Vapor Vertebrae 07-2015 Part A

Sky空 x OSCOB
Nobody

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When the gaseous-longitudinal gauze of Sky空 meets the occasionally hazy but always eclectic morphogenesis of OSCOB, chances are that both artists stay true to their respective games and let their sublime frequencies meet, mesh and depart. This is exactly what happens on Nobody, a spectral-granular Ambient aureole of spellbinding juxtapositions. The softly simmering lo-freq is more similar to a cyberpunk heartbeat than a fully fleshed out 4/4 bassline, complementing the halides and cloudlets in the auspicious air. Nobody is amicable and benignant, but the diaphanous synth plumes are surprisingly coarse-grained and gritty, seeming more like calcined steel-girder constructions than actual skies of freedom. That 80’s spirit is fittingly engrained though, at least the moss-covered bosky circumambience of New Age. One can forcefully denote this a Vaporwave track, but it outgrows the epicurean retrogression via reciprocating between its unvarnished constituents. An honest, decidedly laid-back endeavor.

Twitter: @shyskylife @VirtualPlazaMax

コンシャスTHOUGHTS
Crazy 'Bout 'Cha

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I’m not kidding: sometimes I simply adore a vaporwaver’s self-referential cheekiness as he or she lays out the respective plan in blinding clarity. This is what Glasgow’s sound guru Chrissy aka コンシャスTHOUGHTS has in mind when he dishes up Crazy 'Bout 'Cha, a clear-cut Jeffery Osborne tribute if there ever was one, cautiously curated and ennobled with vignettes of blurred frequencies, a cerulean laser interferometry as well as the needed time to celebrate the various hooks and chord progressions of the chorus. Granted, this is one of the seemingly lazier songs of コンシャスTHOUGHTS due to the specific needs and radiations of Future Funk, but don’t mistake the concentrated, euphony-focused barycenter with a half-assed effort! Usually, there is some sort of mystical parallax layer integrated in the producer’s chemotaxis, but on Crazy 'Bout 'Cha the sun does shine all the time, there’s no appendix or perturbation to absorb, it’s as straight-forward as can be. 100% Future Funk, with rhizomes to the past no less.

Twitter: @chrissycray1

F R X N I
The Entrance

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The Entrance by Tennessee’s primary-primordial vaporer F R X N I is an umbrageous Mallsoft mélange of the dystopian kind, set in a locale when consumerism itself is out of order and basically impossible as the once superbly polished marble walls of the perihelic mall are now anything but a vestige of dreams, a ruin of desires, a nullspace where money isn’t worth a dime. What a strange adage. Anyway, the front artwork guides the listener, making us all aware of the obliquitous state. We breathe dust, the only pulmonary remuneration that exists within the boundaries of The Entrance. The track is hence particularly cavernous and reverb-coated, embracing the emptiness, hailing the hollowness. Distant violins and a bittersweet Caribbean punctilio of The Girl From Ipanema echo through the asbestus jungle. Ghostly even on a microbial level, this is not necessarily a Silent Hill 3-based trauma, but then again not too far off either. Are these polyphonic instances real? Is this the last demonic superimposition of a once efficiently run US-mall? 

Twitter: @corporatemodel

Bonus Fruit
Hardest To Miss

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It is the privilege of Deiter Hetrick to explain the differences and niches that are enshrined in his various monikers, but for the time being, I think that his artistic endeavors GALAXIANオーブ or Gオーブ are more driven by a crestfallen ambience in tandem with the baroclinic boundaries of a gravitational redshift which altogether leave a little fovea in one’s eye at best, whereas Bonus Fruit is tomorrow’s tropical-tetragonal thiazide. Hardest To Miss is a perfectly crazy syncytium of various themes, genres and styles that would even make The Avalanches prick up their ears, a B-side ostracized from an album released on Florida’s DMT Tapes. There’s so much going on in the arhythmic stop-and-go leeway gridlock fusillade that it is hard to fathom the basic gist… if there is one, that is. Ranging from Ska-infested sea shanties over a saltatory oompah orogeny to a mephitic flavor of Baltic rusticity that eventually leads to a certain slowed-down Reggae-oriented love song, all cornerstones and particles lead back to the song title when the time is nigh to ask oneself: which of the ingredients is hardest to miss?

Twitter: @modernsqueeze

Yzome
Bottomfeeding

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The pecking order of today is aurally visualized by Bottomfeeding, a short interlude by Seattleite Yzome, fittingly or not called "your new favorite Autechre parody band," so there must be something labyrinthine and convoluted in this little sparkler, even if it’s just your basic rhythm in 3/14 time. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: Bottomfeeding is thankfully open to scrutiny and quite comprehensible, which makes it a phragmoplast of puissance and power. Launching with a medulla-emptying Trap beat complete with artificial sporophytes among whose interstices a few ear-piercing alienesque guitar screeches are grafted, Yzome fathom the pectiniform gyration between analog-alkaliphilic glissando slides on the one hand and a drum-infested ebullient staccato tachycardia on the other hand. Add a few lanthanum-alloyed earthquakes and a playfully serious undercurrent of ophidian snakecharmer melodies, and you receive a semi-robotic pseudotensor of a track, and amazingly balanced it is too. The caravan-evoking beat structure gives Bottomfeeding a harder edge, neither ridiculing nor destroying the track’s raison d’être. This is a saffron desert alright… but its mirages and kineticism are luring!

Twitter: @yzome

Vaporwave Review 107: Vapor Vertebrae 07/2015 [Part A]. Originally published on Jul. 6, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.