Vapor Vertebrae 02-2015

Cyberlust
Shop Online

<online_4ever>

Hailing from Argentina, Cyberlust girl Lola is an expert for montages and shapeshifting moxies transmogrified into Vaporwave vortices. One particularly interesting vertebra is Shop Online from the album online_4ever. Launching with downwards-spiraling verglas stabs lucently forming a pristine lullaby, this parochial section eventually leads to a slowed state of reverberated mall mica. The hi-hats are elasticized, the city tenor sax becomes an alto one, distant shouts of consumerism are reflected on the genre’s most important walls… phylogenetically speaking. The array of textures make a lore out of a lure, the melody of the prelude remains stuck in one’s head for months, maybe even years. This is one tune to remember! Its aural photometry is panchromatic, absorbing all pastel colors without turning them into a neon frenzy. This is Ambient after all, wondrously drowsy, a suntrap for the home user, emitting the marble floor of shopping centers even within one’s abode. Online shopping has never been this sweet.

Twitter: @cyberlusttt
Video: Artzie Music

SODA Lite
Passion

<Slice Of Life>

The Reggae and Dub scene has reserved a particular niche when things get romantic and rose-tinted; the style is called Lovers Rock and is probably most compatible with a nihilist’s circadian doldrums. While Melbourne’s SODA Lite hasn’t crafted a tune that can be linked to Jamaica, it certainly can be attached to amethystine trysts. Passion comprises of a saccharified sax helix whose endmost wish is to – no pun intended – erect a polyfoil experience for the bae and her gentle star. The jazzy piano preset of the keyboard becomes a hexangular quilting, frilly pan pipes caulk the perfervid atmosphere, oh, and there’s percolating marimbas, swooshing particle winds and laser lariats thrown in as well. This wouldn’t be Vaporwave after all. Passion celebrates weird simultaneities: it is undoubtedly sleazy and laid-back, yet candid and cordial. In addition, it seems like a prolonged tune when the melodies go crazy beyond its apex, serving as concupiscent twists of liveliness and action. The underlying message is for SODA Lite to know and you to find out. 

Twitter: @sodalite222
Video: SODA Lite

コンシャスThoughts
Midnight

<Vaporware Vol. 3>

The stylistic kaleidoscope of コンシャスThoughts is one of zoetropic proportions, having its fractals built anew time and again, as Vaporware Vol. 3 – an album of one, not a compilation of various artists – magnanimously showcases. Not shy of sampling a tune, nor expelling the thought of producing something from the ground up, Chrissy Cray’s Midnight is a heterodyned highlight of both approaches, superimposing blue-violet Rhodes rhizomes and susurrant saxes in a strangely cavernous yet open space at a nocturnal city beach. Whether it is the polyphonic marimba globs, the caproic cowbells and their iridescent afterglow, or the handclap-infested midtempo Hip-Hop beat, languor and carefreeness are in the air. The synthesis of mellow melodies and memorable patterns creates a void whose lacunar nothingness is immediately filled with oneiric contentment. コンシャスThoughts creates an oasis of peace, a mirage whose fugacity is luckily transferred to your HD/SSD/cloud service for further inspection. Midnight is a magnificent tune, harboring a glimpse of 80’s MIDI horn stabs, softened cymbal coruscations and a peritoneum of paradisiac pericarps.

Twitter: @chrissycray1
Video: Artzie Music

Groovy Godzilla
At First Sight

<Single>

Not necessarily based on Ambient for reasons that manifest themselves immediately when the first chords are reaching the ears of the interested party, Long Beach, California’s Groovy Godzilla unleashes an effervescent corker called At First Sight, the first single of the artist's amorous album Godzilla Finds Love. Amalgamating the benthic aurora of Future Funk and a Brazilian laissez-faire granuloma, the single eventually emits a very insouciant vibe with a very interesting twist to the dedicated music historian (who will never come across the tune, let alone this review in the first place, but what the hell): the stabs, vox & brass blebs are poured into a Boogie/Batucada synergy. While the first style is known in Occidental locales all around the globe, the latter is, in short, a tunnel vision of a Samba on speed. Groovy Godzilla’s mélange doesn’t cause a tachycardia, but its energetic aura is noticeable and injects that undercurrent of glee and joy. The timbre is archetypically Latin, the singing coquette in the epicenter becomes an instrument herself, even though her vocals are perfectly understandable… until they morph into a dub-dub-duh Space-Age punctilio. Dreams come true in this mocha-colored echopraxia of Latinisms. Gooodzillaaaa!

Twitter: @aviscerall

Mmöner
Genesis Of The End

<Misty Skin>

After all these positively posh plasticizers, it is up to Mmöner to be the black sheep, cauterizing the colors in favor of high chromaticity and a braiding of metalization. Enter Genesis Of the enD whose playfully stylized appearance letter-wise is the only vestibule to fun you’re going to receive. The tune is the fourth in a series of Witch House-oriented Vapor-esque vignettes, made available on the EP Misty Skin. The above tune isn’t overwhelmingly belligerent though; multiplexing susurrant – albeit rufescent – organ pads of thermal heat with a similarly hazy beat setup in 4/4 time, the song begins to grow and radiate after approximately 50 seconds. All of a sudden, vocoded falsetto eruptions lead to a weirdly majestic, almost triumphant abyss into darkness. Mmöner makes sure that the textures are revisited throughout the track, and yet does Genesis Of the enD feel progressive, with a clear cotyledon and an even clearer apotheosis. The nastiness of Witch House is only situated within the interstices, nascent but ultimately harmless enough to succumb to the retrogressive Rave patterns, fluorescent melodies and incandescent Yorkshire expectorations.

Twitter: @MmonerWorld
Video: Mmöner 

Ambient Review 413: Vapor Vertebrae 02/2015. Originally published on Feb. 4, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.