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#vaporwave music
warizoh · 8 months
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declanlikesmusic · 9 months
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never got into vaporwave probably, what projects should i listen to for an introduction??
I always love this question. Finding the best primers to the whole of the vaporwave landscape and introducing new people to them is one of the many things with this genre that I just find so fun. I'm going to try to be as succinct as I can, but I am going to shoutout a lot, specifically twelve, so go ahead and take your time with these.
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Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe (2011)
The biggest vaporwave album of all time. I will tell you now that this album is by no means perfect, it has quite a mixed reputation among fans & outsiders of the genre, but this is the album to single-handedly define the genre's core ethos in such a highly-concentrated way. If nothing else, this should give you a taste of what inspires and influences the genre most.
Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010)
By all accounts, this is the very first vaporwave album and to this day, nothing sounds quite like it. A classic array of disorienting, hazy & psychedelic loops of old popular songs that still sound fresh and wholly enveloping.
猫 シ Corp. – HIRAETH (2014)
This one here is to help people gain a better understanding of what your typical standard vaporwave album often sounds like. It's quite varied in a number of subtly different styles & approaches to traditional vaporwave with some ambiance sprinkled in as well.
SAINT PEPSI – Hit Vibes (2013)
Now we're getting into the individual subgenres of vaporwave and while there's a few traditional vaporwave tunes sprinkled in here for variety, this album birthed & defined the genre of future funk with some of the best dance bangers you'll find in the scene. Lots of classy tunes on here, it's an absolute jam.
Blank Banshee – Blank Banshee 0 (2012)
Up to this point, every album I've shared has been intensely sample-based. This album still carries some samples, but it has original beats & synths to establish another subgenre known as vaportrap. It's a great beat tape with some classic tunes and I also recommend its sequel too, which is my favourite vapor album of all time.
ESPRIT 空想 – virtua.zip (2014)
Carrying on from the last album, this one almost doesn't use samples at all and when it does, it's usually an extra sound or instrument at most. I'm putting this here to establish that even basic vaporwave can be crafted from original compositions and the results are short but great.
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – 現実を超えて (2014)
What makes vaporwave the way it is and not like any other genre adjacent to it is its intensely heavy focuses on atmosphere more than anything else. So naturally, you're going to see a lot of bridges to ambient music. This first example is the subgenre of slushwave, which crafts the same excellent vaporwave tunes, but additionally filters them through such a wash of effects that transform them into psychedelic & blissful dreamscapes.
식료품groceries – 슈퍼마켓Yes! We're Open (2014)
The next subgenre in this vein is mallsoft, which answers the question of vaporwave being set in the tall & wide spaces of shopping centres by placing relaxing tunes in pools of reverb and letting them sprawl from the loudspeakers of the area's corners. This album is the first big one to establish that with a unique setting and gorgeous sample choices.
2814 – 新しい日の誕生 (2015)
The last of these ambient subgenres is dreampunk, which is a lot like vaportrap in that it heavily relies on its own compositions with very few samples while still retaining the genre's focus on nostalgia, this time set in the melancholic & rainy nights of the urban city through what is at least the second biggest album in the entire genre.
death's dynamic shroud – I'll Try Living Like This (2015)
I'm gonna end this list with a few of the genre's weirdest corners. Vaporwave is constantly wide open to new & unique ways of experimentation and this album stands as the best example of that. Wholly unique aesthetic choices, completely innovative sampling techniques and an overall opus of incredibly strange, surreal & psydchedelic soundscapes.
Infinity Frequencies – Computer Death (2013)
After that, I'll close this list with two examples of an abstract subgenre known by two names. They're synonymous to the greater community & world of music, but I see them as two different approaches. They're both defined by the creation of intensely haunting, isolated & loops of mysterious soundbites extracted from the likes of television & radio. Signalwave is what I use to describe the more accessible & musical end of that sound and this start of a trilogy is the best example for it.
░▒▓新しいデラックスライフ▓▒░ – ▣世界から解放され▣ (2012)
On the other hand, I will leave you with what I consider to be the most divisive vaporwave record of all time. This album defines what is more commonly known as broken transmission and it is much more obtuse, glitchy, dark & surreal to listen to depending on the album. You're going to listen to this and either love it, hate it or sit inbetween. People have taken it as a joke while others view it as a work of art. Approach this one at your own discretion.
That's it! Those are the first 12 vaporwave albums that I will almost always recommend every single one of you to check out first. The greater landscape of vaporwave doesn't start & end with these albums, but instead, they give you the best surface level primer to help dip your toes in to such an amazing genre of music.
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itscodebaby · 30 days
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Here's the second track I made from the summer sounding vaporwave collection I put together a few years ago.
Similar vibe and style to the previous one. Keeping with the summer theme.
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lilsageart · 2 months
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🌐New Song👁️
JoshuaSageArt - Synthwave Paradise (w/ Crizzy)
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filthyneverdie · 6 months
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NAMO - Rudimentary Implant | DREAMSCAPES
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illumifiji · 1 year
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ᵍ ᵉ ᵗ ˡ ᵒ ˢ ᵗ ᶦ ⁿ ᵗ ʰ ᵉ ʷ ᵃ ᵛ ᵉ
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cultofcreatures · 3 months
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monkey-network · 8 months
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syssettings · 3 months
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@daysofkinzie & @syssettings
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– 💿
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yulia-inferis · 3 months
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Proclus Quote: “Homie, A true philosopher is married to wisdom; he needs no other bride fam.”
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clownhooves · 3 months
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I released some old vaporwave tracks i made that i forgot about
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cyberwavebabe · 3 months
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youtube
Permaculture (组织胜过时间) by modest by default (2023)
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declanlikesmusic · 2 months
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The Best Song on I'll Try Living Like This
In May of 2015, the now legendary & iconic vaporwave trio known as death's dynamic shroud put out what would be the 12th album in their now 50+ discography of full-length records, this one on the then-prestigious Dream Catalogue label: I'll Try Living Like This, produced solely by two of its members James Webster (known as HCMJ) and Keith Rankin (known as Giant Claw). The album was produced in the midst of awaiting cassette production for what would end up being their 13th album in 2016 on Rankin's Orange Milk Records label, produced by the remaining member Tech Honors: CLASSROOM SEXXTAPE.
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From the moment it came out to this very day and beyond, I'll Try Living Like This remains to be seen as death's dynamic shroud's revolutionary, genre-redefining magnum opus and it stands as one of vaporwave's most creative & experimental records to achieve this level of notoriety. There's a lot to be said about each individual track and how it pushes the boundaries of a genre so many people neglectfully view as reductive & derivative. But one tracks I want to particularly highlight is one that isn't often seen as the emotional high point that it is early on into the record.
혼자 남은 지금 꼴이
The fourth track into the record in a short streak of amazing tunes kicks off with two samples: The introductory vocal humming of Avant from his song Separated and the stretched out instrumental to AOA's Miniskirt providing the beat & chords, provided more density & reverberation added to the beat. Beyond that, you hear a whole lot going on. There's a specific recurring vocal sample that gets chopped up & glitchy throughout the song, I can't confidently tell you where that's from, it could be from Separated again for all I could tell. Above that, you hear dialogue from CSI: NY spliced in, coming from Kim Kardashian of all people, some shimmering sounds coming from the intro to Fleetwood Mac's classic song Everywhere and later on, some lesser edited samples of the Legend of Zelda Sound & Drama, which I'll touch on in a moment.
It's an incredibly dense track, but more important than what it samples it how it feels to sample these things. The Miniskirt beat, once an upbeat, sharply produced k-pop track, is paulstretched & echoed out to feel much more lethargic but equally intoxicating. I think even without the added elements, the backing track is absolutely thick & heavy. It's like walking through the city on a packed night and just slowly dragging yourself through an extremely concentrated atmosphere, an opaque fog of urban smoke & emotional weight, and it wouldn't feel that way if it didn't sound so… melancholic.
There's a sadness permeating throughout the song. The strange CSI: NY dialogue, the dragged out & buffering vocal glitches, the lonely Avant vocalizing, there's something about all of those elements, combined with the once sensual love song beat profusely slowed down, that makes the whole experience feel so depressive, like an alcoholic bender. After two and a half minutes of this, you're given even more hints to what all of this is. A Japanese dialogue sample from the aforementioned Zelda Sound Drama plays and it of course reads like a piece of Zelda drama… but one sentence sticks out:
愛が鍵です。(Love is the key.)
A little further in, the shimmering of the Everywhere sample strips away. For a moment, it feels less crowded, but still… sad. Shortly before the four minute mark, Link's cry for Zelda is heard, the beat disappears for that moment and when it cuts back in, you hear something swelling in the background. You feel an emotional tension starting to rise. Then Avant sings.
We never turned our backs on each other But now that we're separated We can't stand one another And when we were together We never turned our backs on each other But now that we're separated We can't stand one another You did me wrong
This is a breakup song. More than anything else, it's a tragic, bittersweet, heart-wrenching breakup song. The added bass synths to the beat and orchestral strings climbing further up in the background for as long as those lines are sung; it feels like the rest of the track that came before was trying to suppress its deeply sorrowing emotions before all that resistance just shatters and every ounce of grief just spills out into tears falling into the puddles of rain below. The song concludes from there and it overall changes the dynamic depths of this album's extremely abtract concepts that are as hard to define, pinpoint or deciphir as this one is, if not more so.
This wasn't my favourite song for the longest time. I mean, for a long while, it was 그대 기억에 지쳐 잠들죠, but that's more of an interlude piece that directly transitions into a reprise of this song, funnily enough, that further elaborates on that Miniskirt sample with a bit of an eccojam. But other times, it was Loving is Easy or everybody's favourite 내 마음은 떨고. It was hard to define what really makes I'll Try Living Like This's best song. Sure, the latter had probably the best production of the bunch and the most energy for it, but an emotional pique or a definitive highly was hard to come by in an album that was always so consistent but always in some way relied on its surrounding pieces or the overall album package. 혼자 남은 지금 꼴이, however, completely stands on its own. As its own song and its own emotional piece.
I think it goes ultimately unrecognised in the grand scheme of this album because of how subtle it all is. Everything I just described to you about the song is subtle in their respective degrees. You really don't come to notice its value at the face; you find it out by digesting it further & more thoroughly, giving each listen its own time to clue you in to what it's about and what it's doing here on the album. It ultimately comes across as the most rewarding song on what is considered to this day to be death's dynamic shroud's masterpiece.
One that is immeditely ruined by the vocal samples on 이보다 좋을 수는 없겠어, but believe me, we do not want to have that conversation today.
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itscodebaby · 19 days
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Since you all loved the last one so much (thank you!), here is another track from my summer love collection.
For this one, I was going for a passionate summer night kind of vibe.
Let me know what you think.
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yaniasogames · 6 months
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yknow last rb annoyed me so i am dumping my music here as a trans girl who enjoys making vaporwave under random aliases. please like and rb if u enjoy yada yada yada you know the drill 💗
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filthyneverdie · 6 months
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NAMO - Olympus | DREAMSCAPES
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