I Still Love Vaporwave

How I got into the aesthetics – 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 Lopatin were connected to this whole vaporwave thing. But I remember curiously checking Bandcamp for the genre tag. Early mixtapes by Luxury Elite, Saint Pepsi and Eyeliner were among the first batch I downloaded. I really enjoyed them, and so vaporwave quickly became one of my go-to genres for new music, even though I knew next to nothing about the sound’s genesis 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 are initially discovering the genre, I’d stumble across Telepath and HKE, their group 2814 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 in January 2015, I fell for it so hard.

My first vaporwave phase lasted from the fall 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 meme. Many thought of it as a joke. I still loved it, though I just followed it 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 vaporlounge.

The hypetrain has moved on, and vaporwave has been declared dead since the mid-2010s. But if you really care to look at the scene and the releases, you will have to recognize that it’s still very much alive – in the depths of the internet, where it all once started.

When I tell people that I’m still really into vaporwave, I often get nothing but strange, bewildered looks as an answer. “Vaporwave”, they often repeat with a bemused accentuation, “but 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.”

What does that lineage actually mean today? US Golf 95 has the perfect non-explanation: “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)

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)

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

02. 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 vaporwave, mallsoft

03. Disconscious – Hologram Plaza (2013)

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: “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)

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

05. 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

06. 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

07. Saint Pepsi – Hit Vibes (2013)

POV: It’s the late 1970s, and you’ve somehow made it into Studio 54. You have $10 in your pocket. You’ll have 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)

POV: 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 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)

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: Vaporlounge

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

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 always be worse.

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

Subgenre: Barber beats