Macintosh Plus

A Washington native, DJ and producer Ramona Andra Xavier is best known under her alias Vektroid, as well as for a string of countless pseudonyms that have marked a decade of musical activity.

Her best-known side-project, Macintosh Plus – a name that says it all – certainly didn't go unnoticed. Just look at the small details that set apart the cover of her one-shot to grasp its conceptual vision: the bust of Helios, god of light, in the foreground, crosses paths with the retro aesthetic of a checkerboard background, behind which the Twin Towers appear, half-shattered symbol of American capitalism, existing only as a reflection on the cover – an image that has become iconic within the vaporwave imagination, whose branching-out and its aims of distortion, remixing and/or mash-up of pre-existing tracks made the web turn up its nose, initially dismissing it as a passing phenomenon, unoriginal and self-indulgent.

And yet, in a world that moves far too fast, the cult status of Macintosh Plus's “Floral Shoppe” (Beer on the Bug, 2011) brings us back to the sheer relaxation of listening, while revealing a playful, if unwittingly innovative, production.

With the mysterious, rarefied post-ballad “ブート” (“Boot-up”) we plunge headlong into an endless ocean, made of dystopian narratives with a constant sense of dread lurking behind us, as if some unknown entity were watching: Xavier stirs the spirit through an intuitive distortion of the smooth soul track “Tar Baby”, originally performed by British singer Sade, warping her vocal sensuality before plunging it into total murk. The constant “scratched” passages running through the piece definitively break the fourth wall and dazzle with their ingenuity. Not to mention the progressive speeding-up of the samples, alternating with a radical shift in atmosphere that favours the track's higher frequencies over its final three-quarters. All elements that lead us to reflect on vaporwave's poetics as a transformative art form.

The American DJ signals to the listener the end of an era. Streaming – lossless streaming in particular – was beginning to take hold in the international music market, emerging as a grotesque creature with cacophonous, unpredictable traits, ready to take the place of physical media, whose innocence now evokes a distant, hazy memory: of course, today there's an awareness that everything online could vanish at any moment, and over time this has led to the birth of bootleg (unofficial, or “pirated”) editions of Macintosh Plus's vaporwave classic, as well as a thoroughly respectable range of vintage merchandise that has cemented its fame.

Transcendental in form, the following “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (“Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing”) suddenly becomes the most famous vaporwave track in history: its frequent nods to drugs, reinforced by the mention of American artist Lisa Frank – known for her hallucinogenic artwork – and the classic time for consuming cannabis (04:20), have made it a mythical, untouchable track, as well as one of the first true examples of eccojams, that strand of vaporwave in which looped tracks, steeped in “dreamy” effusions, take centre stage. Web veterans, myself included, remember it not only for the reputation it built over the years, but for the iconic meme that helped cement the track's success, namely the famous “/music plays”, a “joke” that usually closes out a quote, an aphorism or a comment built around listening to the vapor hit.

The slowed rework of “It's Your Move”, a minor track by celebrated American pop-soul singer Diana Ross, stirs up a feeling of uncertainty and ambiguity, yet also lethargy and abstraction: the central elements of the drum machine fragment into a river of embryonic reverb that takes over, while the synth melody turns into a genuine anthem. Xavier cuts and stitches the verses with sheer force, breaking them apart like the subject of a Cubist painting: and just when everything seems to be over, the track slows down even further, anticipating by several years the zoomergaze aesthetic, before collapsing into a suffocating production fully in the style of sound collage.

“Lisa Frank 420” still manages to spark interest today among fans and non-fans of the genre alike, showing no signs of its age – if anything, making us damn envious of it.

The title track “花の専門店” (literally “Flower Shop”), though less dazzling than the preceding near-masterpiece, stands out for a mix that surprises with its blunt irony. The ending is marked by micromontage cuts performed in reverse, paired with an endless ambient loop that fades away gently. The sinuous “ライブラリ” (“Library”) borrows the blue-eyed soul track “You Need A Hero” by American yacht-rock band Pages, already reshaped for the title track. Wrapped in a substantial bassline, warm synths and vaguely nostalgic choruses, the track weaves between the fleeting romanticism that defines late-Seventies sophisti-pop and an unusual amateurishness that resists the desensitising pull of the musical context.

The stellar “地理” (“Geography”) introduces us to the ambient counterpart of Xavier's work: here the samples are uprooted, already brimming with a minimal electronic sound that could pass for a Windows NT 4.0 platformer soundtrack. Equally fascinating is the following “ECCOと悪寒ダイビング” (“Relax and Dive In with ECCO”), a gloriously chillout experience that picks up the lesson of the German group Dancing Fantasy. Between new-age digressions and flashes of ambient music propped up by funky guitars, “外ギン” (“Soto Gin”) shines in its extremely short runtime – roughly a minute and fifteen seconds.

Not to be overlooked is the psychedelic-sensorial crescendo of “月” (“Moon”), a rework of the synth-funk cover of “I Only Have Eyes For You” (Zapp). The closing track “海底” (“Seabed”), an eccojam of Jamie Foxx's contemporary R&B track “Sleeping Pill”, has neither an intro nor an outro: misanthropic and merciless, the loop twists and turns second by second, foregrounding the cadence of the electronic drums and the harrowing weight of the applied pitch down, closer to the echoes of restless ghosts from the past than to plainly distorted voices.

“Floral Shoppe”, which turns a full fifteen this year, has no real conclusion, and yet it ends in the most brutal way possible, with a deep, torn... cut.

Ramona Andra Xavier's non-disco remains influential and impactful for the new generation, contributing to the ongoing transformation of the cyberpunk genre.

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06/05/2026