I Still Love Vaporwave

How I got into the a e s t h e t i c s – plus my personal list of desert island discs

Once upon a time, 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 vaporwave producer HKE.

With its screwed and chopped aesthetics, glitchy lo-fi samples and strange, eerie atmosphere, vaporwave wasn’t too far off from the weird mixture of underground music I was into at the time: experimental hip-hop, early cloud rap, the L.A. beat scene and UK post-dubstep.

In those days, I also watched a lot of skate edits. Some of my favorites were the early works by New York City’s Bronze 56K crew. They’d have amazing visuals in their vids – old school computer graphics, Roman busts and weird VHS glitch effects. It was in their videos that I’d discover these dope lo-fi disco jams by an anonymous entity called 18 Carat Affair.

I’d been discovering and studying classic ambient music for some time as well, and the music of Daniel Lopatin alias Oneohtrix Point Never felt like a modern update of that sound. I might have first heard about vaporwave when getting into his brilliant Warp debut R Plus Seven. Many reviews called him a foundational figure of the genre and referenced its influence on the album.

I didn’t yet understand how 18 Carat Affair and Oneohtrix Point Never were connected to this whole vaporwave thing. But I remember curiously checking Bandcamp for the genre tag. Early mixtapes by Luxury Elite, Saint Pepsi, Macintosh Plus, Blank Banshee and Eyeliner were among the first batch I downloaded.

I really enjoyed these tapes, as diverse as they sounded. Vaporwave quickly became one of my go-to genres for new music, even though I knew nothing about the culture, the scene and the people who made it. I just loved the visuals and the music. Both reminded me of the 1980s and 1990s – the time of my childhood and youth – but in an interesting, twisted way that wasn’t just about nostalgia.

Just a few months or maybe a year after initially discovering the genre, I’d stumble across Telepath, HKE and their Dream Catalogue label. These artists were considered vaporwave, but their ambient style of music was unlike anything that I’d heard on those earlier mixtapes. They called it slushwave, phaserwave or dreampunk, and when 2814’s sample-free second album Birth Of A New Day came out on Dream Catalogue in January 2015, I fell for it so hard.

My first vaporwave phase lasted from the summer of 2013 until the end of 2016. Towards the end of that era, some of my favorite artists drifted off (hardvapour, anyone?), a lot of generic music came out, and the genre was turned into a Simpsons meme. Many still thought of it as a bad joke. There was a lot of gatekeeping and infighting going on. I kept enjoying the music, I just followed the scene from a certain distance now. I would maintain an on and off love affair with it for some years.

During the pandemic, I discovered barber beats on Bandcamp. It essentially felt as if some of my favorite electronic music from the 1990s – trip-hop, downtempo, drum’n’bass, nujazz – was receiving a massive facelift. Barber beats had little resemblance to what vaporwave sounded like a few years prior, but that was exactly what I found appealing about the genre. It morphed constantly. It was more a feeling than a formula. And it re-established an emotional connection to music that I had somehow lost along my listening journey.

Even if vaporwave is still a relatively young genre, it has come a long way since its inception, when semi-anonymous bedroom producers started slowing down samples from 1980s pop, lounge and mall muzak, bathing them in reverb and other sound effects. These last few years, I’ve been going back to following all the various sub-scenes: slushwave and signalwave, barber beats and future funk, and I’ve been discovering new ones like vaporbreaks and the Y2K/Frutiger Aero style.

Vaporwave has been declared dead since the mid-2010s. But if you really care to look at the scene and the amount of releases coming out, you will have to recognize that it’s still very much alive – in the depths of the internet, where it all once started. Still, whenever I tell people that I’m really into vaporwave, I often get nothing but strange, bewildered looks as an answer. “Vaporwave”, they repeat with a bemused accentuation, “hasn’t that been over for a decade?”

“Vaporwave is in a really interesting place right now,” Scottish producer US Golf 95 was quoted in an interview last year. “The hype has definitely died down. I see this as a good thing in a way. It’s allowing the envelope to be pushed in many different directions.”

“Vaporwave is now a general feeling. The nostalgia, artwork and sum total of inspirations (…) keep it under the vaporwave umbrella. I’m really interested in seeing where vaporwave goes in the next five to ten years – It could potentially be unrecognisable to the core albums that established the genre.”

My Desert Island Discs (Vaporwave Edition)

Here are my 10 favorite albums in chronological order, focusing on the first decade of the genre’s existence, from it’s early incarnation in 2011 until the rise of barber beats around 2021.

01. Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe (2011)

POV: You’re a cubicle drone, updating spreadsheets and building PowerPoint presentations. Your work has no meaning at all, but it pays the bills. The company just installed a water cooler in the office. Life could be worse.

Best YouTube comment: “great music for staring at the ceiling wondering what went wrong in life”

Subgenre: Classic vapor

02. MACROSS 82-99 – A Million Miles Away (2014)

POV: It’s Friday night. You’re too young and broke to go out to the clubs, so you invite some friends over to your dorm room to smoke weed, watch TV on mute and share the aux cable. You’ll be having a great time tonight.

Best YouTube comment: “I can just imagine riding in a sick car through Neo-Tokyo whilst jamming to this”

Subgenre: Future funk

03. 식료품groceries – 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open (2014)

POV: You’re walking through an abandoned mall. There are no customers and the shops are all closed, but the escalators are still moving. The music is still playing too, albeit a little warped and broken.

Best YouTube comment: “mannn, wish life still felt like this”

Subgenre: Mallsoft

04. 2814 – 新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day) (2015)

POV: You’re standing on the balcony of a high-rise building in an Asian metropolis, smoking a cigarette at night. It’s raining lightly. A huge cruise ship is pulling silently into the harbour.

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

Subgenre: Dreampunk

05. Luxury Elite – World Class (2015)

POV: You close the door of your corner office in a high rise building in the financial district. You’re celebrating your yearly six-figure bonus with an expensive cigar and a glass of whiskey, overlooking the city lights.

Best YouTube comment: “This album has that new car smell.”

Subgenre: Late night lo-fi

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

POV: You’re remembering a dream from a past life.

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

07. 猫 シ Corp. – News at 11 (2016)

POV: It’s 11 o’clock on September 11, 2001. The WTC attacks haven’t happened yet. Maybe, in a parallel strand of time, they will never happen.

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: Classic vapor, mallsoft

08. Infinity Frequencies – Between Two Worlds (2018)

POV: You’re alone in the museum at night. Two sculptures are standing in an otherwise empty room. A thought creeps into your head: What if everyone else is dead and you’re the only person alive in the world?

Best YouTube comment: “The lights are on, but nobody’s home”

Subgenre: Signalwave

09. Webinar™ – w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m (2021)

POV: You’re sitting at mom and dad’s personal computer upstairs. The modem is dialing up, opening a window into a world of awe and wonder for you to get lost in.

Best YouTube comment: “Don’t mind me, just surfing the web on a warm summer afternoon in ‘99.”

Subgenre: Y2K / Vaporlounge

10. Macroblank – 行方不明 (2021)

POV: Your night train is leaving Shinjuku station on time. Loosening your tie, you’re having a bento box and a cold beer, watching the city lights flying by.

Best YouTube comment: “Came here for the Nazgul, stayed for the tunes”

Subgenre: Barber beats