Vapor Vertebrae 04-2015 Part C

Remember & Hong Kong Express
Elevation

<Single>

Dream Catalogue initiator and Vaporwave luminary Hong Kong Express has saved Vaporwave from its – admittedly stereotype-laden – doom when he launched the label in 2014 or, as the artist cheekily suggests, in 2814 alright. Now that the V-genre has the epistemological aura of scientificity, with its ambivalent system of justified belief vs. opinion firmly in place, anything seems to be possible, whether it's libelous rants… or genre-crossing halides. Elevation is a case in point for the latter, a longform collaboration of 12+ minutes concocted with the enigmatic entity Remember. Serving as a fully developed gateway and a teaser for the things to come, Elevation is a semi-industrial punctilio planetesimal loaded with meta-metallicity, acidic synth sinews, stokehold breakbeats and superresonant hi-hat telomeres. Despite its core being pulsatile and tetragonal, the stop-and-go motion is less of a jitter surfactant than a colloidal cannelure; ipso facto it wafts. Amidst the gelid shards and cryofibrillar gluons, there are waves of euphony flowing, giving the duo’s tunnel nematode a lilting polarimetry encapsulated in a retro-futuristic high-rise barycenter. 

Twitter: @HKEdream @dream_catalogue

VHS Logos
Telefunken

<Single>

VHS Logos brought Vaporwave to Brazil, and then back to the world. What sounds like a cheesy legend isn’t too far out at the end of the day, especially in the wake of Telefunken, a strangely titled epithelium at first sight, possibly reciprocating between a dissipative coinage whirled through the Swiss Romansh language of Rhaeto-Romanic origin. The truth, as it turns out, is much more mundane… and therefore delightful. The track title simply derives from the eponymous German radio/television company, and VHS Logos’ track seems to be an approximation of a television set’s quasi-centennial lure. The arrangement suggests that the whole track is played through an old radio and then subsequently re-recorded on site. Telefunken is one of VHSLogos’ nonchalantly blurred ephemera, lacking the cellular concrete and coruscating callisthenics of his beat-driven productions in favor of softened alarm clocks, hazy piano chords, a droning tape senescence and laid-back guitars which rightfully bring the Funk into the track’s auspicious title. This is a limewashed synth sarcopenia, a beautiful albeit portentous rise of attrition that impalpably happens to the cochleae of a whole generation of Vaporwavers right now and will be painfully realized in 55+ years where we can't hear shit. Egad, those fuzzy frequencies are just too silky and the least abrasive aureoles!

Twitter: @VHSLogos

Mason Callaway
Winter Longing

<Single>

I have to admit that I’ve fallen in love with Mason Callaway’s Winter Longing, no matter the rising temperature and vernal lechery that blaze across the land. The adolescent rapper from Sioux Falls, South Dakota teams up with the debonair Frenchman Vantage aka V // and transmutes the funkmaster’s track Snow Jam from the ultramafic tape Metro City (2015) into superconductivity. Vantage’s former instrumental remains fully intact, still comprising its retrosternal macronutrients and unapologetically periglacial catchiness, but now sees its titration process annealed and calcined by Mason Callaway’s phototropic toasts and seemingly incompatible aliphatic catchwords that connect the frosty chemotaxis with a lyrical sun/fun/heat abiogenesis. This chirality works really well, even though this shouldn’t be the case from the outset. Initially, the vocals are tightly integrated in the first third of Winter Longing. Afterwards, the rapper protrudes the vermillion hue and towers over the fluvio-lacustrine snowdrift. No harm done, as the melody-driven translucence is a suitable counterpoint, thus maintaining the balance. A synergetic win/win situation for both artists, or as Vantage probably wants me to stylize it: win//win.

Twitter: @masoncallaway @VantageNoise

Aloe Island Posse
Welcome To Aloe [アロエ島]

<Welcome To Aloe Island>

North Vancouver’s Aloe Island Posse not only brought one of the most scintillatingly exotic monikers into the Vaporwave helix, the producer is also keen on the power of nomological escapism viewed through – and diffracted by – the 80’s. The magnanimously sun-dappled Welcome To Aloe offers a tastefully plethoric phoresy whose uplifting, fast-paced rhythm is the first cornerstone of the track’s appeal. The second ingredient is the cowbell-infested synth pad staccato in tandem with the viridian texture-related alterations of the melodic fermions. With the pitch-shifted Japanese vocals as the third condiment, Welcome To Aloe [アロエ島] outgrows itself and not only becomes the primary chromophore of the artist’s body of kaleidoscopic complexion, it also easily carries the similarly titled digital album Welcome To Aloe Island. Everything feels alright, one is loved and caressed in the endemic aloe world, but despite the euphoric elation, the artist never degrades the paradisiac notion into a plastic bubblegum vanity. If you like your Vaporwave catchy and incandescent as can be, Welcome To Aloe [アロエ島] is the hydrazine to fuel your estuary. 

Twitter: @ALOEISLANDPOSSE

Walt Thisney
Prism

<Abstrakta EP>

If suntraps aren’t your thing, you might be fond of Walt Thisney’s neon-lit concrete solanums. The artist hailing from Thisneyland inflames his tunes with arpeggiated Miami rhizomes and a pinch of futuristic uneasiness, thereby toning down the blazing colors just enough to not get lost in an overly excited ecstasy. Prism meanwhile, taken from the Abstrakta EP released on 30th Floor Records, is a megacity's amniotic ventiduct that launches in medias res, with its histrionic synth lariats already firmly in place. Orthochromatic magenta verglas, alkaloidal moxie multiplexes, BGM-evoking hooks and caproic chord progressions let this sparkler grow into a superimposition: the breathtaking vistas of the big city flash by, viscoelastic tunnel visions function as cajoling plasticizers, but within, amidst and around these positive notions, the omnipresent precariousness cannot be entirely caulked. This leads to a wondrously polysemous state with no gimcrack attached: Prism is a longitudinal airflow, but the surfaces of the synths emit a heavy earthbound burden in tandem with cyber adventures, feral agents and ignis fatuus illuminants. A vapor vitrectomy to obey to.

Twitter: @WalThisney

Ambient Review 428: Vapor Vertebrae 04/2015 [Part C]. Originally published on Apr. 22, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.