Interestingly enough, 2814's "Birth of a New Day" (the last album cover featured in your post) was created without any samples at all in an attempt to evoke the vaporwave ethos in an organic fashion. I find that vaporwave takes up an inordinate amount of my listening; there is art, and even skill, in the act of curating represented by a vaporwave mixtape. Your readers may be interested in some further thoughts on the genre which I wrote here: https://www.ruins.blog/p/vaporwave
"It seems vaporwave artists yearned for the spirit of 80s and 90s capitalism, even though most were too young to remember anything of the era. Something did change post-9/11: a certain optimism—I’d call it the utopianism of neoliberalism in its first two decades—disappeared from the world."
Nail on head. We always long for what we used to have. I think this is why dissident right memes from 2016 are seeing a resurgence in 2023. We are forever looking back, trying to make sense of our past, whether through remixes or remakes. Nostalgia is a market in itself.
I always associated Vaporwave with some of the micro-genre's invented by online communities such as PFMS (Pitchfork's now-defunct message board) , and Hipinion (https://forums.hipinion.com/). Threads which spawned beautiful mix-tapes like CFCF's Night Bus series (https://doulikenightbus.com/) or 'Convertible to Yokohama' are more evocative than prescribed to a specific style.
02 : Vaporwave is actually an under appreciated sub-genre of Composer John Oswald’s plunderphonics ... Great repost and thanks to William Cohen for the ruins.blog link 🍻😎👏
Really enjoying this series of gnomic Twitter threads converted to posts.
Interestingly enough, 2814's "Birth of a New Day" (the last album cover featured in your post) was created without any samples at all in an attempt to evoke the vaporwave ethos in an organic fashion. I find that vaporwave takes up an inordinate amount of my listening; there is art, and even skill, in the act of curating represented by a vaporwave mixtape. Your readers may be interested in some further thoughts on the genre which I wrote here: https://www.ruins.blog/p/vaporwave
"It seems vaporwave artists yearned for the spirit of 80s and 90s capitalism, even though most were too young to remember anything of the era. Something did change post-9/11: a certain optimism—I’d call it the utopianism of neoliberalism in its first two decades—disappeared from the world."
Nail on head. We always long for what we used to have. I think this is why dissident right memes from 2016 are seeing a resurgence in 2023. We are forever looking back, trying to make sense of our past, whether through remixes or remakes. Nostalgia is a market in itself.
I always associated Vaporwave with some of the micro-genre's invented by online communities such as PFMS (Pitchfork's now-defunct message board) , and Hipinion (https://forums.hipinion.com/). Threads which spawned beautiful mix-tapes like CFCF's Night Bus series (https://doulikenightbus.com/) or 'Convertible to Yokohama' are more evocative than prescribed to a specific style.
02 : Vaporwave is actually an under appreciated sub-genre of Composer John Oswald’s plunderphonics ... Great repost and thanks to William Cohen for the ruins.blog link 🍻😎👏