vaporwave:drawing relationships between the microgenre of electronic music and cyber visual culture

Starting in 2010s, vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music that owes its origins to a social networking site called reddit. Reddit, along with 4chan (an online discussion board) also has been the source of origin of many subversive cyber-cultural movements that essentially started out with visuals but spilled on to animation, music, et cetera. Vaporwave, like many other cyber subcultures, owes its conception to crowdsourced creative contributions, thus blurring the lines between the artist and the audience.

The community engaging with vaporwave is perhaps is as, if not less, important than the identity and the function of the community itself. The presence of contemporaneous generations on the internet and the diverse range of expressions that are aided by fast-paced communications offered by massive strides in techonology have allowed for confluences of multitudes of discourses originating from diverse geo-cultural regions, and globalisation of these discourses, a few of them if not all. Vaporwave is one of the many movements that critiqued modern production of art in terms of structure of the music, production and distribution, meaning, and aesthetics.

Vaporwave: An Introduction

The music

Vaporwave has often been viewed as a vague satirical take on modern consumerist culture. The name itself has come from vaporware, which, according to Dictionary.com is “a product, especially software, that is promoted or marketed while it is still in development and that may never be produced.” The vaporwave music has little to its name “in real life”, or beyond the internet, because there are little or no physical, tangible manifestations of the movement. Essentially because of its mostly digital presence is also the reason that its adherence to legal and commercial aspect of various processes of music production, regulation and redistribution is close to nil, which has been popularly construed as subversion or circumvention of mass production of art, and thus thought of as a “satirical take on capitalism”. The genre and its visual representation are all produced under aliases or anonymously for anonymous audiences.

Drawing largely from 80s “elevator music”, synthpop, and disco music, fused with the concept of “glitch” art, vaporwave originated from “chopped and sliced” music, where portions of a certain jazz song was “chopped”, or cut, and further edits are made to the tempo (generally slowed down), the pitch, and the key. Additions are made in terms of extra beats, or the “glitch” is represented by creating distortions in terms of syntax or the structure of the particular track. The very first album that was attributed as vaporwave was Vektroid’s “Floral Shoppe”, with the song Computing of Lisa Frank 420//contemporary ( リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー) under the alias of Macintosh Plus. The track used Diana Ross’s 1984 song “It’s Your Move”.

It must be noted that the audio elements used are probably not owned, probably sourced illegally, and then reproduced under anonymity. An average vaporwave track is distorted repetition of portions from source music, with no particular format or structure. The tracks can vary from a minute to ten minutes long. The music is generally low-fidelity, and is accompanied by disortionist graphics. Many have gone as far to call vaporwave “post-music”, which essentially implies that the conventional meaning and function of music are increasingly being replaced, the process being necessitated by “postmodern” times.

Source: weheartit.com

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The graphics that came to represent vaporwave in essense follow similar thought process. Before being identified with vaporwave, the glitchy graphics with 80s computer and gaming elements, pastel colours, exoticised tropical locations, and antiquitarian busts were trending on the popular microblogging site tumblr.

The visuals do not follow any particular established ideas of composition or visual harmony, and depend on digital elements and editing functions to render the creatives a distortionist, futuristic effect in terms of pastel and neon colours, a disregard for palettes, and a general questioning of logic in terms of what message the visual is supposed to be giving. The typography resembles the WordArt found in earlier versions of Windows operating systems, with bright gradients, 3D effects and warping. One also observes Kanji and Hiragana (Japanese scripts) and an odd sense of kerning and punctuation, The fascination with Japanese visuals also seems to be coming from the Japanese advertisements from the 80s, and the nostalgia of Japanese popular culture which were consumed widely since 90s through video games, anime and manga, etc.

Memes

An essential element of vaporwave was the simultaneous birth of memes, even though known for their humorous value, also provided for a vent for shared expression, queries, and dissent. The millennials, a term refers to persons reaching adulthood in the 21st century, and often is applied on teenagers and young adults, are known to be the creators and consumers of a meme culture on the internet in most cases.

fireden.net

Both these cultures drew freely from each other as humour and conscious destruction of syntax and socially established notions of what is considered sensible, which is also basically conformist.

Many observers also found vaporware humorous. However, humour historically has been a way of undermining authoritative structures and figures.

Vaporware thus has not only been a subversive counter culture but also closely integrated to a larger cyberculture of expression of dissent.

source:pinterest.com

References

Koc, A. “Do You Want Vaporwave, or Do You Want the Truth”. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Enquiry. 2017.

Fleetwood, P. “The Rise and Fall of Vaporwave: Resistance and Sublimation in on-line Counter-Cultures”.Granite: Aberdeen University Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Journal Proceedings of 1st Granite Symposium: Engaging the Intersections of Humanity and Technology. 2017.