Vaporwave / Lofi Aesthetics
There is this aesthetic of slowed down + reverb + pitched down audio paired with animated visuals of a specific aesthetic (such as these set of posts). There are so many YouTube accounts dedicated to creating things like these which are continuously recommended to me form the Youtube algorithm. The audios are generally pretty melancholic and have a nostalgic tone to it when paired with the visuals. I'm specifically looking at the visuals here though, I just really like the animations as they have the grainy VHS degradation, shine/glow, and contrast of simple colour palettes which I just basically love the look of.
This aesthetic/sub-genre seems to have sprung, at least in my eyes, from the vaporwave aesthetic. I watched a YouTube video titled “How Vaporwave AESTHETICS took over the internet”, and this dude went way back to WWII when Japan was essentially military dictatorship and turned pro democratic. As the US funded Japan’s post-war economy, instead of putting the money towards the military to be an ally for the US, it was put into industrialisation and technology of the country. This period during the 80s and 90s was known as the Japanese Economic Miracle and this is the era that inspired vaporwave. The elements of bright city lights, metropolitan lifestyle, neon, luxury, easy living, technology and pop music transformed the country into a modern consumerism-filled country.
The word vaporwave comes from the term ‘vapourware’ which is used in the computer industry to refer to a computer software/hardware that has been announced but is never manufactured nor officially cancelled, it just disappears, kind of like the bygone era it is supposed to represent.
The 2011 song by Macintosh Plus established the blueprint for this movement. Vaporwave was a cultural/social online type of thing that evoked images of some idealised futuristic but nonetheless fictional Japan (eg. Cyberpunk, neon, Blade Runner).
Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos, probably influenced by Metahaven as well and Web 2.0
“Weather channel, elevator music and things like that were common audio to remix, so that you can tell what it is as its familiar but at the same time its different. At its core, vaporwave is a form of escapism, something that takes you somewhere else while at the same time evoking feelings you cant really describe ... we will keep reminiscing about the past as humans have always done since the beginning of humanity eg. romanticism, glorification of all past and future”
