Is This The Laziest Shit, Ever?

[Bently Sheds]

Whilst on Bandcamp I stumbled across this album - ｓｕｐｅｒｋｅｌｌｙ素晴らしいです [Peninsula Edition] ／／ DMT�����-�����294 by  P E N T I U M 2 // ダニ in the Vaporwave category and it struck me as the laziest fucking shit, ever. It's a collection of "songs" that basically consist of short excerpts of late 80s/early 90s pop singles slowed down with a bit of reverb and delay on it.

Tracks I identified immediately :
1. To Be With You Again - Level 42
2. West End Girls - PSB
7. Blue Monday - New Order
9. Get The Balance Right - Depeche Mode
10. Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now - Sam Fox
13. Shout - Tears For Fears
14 - Heart - PSB

After that I got depressed and gave up listening.
The comments piss me off too, wankers born in 1999 guffing on about feeling nostalgic for those good old days that they didn't eve live through. Fucking twats.

Is this what that there Vaporwave is, then? Just a verse of a 1988 chart hit slowed down 20% and Hall Reverb added? I know that scene's about 20 years old, which means there should be a VaporVaporWaveWave scene ironically celebrating the ironic nostalgia of an animated .GIF of a .TIFF of a bust of Socrates painted to look like the Packard Bell logo, soundtracked by the Windows 95 start up noise slowed down by 90% and 100% wet Cathedral reverb splashed on top.

Decent Vaporwave - Recommend me do;  it can't all be this shite, surely?

[Pauline Walnuts]

I quite liked Beach Blanket Buffet by Tropical Dreams and on the same label

https://goingnativerecords.bandcamp.com/album/lipstick-autograph

Actually, I'm not sure these are Vapourwave, so ignore me.

[The Culture Bunker]

Surely the whole album the OP linked to is one huge copyright infringement?

As well as complete crap, of course.

[Pauline Walnuts]

[Famous Mortimer]

A (possibly former?) CaBber did some pretty excellent vaporwave under the name Intl. Debris, but my love affair with the rest of the genre ended due to hearing one too many of the things you linked to in the OP.

[PlanktonSideburns]

The orange milk records record label has hours and hours of vapourware and beyond stuff, of great quality

[popcorn]

This is part of a trend I find maddeningly idiotic - "slow a song down and add lots of reverb".

"Something about us by daft punk but you're the last 2 people on earth". The song is already slow and dreamy, so slowing it down a bit is redundant. Adding reverb adds a sense of space and distance, it doesn't make things more cosy and intimate!!!!!!

'nude' by radiohead but you're waiting in the car park alone at 12am waiting for the rain to subside". A car is an acoustically dead environment. Why is there so much reverb in my car? This is more like "Radiohead but you're on drugs soaking wet in a cave".

[jobotic]

Does any vapour wave improve on Eccojams?

I'm a bit sick of eighties fetishisation, and there's an awful lot of it about

[purlieu]

A (possibly former?) CaBber did some pretty excellent vaporwave under the name Intl. Debris, but my love affair with the rest of the genre ended due to hearing one too many of the things you linked to in the OP.

Oh hello, that's me. Yeah, I was into the vaporwave thing for a few of years, ended up doing some stuff based around samples of '90s TV themes and rave music and stuff as some genuine nostalgia and trying to do something a bit different in a style that was already past its sell-by date at that point.

The very earliest vaporwave albums were very much just snippets of '80s pop music, TV themes, muzak and so on, slowed down and looped with some effects on. They weren't released conventionally - I remember Internet Club didn't even called his albums 'albums', just described them as 'zips' as they were literally zip files of these little tracks, uploaded to Mediafire. A few similar things came out on tiny experimental DIY tape labels around the same time. Generally, these 2011-2012 records have a certain something about them, perhaps it's some good choices of tracks to sample, perhaps it was just hearing them first, but there's a bit of a surreal / haunting feel to them. But they were really just "here's some tracks making old MOR stuff sound a bit weird" with no other claims.

Somehow or other, it all got picked up by internet-savvy teenagers and due to it effectively being very easy to make, there came tens of thousands of copycat albums on various Bandcamp labels, generally with diminishing results. Your OP album is on DMT Tapes, which is one of the worst offending labels. I picked up their entire discography for about £3 in 2015, and I think I found one album I liked on there - and that was when I was really into the style. By 2013 the phrase 'vaporwave is dead' had pretty much become a meme, because it had failed to adapt in any real manner. There have been a few interesting spinoffs in the years since, largely those who've used some techniques and aesthetics of the style but applied it to original compositions, or the people who've expanded it into full-on plunderphonics stuff, but sadly there are still God knows how many people attempting the same old thing after all these years.

I cut all ties with the scene a few years ago due to - perhaps unsurprisingly, given the average age of the people involved - lots and lots of bitching and utterly pointless drama, as well as fucking depressing number of alt-right people involved. Dealing with transphobia and racism every time you go on Twitter is enough to put you off. I have no idea what it's like these days, but it was horrifically toxic three or four years ago, and my one and only interaction with anyone involved in it since then was last year and was pretty much the same experience. I pretty much stopped listening to it as a result.


Good vaporwave? I'm still very fond of Vektroid's Fuji Grid TV album - that's generally Japanese commercial music and TV snippets chopped and screwed, a kind of attempt to sound like skipping through TV channels while you're half asleep. Has a lo-fi sound collage approach, which is what helps give it the slightly disorienting feel that made some of the early stuff good, and is lacking in most of the 'made in five minutes' records of later artists. It was also a very direct influence on my Intercity 125 British TV-inspired albums.

telepath started out making fairly straight-forward stuff and began to deconstruct it into hypnotic ambient music. アンドロメダ is still made entirely from '80s music, looped and slowed down, but he does so much to it that it ends up completely its own thing. Sadly a Trump voter.

Nmesh is probably your best bet, as he was a plunderphonic artist for many years before starting on vaporwave, and thus had an idea how to use some of the aesthetics of the style in a much more fleshed out manner. Dream Sequins® is a pretty great album, and Pharma takes the style about as far as it can go without literally just becoming plunderphonics again.

[grainger]

Bandcamp don't even let people post cover versions (to avoid any legal issues that might arise), so I very much doubt these fall within their T&Cs.

[purlieu]

There have been a fair few legals things with vaporwave albums, I remember a hugely popular artist called 2047 having a bunch of albums taken offline as they consisted of nothing but Solar Fields tracks slowed down by about 70%, a few more have gone over the years. What's remarkable is that Bandcamp Daily have written a lot about vaporwave over the years. Mind you, I've seen hundreds of cover versions on there too.

[The Culture Bunker]

Bandcamp don't even let people post cover versions (to avoid any legal issues that might arise), so I very much doubt these fall within their T&Cs.

Surely they must allow some acts to put covers up? The Midnight put out an EP with a cover of 'Because the Night' just a few months ago,  that I bought on Bandcamp - and while they're not the Beatles, they're hardly some obscure bedroom act.

[Better Midlands]

I still think Saint Pepsi - Private Caller holds up, actually makes me nostalgic for 2013 when I listen to it now.

Mediafired™ - Pixies brings back the feels too, just a 1.5 bar loop of Wuthering Heights = double nostalgia

[PlanktonSideburns]

Here's a more CAB appropriate vapourwave album

https://cavalierosityrecords.bandcamp.com/album/jhonny-tapecunt-vapourwave-is-for-cunts

[The Mollusk]

V good post from purlieu as always!

I haven't even remotely followed the stuff for a long time now but the new Death's Dynamic Shroud album was getting some decent hype so I have that a go and really enjoyed it. Seems like a good summation of how the style evolved from stagnancy into utilising the foundations of the sound to create much more well-realised and well-produced bangers.

Someone might tell me that it's very derivative of stuff that happened a few years ago (IIRC it sounds like an expansion on the sort of stuff Blank Banshee was making) and I'd accept that! But nevertheless I think it's a decent album. I think Blanck Mass also did a god job early on at extracting the good bits of the sound and building on them in more unique and interesting ways.

Bit of a badly chucked together post there sorry, been out for cocktails tonight.

[purlieu]

Yeah, death's dynamic shroud.wmv are another group who do Nmesh-style stuff, using vaporwave as an aspect to do broader plunderphonic soundscape stuff. Their material's always been way too maximal for my taste but they're absolutely worth a shot.

[Crenners]

[Goldentony]

Surely the whole album the OP linked to is one huge copyright infringement?

that's one of those laws you only have to pretend to give a shit about

[The Mollusk]

WHIIIIITE EMULSION

[Famous Mortimer]

Nmesh are / is excellent, they've released so much stuff though that there's bound to be something you'd like.

[Goldentony]

oh and a serious answer is OPN's Memory Vague video. That last tune isn a Chia DeBurgh sample isn't it? it's AMAZING

https://youtu.be/G1flq8LKkzk

in fact someone's done a 10 hour redo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltncQ0t8I6A

[chveik]

Does any vapour wave improve on Eccojams?

no

[grainger]

Surely they must allow some acts to put covers up? The Midnight put out an EP with a cover of 'Because the Night' just a few months ago,  that I bought on Bandcamp - and while they're not the Beatles, they're hardly some obscure bedroom act.

Ah, it seems I misremembered slightly, but I think this - from their T&Cs - explains it.

"What can I upload? Are covers OK?
You must own or control all rights to everything you upload. That means covers are out, unless you have a written license or authorization from the artist to upload the cover to Bandcamp and grant us the rights in the terms below. Do not upload cover songs unless you have obtained all permissions and authorizations in writing!"

So unless the artist in this thread got written permission, then...

[Natnar]

Whilst on Bandcamp I stumbled across this album - ｓｕｐｅｒｋｅｌｌｙ素晴らしいです [Peninsula Edition] ／／ DMT�����-�����294 by  P E N T I U M 2 // ダニ in the Vaporwave category and it struck me as the laziest fucking shit, ever. It's a collection of "songs" that basically consist of short excerpts of late 80s/early 90s pop singles slowed down with a bit of reverb and delay on it.

Tracks I identified immediately :
1. To Be With You Again - Level 42
2. West End Girls - PSB
7. Blue Monday - New Order
9. Get The Balance Right - Depeche Mode
10. Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now - Sam Fox
13. Shout - Tears For Fears
14 - Heart - PSB

After that I got depressed and gave up listening.
The comments piss me off too, wankers born in 1999 guffing on about feeling nostalgic for those good old days that they didn't eve live through. Fucking twats.

Is this what that there Vaporwave is, then? Just a verse of a 1988 chart hit slowed down 20% and Hall Reverb added? I know that scene's about 20 years old, which means there should be a VaporVaporWaveWave scene ironically celebrating the ironic nostalgia of an animated .GIF of a .TIFF of a bust of Socrates painted to look like the Packard Bell logo, soundtracked by the Windows 95 start up noise slowed down by 90% and 100% wet Cathedral reverb splashed on top.

Decent Vaporwave - Recommend me do;  it can't all be this shite, surely?

I like this stuff cause it reminds me of when i was a kid and used to play 7 inch singles at the wrong speed.

[willbo]

lazy shit? Do you have any idea how long it takes to learn enough Japanese to title the songs and dig through your 90s PC demo discs to make the covers?

[Midas]

there's loads of covers on bandcamp tho

[bgmnts]

Fucking hell people just cant let go of the 80s can they?

And yeah I suppose the get out clause for copyright is that it's legally different?

Suppose I can chalk up vaporwave as more derivative shit I'm glad I didnt invest any time trying to like to keep up.

[purlieu]

Nmesh are / is excellent, they've released so much stuff though that there's bound to be something you'd like.

As a bonus, he's an absolutely lovely guy. Been online friends with him for about 15 years now, just one of those wonderful people who it's impossible to say a bad word about. Really, for your average listener, Dream Sequins, Pharma and his split with telepath are the only vaporwave-related albums you'll ever need.

[grainger]

And yeah I suppose the get out clause for copyright is that it's legally different?

It's sampling. You can't legally include samples of copyrighted in your track without permission from the copyright holder.

[grainger]

there's loads of covers on bandcamp tho

Either they have permission, or perhaps they're breaking the terms and conditions. Maybe Bandcamp don't enforce their rules unless someone reports a breach, or maybe the condition is only there to cover Bandcamp if the person with publishing rights gets lawyery.