Vapor Vertebrae 03-2015 Part B

VHS Logos
Singularity

<Single>

If you see a skull in the Doom Metal scene, drowsiness ensues: you’ve encountered this trope too many times. However, in Vaporwave circles, if you spot the skull in a front artwork, chances are that chromodynamics are shaken and vivacity ensues. Enter VHS Logos from the parts of the internet they call Brazil who tries to either sneak in or fully confront the vaporgazer with the archetypal skull symbol. On his single Singularity, we can see 50% of it loom behind an iridescent Dural-esque figura, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. Atypically for the producer, in lieu of pithy beat eclecticism, he presents an Ambient streamlet of wondrously washed out pluvialisms; polyfoil piano prongs of the pentatonic kinds, horticultural mantles of haze and designedly playful sutures reveal a reticulation of ebullient patchworks. Unapologetically dreamy, this aural avulsion – no matter its elaborate shortness – is the rain forest that should have been pictured on the front artwork, a rainbow within the cerebral ventricle.

Twitter: @VHSLogos

Lowranger
Blev

<Tropics>

What does Blev stand for, that Russian sounding Swedish catchword which graces the punchy verglas artifact of Lowranger’s moxie container called Tropics? I have no idea, but Inner Ocean Records’ manager Cory Zaradur chose wisely and cautiously widens the stylistic array of the label with Lowranger's release. Blev comes to you right from St. Petersburg, but you wouldn’t know it due to the immersive synergy taking place within its temporal physiognomy of a mere 44 seconds: merging elevator muzak with jungular lariats, the piece encapsulates that jazzy aura of laissez-faire with a noticeable nucleus of chlorotic conga crests. Comprising of only two principal tones and a few harmonic complements, Blev is the luring prime example of Vaporwave’s more soothing aureoles. Neither too flimsy a fugacity, nor overly immaterial despite its obliging spineless countenance, it is dense enough to radiate vitamin V through its intrinsic interstices. This is more of a suntrap than a sunburst, a perfectly percolating parochialism.

Label's Twitter: @inner_ocean

Zuper
Shine (Vaperror Flip)

<Remix>

Zuper is the side project of Carlos Aiono, known for being one half of the French Filter House duo Milos. Maybe that sentence should be constructed vice versa, but the approximated truth is that Zuper’s Shine is an eminently crystalline halide made of benthic droplets, coruscating hi-hats, glaucous vocals and aquatic convulsions, or in short: a very deep Hip-Hop-oriented affair. In the hands of Vaperror, its complexion remains stable and the chords themselves ultimately recognizable. The twist in Vaperror’s Flip is based on the seemingly antithetical pericarps that are planted within this matutinal antrum: on the one hand, Vaperror stresses the Ambient factor via cosmically spiraling ventiducts of languorous chords which caulk the looming darkness. On the other hand, the producer from Athens, Georgia emphasizes the luminescence of the hi-hats and beats. In Zuper’s original, they are embedded within the circumambience, leaving a syringa plateau behind. In Vaperror’s Flip, they coruscate, rattle and clang amid the bubbling superfluids and synth sybaritism. The remix suggests that it functions as the flip side of a single coin. It’s therefore not the right question to ask which version to prefer – it’s the search for good reasons why you shouldn’t agglutinate both the original and the remix and treat them as phylogenetic derivations of the same cotyledon.

Twitter: @VAPERROR  @ZuperMusic

Trancecorp. Research Team
Screw Tape

<Single>

Whether she is going for the cognomen Trance.Biz or oscillates toward the faux-collective Trancecorp. Research Team, the Bemidji, Minnesota-based producer is keen enough to strive for the intervening spaces and conglomerates of genres and styles such as Seapunk, Ambient, bedazzling trance and – no surprise here – Vaporwave. Title-wise, Screw Tape may inherit an aggressive undertone of cursed technical problems that only a surveyor can fully absorb, but the actual soundscape is a vanillarific peritoneum that resembles the Gaussian superimposition of the front artwork. Gracefully implementing a fusillade of Jungle/Drum’n’Bass staccato peculiarities in an otherwise convulsively pulsating granuloma of palpitating cloudlets, Screw Tape certainly fathoms the dynamics of its polyvalence. Fully relying on a balmy undercurrent traversed by male(volent?) vocals amidst argentine punctilio metallics, this thermal titration remains a thiazide alright.

Twitter: @trancedotbiz

Space Candy
Cloud 9 3/4

<Single>

Alex’s Space Candy project is a multiplex of different styles, and the artist is fully aware of this, as the concept of space is as enigmatic as ever, with the addendum of the saccharine word candy somewhat ostracizing – if not completely annihilating – the proposed effulgence of dark matter. Attach an amethystine comic character to your moniker, and you’ve lost an oh so devoted and serious listener, eh? However, once the traveler sees the diverse nuclei and appendixes as reciprocative in lieu of opposing, a remunerative echopraxia ensues. This is obviously the case with Cloud 9 3/4, for its euphonious euphoria is simply too panchromatic to ignore. High energy synth guitars are probably the most acidic element of Space Candy’s corker, but the remaining constituents are worth anyone’s while as well: from willfully emaciated chiptune helixes over rhythmically pulsatile gluons in full force to pristinely glistening piano emeralds attached to the pitch-shifted vox, Cloud 9 3/4 is strongly convivial and simply cool, but Alex also manages to unite the autochthonous gravity with an aeriform hydrazine. And for whatever reason, this caproic concoction works!

Twitter: @spacecandymusic

Washed Hue
Nostalgia

<True Violence>

 

While the scope of Vaporwave has expanded properly and can now even be attached to electronic productions of all kinds that heretofore sported poetic genre naming conventions such as Electronica or IDM, Ontario, Canada’s Washed Hue is thankfully still keen enough on Vaporwave’s true heritage of slowed-down synth-and-jazz quiltings. Or so it seems. The aptly titled Nostalgia shows that this kind of contemplation needn’t be a petrifying thought process. In fact, Nostalgia celebrates the MIDI-esque synthetics of the 80’s/90’s in a blazingly plasticizing fashion which remains open to scrutiny at all times. The source material definitely sits right in-between gimcrack and tryst; mixed choirs of R’n’B singers spawn hexangular vocal patterns, helicoidal synth fibers float in the distance, themselves severely outshone by the major chords of a strong melody that is delightfully serrated. Washed Hue is more of a curator instead of a creator in this here case, but as such he manages to outline and delineate the neon-colored iterations, bringing the listener the best propulsions and paradisiac gradients of that period. And this conceptual flume is still worth much in the vestibule to Vaporwave.  

Twitter: @WashedHue

Ambient Review 420: Vapor Vertebrae 03/2015 [Part B]. Originally published on Mar. 11, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.