There’s a lot of hints throughout this site about my interest in the genre known as vaporwave, such as here, here and here — yes, I’ve been listening to it for quite a while now. I don’t remember from when though. I suppose it started seeping into my listening habits in the first half of the 2010s when there was a bit of a surge in these type of internet-based microgenres around that time with things like Tumblr and other social media platforms getting new music to the ears of new listeners — bypassing the traditional and established ways of getting music to listeners, such as live shows, distribution in record stores and that sort of thing. Remember seapunk? Or slimepunk?
Without going into some sort of archival essay about it — as you can find more out that here — I suppose vaporwave sort of evolved out of the artists grouped under the loose hypnagogic pop umbrella, coming out around the end of the naughties going into the decade with artists like James Ferraro and Ford & Lopatin — the “Lopatin” in the latter eventually finding more success as Oneohtrix Point Never. In my recollection a lot of these artists were connected somewhat to the Hippos In Tanks label that was bubbling at the surface at the time, with myself getting into artists working on the darker end of the spectrum from that pool, incorporating more EBM and classic experimental 80s electronics like Gatekeeper and White Car. I still listen to tracks by those two bands here and there and I suspect at least one of them will get a treatment from me on these pages at some point in the future. There’s a clip of a track called “Feel Hunt” from the 2010 EP No Better by White Car below.
I suppose I latched onto vaporwave due to my musical listening having a prolonged interest in styles and production techniques from the 1980s for already quite a while at that point. Not only that but I was sort of fascinated with how the genre sort of worked differently than what I was used to — that being from more of a post-hardcore, indie and post-punk revival background in where the members of the band are featured prominently in any given band’s imagery and with an emphasis of playing live to audiences and releasing physical recordings. With vaporwave it all seemed so anonymous.
Who were these people creating this music? Often their names — as in line with the aesthetic — were often names set in Asian alphabets and with little information about them. Most never played a show or more so, never left the studio. I’ve never been aware of artists claiming to be vaporwave playing live — at least to my knowledge. The music could be created by algorithms for all I knew, or these days even AI.
A vaporwave track could range from a completely original composition to the simple task of taking some old italo disco or electrofunk track, pitching the pitch and speed down and running it through copious amounts of VST reverb plugins. An example of this is posted below of a warped version of “Only You” by Italian solo artist Savage — who has been covered here before — complete with the pitching down effect and accompanied by visuals that pull from the vaporwave a e s t h e t i c s quite generously. I have no idea who orchestrated this version.
Evolving as a teenager with the internet in the 1990s I get the feeling of the genre. If anything it represents to me at least a time of optimism as far as the internet was concerned. It was simpler, with uncharted possibilities, and unknown contributors creating art and music in that medium at the time. I remember making simple web pages in basic HTML at school — a long shot from the somewhat dystopian nightmare that the internet can be these days.
Anyway, where was I?
Coming back to this track here — entitled “Keep Calm” by New Zealand electronic artist Eyeliner — it sort of wormed it’s way into my head after being included on a playlist I made of some MP3s I had collected over the years, probably discovered through the numerous mixes made by popular internet vaporwave curator Jason Sanders over the years. This track was released on the artist’s 2020 album with a very apt vaporwave title — Drop Shadow.
Starting off with the sound of gently crashing waves, a lush square wave pad comes in followed by other synths and some dramatic saxophones. They almost sound like the real thing to me, but given the artist’s overview of the record and its use of the Korg Wavestation and M1 and their MIDI instrument sounds as well as the pitch bends in the saxophone passages that couldn’t be done by a real sax — they are likely digital emulations. I should know a bit here as I played tenor sax in junior high and still have a really beaten up, ancient tenor sax that I bust out on very rare occasions. I can barely play passages on that thing from tracks like “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, “The Heat Is On” by Glenn Frey and Mick Karn‘s sax work on “European Son” when he was riding high playing in Japan.
Anyway, as this track progresses it comes to a climax in it’s serene tone, resolving with some human-like digital “aahs” and some percussive hits that sound like they come off a digital piano, only to return back to the sound of the waves that started the track.
It brings up a lot of imagery for me — specifically from some films from the mid 80s which I’m sure Eyeliner is familar with. The early to mid 80s soundtracks of the directorial work of Michael Mann come to mind. There’s scenes in his 1986 film Manhunter — which was the original film adaption of the novel Red Dragon in which the blockbuster early 90s film The Silence Of The Lambs is based on that book’s sequel of the same name — where protagonist Will Graham (played by William Peterson) and his wife (played by Kim Greist) are sharing a number of dazzling, reflective moments at their beachfront home in the middle of a film that’s quiet stylized and dark. The ending scene of that film is included below. Similar moments would occur in oceanside sunsets in other Mann creations like the popular TV series Miami Vice. Even the interior decor styling of the apartment complex where Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons) from the 1988 David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers oddly comes to mind.
Or perhaps some of the muzak played in shops like K-Mart back in the 80s and early 90s. I remember such music from wandering around department stores as a kid and if anything had a strange resurgence of interest in the early 2010s with this sub-genre. In fact, there’s a whole archive of K-Mart stock music tapes that have been digitised and made the rounds in music press a number of years back — on the genre-specific site Vapor95.com no less:
It’s not just these things I’ve just listed off though — it’s sort of a zeitgeist feeling that was tapped into around that time where the imagery and the current music of the time had this emotional imagery. It’s a definite vaporwave moment.
If anything my references are a bit more heavy-handed in terms of imagery and mood, especially given the album artwork and promotion video work for this track “Keep Calm” and the album it’s released on, Drop Shadow. Like another track I’ve covered here in this genre, the cover art harkens back to a time back in the late-80s/mid-90s when a lot of packaging and advertising material for computer tech and even video games had this type of aesthetic — the fascinating allure of computer graphics and early 3D modelling. It definitely has a sense of fun and the possibilities of imagination in a retro-future type of way.
The promo video for “Keep Calm” at the top of this post — and indeed for other tracks off of this album — extend that light-hearted, playful feeling. It’s like going through a retro VR walk-though that starts with what seems like the swirl of a galaxy only to pull out to reveal it’s the crema in a cappuccino cup. There’s then a rendering of a piano, a potted fern, a marble-edged pool, a giant rotating 3D tenor saxophone and a black, compact car with KEEP CALM on the license plate. Someone had fun making this.
Eyeliner is the moniker of Luke Rowell, who has apparently been composing computer-based music over the past couple of decades or so. I get the impression he’s quite active in the New Zealand scene, having done archival and digitization work on master tapes from the archives of the long-running New Zealand label Flying Nun — a label that since 1981 has released recordings by seminal bands from that country including The Clean and The Chills who were part of the Dunedin Sound scene of the 1980s.
Heck, Eyeliner has even become a subject of a book in the 33 1/3 series by Bloomsbury Publishing, which since the early 2000s has been publishing books about milestone artists and albums. I have a book from this series about the album In On The Killtaker by Fugazi, who have been covered in these pages before.
Closing this one up here, I’ve posted another video for the title track “Drop Shadow” by Eyeliner below. Again, we have the fun 3D visuals and a sound that gives one the urge to do a few ripping rounds of Super Mario Kart.
I suppose my interest in the genre has bled into my own creative output — albeit in a more subtle way — with stylistic choices in how I write tracks. Most notable is this alternate version of the track “It’s No Laughing Matter”, with the original version of the track being released on the album When Push Comes To Shove (2019). This alternate version, entitled “It’s No Laughing Matter (Obscure Dream Version)”, was produced in the months leading up to the Era Of Coronavirus in early 2020 and was mainly put together for a small art show I was commissioned to do at a gallery here in Glasgow for my multimedia work as Soft Riot — namely the various music and promo videos I’ve done in the years leading up to it. It was fun to write and I can foresee myself working out something similar again sometime in the near future.