I Still Love Vaporwave

How I got into the aesthetics – plus a brief genre history and my personal list of desert island discs

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 a 2014 interview with the UK vaporwave producer HKE.

With its screwed and chopped aesthetics, sloppily edited samples and wonky atmosphere, vaporwave actually 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 beat scene and post-dubstep. I’d spent the previous decade listening to underground rap – Madlib, Dilla, DOOM – and UK electronic music that had grown out of the jungle, garage and dubstep scenes.

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 day update of that sound. I hadn’t even heard about vaporwave when I got into his music, but around the time of his Warp debut R Plus Seven, I might have read something about him being a foundational figure of vaporwave online. I remember checking Bandcamp for the tag and early mixtapes by Luxury Elite, Saint Pepsi and Eyeliner being among the first batch I downloaded. I liked what I heard.

In those days, I 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. The music was brilliant too. It was in these videos that I’d discover these really dope lo-fi disco jams by an anonymous entity called 18 Carat Affair.

Eventually I’d discover Telepath and HKE, as well as 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 in January 2015, I fell for it so hard.

My first vaporwave phase lasted from the summer of 2013 until the end of 2016. After that, I would maintain an on and off love affair with vaporwave for some years. Some of my favorite artists drifted off (hardvapour, anyone?), a lot of generic stuff came out, and vaporwave turned into an online meme. Many thought of it as a joke genre. I still loved it, though I just followed it from a certain distance now.

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.

Vaporwave re-established an emotional connection to the music that I had partly lost along my listening journey. What unites the best vaporwave is an indistinct feeling of nostalgia and longing – for times the artists often haven’t even lived through and places they’ve never visited.

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.

The hypetrain has moved on, but all around the world, you will find representatives of a generation that grew up on it – they’re now in their mid-20s, keeping the spirit afloat, with shared roots in DIY internet culture.

Vaporwave has been declared dead since the mid-2010s, but if you look at the scene and the releases, it’s still very much alive – in the depths of the internet, where it all once started.

My Desert Island Discs (Vaporwave Edition)

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.

01. 2814 – 新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day) (2015)

Scenery: 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.

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

Subgenre: Dreampunk

02. 猫 シ Corp. – News at 11 (2016)

Scenery: 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. Not this time.

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, mallsoft

03. Disconscious – Hologram Plaza (2013)

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

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

04. Luxury Elite – World Class (2015)

Scenery: You’re closing the door of your corner office in a high rise building in the financial district. It’s late in the evening and in the year. You’re celebrating your yearly six-figure bonus alone, smoking a cigar and pouring some whiskey into a tumbler. You press play on your Bang & Olufsen CD player, overlooking the city lights.

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

Subgenre: Late night lo-fi

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

Scenery: You’re remembering a dream from a past life. This is the soundtrack to that memory –  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)

06. Infinity Frequencies – Between Two Worlds (2018)

Scenery: You’re alone at the museum at night. Two sculptures are standing in an otherwise empty room. All of a sudden, you can’t say for sure if you’re dead or alive.

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

Subgenre: Broken transmission, signalwave

07. Saint Pepsi – Hit Vibes (2013)

Scenery: It’s the late 1970s, and you’ve somehow made it into Studio 54. There are models, freaks, artists and poseurs everywhere. You have $20 in your pocket for tomorrow’s breakfast. You’ll be having a great time tonight.

Best Youtube comment: “Kids listen, there’s no harm in loving something without any kind of cynicism. Life is lived once and no one cares how cool you are. Get lost in the groove.”

Subgenre: Future funk

08. s a k i 夢 – 夢の中で失われました (2016)

Scenery: Your name is Saki. You’re a fish. A human just took you to his home and put you in an aquarium. You fell asleep, then the human woke you up to feed you. You’re grateful for the food, and you hope a long life with this human is ahead of you. You just wish you knew his name.

Best YouTube comment: “god i fish that were me”

Subgenre: Fishvapour

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

Scenery: “Sink into the abyss, feel the warmth of liquid Ecco, and login now to join the deep dive of life.”

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

Subgenre: Vaporlounge

10. Haircuts For Men – 大​理​石​の​フ​ァ​ン​タ​ジ​ー [Marble Fantasy] (2016)

Scenery: You’re a cubicle drone, answering to email threads, 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 always be worse.

Best YouTube comment: “Crazy ass Muzak for your corporate environment have the best business efficiency a CEOs favorite”

Subgenre: Barber beats