communities and their imagery be conflated with extremes of domestic and hygienic neglect. Because I know that whoever compiled those images wouldn't just have wandered into an online culture and just taken what worked the most for them because they believed that everything in culture and on the internet is free of context and free to use for whatever purpose they want. And even if they didn't, it would be very different from someone taking sensitive items of non-Western culture and putting them in Western museums and galleries for Westerners to gawp at and misinterpret. Thankfully we don't have to worry about these things, because the people who make videos for major independent labels are fair, responsible and scrupulous.)

Harmful or otherwise, there's no denying that these subcultures (as well as people who have one way or another unfortunately neglected on hygiene, a completely different category) are being objectified in the video for the amusement, terror and fascination of us normal, right-thinking people. It might be different if these people were deliberately objectifying themselves directly, for their own purposes and under their own control (as some of them might have been doing in the original videos), but that ultimately might not be the case here because those videos and images have been re-purposed and reframed. So it becomes the contemporary manifestation of the nineteenth-century freak show, really. You remember the way the bodies of women of colour were (as said e.g. here) used as props in recent widely publicised pop performances. And Warp have commissioned videos that ogle anomalous bodies before, particularly Chris Cunningham videos such as Rubber Johnny. He was dancing to the music of Aphex Twin in a potentially empowering way, but the opening and the depiction of him in the dark amped up the horrifying aspect as much as it could, just like 'Still Life (Betamale)'. Then there's the photography of Diane Arbus, pictures of people with all sorts of sexualities, disabilities and othernesses (disability activist David Hevey calls it 'enfreakment' and that's a great word for the 'Still Life (Betamale)' video) which in themselves are one thing, but Arbus and indeed Susan Sontag also explicitly drew connections between the subjects / objects in the photography and a supposed condition of alienation. Then there's Frank Zappa, who considered himself (and his fans still believe it today) to be an 'anthropologist' and sociologist of the seedy side of American life as he was recording a mentally ill person for his Bizarre label, and making music that reflected perceptions of bad taste in all its varieties. His fans say his music is tough, provocative and challenging, but fun, true and a genuine, important reflection of the way things are, and they say that he sticks it to the man, and that they know all this makes them the special chosen few.

They don't see what all this is, the dubiously celebrative and undeconstructive gaze of the normality police masquerading as new and meaningful commentary.

'In times of socio-cultural stress, when the need for positive self-definition asserts itself but no compelling criterion of self-identification appears, it is always possible to say something like: 'I may not know the precise content of my own felt humanity, but I am most certainly not like that,' and simply point to something in the landscape that is manifestly different from oneself' - Hayden White, 'The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea', in Dudley and Novak (eds.), The Wild Man Within: An Image of Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism.

'Modernism' has a long and ugly history of using Others and 'deviants' to say what it wants to say about a confusing, changing world quickly and easily and with the greatest impact. Progressive weirdness and depictions of modernity, don't have to - and shouldn't - involve things that are actually part of actual people's actual lives and turn them into objects that represent, enforce and amplify constructions and alienations that we already brought to the table.

This is precisely what I was going on about in the latest Pattern Recognition, about how online music is in danger of being confined to a set of easily recognisable characteristics that serve to maintain a reductive sense of 'internetness'. If the central focus of underground new culture is going to move online - and this is an exciting prospect - it should not proceed by objectifying, reducing and colonising what it finds there into a series of ostensibly edgy symbols that only serve to shore up its own prejudices in a facile postmodernist Seth-MacFarlane-come-Douglas-Coupland-come-Frank-Zappa way. The internet and the digital world are not pathologies, the cultures that develop there are not symptoms to be gazed at, to titillate us and make us feel both in the know, bravely in touch with the challenging truth, and superior to the freaks. Call it the IRL gaze. Call it the Internet Other. I shudder to think that the positive reaction to this video reflects the way people have been listening to other artists who have been associated, tenuously (as many are) or otherwise, with internet culture or internetness, or that this is what people think the potential of the internet is.

And, problems of inter-cultural art-making aside, I hate to think that this video is supposed to be what relevancy and modernity, or truth and satire, are today. Really? This? A confirmation of the ugly suspicions of people who are freaked out by the new technology blaring as subtly as an eighteen-wheeler airhorn? Next we'll have a music video about that baby you heard about that thought a book was an iPad, or people who say 'hashtag' out loud (why do people hate that? Cos it violates that precious physical / electronic boundary), or about how there are too many albums to listen to now and how horrible that is, or a terrifying video about how someone spent more than half an hour looking at jpegs of cats and they had no idea it had been that long. And people will be all like Yes. This. This is What The World Is Coming To, never suspecting that the very pleasure and ease with which they accept all this represents and stems from the fact that they're not moving on, not adapting, not discovering anything or seeing the new structures openly, but keeping them in their place, at arm's length.

The Matrix claims its latest victim

And if you're thinking, 'But the internet really is evil, we have to bear this in mind!' I'm not disagreeing that there are drawbacks to the rise of the digital world. Again, watch Black Mirror. Or, as I said, to certain sorts of sexual imagery on it. But even as a cause for genuine concern, I don't agree that parading objectifying representations of its deviancy in an atmosphere of horror and the grotesque is fair or helpful, and certainly not a great artistic statement we can be proud of.

Again, I don't mean to say that anyone who made this or liked this is did so deliberately or maliciously, and if people who made it and liked it are not aware of critical perspectives like these that are admittedly not well-known or well-developed, that's hardly their fault. And God knows I've been guilty of approaching all the stuff I've moaned about above in some of my writing, but my perspective has been changing and I hope it will continue to do so - I'm feeling that new music has more to offer than this.

Essay: INVEST IN VAPORWAVE FUTURES!

My latest essay for Dummy takes a second look at vaporwave, a year after my original article on the emerging genre (click here to read). A lot of what I wrote was positive, some of it not so positive. This one got a bit of flack, and, again, I'm genuinely sorry for any upset it caused in the vaporwave community. If there was anything amiss about my aesthetic approach, especially my approach to some of the more recently emerged artists, other than a basic sense of annoyance it has generated, I would urge people to put their thinking in publicly available online writing and send me a link. It is very important that music writers associated with established publications (such as myself) should not be the only people who get to describe and debate about new music such as vaporwave. The internet is your mouthpiece, and I will listen.

I'd like it to be noted that I do not 'endorse' the 'broporwave' tract, I simply agreed with its general point. More particularly, I don't agree with its complete damning of such institutions as Fortune 500 and SPF 420. As I say in the article, I think a lot of the work associated with them is great. And in my general criticisms of what was described as 'broporwave,' it was naturally not my implication that the music-making and listening was illegitimate or unlovable (and maybe even 'inferior' was too unkind a word), just that in my opinion it generally had less to contribute than earlier vaporwave did. My stance was relatively mild.

As for the usual accusations that my approach to new music is too considered / too deep: as ever, I make absolutely no apologies for that :-)

(Also: I did a blogpost on some of the historical differences in the genre terms surrounding / related to vaporwave. Click here if you're interested.)

some chillwave differences

In my recent Dummy article taking a second look at vaporwave (click here to see it) I wrote

there has been some confusion between vaporwave, hypnagogic pop and chillwave. OK I'm sorry, I know that there's a special place in hell for people who, like me, constantly strive to maintain a separation between vaporwave, hypnagogic pop and chillwave - it's a back room where Satan forever explains the differences between death metal, black metal and doom metal. But vaporwave and its sibling genres each had different beginnings, different artists and different approaches when they were first identified, before they were blurred together by writers, fans and artists unable to tell the difference between the three.

So I thought that I would outline some of the differences that have been made in the past between the three - just for the record, just for anyone that wants to know. Clearly they are all part of the same family of styles, but there are, or at least have been, stylistic and contextual differences between them. Please note: I am abundantly aware that most people, musicians, fans and bystanders alike, might not give two shits about these differences. Nor should they. Or the history, for that matter. People can and will use these terms however they want to - I am no-one to stop them, and I wouldn't want to. No one appreciates more than me that 'in the end it's all music.' No one appreciates more than me that genres are imaginary constructions. But at their most historically differentiated, this is how the three terms / constructions stand. If this is all ridiculous to you, so be it, it's pretty ridiculous to me too. And to me, this is less about being a 'hipster' (lol hipsters lol omg haha let's move on) than about surveying the landscape of underground new music in the detail it deserves.

Nor, indeed, is this account definitive, of course. If I am wrong or missing something about the history, let me know and I'll make edits to this page. And please feel free to debate anything and everything in the comments.

Note that although the terms have regularly been blurred together in articles and blog posts for four years now, a decisive factor today comes from Bandcamp tags, which are (like it or not) heavily promoting the genre-identification of music, since they're a way to get new releases noticed by the right people. Usually, the genre tags are multiple, and a great many artists use both the 'chillwave' and 'vaporwave' tags at the same time, often more as well.

Chillwave

Probably the most well-known term today, 'chillwave' was identified and described by Carles, the author of the widely-read Hipster Runoff blog, in a post on July 27 2009 (click here to read). Referring to new acts Washed Out, Neon Indian and Memory Cassette / Memory Tapes, he says:

Feels like 'chill wave' is dominated by 'thick/chill synths'... Feel like chillwave is supposed to sound like something that was playing in the background of 'an old VHS cassette that u found in ur attic from the late 80s/early 90s.'

Carles is writing within, referring to and situating 'chill wave' in relation to the indie community and its traditions, mentioning Animal Collective, Pitchfork and Gorilla vs Bear. It should be noted that the blog is predominantly satirical in nature, but actually I don't read the post as 100% sarcastic or nonsensical. Clearly tongue in cheek to varying degrees in various parts? Yes absolutely. A complete falsehood both in intention and effect? No. There will of course be disagreement on this. Carles went on to mention chillwave a number of times, adding Toro Y Moi to the genre, which made a lot of sense musically.

Subsequently, the meaning of the term mutated as it was passed around. For many, most prominently Simon Reynolds, chillwave was a general term that referred to a number of lo-fi indie / underground musicians exploring 80s pop styles who could have been seen as following or influenced by Ariel Pink (I have disputed this interpretation here, preferring to talk about an 'Altered Zones Generation'). Chillwave arguably still carries connotations of prominent indie musicians with an easy-going, relaxing retro style. But now that it's become closely associated with vaporwave, chillwave's connotations of technology that was cutting-edge (and pretty yuppy) in the 80s but that are charmingly lo-fi and kitsch now are heavier than ever (remember, interest in and attachment to kitsch doesn't automatically imply insincerity, irony, satire, mockery or bad music). But in the beginning at least, chillwave was a lot more poppy, whereas vaporwave is a more raw / hardcore approach with a much more specific and developed visual / conceptual / extra-sonic world. Since Carles's chillwave resonated so well with a particular hipster stereotype that was popular at the time, it's unsurprising that Washed Out's track 'Feel it All Around,' the mp3 attached to Carles's original post, became the theme tune to the comedy series Portlandia.

Hypnagogic Pop

Appearing at almost the exact same time as Carles's chillwave post, 'Hypnagogic Pop' was described by David Keenan in an article published in the August 2009 issue of Wire Magazine (#306). It mentions The Skaters and its constituent parts James Ferraro (this long before he was well-known and hi-fi) and Spencer Clark, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, the Shdwply label, Emeralds and more. The article is a great read, with some wonderfully expressed images and insights, and can be read by clicking here - I don't endorse the comments made below it though. Keenan, the Wire and the artists discussed in the article are generally speaking in a more underground and experimental place than the artists associated with chillwave. This distinction is borne out in the music described, which typically has clearly more exaggerated lo-fi qualities than what was in the same month called chillwave, and a more free-form experimental feel.

Taking its name from the hallucinatory state between being asleep and being awake, Keenan gave a rich and full description of its stylistic characteristics and prevalence that can't be reduced to any one quotation so do read the original, but to pick out some key parts:

Hypnagogic pop is pop music refracted through the memory of a memory. It draws its power from the 1980s pop culture into which many of the genre's players were born, and which is only now being factored into underground music as a spectral influence... Hypnagogic pop is 1980s-inspired psychedelia... it homes in on the futuristic signifiers of the 1980s.

Although aesthetically and thematically there is considerable overlap between chillwave and hypnagogic pop (and, indeed, hauntology), it should nevertheless be noted that the cultural contexts of each original statement on the genres, together with the artists described therein, are different. Moreover, to my ears at least, the differences in sounds between each group of artists are also pretty audible. However, as the terms passed into the underground new music discourse, they understandably blurred together.

Vaporwave

As far as I know, this term started life in a blogpost of October 13, 2011, describing 'Surfs Pure Hearts' by Girlhood. I would have identified the sound of this release as squarely within hypnagogic pop, but of course that's just me, and it seems quite possible that the post's author wasn't familiar with that category. Then when I was researching for the first part of my article on 'the virtual plaza,' I found the term 'vaporwave' as one of a number of Last.fm tags attached to the music in question. I showed Robin Burnett (i.e. INTERNET CLUB etc) the set of tags and they liked that one best. In the article, I explored my own sense of the term's connotations ('vaporware,' and a Marx quote that 'vapor' reminded me of, 'all that is solid melts into air') and quoted Robin Burnett and Vektroid's reactions to it too.

It should be noted that much of the descriptive language in my article was aimed at 'the virtual plaza,' which included not just vaporwave but a bunch of rather different artists surrounding Dis magazine, Hippos in Tanks and UNO NYC as well. However, since the first part of the article, on vaporwave, was far, far more widely read than the second part on the Dis, HIT, UNONYC artists, and since it began with an introduction to the virtual plaza as a whole, the associations with vaporwave might have been skewed for readers more towards the cynical and dystopian music of the second part. As a sub-category of / differentiation within 'the virtual plaza,' then, I described vaporwave as:

a next step in the evolution of hypnagogic pop... the typical vaporwave track is a wholly synthesised or heavily processed chunk of corporate mood music, bright and earnest or slow and sultry, often beautiful, either looped out of sync and beyond the point of functionality or standing alone, and sometimes with a smattering of miasma about it. It’s made by mysterious and often nameless entities that lurk the internet, often behind a pseudo-corporate name or web façade, and whose music is typically free to download through Mediafire, Last FM, Soundcloud or Bandcamp... The typical vaporwave zip file (album, if you like) presents itself as a collection of inspiringly modern, motivational and mood-regulating settings – perfect for that infomercial, that menu screen, that in-flight safety video, that business park promotional video, that drinks reception in the lobby.

The bulk of my description of the term was focused on its similarities and differences with hypnagogic pop. My use of the term 'vaporwave' reflected how I saw it as something new and different from hypnagogic pop (even though it was on a continuum with it), something with a more modern, hi-fi sound often favouring e-piano and crystal chimes and a sample-based approach. It's clearer to me now that the vaporwave community were using the term to describe something a lot more synonymous with Keenan's hypnagogic pop (again, those people could well have been less familiar with the latter term). My reaction to the term's use in the article was complex, but for many of the artists, 'vaporwave' was simply a reference to a perception of fogginess and cloudiness in the music (and I quoted Burnett on this).

For me, the unique departure that I saw as 'vaporwave' (i.e. the stuff that distinguishes it from the other genre categories above and below) begins with NEW DREAMS LTD. by LASERDISC VISIONS in July 2011 (I am less sure of the INTERNET CLUB chronology, but for me it also has this quality). I stand by this.

EDIT: Robin Burnett tweeted this:

@RougesFoam w/r/t to chronology: a year or so ago vek said she considered a record me and @Leonce made back in january of 2011 called Vector Tables (http://datavision.bandcamp.com/) heavily influential towards New Dreams Ltd.—VT in turn i'd say was influenced by Games' SPEND THE NIGHT WITH GAMES mixtape and Lopatin's Eccojams, although with the hindsight of two and a half years it's fair to say VT (especially the second and last tracks) took from the wreckage of hypnagogic pop in general, and i guess just an observation that r&b and 80s ads sounded great slowed down—even before VT though, vektroid's TELNET EROTIKA record from late 2010 was on this same exact wavelength, but produced much better, haha. I suppose just me and vek were just doing the same sorts of things at the same time, but we didn't know it until like, mid 2011.

@RougesFoam INTERNET CLUB itself started as a bit of a turntable.fm-based joke to make purposely ridiculous nonsense

@RougesFoam but it changed tack after Leonce turned me on to Computer Dreams in july 2011

However, in the past year it has become a lot clearer that the most influential album by that artist is FLORAL SHOPPE by MACINTOSH PLUS, released December 2011. I had placed less emphasis on this album in my article because I associated that album more with hypnagogic pop, screwing and echo jams, and less squarely with 'the virtual plaza.' Given the average sound of stuff tagged vaporwave today, for the bulk of fans at least 'FLORAL SHOPPE' seems to be the definitive vaporwave album (and the November 2012 Needle Drop review of the album, currently at 28,000 views, is probably highly responsible for this - I for one was a little disappointed in that review, its generalisations and its cynical parts, and hope that people haven't been putting my article(s) in the same boat with it - I fear they might have, but que sera).

(It's also worth noting that vaporwave producers are very often, I think, younger than the chillwavers and hypnagogic pop artists, the latter being now generally in their mid / late twenties.)

Other articles had their own definitions, probably influenced to varying extents by what had come before: Leor Galil for Chicago Reader (February 19, 2013):

Vaporwave... is sample based, layering and warping pieces of the most reviled forms of music in the recording era: chintzy 80s lounge, smooth jazz, Muzak. Sometimes producers slow down and layer samples till they sound like velvety R&B slow jams, or chop and repeat them to create a sort of languid stutter. Its dreamlike feel recalls the hypnagogic pop of multiply pseudonymous New York musician and producer James Ferraro.

Michelle Lhooq for Thump (June 25, 2013):

Imagine taking bits of 80's Muzak, late-night infomercials, smooth jazz, and that tinny tune receptionists play when they put you on hold, then chopping that up, pitching it down, and scrambling it to the point where you’ve got saxophone goo dripping out of a cheap plastic valve. That’s vaporwave. 

Today there is some internal tension over a subcategory / degradation of vaporwave going by the term 'broporwave.' See my second essay on vaporwave for more on this. Many of the artists involved have appropriated this term with tongue-in-cheek but ultimately fond connotations (good for them). To whatever extent broporwave is something distinct from vaporwave, it's clear that much of what is being discussed as or tagged as vaporwave today is heavily to do with retro, technostalgic kitsch and 80s smooth-jam pop music (remember, interest in and attachment to kitsch doesn't automatically imply insincerity, irony, satire, mockery or bad music), bringing it a little closer, spiritually, to hypnagogic pop and chillwave than I initially saw it as being. Of course, it is not for me, or Fantano, or Galil, or Lhooq, to say definitively what vaporwave 'is.' It is for you and the underground new music community to decide. (Or of course, you may take none of these terms seriously in the first place).

EDIT: See also: interviews of Ailanthus Recordings and some of the artists on it: Part 1 - The Head of Ailanthus and Part 2 - 회사AUTO.

UPDATE: Liz, the co-founder of SPF420, said this in a Dummy article on New Generation:

"Vaporwave, in my opinion, is our current 'punk scene'. The digital rebels. The ones who 'steal' others' music, just to manipulate it and chop it up a bit. That is so fucking punk...It's like how punk bands only knew how to play power chords. It's brilliant. Vaporwave isn't lazy, and neither is punk. I think that these two genres of music are parallel: short tracks with messages that are very literal, made with minimal intent (for the most part)."

The writer of the article, Russell Thomas, concluded:

New Generation, its associates and sister-collectives, consist of a marginalised set of up-and-coming music-makers who make being the natural underdog seem cooler and more rewarding than ever before - this movement speaks of a more connected world, with embryonic punk spirit living in each sampled track, cover and remix.  

Also: Glo-Fi

Glo-Fi was a term gently pushed by Pitchfork that they first started using, amazingly enough, in late July 2009 as well, within the same like two weeks 'chillwave' and 'hypnagogic pop' were coined. Perhaps the music in question here is even lighter, more guitarry and even more typically indie than Washed Out etc, but it's kind of besides the point, ultimately because you rarely see the term used nowadays - it lost out to the others, and it's so similar to them, just less specific / useful.

Also: Hauntology

This is definitely part of the same broad historical genus as the others, but it's at a significant remove from them in terms of time, space and culture. While the term is usually associated with Derrida's coinage of the word in Specters of Marx (and I have written my own, more general and abstract interpretation of the aesthetic) in most cases it implies the work of a generation of musicians who grew up in the 60s, 70s or 80s, generally British, exploring music from the mid-twentieth century (typically 60s BBC music) using various techniques of estrangement. The category was described and developed by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds in late 2005 and 2006. Lots of the stuff that's seen to be quintessential hauntology, such as the stuff by The Caretaker, is deeply comparable to vaporwave. The creative process is very similar, but the cultural contexts and source material is very different. And actually, I've always seen hauntology as darker, more tragically ironic.

Also: Echo Jams / Ecco Jams

It was Daniel Lopatin's sideline in what came to be called echo jams that, it seems, provided the initial spark of influence that led to vaporwave. Vaporwave artists have counted Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010) as a key influence. Lopatin's track 'Nobody Here' was also hugely popular in the underground. To me, echo jams is proto-vaporwave - looping and often screwing the sweetest bits of late eighties adult contemporary pop, before the distinguishing interest in more modern, hi-tech corporate sounds took hold. The early stuff by Computer Dreams, 骨架的, esc 不在 etc. is very much cut from this cloth. Now, this technique is so prevalent in what's now being discussed and tagged as vaporwave that they're practically the same category.

Pattern Recognition: The Fantasy Behind Veiled Musicians

My Pattern Recognition column for Electronic Beats reaches its third volume, with a piece on the aesthetics of anonymous or reclusive - 'veiled' - musicians (click here to read it) - kicking off with the Burial is Four Tet farce, then going on to look at Jandek and a mysterious and amazing Soundcloud account, that of Pepsi 7up.

There has long been something attractive, tantalising and romantic about an anonymous artist, especially one who chooses to be... Take away the name, the face and the life story, and a big, mysterious hole appears, an empty space that people can fill up with their fantasies.

The most telling aspects of Jandek’s initial reception, however, were the assumptions that were made about what sort of a person he was and how and why the music was made... The suggestion that the emotion in Jandek’s music was merely performed or inferred rather than ‘real’ was barely made.

It’s worth noting that if Jandek really is Sterling Smith, he was born in 1944, making him part of the same pioneering generation as Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Charlemagne Palestine, David Lynch, Lou Reed, John Cale, Neil Young, Jefferson Airplane, The Residents and The Beatles.

It’s very difficult to describe just how surprising and captivating Pepsi 7up’s “Over The Rainbow” is. A choir of synthesized voices, a voice probably designed to be female leading with the fragmentary melody and lyrics, accompanied by a number of male voices, the glockenspiel and another synthesiser. The voices are so startling familiar in some ways and so estranged in others—you can almost feel mouths pronouncing consonants, but the beginning and endings of the sounds and the ways they change over time are not human... It’s like that hit of happiness you get from recognizing a loved one occurring even though—or maybe because—their skin is shimmering aquamarine and the lower half of their face is barely recognizable. It’s like figuring out you have a crush on a being from another dimension.

Essay: Meanwhile in the UK's dance underground...

My latest Dummy essay returns to the UK dance underground (click here to read it) looking for fresh new developments since my piece on Texas last autumn. It's been described as exhaustive and encyclopedic, but it's not quite supposed to be a run-down of everything that's happening - only the weird new stuff and less famous labels that are beginning to shine. Featuring Sophie, Rustie, Hudson Mohawke, Numbers, Redinho, Lockah, Donky Pitch, Hyetal, E.m.m.a., Night Slugs, Jam City, Helix, Hysterics, L-Vis 1990, Keysound, Visionist, Wen, Beneath, the Grime 2.0 compilation.

Bipp might be the first underground dance hit to have evolved an endoskeleton. There are almost no perpendicular lines in time or timbre space – sounds curve upward, glide downward, slide off another or withdraw swiftly into the membranes they came from, leaving silence.

Since 2008 there have been several different sub-scenes and sub-sounds that never really got called anything more fitting than “post-dubstep”. One descriptive term that has been coming up a lot in music writing since 2008 is “neon”. It seems to describe many different kinds of a more playful, expressive, synth-led sound that has variously tied together strands of grime, 8-bit, skweee, aquacrunk and synthed 80s R&B and disco-funk (what’s sometimes called “boogie” these days), and often placing this on a rhythmic bed of halfstep, UK funky, or more recently footwork or the “trap” production style.

 

An offshoot of the magical neon sound is the highly modern, streamlined, robotic sound developed by Jam City on ‘Classical Curves’, released by Night Slugs a year ago. It brings in a more hardcore sound probably partly influenced by the Night Slugs family’s recent interest in ballroom. Now, though, Jam City is not the only producer to be exploring this territory. This year on Night Slugs’s recent ‘Club Constructions’ initiative, Helix (from Georgia in the US), and Hysterics (a new alias for star-of-2010 UK producer Girl Unit), look to similarly lean, repetitious, unusual, almost industrially hard, heavily syncopated (even in the bass) grooves, now practically the antithesis of the fairy-dust-and-joy Scottish sound.

In March, this Keysound salvo was topped off by, as Angus Finlayson noted, a full-on “statement of intent”: the manifesto-like 14-track compilation tellingly called ‘This Is How We Roll’. An essential listen in every sense, it opens with the provocatively titled New Wave, a track by Visionist, Beneath and Wen together that crystallises this dread, shimmering, rolling, heavily syncopated sound both musically and in its vocal sample, which announces “the new wave, coming through.”

By drawing inspiration from UK funky, footwork and UK garage and driving their syncopations so far from house’s 4/4, could the UK dance underground have converged on a new rhythmic template, a new beat pattern, for the first time in several years? ... it’s interesting times for the UK scene once again

Essay: Sci-Fi, Hi-Tech, Future?

Another essay for Dummy, on the overlap and mismatch between sci-fi, hi-tech and ideas about the future, and how that pertains to some recent underground pop acts (click here to read). Featuring:  Ford & Lopatin, Zoology Records, The-Drum, many others, and the influence of films, Joe Meek, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode etc.

Sci-fi, hi-tech and hi-def certainly provide a welcome alternative to the yellowing, musty retro that’s been all over culture in the past decade, and this change is being felt significantly in the new music underground. But does it actually have anything to do with looking towards the future itself?... where does sci-fi end and the future begin?...

It was Kraftwerk who brought the association of hi-tech music with robots into pop music, and alongside them, acts like Tangerine Dream brought in the association of hi-tech music with the cosmos. These associations have in turn given rise to an association between the future and a certain way of writing synthesiser music: basic, stilted, metronomic and repetitive like robots were seen to be – not just more than human but also a lot less than human. This association that persists to this day, even as artists such as Boards of Canada, Stereolab, Broadcast and Daft Punk frame it as historicised, problematic or kitschy...Th idea formed that future music can’t just simply be new – in order to be future it has to be hi-tech and fast in particular ways, much like a sci-fi party will celebrate particular tropes such as robots and aliens that look and sound a particular way...

This late-twentieth-century Kraftwerkian paradigm of future music is beginning to disintegrate and mutate. But with the decline of retro and lo-fi (the two have been practically synonymous) within the tastes of the new music underground comes the rise of hi-tech and of interest in the future...

‘Sense Net’ is an extraordinarily detailed, restless journey through hi-tech and alien spaces bristling with a weird and overwhelming allure. The crazy-rich /BZE is in constant flux, its polygon corridors rotating as you move in anti-grav from module to module with a machine voice repeatedly advising you to ‘stay calm’. The gorgeous ‘/SYS’ is an alien courtly dance in shivering reverb, elegantly counter-posing slices of your human pop music...

For me at least, a genuinely futuristic music should go further than revisiting a series of recognisable, familiar and stable tropes, like those traditionally associated with sci-fi... I think something more futuristic has to be a little more abstract...the music that feels most beguilingly futuristic to me doesn’t wear pre-established concepts on its sleeves, doesn’t simply dress up as something we already thought was futuristic – Arca, Nguzunguzu, Lōtic, I AM WATER, Ikonika, Karmelloz, 18+, Mykki Blanco, Clams Casino. Are these artists astronauts, robots or aliens? Only in the very broadest sense – really they’re something else entirely...