9 ms·
Vaporwave was created then destroyed by the internet (2016)
- chrisco255 5y agoI've heard this genre called vaporwave, synthwave, and retrowave. Which meme is going to win? Also for anyone interested, a pretty good resource for retrowave related music, art, and games: https://newretrowave.com/ https://newretrowave.com/
- throwaway8451 5y agoSynthwave‘s cheery, Vaporwave‘s sad/depressed. I never liked the latter for that reason.
- wraptile 5y agoThat's not true at all. There are plenty of cheery vaporwave songs mentioned in the article itself: saint pepsi [1], macross 82-99 [2] etc. all early vaporwave entries based on city-pop which is as cheery as you can get! In fact that's probably the most popular remaining evolutions of the genre, both of the mentioned artists are still huge! (multi-million listens on spotify) 1 - https://saintpepsi.bandcamp.com/album/hit-vibes https://saintpepsi.bandcamp.com/album/hit-vibes 2 - https://soundcloud.com/macross-82-99/popular-tracks https://soundcloud.com/macross-82-99/popular-tracks
- Dracophoenix 5y agoSaint Pepsi and Macross are generally classified as Future Funk artists rather than "pure" vaporwave in the vein of Macintosh Plus. For anyone who is interested in Future Funk (i.e. "cheery" vaporwave) a now-archived and inactive youtube channel by the name of Artzie Music [1] collected classics of the FF genre and is, for now, still available to peruse. The best ones in my opinion were uploaded between 2017 and 2018. [1]https://youtube.com/c/ArtzieMusic/videos https://youtube.com/c/ArtzieMusic/videos
- fithisux 5y agoVery good artists, additionally I can suggest Jesse Cassetes. https://soundcloud.com/jessecassettes https://soundcloud.com/jessecassettes And Stinkbug.
- cols 5y agoCool link. Thanks for posting!
- ehnto 5y agoIf we are honest with the cultural aspect of it, vaporwave is the meme of taking old songs, slowing them down, making the time wonky, and occasionally overlaying software sounds or adjusting the phrasing. Where synthwave describes a much broader range of music with a retro-futurist sound more often than not new original music, and not reliant on sampling phrases from songs outright.
- stryan 5y agoVaporwave is a different genre from synthwave. Synthwave is based off synth-heavy 80s music, especially action and thriller/noir movie soundtracks. If you watched Stranger Things that has a very synthwave sound track. Vaporwave is more sample based and is traditionally about looping distorted samples of 80s/90s songs, though it branched out a lot. Personally I'm a fan of naturewave, which is looped and edited "nature" or "new wave" sounds. But, key difference, it normally doesn't use a lot of classic synth sounds. Retrowave I think refers to the over all aesthetic genre; so vaporwave and synthwave both fall under retrowave.
- ionwake 5y agoCorrection: Vaporwave is more based.
- odiroot 5y agoVapor-wave is definitely on the meme side. Synth-wave is probably the most "serious" and retro-wave is usually just synonym for the former.
- oldsecondhand 5y agoVaporwave just morphed into mallsoft.
- cols 5y agoI’ll start out by saying I’m an avid fan of vapor/synth/whatever wave. I’ve heard this argument before and I can’t be the only one to think it’s silly, right? A cursory search of Spotify, Bandcamp, or YouTube will show that ALL the “wave” genres are alive and well some 5 years after this article was written. Some artists have moved on to other aesthetics, some artists have continued to produce the same sound they always did. How is this different from any other genre? Incidentally here’s some sweet tunes! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1APbMkLxJGgWT88wpKyCIA?si=K91xoquKRkWD2D_ACdaM3A&dl_branch=1 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1APbMkLxJGgWT88wpKyCIA?si=... As a side note, I just discovered another “wave” offshoot called “corporate businesswave”. What a time to be alive. https://open.spotify.com/user/blackscholescat/playlist/39pqsBTsb9UNYv1dXbZpff?si=YilIVuUgRxmWjLxsAZfq-w&dl_branch=1 https://open.spotify.com/user/blackscholescat/playlist/39pqs...
- JonathanMerklin 5y agoCorporate businesswave is so perfectly my aesthetic, thank you so much for the recommendation.
- httpsterio 5y agoIf you haven't heard, you should also check out Mitch Murder's Businessfunk mixtapes.
- meowface 5y agoYou might also be interested in PilotRedSun's animations and music. He has a kind of similar sensibility. Animations: https://www.youtube.com/c/PilotRedSun/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/PilotRedSun/videos (Most famous/viral one, though it's also the only one that isn't with music he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGbhJjXl9Rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGbhJjXl9Rk) Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1mUiAjHzAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1mUiAjHzAI, https://www.youtube.com/c/Pilotredsky/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Pilotredsky/videos
- tarsinge 5y agoThe Business Casual label on Bandcamp has some nice releases.
- tus89 5y agoAdd this to the list of things I'll just never understand. Subreddits with n*100k subs. For what? Something that sounds like tracker music from the 90s?
- grp000 5y agoAnd the music that you listen to is what, objectively better?
- isoprophlex 5y agoThe article gives a pretty comprehensive overview of why people might enjoy vaporwave and it's offshoots. Politics, humor, the aesthetic itself. Some releases even have a definite musical quality: Blank Banshee has put out very interesting music, and some production values in Vaporwave-esque music clearly made it into the mainstream.
- ntauthority 5y agoPersonally, I love 'tracker music from the 90s', and it's great to see things resembling it pop up in my streaming app's recommendation list every so often.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoWho else accidentally read this title as "vaporware" instead of vaporwave. Kinda unnerving how that happens when scanning headlines.
- httpsterio 5y agoI mean, they're kinda in the similar style and I think the naming of vaporwave is intentionally borrowing from vaporware. Vaporware is tech and products that had a beautiful idea that never came to fruitition and vaporware makes music out of tracks that used to belong but don't any longer. There's a similar feeling of abandonment and emphasis on feelings of being in the wrong place and the wrong time.
- kilroy123 5y agoI did the same and was confused. I'm only a 1/3rd of the way through my first morning coffee.
- drloser 5y agoI read 4 chapters before reading vaporwaVe correctly.
- Stratoscope 5y agoYou are not the only one. I opened the HN home page two or three times before I clicked on this comment thread, and each time I thought "huh? we had vaporware way before the internet." > "Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system and first appeared in print in a newsletter by entrepreneur Esther Dyson in 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware It also reminded me that a few days ago I read about some new ThinkPads that use vapor chambers instead of heat pipes. That sounds like it will be much more healthy for these high performance computers.
- rightbyte 5y agoNothing made any sense until I got to your comment.
- newobj 5y agoVaporwave’s not dead
- kregasaurusrex 5y agoI think overzealous copyright quietly killed Vaporwave. It focused on being anti-capitalist & satirical, where Vaporwave as a genre spawned out of this retrofuturistic desire to return to the 80's and 90's era of rosy nostalgia to chill electronic music like the K-Mart store tapes[0] fused with graphics from the era's games like Ecco the Dolphin[1]. The genre stood out because it was a new artform that encouraged stylistic experimentation, where listeners appreciated the nicheness and relative unpopularity. One of the albums, Floral Shoppe[2], that helped create the movement was taken down on YouTube after receiving tens of millions of views because it directly used modulated (slowed down, reversed, autotuned, etc) samples from songs owned by Sony that fell outside the scope of fair use to the point the artist couldn't claim the album as an original work. This may have doomed it from the start to be a victim of its own relatively small success- as soon as more listeners discovered Vaporwave, it would be co-opted by the mainstream in the form of 'A E S T H E T I C S' and would cease to be the creative & original subgenre it set out to be. [0] https://www.npr.org/2015/10/12/448059164/putting-the-k-in-muzak-years-of-kmart-background-music-archived-on-tape https://www.npr.org/2015/10/12/448059164/putting-the-k-in-mu... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Person%27s_Eccojams_Vol._1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Person%27s_Eccojams_Vol.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_Shoppe#Lisa_Frank_420/Modern_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_Shoppe#Lisa_Frank_420/M...
- fzzzy 5y agoFloral shoppe is definitely fair use. Getting taken down from youtube is not a court of law.
- supernintendo 5y agoMy bf loves vaporwave and is sharing new artists in this genre with me all the time. 3D BLAST, Mélonade, Death's Dynamic Shroud and Runners Club 95 are a few of the producers / bands I like the most. I don't understand the fuss about labels; it's all electronic dance music to me.
- S_A_P 5y agoAs I’ve gotten older I just don’t have time for discovery. The proliferation of sub genres has added enough friction for me that I largely don’t try anymore. That said I play music pretty much every day and I have made music for 24 years. I have always liked downtempo music that wasn’t overly bright and was generally lofi. When describing what I like, sometimes it is golden age hip hop sounding. Sometimes it’s Boards of Canada sounding. Sometimes it sounds like Air. I occasionally bump into new music I like but the fragmentation of genres makes it difficult to discover new things. I wish that music was defined more by mood/mix/tempo and overall production aesthetic. I think there is a need for a Shazam like app that can listen to a song you like and find others for you that are similar.
- httpsterio 5y agoLast.fm used to be popular and still does an alright job at that. Usage numbers are down so there might be less variety, but I especially liked the "neighbours" to find people with similar music taste and then I lurked at what they played and I hadn't heard myself before.
- cols 5y agoI feel you. My strategy of late has been to listen to a playlist of a genre I like but composed of artists I haven’t heard of on Spotify. I do this in the background while I am working. I heart the ones I like and add them to a special playlist and over time I’ve built up a few different playlists and expanded my inventory of tunes. Before being a programmer I was a studio musician and engineer and I swear I listen to more music now than ever. Edit: incidentally, I totally agree with you about wishing there was a service that focused on mood/tempo more than anything. I’ve found that Spotify has been doing some of this type of aggregating and it’s not too bad. I’ve gotten a ton of good music from the Late Night Vibes playlist.
- fithisux 5y agoIs it really killed? It is still produced but even more important it has evolved through CityPop to FutureFunk and even has touched a bit other genres. I you haven't yet, give it a try. There are many online radio stations that play both FutureFunk and Vaporwave. As for the SynthWave (2.0 because the original SynthWave happened in very early 80s and I do not know why it is called that way since it is unrelated and I prfere to call it RetroWave) it is still produced. I suggest you try it, the more recent incarnations even have vocals which resemble a lot the US Pop Rock music of the mid 80s but in some songs you can even hear clearly the influence of ItaloDisco. I really like both and they are very original and important parts of music history. Still carry in them the seeds of the very early 80s evolution in music aka "New Wave" but have completely different aesthetics (VaporWave is mid 90s nostalgia oriented). If you search in discogs you can even find collections that fuse VaporWave/SynthWave/ItaloDisco and Funk to produce very ethereal music. PS there also exists the very difference subgenre of SovietWave
- kregasaurusrex 5y agoItalodisco is super underrated- it has a lot of the upbeat analog electronic dance music that many of the *waves try to recreate; and did it 40ish years ago. Always felt it was more poppy and fun than the Eurobeat songs that came afterwards like those featured in the anime series Initial D.
- fithisux 5y agoI'm definitely in love with ItaloDisco. I watched it from its humble start, to this day. The emphasis has always been on quality Italo house [1989-1993] + Eurobeat[British, Italian] + J-Euro + Classic Italodance (1992-1998) + Hyper-Techno are derivatives of huge importance in the history of EDM and worth to listen filirting many times with their origins. Catch: I consider Spacesynth to be ItaloDisco and the 1988-1993 Italo-energy movement to also be ItaloDisco It is not only underrated. It is the King of the Dance Floor since 1978 with disco being the Queen. Also it is the behind all the music revolutions since then in Europe. And definitely is behind modern SynthWave and Vaporwave.
- odiroot 5y ago
- bricemo 5y agoI’ll just assume everyone here is a fan and share some great playlists: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0wIjGv5BH8dRETiikmormc?si=qqRII8gKTZmu2Vwu-Oa86g&dl_branch=1 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0wIjGv5BH8dRETiikmormc?si=... https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ALbeqn1aDPutYOozVRres?si=KW6Lz7XqS6qLVREd9QX3Aw&dl_branch=1 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ALbeqn1aDPutYOozVRres?si=... https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DXdLEN7aqioXM?si=gh9fCxPiRzW_g7AIFM2qTg&dl_branch=1 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DXdLEN7aqioXM?si=...
- justaj 5y agoI am a fan, but I don't have a Spotify account.
- navbaker 5y agoMy absolute favorite go-to mix while I’m at work: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K1iS-_EQMGE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K1iS-_EQMGE
- kitsunesoba 5y agoHere’s one that I’ve gotten a a lot of mileage out of. https://youtu.be/U3tqI9Sf5yU https://youtu.be/U3tqI9Sf5yU There’s one other that I really liked, but it seems to have been DMCA’d. The creator of the mix has SoundCloud and Spotify versions, but both are missing tracks… I have the original saved locally as an iTunes playlist but there’s no way to share it.
- pram 5y agoLike “Esquire” has the cultural cachet to declare anything dead or relevant lol
- reedf1 5y agoThis person claims to get it but they clearly don't. My feelings built until they misattributed the meaning of "ecco" in an album title.
- errantspark 5y agoOh my god. So wrong, such confidence. > ... you can hear that the title is a play on the word "echo." It's an obvious nod to the production on the album ...
- meowface 5y agoI mean, it's not entirely wrong. It's just missing the additional context of what else it's on a play on words of. OPN/Daniel Lopatin did refer to his early pre-Eccojams creations as "echo jams": >"I do these "echo jam" videos where I just loop stuff like a phrase from a pop song and repurpose it and put echo on it. It's like really Neanderthal sampling. Not flashy." In 2009 and 2010, he posted the echo jams on his YouTube channel sunsetcorp: https://www.youtube.com/c/sunsetcorp/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/sunsetcorp/videos. (All excellent and still worth watching/listening to today. Some landed on Eccojams, but some didn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuCloea96Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuCloea96Mg is my favorite; be sure to listen start to finish.) Later in 2010, he compiled these tracks and others into Eccojams, which references both "echo jams" and the 1992 Sega game Ecco the Dolphin, which is what the cover art is derived from.
- errantspark 5y agoYou're right, but not mentioning the game feels wrong. (yooooo that song is a whole ass trip)
- larodi 5y agoVaporwave is well alive in 2022 and is actually gaining and transfusing its aesthetic essence in today’s Pop and EDM
- d3nj4l 5y agoHello, time traveller! Have we beaten COVID in 2022?
- odiroot 5y agoNo, just entering the 5th wave.
- remarkEon 5y agoWe have a vaccine for the gamma variant, it’s fine.
- larodi 5y agowe have not beaten lots of things, in particular bad sense of humor, troll approach to strangers in forums, and least but not last using COVID as replacement for a good smiley face. here's one -> :D
- fithisux 5y agoThis type of comment Is usually done for synthwave.
- jianshen 5y agoI never thought I'd see Vaporwave mentioned on HN. Anybody fans of Bandcamp here? I really feel like it's helped keep a lot of these microgenres going even more than Spotify.
- throw8ways 5y agoOne thing a lot of vaporwave artists do nowadays is use uncommon characters in the titles of their songs to make them harder to find. That could be part of why it seems to be disappearing.
- kunagi7 5y agoYou can't kill what already is dead. That's Vaporwave [0]. Maybe I'm a bit biased since I'm an avid fan of Vaporwave. There's subgenres for everything, Mallsoft, Future Funk, Broken Transmission/Signalwave... From sunsetcorp's "angel" [1] to 猫 シ Corp.'s "Palm Mall Mars" [2] there's a decade of really high quality releases. Also, Bandcamp and YouTube provide endless days worth of Vaporwave. Thanks to them I discovered obscure artists like Kanal Vier (German), Canal+ (French) [3] or Jesse Cassettes. References: [0] Phoenix #2772 - You Are Already Dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO6CaqAH_K4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO6CaqAH_K4 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN0czUMRMU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN0czUMRMU8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc5Yz1TnOVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc5Yz1TnOVY [3] https://canalplus.bandcamp.com/track/doute https://canalplus.bandcamp.com/track/doute
- moth-fuzz 5y agoI feel like vaporwave was dead as soon as people started taking it seriously. Seeing the genre at its inception - a critique on how corporations will use substanceless nostalgia to bolster sales - turned into that very thing with this faux-80s-revival music, that for one reason or another sounds nothing like what was actually popular in the 80s, has left quite the sour taste in my mouth. Like, the very idea was to take old “nostalgic” stuff and mangle and distort into something only vaguely resembling that. The idea was to provoke those feelings in you while also detaching from what might actually make one nostalgic. After all, most of the audience can’t remember the 80s or 90s having been a child or not born yet. The idea is to poke fun at how corporations manufacture nostalgia by doing exactly that, except in a ridiculous and obvious way so that people would be in on the joke and so that it would be a transformative work of sorts. But people fell for the trick anyway and now we have kids who weren’t alive in the 80s yearning for the 80s listening to music that doesn’t resemble 80s music. It’s weird. In short: I agree with the author. There are burgeoning genres and music cultures that may resemble vaporwave if you don’t know what it’s origin and intentions were, but the actual message behind vaporwave is lost to history in lieu of its aesthetic. The irony was, in fact, lost.
- lovich 5y agoAs someone who enjoyed vaporwave as it was being produced, “the idea” behind vaporwave was that it sounded good. It may have sounded good because it touched on nostalgic sounds for millennials, but there wasn’t a wide spread movement “… to provoke those feelings in you while also detaching from what might actually make one nostalgic”
- user-the-name 5y agoMaybe you just missed the point.
- thinkingemote 5y agoVaporwave is dead. It's integral to the genre. They were saying at the beginning and five years ago also. Vaporwave cannot exist alive. The thing to understand is that to exist or live in the music industry is incompatible with vapowave, mostly. It's actually genius. To stay alive underground you have to kill it off before it can be adopted by the mainstream. A software analogy could be a license which prohibits use in any professional serious setting. Or maybe the WTF license which many corps hate. Or maybe code which is itself mainly a copy of others. Stuff that can be enjoyed at home but would never be hosted by Microsoft and never be found in a company. The other death metaphor is that it's about what has gone before, the music is about what is dead, musically and culturally.
- dhdkakfb 5y agoThis is probably as good of explanation as any, but still the real killer was Saint Pepsi.
- nvarsj 5y agoFor anyone interested in exploring vaporwave: * https://vaporwaveultra.tumblr.com/ https://vaporwaveultra.tumblr.com/ * http://lucidarchive.com/#/g/1 http://lucidarchive.com/#/g/1 (interactive guide of the above)
- dhdkakfb 5y agoGood lists. Vaporwave died with Saint Pepsi’s first release.
- dhdkakfb 5y agoIt’s true. Vaporwave died with Saint Pepsi’s first release.
- fab1an 5y agoVaporwave is anything but dead - it's been completely absorbed into mainstream aesthetics instead.
- tarsinge 5y agoThat make me think that maybe the mindset of well defined music genres coupled with fashion that is the staple of many publications (Pitchfork, Vice, ...) is just becoming obsolete with the fluid environment of today.
- villgax 5y agoI'd say it was re-discovered by reddit around 2015-2016
- Nihilartikel 5y agoThe artist 'Haircuts for Men' is the one who made me stop smirking at vaporwave and start listening.
- 0des 5y agoI concur, I originally found it on Vapor Memory YouTube channel [0] and it quickly became my go-to for during-the-day soundtrack. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCS8cRSiJjAqgwvmP7VxJw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCS8cRSiJjAqgwvmP7VxJw
- scottmcdot 5y agoA great example of hearing Vaporwave "in action" is when it's played in Dan Bell's Dead Mall YouTube series.
- sammalloy 5y agoLots of call outs and links here, but very few text-based playlists in this discussion. Please, someone, give it to us straight, in ascii. Top 20 artists would suffice.
- jasonladuke0311 5y agoOne of my favorite channels: https://www.youtube.com/user/ThePrimeThanatos/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/ThePrimeThanatos/videos Play a couple of videos and your feed will be filled with all of the neo-80's *wave goodness you could hope for. EDIT: I failed to read your comment.
- sammalloy 5y agoThanks. I wish there was a way to extract data from these files that gave us playlists in plain text. I know that some of these uploads have the full playlist in the description.
- jasonladuke0311 5y agoYeah most of them these days have a full playlist in the comments. You could maybe use the YouTube API to search comments for multiple timestamps, which should be the playlist. https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/comments/list#usage https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/comments/list#...
- efields 5y agoI’m elated by the sharing going on in this comment section. More like this!
- okareaman 5y ago“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” -- Martin Mull https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music...
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y agoIs there any QuickTime demo CD-ROM made with HyperCard-themed Vaporwave? That would be my personal idea of heaven.