Come get lost again in 21 songs that are made to loop into eternity, this is a celebration of the artists who participated in Children of Vapor's inaugural URL Fest!
Sorry I've been absent, I've been hyperfocused on this project for a few weeks! I never double dip on videos in a post but I'm happy with how this commercial turned out, voice acting by yours truly~ Thanks for listening!
01 Stop, Look, Listen - Can We Give to the Sun
02 IONNA - Dragonfly
03 Mom and Dad's Computer - so awake
04 SPOOKIE - let me
05 Gold Blu-27 - The Oriental Crown
06 Dratz - No Whisper
07 Nightleek タマネギ - the signal
08 E Z R A ゴーバー - S u n s e t B a e
09 Brickmason - Jade Green Glossy Lava Stone Tile 2" x 8"
10 V@PYD - Sunscreen
11 victory over death - deltabirth
12 Eccosystem - ヴェイパーウェイヴアライウ
13 M00NofS0rr0W - Dreamy Vintage Vibes
14 KJ Valium - LOVEQST
15 Anonymous420 - Love and sex the universe
16 Toys From Taiwan - Excerpt from JamSpace64
17 Robin Circle - Mukō-gawa
18 Mary K Ashley - ░▒▓█►─═ 閉じ込められた ═─◄█▓▒░
19 BAИSHI - Da Deserted Chateau
20 Pool Plants - Syrup Flight
21 HD CAMERA 忠実 , 至福 † - a cropped photograph
◍ check out "Orbs in my Room" / released by Illuminated Paths label!:
https://illuminatedpaths.bandcamp.com/album/orbs-in-my-room
// available in limited cassette tapes, if you can please support to Illuminated Paths and also discover their amazing catalogue full of awesome artists on different experimental genres, mainly vaporwave and other avant-garde electronic jewels! regards! ◍
I'm always going to have a soft spot for this mini-album.
Vapornoise has to be one of the most fascinatingly eclectic subgenres of any genre, much less vaporwave. It's quite literally vaporwave taken to the extreme of noise music, sometimes in its volume, and other times in its fluidity & chaos. As such, a good few albums fall under this classification, some to greater clarity than others, but not that much. It's so niche, and I'm so fascinated whenever I come across one that's new to my ears.
This one, however, isn't. In fact, it might just be my first experience with the sound right when I was getting into the scene around 2016/2017. It's called ░▒▓RNBW▓▒░ by ☆♀☆♀STAR GIRL ☆♀☆♀, released in November 2015. It is, to put it bluntly, an 8.5-minute-long mini-album consisting of samples from Porter Robinson's Worlds and others, amplified & distorted to the degree of harsh noise. (Seriously, play this at the lowest volume first.) And it works.
I really don't know how else to put it in a way that makes it sound any better, but then again, this album is ridiculously obtuse & abstract. The sample editing is pretty minimal, so if you're picky about that, keep scrolling, but the few crops & edits done feel picked in a way that's both intentional and slapdash random, which really adds to the spontaneity of this album. These tracks can be a couple of minutes long or a couple of seconds, and each time, you have just enough of a snippet of the sample to get its place on the album and how it tells its own twisted story.
The story is twisted, in my view anyway; there's nothing explicitly told to you in the music or any details surrounding the album beyond its aesthetics and titles, so all you get is interpretative. To me, with the loud title formatting, the bright saturated colours, the sample choices, and the industrial noise-level amplification, on top of the sequencing and the track lengths, this tells the story of being captured in an overobsessive relationship and a pseudo-paradise simulation before breaking out and seeing horrific, bloody destruction outside before suffering the worst fate at the tail end.
The first four tracks, WE ARE ONE, THE HEAVENS, DEPEND ON HER, and OUR LOVE IS FOREVER, display this overaffectionate lover and the bright & colourful world they have locked you into. WINDOWS is an actually edited sample, and it sounds eerie & foreboding without giving much of that saturation away. NOWHERE ELSE, TALL GRASS (which is so, so short, it's almost humorous if it weren't for the rest of this album), and SHOW ME EVERYTHING display a sharp distrust the lover now has in you, trying to convince you that this place is not worth leaving, before you find the gap in ESCAPE, you feel resistance trying to pull you back in in THE UNIVERSE, and with the untitled final track… Jesus Christ.
I'm gonna be real, I could go on about that last track. It's the sole thing that turns this from a presumed joke to an actually serious concept record, for me. It's five seconds, it's a loop that plays five times, and the loop in question is the loudest, sharpest, most grisly, industrial, distorted, and borderline hateful song on the whole, entire record. It feels like the machine, in its deepest insides, is designed to murder you the second you have any hope or chance of escaping. It is, and I mean this genuinely with no exaggeration, one of the most frightening & scary pieces of music I have ever heard, and it closes out the record. It ends at the same volume as it starts, and you are snapped back to reality from blistering volumes to a completely blank silence. It might be the loudest song on the entire record, and then, in a snap, just as you are yanked & pulled down the deepest, darkest trenches of it, it's over. And that might be just as, if not more frightening to me than the track itself. It alone justifies and gives weight to the entire rest of the album before it. But that also means I cannot recommend you listen to it even hours before you go to bed. So, make of that what you will.
Overall, I find the record to be one of the most fascinating, esoteric, and mesmerising releases of its time. I really wish we could go back to having obscure, minimal, yet deeply conceptual & visionary vaporwave or adjacent releases like this more often. I would love to procure, curate and host a place where this type of expression is unlimited, and boundaries are pushed to their strangest extremes. I want to be able to find deep cuts this abstract in sample-based music more often again, like I used to almost a decade ago. I don't understand what's stopping most people, aside from their innate desires to want to do more and be taken more seriously, especially while there's still a stigma levied towards vaporwave for being a lazy genre without understanding its basis on recontextualisation & atmosphere above all else. …It's just a shame, really. Because I'd call something like this a damn near masterpiece of its kind. Maybe postmodern, in a sense, too. Whatever it is, it's one of the strangest things I love, by & far, and maybe you'll get something out of it like I do, too. Try it out. As quietly as possible, though.
