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Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoMy mind just can't accept that this isn't a parody / publicity stunt.
- gagege 8y agoVaporwave is always half-serious, half-ironic.
- pjc50 8y agoMaybe the right word is "novelty"; it's being done differently in a deliberately obsolete, retro way. Part of that gives it publicity. But it's also a real item. Like Warhol's signed soup cans.
- 32qwef 8y agoI thought the same thing when all these punk and indie groups were releasing cassettes. Then I found out that most people didn't play the cassettes. They bought them because they look good on a shelf. The cassettes have a download code printed inside (Bandcamp will spit out a CSV), so when you actually want to listen to the music, most will redeem the code (or just stream it). So it's still pretty silly, but not as silly as I thought. I have to presume Floppy releases are similar (Who even has a floppy drive now a days?)
- patorjk 8y agoNot only similar, but exactly what the guy selling the floppies thinks: > "And a lot of these people, I don’t even think a lot of ’em play the shit. They just kind of put it on their shelf."
- achileas 8y agoIt's art and nice to display. People do the same with vinyl records, comics, etc., definitely looks cool to have for collectors and lovers of old tech.
- 32qwef 8y agoYes. I actually kept some of the cassettes I was given, and they do look nice on a shelf. Plus it's a way to support the band. I once considered releasing a tape with no music on it. Just nice cover art. I wonder if anyone would know?
- cl0ne 8y agoI have a copy of this "LP". It's just the cover art, no actual record inside. I guess that made some people pretty mad who actually bought it. https://www.discogs.com/Pigeon-Religion-Why-Do-You-Hate-Pigeon-Religion/release/2050979 https://www.discogs.com/Pigeon-Religion-Why-Do-You-Hate-Pige...
- sincerely 8y agoSOPHIE did that with a CD once, right?
- nerdponx 8y agoPunks, at least, most certainly do listen to cassettes. Cassettes are cheaper to run in small quantities than vinyl. Cassette players are cheap and easy to find. Punk music sounds good on cassette. I'm not so sure about floppy releases. But there is probably some overlap between retrocomputing enthusiasts and vaporwave fans. Maybe they're the target market. At least floppies are thin; a shelf full of cassettes will fill up quickly.
- reaperducer 8y agoPunks, at least, most certainly do listen to cassettes. And my wife, as well. She's not a punk, but she buys cassettes and listens to them, too. I assume because it brings back memories. Duran Duran, Beck, Prince, Police, etc... Used ones from the record store she picks up for about $2. New releases run more, but I don't ask. But she listens to them. We picked up a huge box of blank 90-minute NOS Maxell tapes at an antiques store recently, and she's busy recording her records to tape so she can listen to them via Bluetooth in her car (via battery powered BT dongle). She picked up several brand new tape players and boom boxes in Japan recently to make sure she has something to play her cassettes on. Though I've seen some at Amoeba, too. But they're just way more expensive in L.A. Never try to understand the logic of a hardcore music fan. See also: Tube anything.
- 32qwef 8y ago> Punks, at least, most certainly do listen to cassettes. In my years playing punk / indie music (which only ended last year) I did find a few people who said they listened to the tapes. Most people told me they didn't have a tape player, and just bought the tapes for display. But there was maybe one or two people, the hardcore types, who found an old tape deck in a thrift shop, or had a used car with a tape deck. Even in those cases, I don't think tapes were for every day listening. I would see the same people playing music on their phone or what not. Tapes were for special occasions. > Punk music sounds good on cassette. I agree. So for certain projects, I used to record my music onto a tape, and then feed it back into the computer before I uploaded it. I don't know why more people don't do this.
- nerdponx 8y ago
- gatesphere 8y agoI for one have a large modern tape collection (underground metal, noise, ambient, and sound-art mostly), and I play them quite regularly.
- acconrad 8y agoAnd yet it's a sub with 100,000 followers: https://old.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/ There's a sub-genre that dubs Vaporwave songs with Simpsons clips that has tens of millions of views on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=simpsonwave https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=simpsonwave It is indeed very real. Surreal, even.
- 27182818284 8y agoSimpsonwave is one of those things that reminded me just how great having the Internet is. I'm not in the community by any means, but as soon as I learned about it, I was so happy that it existed and that it had a community putting out work.
- busterarm 8y agoSimpsonwave really brought back my love of Memphis Horrorcore. Come & Get Yo Wig Split! (heavily sampled in one of those Ryan Celcius videos)
- toomanybeersies 8y agoIf you think that Simpsonwave is weird, just wait until you discover fashwave: https://thump.vice.com/en_uk/article/mgwk7b/fashwave-trumpwave-far-right-appropriating-electronic-music https://thump.vice.com/en_uk/article/mgwk7b/fashwave-trumpwa... It's literally the same as vaporwave, but with fascist titles and graphics. Reminds me a lot of neo-Nazis appropriating metal and punk. Vaporwave is a weird genre. It's really popular on the internet, but it never quite hit mainstream, I don't see clubs playing it and most of the artists seem to be self-releasing. A vaporwave artist had a gig here in Melbourne a couple of months ago (I can't remember who it was now), and I thought about going along just to see what kind of people actually listen to it in real life.
- tgb 8y agoWell now I have Cybernazi in my Youtube history, guess I should read the article before clicking the Youtube link and then blithely clicking "okay" on the notice informing me that the video content has been flagged. Though I'm mostly just annoyed that they have replaced an "a" with a delta instead of an alpha.
- 21 8y agoIt's just hipsterism. Just like cassette players, mechanical type-writers, old IBM keyboards, VHS revival, taking pictures on film, so on.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Multicomp 8y agoWoah woah woah, I can see hipsterism being applied to most in that list, but the IBM keyboards do not apply IMO. Anecdote: Most hipsters I know give me guff about using mine, and extol the virtues of the ergonomic rubber dome or "fancy" Corsair rgb. Not judging their choice of kb, only pointing out nobody has said "wow your 1987 beige boat anchor is so cool I'm going to get one"
- Apocryphon 8y agoIt's an aesthetic, or as they call it, an a e s t h e t i c. There's nostalgia in that style, when internet was 90s and simpler. When malls were flourishing and it looked like we were heading towards a comfortable consumerist end of history rather than a hyper-optimized automated dystopia. The Windows 95 phone could be considered vaporwave: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405219
- EE84M3i 8y agoSmall correction - ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ (e.g. Fullwidth unicode latin caps) would be more canonical. I believe it's intended to evoke use of fullwidth romaji in Japanese as a bit of a play on Japanese use of english words to sound cool.
- danbolt 8y agoWhen I read text with the fullwidth latin unicode like that, it certainly feels more dreamlike. I think Vaporwave appeals to me a lot as tapes and the aesthetics of foreign-made (eg: Japan, Taiwan, etc.) electronics feel vivid in the fuzzier memories of my childhood. If the film Inception was made today, the photograph in the vault could have been an old VHS tape.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chippy 8y agoIt is a music genre thats disguised as a joke or a joke thats disguised as a music genre.
- bitwize 8y agoIt's both sincere and a parody. It harks back to the early 90s, the birth of the internet in the public consciousness, and the feeling that the primitive Windows and Mac machines we had were precursors to the Ono-Sendai cyberdecks we would soon be having. But there's a sense of "oh how naïve we were back then" to it.
- linkmotif 8y agoGood thing there was that “podcast on a floppy” post up on here last week.
- JansjoFromIkea 8y agoMaking something that can fit on a floppy disc is pretty cool restriction to give yourself imo. Do you just cripple the bitrate to squeeze a 3+ minute song on, do you stick to super short songs or do you find alternate means of maximising the space (I'm thinking potentially a mixture of midi files with some guidelines, and super low encoded vocals) Floppy discs are much more aesthetically pleasing than cassettes (although maybe not cassette boxes) as a decorative thing imo too.
- Paul_S 8y agoI was disappointed that the floppies didn't contain mods (tracker music).
- sitkack 8y agoMaybe you should release that album you have always been thinking of, "Meta Flame", a Torch program that uses DNN to turn mp3 files into tracker files. All advanced compression schemes use the Grad Student Algorithm [1] [1] http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part1/section-15.html http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part1/section-15.ht... (search for "graduate student algorithm")
- fzzzy 8y agoI think mod releases and midi releases will probably happen eventually.
- Roboprog 8y agoNot exactly “releases”, but freemidi.org gives you a lot to play with. https://freemidi.org/random https://freemidi.org/random
- woodrowbarlow 8y agoDiode Milliampere released an adlib tracker album, YMF262, on 3.5" floppy a few years ago. it fits about 13-14 minutes of music. i managed to score a copy, but they're sold out now. https://diodemilliampere.bandcamp.com/album/ymf262 https://diodemilliampere.bandcamp.com/album/ymf262
- binarymax 8y agoI'm still waiting for the wax cylinder to come back as the coolest media format.
- twoquestions 8y agoSee for yourself! I present to you, Metal Recorded on a Wax Cylinder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR4BuM6dP44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR4BuM6dP44
- vertexFarm 8y agoNah, steampunk has led a full life and died of natural causes. It's in a better place now.
- jancsika 8y agoWould be an interesting constraint to limit oneself to a single html file and use/abuse the burgeoning webaudio API to make an album that fits on one of these.
- werber 8y agohttp://werber.xyz/vaporwave/ http://werber.xyz/vaporwave/ made this a while back while trying to figure out vaporwave, still don't get it
- busterarm 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgLAZ3AtaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgLAZ3AtaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s I find these are pretty good at explaining the mechanics of the genre
- vertexFarm 8y agoI'm sorry, those are bad. The first is a joyless dissection of wordy music theory, which is to production of music as Freudian literary analysis is to writing. That's all made up post-hoc by the academics, the artist never has any of those intentions in mind when they make music and it describes nobody's creative process. And by the way it's synthwave, not vaporwave. The second immediately parroted that stupid myth that vaporwave is all some kind of cerebral criticism of capitalist consumerism. Ugh. One pretentious guy wrote a big "think piece" about that back in like 2011 and it spread like cancer despite all the founding producers in those days going on record saying they have no idea what he was talking about. It's just this soulless and cynical method of taking the complex, hard-to-pin-down emotions that music can evoke and cheapening it into some trite social commentary with a shoehorn and a can of WD-40 to make your banalities fit. So sad. And then the guy in the video goes on to make terrible imitation vaporwave to further demonstrate that he just doesn't get it.
- busterarm 8y agoI went to a music conservatory. Yes, this does accurately describe some peoples' creative process. Even some people who make synthwave. Popular music has been heavily trending away from being outsider art for a while now. People with deeply technical competence in composition have a strong advantage over those that don't. Even Park Jae-sang/Psy went to Berklee. A lot of pop music that you listen to is _extremely_ deliberate. While I agree with you that the capitalist consumerism criticism was just one guy's read on the genre and is complete bullshit, there are a large number of people who are not ignorant about this music who believe it as well. Even the most well known synthwave artist interviewer/blogger/podcast-host believes it (he used to be a coworker of mine). Music becomes something else completely different from what the artist intended once it leaves their hands. They're still good videos.
- FranOntanaya 8y agoAs someone that grew through the 00's — I commend the ability to package the feeling of the era into a style, and some of the things back then (like your first time opening a Basic interpreter) were neat... but, boy, the cliparts and Encarta era is not something I'd be nostalgic of. We had a glimpse of all the information that was out there, but still couldn't access more than a little bit of it. It was frustrating more than anything else. Personally I had gladly archived it in the back of my mind till it started to surge back as vaporwave.
- poisonarena 8y agoI grew up in the 90s and clip art nostalgia is strong in my mind! I think I used Groliers Multimedia Encyclopedia
- poisonarena 8y agoI get the cassette thing because that was an audio format people used for albums, but in the 90s nobody released albums on floppy discs, so this is like all gimmick
- SyneRyder 8y agoThere's always that one exception - Brian Eno released a floppy disk album called Generative Music 1 in 1996. It required Windows 95 and a Sound Blaster AWE32 to play: https://intermorphic.com/sseyo/koan/generativemusic1/ https://intermorphic.com/sseyo/koan/generativemusic1/ "The works I have made with this system symbolise, to me, the beginning of a new era of music. Until a hundred years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable, and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances, and made it possible to hear them identically, over and over again. But now, there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music, and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations — you can hear it when and where you want. Edit: There is a YouTube recording of someone's generated version of Lysis (Tungsten) from the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgbbYLSNbfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgbbYLSNbfg
- munificent 8y ago> nobody released albums on floppy discs You're forgetting that for many people, part of their early exposure to music is music from within computer games, not just music released as standalone albums.
- ryandrake 8y agoMuch of my favorite music as a kid were soundtracks from 8 bit video games, demoscene releases and background music from loaders and cracks. They also influenced my early tastes/trajectories: I discovered Mike Oldfield, Jean Michel Jarre, and OMD from a single C64 SID release. All traded on 5-1/2 floppies among friends.
- 32qwef 8y ago
- ynniv 8y agoI'm impressed with the state of 32kbit AAC streams. You could fit almost 6 minutes of that onto a floppy, and the quality is much higher than an 8-bit MP3
- CrazedGeek 8y agoHow's Opus for this sort of thing?
- sitkack 8y agoOne can play around with Opus by exporting audio streams from existing video and audio ffmpeg -i sample.avi -map a out.wav and then encoding that wav to opus opusenc --downmix-mono --bitrate 32 --vbr out.wav cor.opus to decode opusdec cor.opus final.wav and then play final.wav brew install opus-tools sox ffmpeg
- andai 8y agoOr in one command: ffmpeg -i sample.avi -acodec libopus -b:a 32k -map a sample.opus
- klodolph 8y agoIn listening tests Opus typically outperforms HE-AAC by a fair margin. This is for 64 Kbit/s and under.
- 21 8y ago> Cassette players, they’re not really manufactured anymore, and the prices are going up on used ones Tascam just released a new deck cassette player, with USB: https://ask.audio/articles/tascam-announces-202mkvii-dual-cassette-deck-with-usb-for-next-generation-tape-heads https://ask.audio/articles/tascam-announces-202mkvii-dual-ca...
- KozmoNau7 8y agoThey probably mean quality cassette players. Even that Tascam is made using standard cheap mechanisms, it only has the most basic noise reduction (Dolby B) and no tape type selection. To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C and S, as well as HX-Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for music. A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound seriously good, but nobody wants to sink the money into doing it, when they can just sell crappy Type I tapes at hipster prices.
- slededit 8y agoPeople still buying cassettes are doing it for the LoFi sound anyways. They know their market.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoPeople who will spend $500 on a mediocre tape deck?
- slededit 8y agoIt looks fancy enough and you can show your friends how retro you are. Sure a CD player would be better in every way, but everyone has those. Sound is really secondary here.
- WalterGR 8y agoyou can show your friends how retro you are. My hobbies and the things I spend my discretionary money on are superior to other people’s hobbies and the things they spend their discretionary money on.
- ttul 8y agoDoes anyone else remember the brief period in which you could pack 2.88MB on a 3.5” disk?
- isoprophlex 8y agoWas that actually real? Or just a guesstimated capacity using disk compression? I was maybe 12 years old around that time, and remember being burned by compressed floppy disks not actually always holding more than 1.44 M... My memory is hazy (but fond) Edit: yeah it was actually a thing! That, and many even crazier formats and storage capacities at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
- forkLding 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkPcPqTq4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkPcPqTq4M ^above video got me started on vaporwave
- nerdponx 8y agoIsn't this the album that started vaporwave as whole?
- badpenny 8y agoThat's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1.
- samfriedman 8y agoYes, which was interestingly a side project of Daniel Lopatin, better known by his experimental electronic moniker Oneohtrix Point Never.
- meowface 8y agoOne of the greatest electronic musicians of the decade, in my opinion.
- newobj 8y agoThere's a bit of a Newton/Leibniz situation concerning the "invention" of vaporwave, and without being too much of a music nerd a-hole, I would generally consider the following four albums to share equal claim on the birth of vaporwave (listed here in chronological order: Daniel Lopatin: Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (summer 2010) Vektroid as Laserdisc Visions: New Dreams Ltd. (summer 2011) James Ferraro: Far Side Virtual (fall 2011) Vektroid as Macintosh Plus: Floral Shoppe (late fall 2011)
- smrtinsert 8y agoVaporwave makes great working music. Anything by ecovirtual on Bandcamp comes to mind
- zapt02 8y agoEco Virtual is great -> https://ecovirtual.bandcamp.com/ https://ecovirtual.bandcamp.com/
- citrusui 8y agoCheck out the samples too: https://www.whosampled.com/Eco-Virtual/ https://www.whosampled.com/Eco-Virtual/
- thebigspacefuck 8y agoI like the stuff by Haircuts for Men a lot
- acomjean 8y agoWasn't Mini-discs music on a floppy? IN the US as s format mini-discs weren't very successful, but I used one in grad school. Put my CDs onto discs. Energy efficient, didn't skip, remote on the headphone extender cord and sounded great. The blank disks were fun colors. I have a mini home stereo with a minidisc changer, I tried a few recently and they still work. Mageneto Optical technology. MP3s killed them. People wanted better than 1 cd->1 disc, but the companies were so worried people wouldn't use them if the quality wasn't great. Sony who owned a record company really seamed hell bent on preventing piracy to the detriment of the technology. The little disks only made it to computers later in life. I was going to toss them, but maybe I should hold onto them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
- teddyh 8y agoNo, MiniDiscs are not floppy disks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
- KozmoNau7 8y agoI've started a small collection of obsolete media. So far it's just cassette tapes, floppy disks, minidiscs, the stuff I grew up with. But I'm slowly adding stuff, just because I think it's neat to keep them as reminders of what we used to use.
- chrstphrknwtn 8y agoYou may find this interesting: https://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/lostformats https://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/lostformats
- chippy 8y agoVaporwave is a huge genre which covers a wide range of styles. Here are two favourites which show different styles. From down tempo electro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GW6sLrK40k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GW6sLrK40k to new reworking of 80s pop songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jynPLTeBaFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jynPLTeBaFc The main thing that ties in the different styles is the slight feeling of nostalgia and the internet subculture central to it. The playfulness with the subculture is a core element of the subculture. "Vaporwave is dead" is an example of such. It's post-hipster in a way as hipsters are too serious, always searching for the authenticity, where vaporwave will copy and rework stuff. It's kind of close to the way Discordianism worked - is it a music genre thats disguised as a joke or a joke thats disguised as a music genre?
- bane 8y agoOne of the things that, to me, makes it such a vibrant genre is the huge emergent tree of sub-genres that seemingly sprout out of it on a weekly basis. This means that if you're able to accept the basic premise of the genre, there's probably some sub-genre that you can get into. It reminds me of what we now call the EDM scene, but back in the 90s when it was "Techno" or just "electronic music". There was an attempt to try to map out those sub genres in a great flash presentation: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ Since it's valuable, and we're still early in it, it would be great to also do this with vaporwave. Another important part of the scene is that it's not just a music scene, but a more general cultural movement with visuals, palettes, clothes, food, tv and so on. And on one of the powers of it is that it can not only create new stuff, but draw on an entire cultural period that's already happened.
- Nuzzerino 8y agoBeing a fan of the genre(s) myself, it's nice to see that Ishkur's Guide is still available. I remember finding it on Newgrounds in 2000 or 2001 and being blown away by the level of detail.
- aphextron 8y ago>Another important part of the scene is that it's not just a music scene, but a more general cultural movement with visuals, palettes, clothes, food, tv and so on. I’m trying to imagine “vaporwave food” now, and the closest I can get is those weird little Kid Cuisine TV dinners with the frozen blue stuff for desert.
- duxup 8y agoI always had on and off data integrity issues with floppies .... was it just me?
- zomtorg 8y agoI'm interested to know the following: Is selling vaporwave songs legal, such as those that remix Michael Jackson? If not, who is liable - is it the creator of the song or the seller of floppy disks?
- chippy 8y agoMany of them do break copyright - which is one of the arguments in favour of the "critique of capitalism". You cannot sell stuff and make a profit in this music genre if you cannot sell stuff.
- swirepe 8y agonew 35mm film camera when