Vaporwave

[Leviathant]

That Macintosh Plus album is one of the most demented things ever. Chopped and screwed adult contemporary put through various filters. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it really fucks with you and I enjoy that aspect. Take what is suppose to be comfortable and make it uncomfortable. It's a nostalgia hellride.

Taking music that was shitty thirty years ago and lazily running it through some pirated plugins doesn't make that music not-shitty.
No one cared about this music when it came out in the 80s, I'm not sure why anyone cares about it now. Any illusion of nostalgia is just being projected by the people putting this on bandcamp, or the idle minds running certain music culture blogs. In either case, it's coming from people born a decade after the wholesale-sampled music was originally put to tape. It's low-effort amateur-hour detritus. There's some kind of dementia involved alright, but it's not coming from the music. If I want 80s electronic dementia, I'll listen to the Akira soundtrack.

It's probably no coincidence that anything I've heard referred to as "chopped and screwed" has never lived up to that moniker. When you say chopped and screwed, I'm expecting Disco Hospital or The Anal Staircase, not low rate LA home studio pap.

[perceptionnexus]

I'd never heard vaporwave until just now, listening to a bit of the Ramona Vektroid album. It was "fucking terrifying" in the sense that it sounded exactly like 90s Cinemax on Friday nights, and at that time I was constantly "fucking terrified" that my parents would come in my room and find me engrossed in total softcore action!

[Leviathant]

Um no.

Look. In 2014, when I posted that, "Um, yes." Sorry not sorry. 90% of what people shared with me as Vaporwave at the time could have been created with this boombox:



Note that the clips @thefragile_jake posted just now are all from 2015, except for one - and I think it shows that there was growth in the genre, even in the course of a year - because you had to differentiate from that tiny boombox. I'm not responding to your quote to take another opportunity to dump on the genre like I did six years ago, because:

You just don't get it, sweetie.

...that's okay! Just because it's not for me doesn't mean it's not for anyone else. But the production techniques surrounding early vaporwave aren't arguable - many of the examples from the time were literally tapes of 80s music/muzak played off a voltage starved tape deck, cut into loops, minimally rearranged, and run through a flanger or phaser, with some reverb. By 2015, creative original music elements seem to have become more common in the genre. Judging by Wikipedia (for all its faults) that seems to be when the genre hit peak popularity and began to really disseminate into other things.

I'm glad to see the thread brought back to life, and I hope more people continue to post examples of the genre - it's been a while!