ZS History of Vaporwave (Part 1)

From hypnagogic pop to eccojams (2008-2010)

Try to come up with a snappy definition for vaporwave, and you will fail.

In his 2016 book Babbling Corpse – Vaporwave and The Commodification of Ghosts, the academic author Grafton Tanner recounts how he tried to introduce people to vaporwave, but failed at every attempt to describe its sound and his emotions listening to it: “That is, until I actually played a vaporwave song for them, and then they understood.”

A sonically diverse electronic music genre and art movement that resists easy analysis, vaporwave was born on the internet in the early 2010s.

The first decade of the new millennium had brought with it the vague feeling that Western consumer capitalism might have surpassed its tipping point, so the music looked to past eras for inspiration, to a time before 9/11 and the global financial crisis, before constant accessibility and corporate surveillance – read: the 1980s and 1990s. More specifically, these decades’ aesthetic signifiers and how they communicated naive, optimistic hopes for a better future through technology.

It felt as if the ghosts of those failed hopes were still haunting us, and vaporwave artists channeled those ghosts by sampling pieces of what was perceived as musical rubbish: Elevator muzak, TV commercials, corporate stock music, smooth jazz, bubblegum pop, middle-of-the-road soft rock.

A common misunderstanding is that vaporwave is some sort of trolling joke by a bunch of cynical internet kids, the musical equivalent of a meme or a snarky comment. This interpretation falls short though. For Grafton Tanner, the music “engages in an act of reframing, not necessarily to parody.” It can feel humorous and satirical, but also deeply melancholic and sad. In its best moments, vaporwave manages to transform seemingly worthless sonic material into emotionally resonant art – a process of upcycling.

In the past decade, much has been written about how early vaporwave was a form of ‘internet punk’, a contemporary anti-capitalist art movement that not just emblematized what consumerism did to our places and spaces, but also challenged gender norms and stereotypes as well as celebrity worship culture. I still believe that’s true.

Critique of that view came from the vaporwave scene and producers themselves, some of which maintained that their agenda was never political and their music not designed to deliver any type of social commentary. This argument is besides the point though. The artist’s intentions are just one – and often not a very fertile – means of the interpretation of art. Many artists don’t know why they do what they do, but that shouldn’t hold the audience back from reading meaning into their work. In fact, it’s the very idea that art can be interpretable in manifold ways that serves as one possible definition, constituting its legally privileged status as a basic human right.

What indisputable is that vaporwave artists have always struggled with the idea of the commodification of art in the name of profit. Whether by choice or necessity, they practically rejected the entertainment industry complex and its promotion and marketing cycles, often distributing their music for free under anonymous alias names. Responding to these guerilla tactics, the mainstream music industry and media have been largely ignoring and/or even ridiculing them.

In its beginnings, vaporwave was a subversive DIY grassroots community, an underground resistance of the internet age. Vaporwave has been called the “end of music”, but it was just calling for an end of treating music purely as a corporate product.

In the system of late capitalism, alternative ideas and critical voices are either commodified and absorbed or forced to an existence at the margins of society. The same thing happened to vaporwave in the last 15 years. While parts of it have been co-opted by the mainstream, others have been continuing in the original spirit of the movement but also paying the price for it – operating in the shadows and margins, largely removed from public view.

After following the movement for over a decade as a fan and critic, I’ve decided to make vaporwave one of my main areas of research for the next few months.

What I’m about to try in a series of articles starting today is map out its historical development, starting below with the years leading up to its genesis, which I’m calling the ‘proto-vaporwave’ era (2008-2010). Future posts in this series will explore the genre history through various stages, and I am hoping for this to morph into a compendium which might at one point take the form of a book.

Should you either be interested in this project as a publishing opportunity, want talk to me about the topic in your publication or podcast, or discuss it in any other way, feel free to just drop me a note.

From Hauntology to H-Pop

Back in the early 2010s, a small online scene of music-obsessed kids started experimenting with techniques that academic types would call ‘plunderphonics’.

Now that’s just a fancy term for sampling and editing parts of existing music, originally coined for the collage works of composer John Oswald. These kids didn’t care much about Oswald, but were influenced by developments in electronic music in the years leading up to 2011, which is when their underground movement finally got an official name and was christened ‘vaporwave’.

What these kids were predominantly listening to and influenced by was this primordial soup of synth- and sample-based music with a similarly haunting, nostalgic quality that was shaping up in the second half of the 2000s.

This new music was distributed through independent labels and internet blogs, as well as an evolving landscape of smaller websites, messageboards and early social media – think a mix of MySpace and Soundcloud loosies and album releases as Mediafire links posted in the comment section of The Hipster Runoff.

Just a couple of years into the new millennium, on the eve of the smartphone revolution, artists started referencing the naive futuristic aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s. British music theorists Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds appropriated the term hauntology – a term originally coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida for an “artistic mode of realizing [the] failure of the future that was promised in the past” (Grafton Tanner) – to denote a strand of UK electronic music evoking cultural memories of the 20th century, in which the past haunts the present.

Artists mentioned in this context were the electronica duo Boards of Canada, the post-rock band Broadcast, as well as the producers Burial and James Leyland Kirby alias The Caretaker. They were active in the early to mid-2000s and made use of nostalgic elements in their music through vintage, analog production values, the inclusion of vinyl crackle and tape hiss, and quotes of older styles of music through samples and references. These are the progenitors of vaporwave.

While hauntology focused on British electronica, the writer David Keenan came up with a related term in a 2009 issue of The Wire magazine: He called the lo-fi psychedelic music of loosely connected American musicians such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro hypnagogic pop (or H-Pop). The term wasn’t well-received at first, but it stuck.

I don’t want to spend any time on Pink here, as he’s become irrelevant in my world and had no big impact on vaporwave, but James Ferraro’s can’t be overstated. Not even his work as part of noise/drone duo The Skaters, but his later solo material, especially his 2010 H-Pop album Night Dolls With Hairspray and the controversial 2011 follow-up Far Side Virtual, which reinterpreted muzak, corporate stock music and commercial ringtones in its kitschy, MIDI-heavy sound. While initially misunderstood as an ironic work by some critics, this brilliant piece of experimental art fell on fertile ground in the early vaporwave community.

“That mixture of dread, nostalgia, and transcendence I feel while listening to […] Far Side Virtual is akin to horrific awe or, to borrow a Lovecraftian term, cosmic horror – a horror of the ‘outside’,” Grafton Tanner writes in Babbling Corpse.

James Ferraro – Far Side Virtual album cover (2011)

Back in 2009, other new movements started to dominate music blogs: For example the starry-eyed, nostalgic sound of electronic-leaning indie songwriters such as Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian, which would soon be dubbed chillwave. Washed Out’s smash “Feel It All Around”, based on a loop from a 1983 Italo disco tune by Gary Low, became the blueprint for this rising microgenre.

In the same year, Australian-American songwriter and producer Sam Mehran released a seminal album under the alias Matrix Metals, Flamingo Breeze. With its focus on VHS-warped loops of old disco records, it evokes the spirit of the French Touch era, reimagined as home listening music through the vaporous lens of memory.

On the other side of the mood spectrum, witch house was a new term to describe the music of Michigan band Salem and a handful of other producers – a dark hybrid of electronica and Southern hip-hop, all slowed-down trap beats, eerie synths and garbled voices that some early vaporwave producers reportedly enjoyed.

From hauntology to hypnagogic pop, from chillwave to witch house – while highly diverse in their individual characteristics, these new microgenres were undoubtedly instrumental in the development of vaporwave, and the pioneers of the scene have confirmed all of them as influential to varying degrees.

18 Carat Affair

Kansas-raised musician and producer Denys Parker, who records as 18 Carat Affair, is often identified as a vaporwave forerunner but rarely given the full credit he deserves.

Parker always remained a reclusive, mysterious figure, a prolific DIY musician working completely outside of the commercial entertainment industry. A studied jazz composer, he’d been making music for some years when the new genre emerged; his first releases go back to 2008, but he’s stated he’d been creating tunes in that style since 2005, which is obviously hard to verify now.

In this rare interview with Parker, he’s talking about some of his early influences, from David Lynch to DJ Screw, from Brian Eno to Boards of Canada. He’s also namedropping composers like LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, and citing the Panda Bear album Person Pitch, released in 2007, as a key influence for his proto-vaporwave experiments. In an earlier interview, he’d said he mostly keeps his ears in the past, listening to 1980s disco, house, boogie, funk and soul.

His first release, the EP Cassette Fantasy, came out in June 2008. It’s a collection of 11 short tracks, really just a bunch of lo-fi synth and drum machine loops, mostly under a minute long. In early 2009, he followed it up with another short EP called N. Cruise Blvd and then a 25-minute mini-album, 60/40. Quite similar to the Matrix Metals album from the same year, it presented raw, funky disco loops that sounded as if they’d been copied from tape to tape a hundred times.

Let that sink in briefly. We’re talking about the year 2009 – this is a year and a half before Daniel Lopatin’s Eccojams and two and a half years before Ramona Langley’s Floral Shoppe would come out – the two albums that are widely seen as the first ‘actual’ vaporwave releases. Again, this was long before the vaporwave term was even coined.

Those early 18 Carat Affair records clearly anticipate some of the genre’s core elements in terms of both the music and the visuals though. They featured 1980s-themed covers and a playful, grainy lo-fi sound based on drum machine grooves and vintage synthesizers. Some of Parker’s music was based on samples, but a lot of it was recorded on hardware; he preferred recording directly to tape, so his tracks became momentary snapshots that couldn’t be altered or mixed afterwards.

Parker went on to produce an impressive independent catalogue. His 2011 album Vintage Romance was one of the most accomplished statements of early vaporwave. His music would find a wider audience through its frequent use in skateboarding videos, particularly the edits by the Bronze 56k crew. His last (frankly, excellent) album, Body Double, came out in 2022.

In my mind there’s no doubt that Denys Parker must be regarded as an early pioneer of (proto-)vaporwave, one who’s paved the way for so many other artists while carving out his very own, idiosyncratic route.

Oneohtrix Point Never

Probably the single most impactful figure of the proto-vaporwave scene would be Daniel Lopatin, the producer that created the methodical and sonic foundations the new genre was built upon.

In July 2009, Lopatin launched the Youtube channel sunsetcorp, where he’d upload a bunch of new experimental pieces he called eccojams. I’m quoting from my original article on OPN:

“For these remixes, he applied a technique adapted from the late DJ Screw, a visionary hip-hop DJ from Houston, to cheesy 1980s dance pop, smooth jazz and yacht rock songs, essentially slowing these tunes down heavily and adding echo and pitch-shifting effects. In the academic music world, similar sampling and editing techniques were known as ‘plunderphonics’.”

“Lopatin would add his own video art to these jams, editing together footage from old music videos, commercials, ads and animated films. These works would eventually be compiled on the audiovisual project Memory Vague (August 2009), a foundational document of the vaporwave scene.”

In the months after, Lopatin reconnected with his friend Joel Ford, with whom he had played in high school bands together, back in Boston where they grew up. After graduation, Ford had moved to New York and become part of the indie pop group Tigercity, while Lopatin had started making experimental synth music as Oneohtrix Point Never. In early 2010, they began writing together for a mutual synth pop project called Games – a name they’d soon have to abandon due to legal issues. From then on, they just went by Lopatin & Ford.

Between February and April, they’d release a series of three mixtapes called Heaven Can Wait, which contained slowed-down edits of 1980s dance pop, Italo disco and soft rock songs – music that was deemed cheesy and tasteless at the time, but that carried a deeply melancholic, emotional core for listeners who remembered them vaguely from their childhood and adolescence.

In July, Games would unleash the two-hour mixtape Spent The Night With… in a run of 100 double cassettes through The Curatorial Club, a tape label connected to the music blog Chocolate Bobka. Here they applied the plunderphonics template to all kinds of music they liked, not just pop and disco, but 1990s hip-hop and trip-hop too, and even early Chicago house and Detroit techno.

There would be two more Games releases that year – the instrumental, glitchy single “Everything is Working” and the more fully-formed EP “That We Can Play”. The latter included a bunch of sparkling original synth pop tunes including the underground hit “Strawberry Skies” (with vocals by a young Laurel Halo).

That summer, Lopatin would compile some of the sunsetcorp edits, add some new pieces in that style and release the package as the proto-vaporwave classic mixtape Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 on The Curatorial Club in a run of 100 cassettes. The source material went from Janet Jackson to Kate Bush, from 2pac to ELO, and from Chris de Burgh’s 1986 pop ballad “Lady in Red” to Toto’s 1982 yacht rock classic “Africa”.

When Eccojams came out in August 2010, the term ‘vaporwave’ hadn’t even been coined yet (that would happen sometime in the following year). But without it, the genre clearly wouldn’t exist today. Through Lopatin’s treatments, these old songs developed a new quality, one that felt strangely familiar and unsettlingly uncanny at the same time.

Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 – mixtape cover

By the time that some of the very early pioneers like Ramona Langley (alias Vektroid) and Robin Barnett (alias Internet Club) ran off with that effects template, Lopatin had already moved on from the idea. Like James Ferraro, he didn’t see himself as part of any scene and was significantly older than most of the first generation vaporwave producers.

In 2011, he would release an album of original indie pop with Joel Ford called Channel Pressure, which was followed by the still plunderphonics-influenced, but much more through-composed OPN album Replica. Neither Lopatin nor Ford would ever revisit the musical style of the genre they helped launch, but their foundational role remains unquestioned.

Skeleton 骷

We’re getting closer to the actual formation of the vaporwave scene, but we’re still a couple of months ahead.

In September 2010, a month after Eccojams, an anonymous MySpace page started releasing ten sample-based tracks credited to the moniker 失われた記憶 (‘Lost Memory’) in quick succession over a couple of weeks.

That same account would release two full albums back-to-back in October and November: Skeleton and Holograms. Both seemed to be the work of the same anonymous producer, who now went by the name 骨架的 (‘Skeleton’; they would later change their moniker to a more accurate Japanese translation, 骷).

To this day, nobody seems to know who was behind those artist monikers. Aside from that they’re apparently hailing from Queens, New York, not much is known about their identity and biography. But Skeleton is now widely considered “one of the first abstract hints towards the creation of the vaporwave genre”, while Holograms “would later be a major inspiration for the 2011 output of Computer Dreams, Vektroid, and Internet Club.” (vaporwave.wiki)

What’s interesting to note if you listen to these two albums today is how different they sound, even if they were released just a month apart. I have no idea how the mysterious producer came up with this kind of music at that point in time. It seems likely that we’ll never find out, at least not directly from them.

骨架的 – Skeleton (first album cover)

From today’s vantage point, Skeleton sounds more like a dark, unsettling ambient album created from obscure samples; Holograms was possibly even more impactful for the emerging vaporwave scene, as it sounds brighter and more playful in its appreciation of the tropes of late 20th century commercial music, therefore feeling more closely related to the proto-vaporwave of Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro.

The anonymous producer went on to release more music throughout the 2010s, but followed a quite erratic release schedule that often included deleting albums a few months after release and reuploading versions with alternate tracklistings and covers. In 2024, their catalogue was completely removed from Bandcamp and streaming services. The reason remains unclear.

Vektroid’s Telnet Erotika

Ramona Langley would become the central figure of the first vaporwave generation. A self-taught independent producer who grew up in Washington State and then moved to Portland, Oregon, she started making experimental electronic music in the mid-2000s under the alias Vektordrum. The EP Telnet Erotika was her first release as Vektroid, consisting of five tracks deeply inspired by Daniel Lopatin’s work (a fact she openly declared in the original Bandcamp liner notes).

Released on 22 November 2010, Telnet Erotika still falls into the proto-vaporwave realm. The music was definitely influenced by sunsetcorp and Eccojams, but Langley did more than just slow down, edit and add some reverb filters – she was stacking layers of original synths and programmed drums influenced by hip-hop, trap and EDM, basically delivering a blueprint for the entire subgenre of vaportrap. It’s definitely one of the most visionary releases from that era, and many other producers from that first vaporwave generation have talked about its massive impact.

Vektroid later deleted the original Telnet Erotika from her sites. The 2017 album version that is currently available as Telnet Complete is differing a lot from the 2010 EP. It has seven more tracks, and all tracks were edited, reworked and remastered. While Complete is surely an interesting project in itself, I recommend listening to the first version of Erotika in this context to truly understand its trajectory.

Ramona Langley would become part of the first vaporwave generation in the year following the release of Telnet Erotika, but the proto-vaporwave era comes to an end here. More on Langley’s important role in the early scene to follow in the next post of this series.

Essential Listening: 10 Proto-Vaporwave Records

1. 18 Carat Affair – 60/40 (EP, 02/2009)

2. Oneohtrix Point Never – Memory Vague (DVD, 08/2009)

3. Matrix Metals – Flamingo Breeze (album, summer 2009)

4. Games – Spend The Night With… (mixtape, 07/2010)

5. Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (mixtape, 08/2010)

6. Skeleton 骷 – Skeleton (album, 10/2010)

7. Skeleton 骷 – Holograms (album, 11/2010)

8. Vektroid – Telnet Erotika (EP, 11/2010)

9. 18 Carat Affair – Vintage Romance (album, 07/2011)

10. James Ferraro – Far Side Virtual (album, 10/2011)