What I had to go through. This was probably the most exciting and fun part of the whole process. It took one and a half weeks to master the genre and put myself into the position and mood of someone proficient in such style. This was some sort of method of music production. What does it feel like to be a vaporware/synthwave producer? I viewed the whole process to be comical. This type of genre makes me laugh, but I took it seriously. I went through many albums and many disappointments as well. However, I took at least three albums into the booth and the DAW to drive the whole aesthetic. One of them is a vaporwave classic, another a northern Portuguese relic, and the latter an underground Bandcamp gem that cost me a dollar.
Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus (2011, Beer on the Rug)
If one chats about vaporwave with someone else, this album is probably the one and the only album they’ll talk about. I don’t necessarily think the genre is terrible. It became obsolete quickly due to the social media virality effect, where something gets really big for a short period and well-known and later becomes overused, boring, and irrelevant. The average vaporwave listener knows this album. On the other hand, the average vaporwave enjoyer will mention Nmesh’s Pharma album, released in 2017. It can be considered the genre’s resurrection. Nevertheless, my task is not to make a track representing an Avant-garde take on the genre but to make a recognisable and iconic track with all stereotypes. Most of those come from Floral Shoppe, an album produced by Macintosh Plus, one of Vektroid’s (Ramona Xavier) alias.
Formally, Floral Shoppe is a collection of easy-listening tracks from the 80s and 90s, forgotten bits of adult contemporary muzak–a genre designed to anonymously fill silences–battered into warped epics. Sounds matter over performance; Pages albums, smooth jazz compilations, Diana Ross records, the N64 Turok soundtrack, are all fed into the Macintosh Plus machine and spit back purple, unsettling, with voices slowed to wordless drawls, tempos abused at whim, snippets mashed over each other at clashing time signatures.
Review on Sputnik Music
by Electric City (February 16th, 2014)
It’s basically the chopped and screwed culture taken to another level of aesthetics. This is time with samples that locate the listener back in the 80s and provokes a sense of nostalgia. It’s the result of what would happen if soul music had a crossover with dementia (disease), the same idea that The Caretaker had when making the plunderphonic/sound collage album Every Where At The End of Time (2016).
In Floral Shoppe, Xavier sought catchiness through repetition. If one knows the sample’s source, one would be infuriated by how the samples are chopped, but there’s a musicality to them. The same way plunderphonics is supposed to be produced according to John Oswald:
Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. A device such as a wind-up music box produces sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced – the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright.
“Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative”
– as presented by John Oswald to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985.
リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュ
This was the song that popularised the album and the genre was only discovered a few years after the album’s release. This song was all over the internet, especially in the new humorous content known as memes.
Vaporwave has a humorous side to its production, even though Ramona wanted the complete opposite outcome.
All of these revolve around alternative ways of perceiving the world, so much so that it’s tempting to think Xavier appreciates “consumerist culture” less as something to analyze from a distance and more as something to enjoy in its own right—something that opens up new ways of living.
Bandcamp interview to Ramona Xavier (June 21, 2016)
Its popularisation started when Anthony Fantano, a music critic, decided to review the album five years later its release, the same time Sputnik Music reviewed the album with a really good score. However, Fantano gave a 4/10, which brought the attention of his fans, who resumed the whole album’s aesthetic to be “slowed down Diana Ross songs”.
Nevertheless, the subculture that revolved around these memes created the extension of its aesthetic: a fusion between neon pop, 80s nostalgia and vintage culture, a phenomenon described by Simon Reynolds as Retromania – the obsession of pop culture with its own past.
Around the same time when these reviews came, pop culture was processing two films that I consider to be iconoclastic to this matter and definitely helps the fans to connect both ends. Drive (2011), The neon demon (2016), Only God Forgives (2013) by Nicolas Winding Refn, Chunking Express (1994), As Tears Go By (1988) by Wong Kar Wai, Akira (1988) by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Ghost in the Shell (1995) by Mamoru Oshii, Lost in Translation (2003) by Sofia Coppola, Millennium Mambo (2001) by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Mulholland Drive (2001) and Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch, among many others. These type of
My reception
Most of the songs take the listener in a romantic spiral encapsulated in a drunk visage, and the tempo helps to give more passion, with bittersweetness, making your body react to it. I am not a musician, and probably there are better words and definitions for this. However, there is a tendency for vaporwave to be slow, and that can be seen in the subculture vaporwave trend on YouTube called slowed down + reverb, where any 80s song will work and make the listener feel more melancholic, nostalgic, and romantic, and the main idea, I suppose, is to be trapped into these lame oversaturated core emotionality. These aspects were key elements of my thinking process when making the track, and this exaggeration is also explored by another artist called David Bruno from northern Portugal.