Vaporwave

I know this album has been posted in this thread. But have you guys heard this track? https://bedlamtapes.bandcamp.com/track/love-poem

Oh... I'm sure this has been posted before... I haven't perused this thread in a while.

Vaporwave: A Brief History

Haha oh God I love that wosX has smacked a big Hardvapour advert over the top now.

  On 3/7/2016 at 9:37 PM, purlieu said:

Haha oh God I love that wosX has smacked a big Hardvapour advert over the top now.

I don't like it. I don't really care though. (was there some internet beef over this too? like between HKE and Oscob or something?)

Anyway, I'm not even following this hardvapor stuff. Some chuckle-worthy tracks and vids and that's it. I wasted all my futile ire regarding genre revisionism when brostep blew up. Internet drama and forced inorganic "progression" just isn't my cup tea.

The beef with Oscob came after hardvapour started, largely because he reacted it so badly he pretty much cut all ties with wosX and HKE immediately (resulting in his albums being dropped from the Dream Catalogue Bandcamp). It's all absurd. HV itself came about because HKE and wosX were tired of how stagnant most of the vaporwave scene is lately. A trip to the subreddit reveals a lot of kids just slowing down loops and putting them online without any of the quality control or conceptual interest of the best stuff. There've also been a lot of people moaning about anything that doesn't just sound like that being labelled as vaporwave, which some have seen as another sign of the style being stifled and stagnating. So hardvapour is basically an intentional antithesis of what that end of vaporwave currently stands for. All the various characters and the heavy restricted limits of what is hard/hating what is soft are basically a satire on that "this isn't vaporwave" thing and the limited ideas within so much of the music these days.

I have the whole Antifur catalogue on my computer and there's a surprising amount of decent material in there, amongst the laughably bad gabber. The compilation is worth listening to for the tracks by HKE, Void, telepath, Vaperror, Nmesh and 2814 which are all predictably awesome. As with vaporwave itself it started out as a joke/satire but has very quickly become an outlet for artists to create a style they weren't working in previously and a lot of time seems to have been put into some of these tracks.

  On 3/8/2016 at 12:50 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

i actually think it's quite an interesting development! and very tongue in cheek with the russian / communism references.

yeah the dystopian rave concept is pretty ripe

  On 3/8/2016 at 1:33 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

 

  On 3/8/2016 at 12:58 PM, purlieu said:

The beef with Oscob came after hardvapour started, largely because he reacted it so badly he pretty much cut all ties with wosX and HKE immediately (resulting in his albums being dropped from the Dream Catalogue Bandcamp). It's all absurd. HV itself came about because HKE and wosX were tired of how stagnant most of the vaporwave scene is lately. A trip to the subreddit reveals a lot of kids just slowing down loops and putting them online without any of the quality control or conceptual interest of the best stuff. There've also been a lot of people moaning about anything that doesn't just sound like that being labelled as vaporwave, which some have seen as another sign of the style being stifled and stagnating. So hardvapour is basically an intentional antithesis of what that end of vaporwave currently stands for. All the various characters and the heavy restricted limits of what is hard/hating what is soft are basically a satire on that "this isn't vaporwave" thing and the limited ideas within so much of the music these days.

 

I have the whole Antifur catalogue on my computer and there's a surprising amount of decent material in there, amongst the laughably bad gabber. The compilation is worth listening to for the tracks by HKE, Void, telepath, Vaperror, Nmesh and 2814 which are all predictably awesome. As with vaporwave itself it started out as a joke/satire but has very quickly become an outlet for artists to create a style they weren't working in previously and a lot of time seems to have been put into some of these tracks.

 

ahh good old drama! never not far away, and very easy to do when everyone is communicating by text on the interwebs.

 

Oh wow, had no idea all that occurred.

Been meaning to give the Hacking for Freedom album a spin. It really is a catch-22 for me, I like that vaporwave is progressing but I find some well-produced stuff less interesting as "vaporwave" but on the flipside there is so much derivative, poorly done stuff out there.

The truth is people are still putting interesting things out under the vaporwave banner - Cyber Dream is a nice new label that puts out quite a dream ambient vibe but with very sample based stuff in. This album as great mix of stuff. At the same time, outside of Lux Elite and Catcorp, I'm not really finding anything that inspires me in the 'classic' style any more. It's four years since the heyday of New Dream Ltd, Infinity Freq, Internet Club etc. and some people are still slowing down the same sources and doing nothing new to them - personally I just can't get into it anymore. A lot of it has become as production-line bland as the music the style was originally parodying, and that's kind of bleak in a way. It's this kind of thing that the hv lot are calling 'softvapour'. wosX has mentioned a few times that he still likes good vaporwave.

Also a lot of the community is pretty self absorbed. HKE went on a bit of a drunk rant about it on Facebook last week, calling out certain people who have basically been laying into him/DC constantly on Twitter since Vaporwave Is Dead came out. Probably not the most mature move, but some of the responses were a fascinating insight into the mentality of the scene - my favourite being in a side-discussion of why DC albums are no longer free (i.e. so they could get on Bleep), someone genuinely suggested that after HKE's rant, Bleep would definitely end all ties with him. The assumption that employees of Bleep would use a fairly inoffensive post on a vaporwave Facebook group as a contract breaker - the assumption that they'd even be aware of it! - gives some idea of the cluelessness and/or self-importance of some of these people.

https://highschooldramateacher.bandcamp.com

https://sephorabrainvibes.bandcamp.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1NKD7dDnGY

  On 3/13/2016 at 11:56 PM, Nidhogg said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1NKD7dDnGY

Holy shit that is beautiful

been a bit since the vapors hit me like this:

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=294162027/size=medium/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/transparent=true/

Nice pic.

Not sure if it's been posted already but I came across this a while ago

https://haircutsformen.bandcamp.com/album/lp-3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNqnZd967PM&list=PLlZd7IUpfmiCTc5VKafvZPOIzlndvyEQk

https://avaloneanaeon.bandcamp.com/album/-

https://virtualdreamplaza.bandcamp.com/album/--50

^ fuk yeh. hwvr, a key word in dat there funky .gif statement - is the word 'wants', lol.

'information is the currency of democracy' ≉ 'the information economy'

Welcome To The Information Age

Imagine a collaboration between James Ferraro (or Lopatin) and David Lynch... Just imagine...

And speaking of, it just occurred to me now... how the hell has Richard never worked in some fashion with David Lynch??

Or w/ David Cronenburg...

  On 4/15/2016 at 7:45 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

yeah rich and lynch could be a good combo but i can imagine both are quite solitary people and would both want to be in charge (thinking this is more lynch than afx though)

Oh shit, thats right now that you mention, it would probably be a clash of the hyper-creatives lol

lol clash of the hyper-creatives vol.2.rar

how bout a kuwait paragraphic / donovan combo-colab ?

Didn't realize solo jazz cup was you guys, my non-watmm m8 really loves that water vid.

  On 4/23/2016 at 7:08 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

not sure if people have been keeping up but in the last week several vape labels and artists have been hit with copyright notices or decided to voluntarily withdraw any copyrighted material from their bandcamp.

 

we will most likely be setting up a group / page soon and attempt to lobby for a modernisation of copyright law. i'll post the details in here when this happens, but the idea is to network and discuss ways of progressing in this area. it won't be able to save all the folks getting affected by this in the short term but i believe doing something is better than doing nothing.

Nice idea, glad to see people taking action to keep the community alive, regardless of what our take is on sampling ethics...

Consider this though, on the flip side, how ironically fitting and kind of awesome would it be if heavy-sample-based vaporwave producers were forced to smuggle and distribute their releases deeper into the nets via filesharing / torrents, or elsewhere in order to keep it from takedowns due to copyright violations. Imagine a dedicated deep web of sorts just for classic style vaporwave cassettes runs and marketplace. Just how fucking CYBERPUNK would that be?!? Maybe this is vaporwave's metaphysically intended ®evolution. Unite technophiles, hackers, and phreakers!

I think the problem is vaporwave trying to go down the 'normal' music direction. Doing runs of 100 tapes sold at way more than cost is a long way from artists uploading zips of anonymous mp3s. It's no surprise HKE is taking down the sample-based stuff from DC, as their latest releases are being made in runs of 500-1000 and distributed by Bleep. It's a completely different area of music distribution and thus has different rules.

  On 4/23/2016 at 10:38 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

yeah it's definitely not a sign to give up producing remixes and sample based music as some people have indicated. i respect that people are considering taking a more original and homemade approach to things, and that's great, but i don't think it's the right way to react to this problem. so it's good to see even don hikaru can agree on this, definitely an interesting and probably accurate take on what will happen too.

Agreed, well said!