'chillwave continuum'?

Numbers

Well-known member
What would such continuum be made of? Is there really a line running from new wave to cold wave, to pop synth (late eighties, early nineties) straight into vaporwave (early 2010)? What happened in between?
 

Trillhouse

Well-known member
u mean hardvapour and shit like that

I think hardvapor was a reaction to some in the scene's dislike for what vaporwave was becoming, so they declared it dead. But in the chronology of vaporwave as a musical genre it was nearly always fairly fractured, quickly separating into classic, hypnagogic drift, vaportrap, future funk etc and people are still making good music in those genres.

But in the purely internet side of things, where the genre has made it's home in places like 4chan, it was inevitable it would become a meme and then eventually get exploited in the meme / culture war, with people trying to co-opt it's popularity with a political message. So you get artist who put out second rate vapor-like tracks, with the same aesthetic, but they'll have an old fascist speech sampled in the background. Or Trumpwave which is the same but with Trump speeches. The Hauntology factor of the accompanying imagery is often weighed heavily with the popularist messages of Nationalism and returning to a time when America was great and men were men etc etc.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
galactic lebensraum.

it's trance for internet fash because hardstyle is too militantly fascist but not in the way of fashwave. i got it in it.
 

other_life

bioconfused
i grabbed a fuck ton of stuff from slsk and started a new rym account to work through and review this thing, lots of it is not really discussed on rym and i'd like to get people excited about it. so far there are 6 reviews, all of astronaut + splits they did, the band 0pn was in
 

Numbers

Well-known member
Thank you for this. I didn't know these older Lopatin releases and they're indeed good. The Skyramps album is a really nice one. (In case others would be curious: someone released a free fan-compilation on Bandcamp, containing many tracks from the tapes you mention.)
 
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other_life

bioconfused
i got discouraged logged out and deleted a bunch of this kind of music from my laptop
i'm very inconsistent.
 

other_life

bioconfused
this music all sounds the fucking same, that's the reason there's practically no discussion about it. most of it does not deserve to be championed.
one of my friends came up with the concept, or maybe just said the words and i conceptualised it, "the hypnagogic illusion".
she pinned it to a fascination with the past but i feel it has more to do with a reticence to either meaningfully engage with the past beyond fascination or creatively imagine a future worth living in. it's "the music of the now age" (fortune 500 compilation series), it's the neoliberal directive to "live in the now". the flattening of all things into the present (yadda yadda yadda)
[things i kept:
oneohtrix (including astronaut and infinity window but by no means completionist)
bee mask (his major records and not his Miscellaneous Tapes And CD-R's)
emeralds (not their side or solo projects, together they were greater than the sum of their parts)
hype williams
jeff witscher (various marble sky and secret abuse records and one abelar scout record)
liz harris
sam mehran (his long-form stuff, not huge on the outer limits recordings stuff)
skaters (shit-load of it but, again, by no means completionist)
yellow swans (at all ends; being there; bring the neon war home; deterioration; drowner; going places; psychic secession)]
 

other_life

bioconfused
in retrospect, vaporwave and what i guess we're now calling "deconstructed club" was probably an implicit backlash to the worst aspects of all of this stuff. the incestuousness/conflicts of interest/gladhanding of 'scenes' making it impossible to break in. how much packaging and artificial scarcity influenced the discussion of these records. the whiteness and being able to do this stuff in the first place being contingent on white comfort
 
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Numbers

Well-known member
That's true. The whole artificial value creation (either via self-induced scarceness or through 'unique' collaborations, etc) is too transparent and tiresome. When I got interested, things already moved towards over-production and free/name-your-price politics. It has the disadvantage of being more of a chore to sift through, but now and then you come across interesting stuff. Often with a humorous twist, which is something too often missed in oh-so serious electronic music. I still occasionally listen to the faux-eighties stuff of Luxury Elite. She made some hilarious tracks.

 

other_life

bioconfused
vaporwave ironically became what eccojams skeleton ndl and internet club records were commenting on in the first place
can't say, in hindsight, that it's surprising
luxury elite is great ( : really fun to talk to
so is scott michael and the other og's of this thing
https://ailanthusrecordings.bandcamp.com/ (+ affiliated pages)
but i haven't talked to anybody from that end since i quit facebook
i've been wondering how real any of it was lately
deckard falls in love with a replicant 2.jpg

i don't really think i was/am old enough to see the *immediate* humor in vaporwave, only in a sideways/retrospective way
i would instead try to get myself into the emotional space conjured by the curation of the samples (or use of presets) and appreciate how it was transformed
good example of it being done with samples
good example of it being done with both original material and screws
the closing track has transported me many a time, included it in this mix

18 carat affair was maybe something of a transitional artist. there's definitely a sadsack minimal synth meets home recorded funk aspect but it's mixed in the soup w these screws/sample gunks/disco slow edits. big influence on luxury elite and that whole living room visions stable
 

luka

Well-known member
I remember stumbling on a really old Barty post where he casually name checked chuck person, not saying he liked or disliked, just as a coordinate point and I remember being quite surprised.


I did t listen to this music at the time and I don't listen to it now but even so I feel it's the most important music of the last however many years, this wave. I don't like it exactly, i just recognise how right it was and how timely and how it presaged so much of what was to come. The anomie.
 

luka

Well-known member
By denying you what you 'need' it foregrounds the lack. Like when you take drugs and the magic doesn't happen. The hollowness of that. No sparkles.
 

luka

Well-known member
And then, in the wake of that, the explosion of interest in this kind of cultural salvage

 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the 2010's has also offered a whole counterpoint to the chill aesthetic too; music that's garishly attention seeking. music that's all foreground, rather than all background.

dancehall's piercing, shenai-like squealing auto-tuned vocals. traps hissing 808 hi hat pyrotechnics. lex lugar midi-brass. music that's all treble rather than the mushy, swampy midrange of this chillwave lineage.

you also have the adhd little-kid-pulling-different-faces-for-attention of a lot of music. your young thug's and tommy lee sparta's constant persona shifts, ad lib raps constant yelps and skrrras and all that. before that there was the skrillex thing where the instrumental was constantly chopping and changing. loads of different bass sounds intersecting one another. all that in stark contrast to the intently wallpaperish nature of chillwave
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
What does it all mean Barty?

it's talking not to the physiology of dematerialisation, but rather its effects on our cognitive processes. music that has to compete with all the stimuli human history has to offer at your fingertibs. music that's just one of 17 tabs competing to grasp your attention against the incest porn on the next tab, the behaeding video a few tabs over, ian dunt live tweeting parliament in the next tab, etc.

it's music attuned to the garishness of vine humour. of youtube vloger''s constant jump cuts, etc.

adhd music for an adhd society
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
you know my thing about cognitive obliteration via the orgasm (over stimulation) or the womb (complete tranquility).
 

luka

Well-known member
it's talking not to the physiology of dematerialisation, but rather its effects on our cognitive processes. music that has to compete with all the stimuli human history has to offer at your fingertibs. music that's just one of 17 tabs competing to grasp your attention against the incest porn on the next tab, the behaeding video a few tabs over, ian dunt live tweeting parliament in the next tab, etc.

it's music attuned to the garishness of vine humour. of youtube vloger''s constant jump cuts, etc.

adhd music for an adhd society

That's a good explanation
 
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