Vaporwave 2009-2024

2009-2024: 15 years of vaporwave

At first glance it might seem strange that the quintessential internet music genre – born on 4chan, Reddit, Tinychat, shared exclusively on Youtube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, a music that, besides reflecting on music itself, has been both an expression and an analysis of the Web – has never received a proper systematic treatment from music criticism, which for years now has largely shifted from print to the web.

And yet it's precisely in the nature of vaporwave to have achieved wide diffusion while remaining confined to a niche, separate from the rest of popular music, both by the will of its own community and due to the bewilderment of the majority, partly because of certain clichés, such as its supposed satirical/parodic character, the idea that it should be appreciated ironically, in a parallel with memes and trash culture.

While outside of music criticism it's not hard to come across attempts to theoretically understand it, what's missing is a guide able to trace a path through the dispersive ocean of its productions, orienting itself around a few dozen “essential records”, following its evolution from its classic form through its various subgenres, all the way to its most recent developments.

The idea behind this feature, then, is to provide a key and an introductory path into the phenomenon for those who, even if familiar with ambient and electronic music, have remained outside of it; but also to offer an underlying interpretation, despite its multiplicity, for those who are already inside it.

It starts in 2009: Daniel Lopatin, a passionate musical archivist, far from as well known as he is today, had already released material since 2006 under the names Dania Shapes and Oneohtrix Point Never (as well as in a couple of other collaborations) – some progressive ambient drone works in the wake of Tangerine Dream. On July 19th and in the following days, he decided to upload four videos to a YouTube channel under the name sunsetcorp. YouTube was only 4 years old, and in the midst of a boom: never before had it been so possible to recover Vhs footage (or Betamax, Super8 etc.) of old TV broadcasts or home movies, and to potentially always have access to an endless archive.

The following month, David Keenan was about to coin the term hypnagogic pop for certain categories of music – some with psychedelic lineage, others noise/drone, others synth-pop (for which the term chillwave would later be used) – that for at least a couple of years had been trafficking in the grainy, distorted memories of the 1970s and 80s, using low-fidelity recording techniques to achieve a hazy, dreamlike effect, as if staging the skewed perception of a collective memory, or the memory of a memory, not consciously experienced: the idea of those decades as held by those who didn't live through them, or by those who lived through them unconsciously; in the words of James Ferraro, “like sounds infiltrating musicians' consciousness back when they were still children, half-asleep: when their parents listened to records (or the TV) in the living room, the music arrived in the bedroom muffled and dampened by the walls”.

On the visual side, this idea of reworking and recontextualizing footage of everyday life – in particular moments associated with well-being (vacations, beaches, palm trees, night or sunset skylines) or forgotten advertisements, especially for computer technologies with an outdated utopian charge, highlighting and even exaggerating their worn-out grain – had indeed spread thanks to YouTube (a telling example being a video made back in 2006 by a Boards of Canada fan for their Roygbiv).

In this light we can then understand Lopatin's videos, released a month later on the DVD "Memory Vague", alongside other tracks of his saturated-sounding new age music, combined with vector graphics and 80s video art. The visual elements follow in the wake of that hypnagogic aesthetic, adding a more mysterious, unsettling and exotic dimension.

In particular, “Nobody Here” is built on a short vocal loop from Chris De Burgh's “The Lady In Red” and a computer-animated graphic called Rainbow Road, taken from the 1983 video game “Laser Granprix”, a multicolored fluorescent light ramp moving back and forth against a backdrop of skyscrapers.

In the words of Simon Reynolds in “Retromania”: “Lopatin had been struck by that found 'visual object', because the 'gothic urban skyline' dismantled the 'saccharine and sentimental associations of rainbows', while also embodying the alienation of metropolitan life. Hence the mournful symbolic weight of the loop: 'There's nobody here'”. The video surprisingly racked up hundreds of thousands of views (now 3 million), giving shape to a widespread feeling of melancholy and abandonment experienced within the context of late capitalism and its online reconstruction.

“Demerol” is a kind of sinister tribute to Michael Jackson, who had died only a few weeks earlier. Following in the footsteps of one of the first plunderphonics artists, John Oswald, who back in 1989 had already sampled and mangled “Bad”, Lopatin distorts, stretches out and renders evanescent the segment of “Morphine” in which MJ references the opioid drug he was addicted to, as if simulating his final hypnagogic phase before dying.

In “Angel”, meanwhile, Fleetwood Mac's “Only Over You” is fragmented and repeated in a jumbled fashion, over images – which we'll see extensively again in vaporwave – inspired by everyday Japanese life and its 80s technology.

These three pieces would come together in full-length form in August 2010 on Eccojams vol.1, released under the name Chuck Person, which among others samples Toto, Janet Jackson, Marvin Gaye, and Tears for Fears. The "echo jams," shortened to "eccojams" in homage to the video game dolphin – another nod to now-obsolete computer graphics – would come to represent the standard from which the genre would slowly take shape.

Again from “Retromania”: “I worked from 9 to 5 and was bored out of my mind, and that was the kind of music I could make at work, grabbing stuff off YouTube. At the time I wasn't doing it for anyone, it was just a cathartic escape from the humdrum activities of the office”. Once he had isolated the micro-fragments that interested him, Lopatin would drench them in “a ton of echo”. Furthermore, not being “a party animal”, he slows the music down: a technique learned from Houston's legendary DJ Screw, whose "drunk" mixes featured gangsta rap tracks decelerated down to narcotic tempos. “It's really simple. I don't like the idea of being the author of this material. In reality I'm just taking part in things that happen on YouTube, everywhere there are people doing similar things”.

Before we get to these other people, though, let's pause on another eccojam track uploaded in July 2010 by Lopatin (who, after these experiments, would go back to developing his idea of progressive, hi-tech electronic music, though still using samples from old commercials on "Replica" in 2011). “END OF LIFE ENTERTAINMENT SCENARIO #1” combines, looping them almost endlessly, a brief image from a 1988 pc adventure game, “Manhunter”, with a fragment of Roger Troutman's “Emotions” and, once again, Janet Jackson's “Lonely”. The result is hypnotic and disorienting. The impression is of having ended up in a liminal space, inside a broken link, at the edges of the Internet and perhaps at the end of music and life itself.

It is online, then, that a community of millennial prosumers develops, simultaneously consumers and producers of a genre that anyone with an internet connection and Audacity can try their hand at, easily pressing a limited run of cassettes. The cassette, after all, was the format of the 80s, a distribution medium for underground scenes, already reclaimed too for the evocative power of tape hiss by artists of hypnagogic music.

The first thing that matters is finding the right loop: while the earliest vapor tracks start from famous pop songs and recognizable vocal elements, distorting them to the point of making the listening experience particularly unreal, most productions would tend to obscure their sources, looping an often introductory melodic hook and frequently cutting out the vocal parts. What gets used is music that is somehow peripheral, incidental, rarely meant for conscious listening: music we encounter in non-places like airports, shopping malls, or during work presentations, music we're subjected to while on hold on the phone, music whose purpose is to numb and soothe us while we wait to be sold something: easy listening, smooth jazz, syrupy new age, contemporary r&b, soft rock.

Going back to trace the original sources, however mysterious and esoteric they've been rendered, becomes an integral part of the listening experience (the site whosampled.com is indispensable in this regard) and is also one of the reasons the scene has remained closed, for initiates only.

The point isn't so much to parody that plasticky muzak, but to distort it in order to strip it of its excessively saccharine qualities, its kitsch naivety; to disguise it while preserving only certain parts (session musicians and producers back then knew their craft, after all) in order to alter them; a good vaporwave track, in short, shouldn't come off worse in comparison with the original (or should at least make that comparison difficult).

The loop is mainly compressed and slowed down, shifted in key (pitch), given a reverb effect (the echo of a lost time), and repeated to the point of exhaustion, often unnaturally, off-time, adding glitches, playing with the slowing down of the voice, which sometimes ends up warping the meaning of a line from the original lyrics (in "Fountain" by 骷 ("Skeleton" in Mandarin), the vocal loop from Dionne Warwick's “How Long?” seems to repeat “Oh, the baby child still fighting frighting”; in the iconic “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (“Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing”) by Macintosh Plus, i.e. Ramona Xavier (better known as Vektroid), Diana Ross on “It's Your Move” seems to say “do you understand, it's all in your hands head”); or again with the loop getting stuck, cutting off right at the start of a bar on the voice's entrance (for example in “Lay On Me” or “Drive Home Thru The Stars For You”, from Black Horse by esc 不在 (fuzai, "absence"), another alias of Vektroid, which once again turns Chris De Burgh into a kind of ghost haunting our electronic devices).

The error, then, should be understood as a way of not fully immersing oneself in the sound, as a way of becoming aware that a meta-musical discourse is also at play, that there is a deception to be uncovered.

Skeleton had already started down this path in late 2010, partly following Lopatin's hypnagogic approach and slowing samples down to an agonizing crawl on his self-titled debut, experimenting with a wheezing ambient sound full of industrial echoes; or in Holograms, with brief dreamlike eccojams built from less recognizable tracks, smooth jazz/soul or space disco, which would help define the classic mechanisms of vapor détournement, aiming to transform the sentimentality or feel-good nature of the original sources into a kind of surreal, subtly unsettling melancholy.

In 2011 Vektroid, already active for several years in the chillwave field, began refining this new language, first by referencing Lopatin's experiments on the EP "Telnet Erotika", then in August by releasing several files: alongside the ecojams of Black Horse (in which she also samples the startup sound of Brian Eno for Windows95) and of New Dreams Ltd Initiation Tape part one (reworked and expanded three years later with some new age-derived tracks taken from the file Midi Dungeon), Ramona compiled a selection of Japanese TV commercials in Prism Genesis under the moniker Fuji Grid TV, and wrapped some Sega Saturn music in a hypnotic fog under the alias Laserdisc Visions. It's perhaps in reference to the vaporousness of these sounds that Robin Burnett, aka Internet Club, officially coined the term, twisting "vaporware" as well - the category covering all that software or hardware announced but never actually released, like empty promises, smoke and mirrors, but also like signals of another virtuality, still unexplored.

Internet Club himself released several experiments in the second half of 2011, the most successful of which is Webinar, where at times the loops - often taken from 2000s stock music for Powerpoint slides - don't rewind exactly but jump out of time, forward or backward (as in "Optimization"), giving the illusion of progression when in fact time is suspended; it's as if the music were inhabited by a force spinning its wheels, trying to break out of the loop without succeeding, ending up creating an opaque, unstable, distant atmosphere (as in "Digital Team Building", whose weary gait recalls Boards of Canada, or as in the labyrinthine new age of "Office Online").

Burnett has clear ideas, despite his remarkable precocity: the following year, at just 16, he would explain in an interview with Dummy that his is "a defamiliarization of elements we're so used to that we no longer even notice them"; "I wanted to attempt something very Debordian, about the way capitalist society, with 'corporate culture', gave rise to a dehumanizing hyperreality, focusing on an infinite generation of ideals conveyed through commodities"; what's on trial here are the big tech companies, which deluded us with the utopias of human progress of the early Internet era, the one of "bottom-up" culture-sharing (which, paradoxically, Burnett never actually experienced firsthand); hyperreality is the illusory reality of the media, by now indistinguishable from original reality, whereas with the early Internet, and partly with earlier technologies, it was still possible to maintain a distance - both oppositional and reflective - from the real.

Among the other 2011 releases from this early, formative phase, in which artists influenced one another meeting on Tinychat and Turntable.fm (and from 2012 also broadcasting live streams with the SPF420 collective), besides the aforementioned Skeleton, it's worth mentioning the influence within the scene of the self-titled Computer Dreams, already released back in June; and the chillwave-leaning releases by 18 Carat Affair, Ferrari Jackson and Dreams West, starting points of a poppier subgenre that recovers funk elements and pairs them with the imagery of VHS tapes and holiday romance.

It's with Floral Shoppe, however, that Vektroid would eventually bring vaporwave to a level of notoriety that became excessive ("thanks" in part to a scathing video review by Anthony Fantano a year later), ending up misread as satirical meme fodder, also due to the success of its visual imagery - which is instead meant to place us in a state of surreality, of "familiar strangeness".

The cover art has something metaphysical about it: references to the obsolete Macintosh and to a (fake?) plant shop via Japanese ideograms lending that touch of initiatory exoticism, a pink checkerboard floor, the head of the Greek god Helios, and in the background the New York skyline still with the Twin Towers, symbols of a golden age or of lost pasts: we have all the basic elements of an "aesthetic" that, recombining itself, would run rampant for years, eventually flattening out into a filter to be applied serially to ironize or universalize one's own reality, even ending up being co-opted by alt-right fringes.

The record alternates a first, eccojam-style section, in which a Sade loop gets stuck flailing as if underwater, Diana Ross's voice expands becoming hyperreal only to fray apart and sublimate in the finale, and the moog of two Pages yacht-rock tracks folds in on itself - in one case in an ever-slower spiral, in the other softening the emphasis of the "You Need A Hero" chorus; and a second, more ambient and cryptic section, a kind of faded tribute to the optimistic new age of Dancing Fantasy.

To better understand this sense of nostalgic unease, let's again cite Reynolds as well as Mark Fisher, touching also on Derrida and Freud, considering both the concept of "hauntology" and that of "unheimlich", the uncanny. In short, for Freud the uncanny is the revelation of something foreign that somehow sounds familiar at the same time, because it has actually undergone a process of repression. In recent decades this concept has been linked to the sense of unease we feel when facing something situated in a borderline zone between being alive and being mechanical.

Hauntologie, on the other hand, is a term Derrida uses in opposition to ontology, meaning the study of that which is not present but is not absent either, which by straddling the living and the dead allows reality to exist. Like a ghost that haunts us, like a grief that never fades, or a trauma, something we have repressed. We can already find this concept in music with Boards of Canada, who created dreamy, bucolic atmospheres by recovering sounds from 1970s Canadian TV nature documentaries and old home movies, always degrading these sources through analogue means to give them a nostalgic yet also sinister character, that of a lost past. Derrida, echoing Marx's famous line "a spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism", defined the spectre of Marx as something that haunts and terrorizes the West. That is, the idea of a future that never was, which nonetheless haunts the present (speaking of Marx, it's also his the phrase "All that is solid melts into air", referring to the rapid obsolescence of capitalism's products).

In "Ghosts of My Life", Mark Fisher sees in the music of BoC, and in that of the Ghost Box label some years later, an attempt to recreate an era of popular modernism: "Ghost Box presides over an alternative world in which the Radiophonic Workshop was more important than the Beatles. The Beatles occupied centre stage in the Spectacle of Pop, while the Radiophonic Workshop infiltrated its jingles, themes and special effects into the fabric of everyday life. The Workshop was truly unheimlich, uncanny, indissolubly tied to a domestic environment that had been invaded by the media. Naturally some have accused Ghost Box's productions of nostalgia, and of course that element plays a role in their appeal. But their aesthetic drags dyschronia into the foreground: the joins between the different parts are too obvious, the samples too jagged for the tracks to sound like restored artefacts, like postmodernist revivalism. Ghost Box conjures up a past that never existed, starting from fragments of the 70s" (that is, before the Americanization of English society).

As mentioned at the beginning, hypnagogic pop itself and chillwave followed this same logic, experimenting with the creation of an alternative past starting from the final years of the analogue era, and of an artificial, muffled nostalgia. Vaporwave then represents a kind of paradoxical, uncanny, and therefore surreal, evolution of these musics: its ghosts are not those of a possible future whose path was blocked and which is imagined from a seemingly unbridgeable distance; rather, they are precisely those of the era immediately following, the one that the future sold out; they are directly the consumer products of capitalism's hedonistic era that occupy our unconscious; the discarded remnants of the past straddling analogue and digital, which played a part in shaping today's society.

The world of analogue media preserved the sense of loss, allowed for the process of mourning and the possibility of remembering the past by compressing it, filing it away into History. If we think of the hauntology of artists like William Basinski or The Caretaker, their sounds are memories that gradually fade away: we're forced to reckon with the fragility of our own memory and our own lives.

The arrival of the digital and of the Net, along with their optimistic utopias of well-being, dismantled this process: within the infinite archive of the Internet it becomes impossible to consign any part of it to oblivion in order to recover a notion of history; what we now experience is the spectacle of an eternal present with no idea of a future; the past is a consumer product that keeps regenerating itself, leaving no room for anything else. All that exists are malfunctions, glitches (already explored by the electronic music of the late 1990s to inject imperfection and variation into programmed compositions); but these represent a suspension of the acoustic signal or an intrusion, not a temporal deterioration as with analogue media. Hard disks and servers can break, but they're interchangeable; the signal is liquid, it can indeed disappear, but it can also be preserved by transferring it without loss.

The Internet, with mp3s and YouTube, has brought back from the unconscious what had been produced to be consumed; vaporwave then imprisons it in a spectral, corrupted, agonizing loop: deformed sounds and voices become one with a technology that seems to threateningly come alive, haunting the present world like ghosts trying to atone for the guilt of having brought it into being, and to free themselves by sublimating into thin air.

The nostalgia stirred up by vaporwave is therefore ambiguous and artificial, because it represents the deconstruction of a collective unconscious, a questioning of our understanding of the past, a reassessment of history. It's not a matter of pining for the flourishing years of neoliberalism, but of constructing an alternative version of them, one that lets that idea of well-being coexist with its flip side: the trauma not only of a loss, but also of a deception.

Between the start of US-Russia disarmament in the mid-80s and September 11, 2001, the West experienced a period of abundance it couldn't really afford, resting as it did on debt, inequality, discrimination, privilege, ecological destruction, and abuses inflicted on the rest of the world. Looking back on it now, we feel both the carefree lightness of (our childhood in) a simpler era full of opportunity, and the unconscious unease of having lived through it obliviously, unable to see the cracks.

A sense of escape from the post-9/11 present undeniably exists, and as we'll see, the choice of more palatable sources—often dictated by a fascination with Japan—would end up reinforcing the escapist side while masking the social critique; but the destination of the journey remains a parallel past, a non-time, a limbo that is both alluring and alienating. It's not just that the promise of the future imagined in the 80s went unfulfilled (synthwave took care of reclaiming that idea of the future); it's the past itself that, thanks to the ghosts of this surreal nostalgia, poised between dream and nightmare, escape and trauma, we discover to be different from how we remembered it—and in some way we re-imagine it.

At the end of 2011, James Ferraro released (alongside the EP Condo Pets) Far Side Virtual, which, while transcending the boundaries of vaporwave, would prove hugely influential on the subgenre later dubbed Utopian Virtual. Ferraro builds original music out of an entire history of unsettling electronic samples, from the factory presets of early digital synthesizers, to individual system sound files from Windows or Nintendo, to voices part human and part robotic, all the way to the sounds of the apps that surround(ed) us in everyday life, like Skype's. The gleaming, weightless Second Life sold to us by the Silicon Valley of the 2000s has somehow grafted itself under our skin, becoming the only possible universe; simulation has invaded reality, and the hyperconnectivity we can no longer do without has ended up alienating us even further: we've come to resemble the machines around us.

2012 is the year that confirms it all; while Vhs-pop atmospheres shine and stun on SURFING by Deep Fantasy (which blends original chillwave with loops from, among others, Kenny G and Yarbrough & Peoples) and Contact Lens (with the psychedelic instrumental hip-hop of Ice in Veins), it's once again Vektroid, Internet Club and Skeleton who outdo themselves, carving out three essential records.

With REDEFINING THE WORKPLACE, Burnett perfects his Corporate New Age, stretching it to the point of parody, as if the idyllic, sunlit office complex pictured on the cover were starting to burn from the foundations up, because all the good intentions of contemporary technology sooner or later end up overwhelmed by ever more extreme malfunctions. Compared to the standard formula, here the samples run through overt interference and corrosion that push the pristine piano loops toward a hazy ambient drone ("#SEO"), or squeeze them into a wall of sound, into airy sublimation ("System Focus", "Synergize", "Outside The Box", plus the closing title track, shifted entirely into high frequencies). The centerpiece of the record may be the 12 minutes of "The Next Level Of Integration And Optimization", where a slow electronic motorik built on a simple piano theme drifts through a phase-shift reminiscent of "Neu! 2", before accelerating into a (fake) dizzying, disorienting crescendo.

With Shader by Sacred Tapestry (reissued 4 years later in an expanded version, now the only one officially available), Ramona Xavier coins an acidic, metaphysical ambient-glitch music: the peaks are "LD・VHD", where a clip from a Japanese airline commercial is recombined and broken apart within a timeless, vertiginous atmosphere; "移住" (Transmigration), an ambient ode for organ and video-game effects, an allegorical fantasy about the preservation of souls through upload; and "新たな夢Spirited Child (Color Ocean Sky)", which reprises the Diana Ross sample used in "Floral Shoppe", shredding it beneath a whirl of primitive, childlike sounds (as in Spencer Clark's hypna-noise experiments), growing ever more ethereal by the end, in a kind of purification process.

Reflections is Skeleton's most cohesive record, where the moods are dreamy and mysterious, spectral yet seductive, carrying the listener into a nocturnal imaginary—like a journey through a deserted metropolis, but also hallucinatory and unreal, striking a balance between nostalgia and unease that few have managed to achieve. Its peak is "Long Ride", though perhaps it's better described as a sudden chasm, a sinister tropical tunnel (thanks to the steel drum of the original reggae synth-pop track "Fly Away" by Laid Back) with no way in or out, or like a neural glitch, an instant, fleeting epiphany of a parallel reality, at once carefree and melancholic.

2013 is the year of the boom: thanks to Fantano and a couple of articles by Adam Harper on Dummy, in which he defines it as "the pop art of the Virtual Plaza" (i.e. of the web as an amplified non-place, a purified simulation of the Market), the community expands enormously, ultimately producing a chaos of releases in which it becomes difficult to separate the good from the negligible.

Labels multiply (the most significant: Fortune 500, Business Casual, Ailanthus Recordings and later Dream Catalogue and DMT Tapes FL), but the mechanism stays the same: artists cloaked in anonymity, suggesting that the music comes to light and takes on a life of its own; scant interest in technique or sound quality, which democratically allows anyone to be part of the scene; an oppositional stance toward the rest of music, which gets plundered and then redistributed for free on YouTube and Bandcamp—all elements that have led it to be seen as the digital equivalent of punk, as well as, as mentioned, of pop art, thanks to its habit of recycling and recontextualizing commercial and mass-media elements through minimal, automated processes.

Release after release, the different forms in which vaporwave manifests become ever more clearly defined, shifting depending both on the sources used and on the pull toward either deeper immersion in the past or greater disorientation; after the classic eccojams, utopian virtual, and Vhs pop, along with hypnagogic drift, we come to late night lo-fi, which is really just a midpoint between the last two: its references are less dreamlike and more nocturnal, televisual as well as urban, blurring the lines between allusions to a life of luxury and one of solitude; then broken transmission, even more obsessed with brief radio and TV jingles and nighttime channel-zapping, verging on pure sound collage, as if music itself could only represent acts of random consumption; and mallsoft, which instead stretches out its samples to convey the feeling of standing in vast, abandoned non-places, transit spaces that are familiar yet lifeless, caught between an all-American nostalgia for a childhood spent in shopping malls and the unease of these now-decayed spaces (much like old hotels or airports), haunted by the "gleaming" ghosts of the past; but also styles that would soon break away, like future funk, which, while sharing origins and production techniques, prefers to give a polish—often speeding them up—to old discofunk hits, but above all city pop, contributing to its mass rediscovery and reappraisal, updating the dance repertoire for generations Y and Z by emphasizing the nostalgic pull of an era they never actually knew (while losing its unsettling edge); or vaportrap, which, conversely, forgets nostalgia altogether, using certain aesthetics as a pretext within a dystopian, anxiety-ridden, accelerationist electronic context, incorporating trap's frenetic rhythms.

Vapor's spread will be such that some purists will already declare the genre's supposed death, more to call out its distortion than anything else: though it never goes fully mainstream, its fanbase will keep growing, blending with that of synthwave, and setting aside its hauntological charge for a flatter, more self-referential kind of enjoyment.

Among the year's best records, we should at least mention: TV Party by Luxury Elite, an exercise in draining the energy out of funk tunes, where Kashif's vocal in the intro of the boogie track "Say Somethin' Love" floats in slow motion like the death rattle of a spirit chained to a martial rhythm ("Mesh"), or where the slap bass and once-soaring voice of Billy Ocean in "Love Zone" drag themselves along exhausted, as if the night were refusing to let the sun rise again ("Classy"); or again, the passionate groove of the Bar-Kays' "Anticipation", which turns into a melancholy last waltz before the ship goes down ("Cruise").

Hologram Plaza by Disconscious, which drenches in reverb some exotica cornerstones—including Carlos Jobim and Martin Denny, plus Piero Piccioni's "Isabel"—giving the sense of music arriving from impossibly comfortable, remote spaces via the piped-in muzak of an abandoned shopping mall ("Mattress Store"); or conveys movement through this artificial landscape by reclaiming a melody from some (already glitchy) Vhs recordings of the American Weather Channel from the mid-90s that had recently surfaced on YouTube ("Endless Escalation"). This fixation on such music, along with the crude graphics of maps, would later find an outlet in a number of climate-themed broken transmission releases.

Transversal Worldwide Shopping by Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza (also known for his ambient records under the name Mount Shrine, and, sadly, for his premature death from Covid) consists of two ambient suites, as different as night and day, whose elements are so blurred together they can't easily be traced back to specific samples: "Polydreaming Mall" opens in a hazy atmosphere, where piano chimes combine with a long, slow Gilmour-esque guitar solo rising above an organ drone, interspersed with PA announcements and the murmur of a crowd; in the last 4 minutes, the opening mood returns in a darker key, along with the patter of a downpour. But the standout track is "ISAL Networks", which would go on to influence what became, from 2014 onward, the successful subgenre known as slushwave. Picking up the sound of rain, it builds a gradual crescendo out of flashes of synthesizer and spiritual chants, somewhere between "Blade Runner" and Popol Vuh. At the five-minute mark, a heavy breakbeat kicks in unexpectedly, carrying this hypnotic vortex along for almost 10 minutes, before giving way to the slow fade of those enigmatic celestial melodies.

The PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises series is Vektroid's answer to Ferraro's fake utopias: digging up libraries of MIDI file versions of bossa, swing or synth-pop tracks (like Phil Collins or Scritti Politti) or of demos for Yamaha keyboards, it retraces the plasticky naiveté of a technology that once dreamed of tearing down the walls of our homes (Home™) or letting us comfortably enjoy the wonders of the world (ClearSkies™).

The fascination with the kitsch sounds of late '80s digital synths is also present in Eyeliner, who with LARP of Luxury flaunt an accelerationist take on synth-pop ("iPod Touch"), with a hi-fi production and largely original compositions aimed at romanticizing ephemeral consumption, at compiling a playlist of virtual holidays ("3D Pool Designer", "New Zealand"); at times it's a vapor update of Com Truise's synthwave ("Toyota Prius"), or even a simulated New Order outtake ("Roomba").

The trend of "ambient" stretching of samples, already explored by mallsoft, along with the reuse of source material sometimes in its entirety, would keep afloat from 2014 onward the hyper-prolific catalogs of several artists who had found the right "formula" and the right sources (in particular a universe of Japanese productions, both pop and underground, often overlooked by the rest of the world: essential viewing here are the "deciphering" lists compiled by Rate Your Music users).

Death's Dynamic Shroud are a collective made up of James Webster (already active in 2012 with Dreams under the name Winter Sleep, in which he compositionally developed the sounds and themes of a video game from his childhood, "Night Into Dreams"), Keith Rankin, already known as Giant Claw, and Tech Honors: over time their productions would go beyond the boundaries of vaporwave, becoming maximalist, lysergic, chaotic, saturated, multiform, hi-tech, drawing their sources from the more recent past; but to get a sense of their earlier, more classic phase, Virtual Utopia Experience is an excellent concentrate, drawing liberally from Japanese video games and anime.

The entire mature output of Luke Laurila, known as t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者, sticks instead to an evanescent, melancholic, minimal and hypnotic ambient music, immersive and regressive, through which to surrender to imagined reminiscences. Slushwave, that is "slush", sludge, or more specifically the sound made by dragging yourself through it; a gushing or lapping. It's the sound of the foggy, stagnant downtempo rhythm smeared by phaser effects and slowdown typical of telepath, evident on the album 現実を超えて (beyond reality), where he manages to improve already good (or at least well-produced) smooth jazz, contemporary r&b or sophisti-pop tracks. Thus Greg Adams' already enigmatic "Burma Road" glides into an ancestral nocturnal haze, or the 6 minutes of Warren Hill's "Your Place Or Mine" become the 14 minutes of "あなたを待って" (wait for you), in which the translation between the real and the imaginary is tangible.

On アンドロメダ (andromeda), also from 2014, the source material is instead almost entirely early-'90s j-pop songs, but they are stretched so far that the result is light years removed from the originals: the effect is catatonic, the rhythms nearly vanish, the voices are mere trails in the background among others, the atmospheres are floating, soothing, warm and welcoming, more like a dreamed space than one actually traversed.

The exotic past evoked by telepath becomes a tool for pulling oneself out of trauma, for purifying oneself in another dimension: for us Westerners, using the memories of a Japan from 40 years ago allows us to maintain a distance and feel a strange nostalgia for something imagined, something that belongs to the realm of the fantastic.

But telepath isn't just a phenomenal curator and recontextualizer of forgotten music; in 2015, together with Hong Kong Express (another ambient musician and founder of Dream Catalogue), as the duo 2814, he composed a dreampunk masterpiece (which is essentially a melancholic, cyberpunk ambient music, with romantic themes — the references to Wong Kar-wai are no accident — set in a futuristic, metropolitan context): 新しい日の誕生 (Birth Of A New Day), where the connection to "andromeda" is evident, but the absence of samples allows the gaze to turn forward, coming to terms with the regret of a future that may be impossible.

2015 continues to be telepath's year, as he releases 7 more albums and 4 splits, including アンタラ通信 (communication Antara), darker and more unsettled, in which female j-pop voices and the noises of a car expo seem to sink into an intergalactic chasm; or the mammoth, but stunningly opening, 星間性交 (interstellar sex), in which Yukako Hayase's kayō techno expands into a sensual explosion amid city fumes and neon lights ("愛の瞬間" (moment of love)); or where, in "深夜の愛" (late night love), the synth-funk instrumental section of Alexander O'Neal's "A Broken Heart Can Mend" is transformed into the soundtrack of an angelic embrace.

That same year he even churns out more than thirty projects under the name 仮想夢プラザ [Virtual Dream Plaza]: in each of them he takes a single track, stretching and looping it, always arriving at 31 minutes of melancholic ambient for the end of time. Among these we should mention 水中夢 (underwater dream), in which Yuki Okazaki's '70s new music orchestra grows languid, breathlessly cadencing a music fit for abandoned carousels, in a more childlike and modern version of The Caretaker's dusty mental ballrooms; and 一緒に海岸を歩きます (walk along the coast together), which fades, like a yellowed postcard, the lounge jazz of Toshifumi Hinata's "Fooled By April".

Another producer who would gain a large following in the same period is Haircuts for Men, with his stealthy remixes, in which the transformative effort is often minimal, applied to material that is sometimes very recent, from Taylor Swift to the most disreputable corners of library music; of his work we should mention the ep 地下カラオケ (Underground Karaoke), thanks to "悲しみは苦いです" (Sadness Is Bitter), which simply lowers the tempo and pitch of the d'n'b track "The Game Is Over" by a certain Jack O'Lantern, which in its trip-hop version is far more moving; and, moving on to 2016, 大理石のファンタジー (Marble Fantasy), in which he digs through chillout, lounge and Balearic compilations to darken their mood. The impression is that, at least in much of his output of more than 70 albums and EPs, the result — and perhaps the very intent, of this whole barber beat strand — didn't get much further than the background music it started from.

Listening to Reflection by 父 (father) one might think that not much effort went into it here either, given that it merely changes the coat on several ambient-glitch tracks released on Kompakt (for instance, speeding up bvdub's "Will You Know Where To Find Me" into "Tomorrow", for which, however, there exists a wonderful video), but there's more to it than that: on the title track, the chord progression of Radiohead's "Daydreaming" is extracted and repeated in unrecognizable glitches, 16 bars at a time; while on "Voices", Apparat's voice on "Song Of Los" seems to arrive straight from the afterlife.

In 2016 the Italian artist b o d y l i n e also assembles a small gem of innocence, Twinkly, in which, alongside j-pop and city pop (already explored, for instance, in 2013's Computer Imagina), he samples homegrown library music and smooth jazz that could easily be imagined as having been heard on some old morning TV show for kids.

Returning to slushwave, the only name that has managed to rival Telepath is perhaps MindSpring Memories, alias of the hyper-prolific Angel Marcloid, already active in noise and later also in metal, industrial, etc. Sticking to a short selection, we should mention 2017's Destination Infinite II, a collection of underwater, foamy, murky, existential atmospheres.

The dense and intricate post-vaporwave phase of Death's Dynamic Shroud would deserve an article of its own: already two years earlier, with I'll Try Living Like This, they had begun radically deconstructing a myriad of mainstream music into a maximalist, narcotic, "overpitched" kaleidoscope of sounds and voices. To ease your way into their universe, though, it might make more sense to start with the more measured Heavy Black Heart (2017), where song form is somewhat better preserved, even within the usual blender of samples spanning k-pop and teen pop, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Rey, music from "Star Trek" and various video games, plus several self-references.

Try thinking of this music as the attempt of a computer that has become sentient to process its own emotions through the music stored within it. Or at least give a chance to the genius of "Tell Me Your Secret", in which the voices of Natasha Thomas and Sugar Daddy are ravaged over the rhythm section of a Katy Perry song, amid the 16-bit keyboard of a Nintendo game and the arias of "Final Fantasy XIV".

This hi-tech evolution of vaportrap (another key exponent being Nmesh, who also released the electro-collage of Pharma in 2017) no longer deals with the traumas of a lost, illusory past by transfiguring them into a synthetic, metaphysical landscape; instead, it recycles and centrifuges the algorithmic chaos of our era to make it genuinely futurable. Having by now accepted humanity's assimilation into the digital, we then try to subject the digital to a stress test in an attempt to reverse the process, to lay the groundwork for a rough sketch of a new humanity.

In 2018 we can count two other important mallsoft projects: 猫シ Corp. (cat system corp.), already known for one of the classics of 2014, Palm Mall, refines its style of field recordings of footsteps, crowd murmurs, advertising announcements, and enveloping, evanescent, narcotized smooth jazz that seems to resound from the sky, in Palm Mall Mars: imagining a future humanity, not so different from the present, gathered inside a Martian shopping mall, beyond whose boundaries lies a still-inhospitable planet, is at once a comforting and a frightening thought.

In A T R I U M, which by contrast should be almost entirely composed, Hallmark '87 raises the bar, merging mallsoft suggestions with dreampunk ones. The concept is dedicated to John Portman Jr., the neo-futurist architect known for his hotels with enormous multi-story atriums making extensive use of exposed concrete: vast vertical spaces that are polished ("Concrete"), gleaming ("Inspired"), comforting in their grandeur ("Portman"), designed to connect people, yet in practice cold, austere ("Awe"), empty, desolate, lifeless.

Moving on to 2019, we can mention two other original producers, influenced by Eyeliner but also riding the wave of the YouTube success of HOME's "chillsynth" music (mistaken for vaporwave thanks to a video with 100 million views that applied the aesthetic to images of the Simpsons): while Windows96 seems to recreate a lethargic, naif virtual world, nostalgic for old RPGs, in Enchanted Instrumentals And Whispers, the atmospheres of FM Skyline in Advanced Memory Suite represent an idealized summa of the '80s as imagined by someone who never lived through them, with references ranging from Durutti Column all the way to Art of Noise.

With Community (2020), Diskette Park perhaps delivers the swan song of vapor sampledelia, drawing on the Lopatin of "R Plus Seven": he chops up an encyclopedia of sounds into short segments to be reiterated as if on a runaway carousel, as though we had by now become humanoids consuming music by pressing fast-forward on the CD player. Only skeletons of past memories remain, incessantly recombined one cell at a time, again in an attempt to originate life from silicon.

While in recent years the original scene has stretched into a slow drift, surviving nonetheless thanks to its entrenched base on Reddit and Telegram, we can still find its techniques at work in ambient and dreampunk music (for instance with 秋 (Autumn)), even in drum and bass form (Sewerslvt) or even dream-pop (in Only Ever in Dreams (2022) by Soft Replica), or with the slushwave of desert sand feels warm at night, deliberately composed to be sampled.

Its imagery, however, endures in the hi-tech evolutions of the utopian virtual (the Orange Milk label being essential here), flirting directly with the sounds of digital synths (like the Fairlight or the Synclavier) and with Midi programming; that is, with that whole "introverted" phase of electronic music straddling the '80s and '90s, also drawing on progressive influences, if we think for instance of late-period Frank Zappa (to name a couple: one of Angel Marcloid's other projects, Nonlocal Forecast, and Cryptovolans).

After the experience of Covid, with the looming climate emergency and the return of war to the heart of the West, the feeling of being trapped in an infinite, rarefied present has perhaps lost some of its force; but looking closely, even if we are facing a new, perhaps darker phase for electronic music, vapor's unease had in some way already anticipated it, coming to terms with the system errors at the root of late capitalism: perhaps one day, not too far off, we'll even find ourselves missing that peaceful sense of emptiness.

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11/03/2026