I Still Love Vaporwave

A brief genre history and a list of all-time favorite albums

Years ago, I developed a habit of listening to slowed-down smooth jazz songs on headphones while simultaneously watching muted YouTube videos of people driving or walking through Asian megacities at night.

I’d first read about this practice of after-work escapism in an interview with the UK vaporwave producer HKE.

Vaporwave is a constant, ephemeral stream of music, like a 24-hour pirate radio station you can tune into whenever you want. You might hear a gorgeous song you will never hear again. You might rave about this amazing set from a non-archived livestream for the rest of your life.

It’s part of the beauty of it.

Even if vaporwave is a relatively young genre, it has come a long way since its inception in the early 2010s, when semi-anonymous bedroom producers started slowing down samples from 1980s pop, lounge and mall muzak, bathing them in reverb and other sound effects.

Over the years, the scene has become extremely diverse, and many subgenres have emerged. Parts of the vaporwave aesthetic have long since been co-opted by the mainstream and referenced in Drake videos and Paris fashion shows. Daniel Lopatin, an early pioneer of the genre, co-produced The Weeknd’s last two albums.

The hypetrain has moved on and many of the pioneers – including Lopatin – haven’t produced anything even remotely resembling vaporwave in recent years. But it’s still very much alive – in the depths of the internet, where it all once started.

A Brief History of Vaporwave

In its core, vaporwave is a form of experimental electronic music. But it wouldn’t exist without a hip-hop DJ from Houston.

In the early 1990s, the late DJ Screw invented a technique of slowing down and adding reverb effects to his records – his chopped & screwed mixtapes must be seen as a precursor to early vaporwave. Daniel Lopatin alias Oneohtrix Point Never was heavily influenced by DJ Screw, when he produced Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 in 2010, likely one of the first records introducing the sound that would become vaporwave.

Aside from Lopatin, James Ferraro and 18 Carat Affair were among the very early producers to influence and define the sound. But it wasn’t until late 2011 that a young trans woman from the Pacific Northwest produced the first full-on vaporwave album by assembling all of its future elements, when Ramona Langley released the genre-shaping Floral Shoppe under her Macintosh Plus alias.

2012 and 2013 were the genre’s breakthrough years. The music and fashion press took notice. Suddenly, vaporwave aesthetics were everywhere. Producers all around the world started copying the templates set out by Lopatin, Langley and others. Due to a low entrance barrier, the internet was flooded with an enormous amount of similar music, experimenting with different sample sources, mood and instrumentation. Various subgenres emerged quite quickly – from mallsoft to future funk, from slushwave to dreampunk, from signalwave to hardvapour.

Vaporwave was a decentralized movement from the start, blooming on online platforms like YouTube, Bandcamp and Soundcloud. Livestreams were the place to meet other fans and discover new artists. Most artists preferred to stay anonymous. The music was often given away for free download or released in small runs on cassette, mainly because of sample clearance issues. (These days, much vaporwave is actually sample-free.)

The genre attracted a diverse set of artists and listeners. Many were quite young when the genre first emerged. They had listened to hip-hop, trap, lo-fi beats and instrumental electronic music like IDM, dubstep or drum’n’bass. Some slightly older fans were brought up on jazz, and I’ve seen the occasional metal head on the forums. Vaporwave re-established an emotional connection to the music that some of them had lost along their journey.

The main musical innovations happened in the first half of the 2010s, so the years from 2011 to 2016 can be seen as the golden era of the genre. Some producers stopped using samples altogether and created music that sounded a bit more like regular ambient, new age or drone music; others fine-tuned the existing formula and went further into nostalgic territory, steadily discovering new sounds to be plundered and manipulated.

What unites some of the best vaporwave is a feeling of nostalgia and longing – for times the artists often haven’t lived through and places they’ve never visited. The music and visual aesthetic are dominated by decaying symbols of late-stage consumer capitalism in the U.S. and Japan; the mallsoft subgenre specifically evokes nostalgic feelings about retail establishments like shopping malls and megastores. Some artists see their music as a form of social commentary, while others distance themselves from having a political message. That didn’t hold a bunch of academic writers back from spinning up the wildest theories.

When many of the original pioneers stopped making vaporwave and focused on other styles of ambient, drone and electronic music instead, it seemed as if the genre had run its course by the late 2010s. The fast-paced internet culture had moved on to the next microtrend. The vaporwave subgenre of barber beats emerged though and became quite popular in the Bandcamp bubble.

While today some argue that vaporwave has been dead for years, others find that it’s still very much alive and relevant in its niche. Personally, I find that so much amazing music is still being born out of that scene, it really can’t be anything but alive. All around the world, you will find representatives of a generation that grew up with vaporwave as a soundtrack to their youth. They’re now in their early to mid-20s, keeping the spirit afloat, with their shared roots in 2010s DIY internet culture.

5 Vaporwave Classics

If you’re not familiar with vaporwave’s classic period yet, I got you covered: Here’s my definitive genre desert island list. Of course, this is highly subjective and slightly controversial, but I do think most vaporwave fans would consider each of these albums a landmark.

2814 – 新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day) (2015)

HKE, one half of legendary duo 2814, once described the mood of his music like this: You’re standing on the balcony of a high-rise building in an Asian metropolis, smoking a cigarette at night, while it’s raining lightly and a huge cruise ship is pulling silently into the harbour.

Birth of a New Day is one of the most original, captivating and moody vaporwave albums, sample-free and built around a lot of haunting processed vocals and slowed-down programmed drums. To this day, no other album makes me feel like this one. It’s such a masterpiece, really.

Best Youtube comment: “I used to hate walking in the rain. Then I discovered this album.”

Subgenre: Dreampunk (mix of vaporwave and ambient with a cyberpunk aesthetic)

Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe (2011)

Under her Macintosh Plus alias, Ramona Andra Langley alias Vektroid took cues from other artists’ experiments and an internet aesthetic that existed on forums and messageboards, but assembled them into a visionary artistic statement. Floral Shoppe also contains the most streamed vaporwave song of all time.

Best Youtube comment: “This album feels like you fell asleep watching the Breakfast Club and you awoke inside the movie. You're trapped within the movie now, but all of the characters are gone, the library is a little dusty and dim, and there is no one there to be found.”

Subgenre: None (this is as vaporwave as it gets)

猫 シ Corp. – News at 11 (2016)

For this outstanding release, Dutch producer Jornt Elzinga (alias Cat System Corp.) assembled samples from TV news programmes, talk shows, commercials and weather channel transmissions. News at 11 was created as a tribute to the victims of 9/11, imagining a parallel strand in time where the WTC attacks never happened. Cat System Corp. has released many other classic vaporwave albums, but this one is my personal favorite from his vast catalogue.

Best Youtube comment: “When the announcer at 5:28 said ‘it's kind of quiet around the country’, I almost cried. God, I miss that.”

Subgenre: Signalwave or Broken Transmission (sampling and manipulating radio and television broadcasts)

Disconscious – Hologram Plaza (2013)

This really feels like walking through an abandoned mall for half an hour. There are no people, the shops are all closed, but the escalators are still moving, and the music is still playing, albeit a little warped and broken. Disconscious was the alias of San Diego-based music producer Parish Bracha, who only released a single album under that alias.

Best Youtube comment: “It's like you're going to heaven after you die and you're all stoked but then you go and it's just so empty and lonely there. You have everything you want but with no one else beside you all you feel is dread beneath the short term pleasure. It's really beautiful”

Subgenre: Mallsoft (slowed-down loungey muzak, often sounds as if played over loudspeakers in malls or megastores)

Telepath テレパシー能力者 – 星間性交 (Seikan seikou) (2015)

Luke Laurila, the other half of 2814, is one of the true pioneers of vaporwave and seen as the inventor of slushwave. Under his Telepath alias, he released a number of formative albums in his most productive phase from 2013–2015. Seikan seikou was the last record of that era, marking an endpoint, but also a climax – a long, atmospheric record, all gargling voices, swirling synths and sluggish beats.

Best Youtube comment: “During lockdown I’d listen to this every night after work while I’d longboard around my neighborhood to unwind, great memories from an otherwise pretty miserable time”

Subgenre: Slushwave (ambient-like, dreamy, cinematic vaporwave)