vaporwave - Nostalgic Future Catalog 怀旧未来档案馆

materials

articles

resources

albums

subgenres

eccojams
faux-utopian
utopian virtual
future vision
hypnagogic drift (post-internet)
broken transmission (signalwave)
mallsoft
late nite lo-fi
vhs pop
future funk
vaportrap
dreampunk
slushwave
segahaze
weathersoft/climatewave

images

smooth jazz, muzak/elevator music, R&B, lounge music, anime/game music, Japanese city pop
early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, video game sprites, stylized Greek sculptures, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes, pink and purple, Japanese text

precursors

hauntology, hypnagogic pop, chillwave

quotes

Vaporwave - Wikipedia:

According to Stereogum's Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin's “chopped and screwed plunderphonics” and the “nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro's Muzak-hellscapes”.
Xavier's Floral Shoppe (credited to “Macintosh Plus”, December 2011) was the first album to be properly considered of the genre, containing all of the style's core elements.
Generally, artists limit the chronology of their source material between Japan's economic flourishing in the 1980s and the September 11 attacks or dot-com bubble burst of 2001.
Common criticisms were that the genre was “too dumb” or “too intellectual”.
Although the author prophesied that vaporwave would not end “as a joke” the way seapunk did, the genre came to be largely viewed as a facetious Internet meme based predominately on a retro visual style or “vibe”, a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. Many of the most influential artists and record labels associated with the genre later drifted into other musical styles.
Its circulation was more akin to an Internet meme than typical music genres of the past.
“vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online”. He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation— precisely tuned “micro-experiences” resulting from social media algorithms funneling different people with similar interests into obscure topics — inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave.
Music educator Grafton Tanner wrote, “vaporwave is one artistic style that seeks to rearrange our relationship with electronic media by forcing us to recognize the unfamiliarity of ubiquitous technology […] vaporwave is the music of ‘non-times’ and ‘non-places’ because it is skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space”.

Vaporwave's Second Life | Complex:

Abandoning the punk ethos and frequent conceptual leanings in favor of comedic “AESTHETIC” videos shared on YouTube and Facebook, vaporwave has finally reached either its logical conclusion (note: media, reflexivity) or full maturity by becoming exactly what it shouldn’t.
“That's ultimately why I released Vaporwave Is Dead— it was to gain a sense of liberation from what I felt were becoming the tired cliches of vaporwave,” HKE says. “I felt a lot of artists in the vaporwave scene, including myself, were in danger of falling into safe and boring formulas of repeating (note: reflexivity) the same ideas over and over.”
For many, vaporwave was just a visual set of aesthetics and a vibe. The visual aspect formed faster than the sound, resulting in releases that look the same but fail to form a sonically cohesive whole.
As a funhouse mirror of pop-culture, vaporwave brought a crowd together. That same crowd eventually abandoned it, because the mirror wasn’t needed anymore — vaporwave had become a part of pop culture.
Nostalgia is more in demand than ever, so it makes sense that vaporwave, a net-genre employing nostalgia frequently great effect, has become something that people are nostalgic about.

Hypnagogic pop - Wikipedia:

the genre can be described as “revisionist nostalgia, not in the sense that ‘everything used to be better’ but because it rewrites collective memory with a view to being more faithful to an idea or a memory of the original than to the original itself.”

MMJ:

The whole idea of genre is fucking stupid, anyway, and that’s why I liked vaporwave — it always felt like it was the anti-genre.
As such, I feel like the whole “dream music” vibe is certainly fluid enough to encompass lots of different musical styles, while still retaining certain elements that make the label stand out as a whole — surreality, futurism, heavy concepts and story-driven projects, while “vaporwave” as a term and an idea has become something of a burden to everyone involved with it.
It’s all about taking the idea that music can be more than just music. […] Of course you had past eras in music which touched on this idea of concept in music, such as progressive rock or new age music, but they never really went the full way in the way that certain portions of the vaporwave scene have done in the past number of years. Vaporwave has really been the first scene of its kind to employ this idea on a wide scale.

Interview: Dream Catalogue’s Hong Kong Express on Vaporwave’s Past, Present, and Future | Red Bull Music Academy Daily:

I think the whole concept of vaporwave having an ideology behind it is overblown, if not entirely misinformed and pulled out of thin air. I’ve had discussions with early forerunners in the genre (or arguably the creators of it), such as Luxury Elite and Internet Club, and both of them agree with me and have stated they never intended to project this in their music. I wouldn’t know what Vektroid’s opinion on it is, but I’m pretty sure the idea of the Macintosh Plus album took more inspiration from something like the TV show Twin Peaks than any anti-capitalist ideology.

NEONVICE · Interview: Hong Kong Express - 2814:

I remember the first time I watched 2046, I had been in a creative slump for a long time, and that film just sparked something to life inside of me. After that, I got around to watching more of his films and again like the way vaporwave was for me, they seemed like the films I had been waiting to see all my life.