Vapor Vertebrae 07-2015 Part B

私Kyasuto x Phoenix #2772
Mental Strength

<Sneak Peek>

Say what you will, but there are cities and states which spawn and inherit that certain sound: Liverpool. Nashville. And Florida, the Sunshine State. The kaleidoscopic wealth of its Vaporwave veils is awe-inspiring, and Palm Beach’s 私Kyasuto makes sure to deliver the goods in tandem with Miami’s Phoenix #2772. Their single Mental Strength is an auspicious teaser for the things to come, enchanting with medulla-emptying bass droplets of smoke and mirrors and a colchicine-coated bokeh of mellow New Age melodies. But it is the percussion section which lets this phytolith skyrocket into the troposphere: whether it is the wondrously phylogenetic bongo tribalism, the agglutinated ophidian snake shakers or the handclap-infested aqueous clicks, the rhythm is the parallax placenta that fuels the mercurial panorama, making a majestic ecomorph out of a cautiously esoteric centriole.

Twitter: @KyasutoMusic @Phoenix2772_

MARCUS32X
Night Wind  [引きこもり Mix]

<Single>

It would be much easier to explain what Ireland-based MARCUS32X doesn’t do in his free time, what with the battery of tasks and opportunities tied to his skills. Marcus is the illustrator and one of the curators for the Artzie AM label, but he’s also part of the collective as a creator, and his 引きこもり Mix of Rah Band’s 1985 sparkler Night Wind is more than able to absorb the characteristic traits of Vaporwave. At least it is now. Launching in medias res with a slowed-down complexion, a physiognomy of hazed hi-hats and thermal guitar phytotelemata amidst recurring Doppler horns, Marcus makes sure to transfigure – even glorify – the nocturnal solanum by means of echoey phragmoplasts, the biomorphic sustain of the Rhodes rhizomes and the overall fuzziness that works so well with the comparatively histrionic oomph of the 80’s flavor. While 引きこもり translates into withdrawal, the remix moves forward instead, embraces the bokeh of city lights and the rain/asphalt confluence. A technocratic but ultimately heartfelt lycopod.

Twitter: @marcus32x

幽霊, TOGETHER!
Sky Island

<Single>

The artwork of 幽霊, TOGETHER! may comprise the simultaneity of beautiful orthochromatic vistas and artifact-pestered glitch jitters, but the soundscapes themselves are mercilessly luring and upfront in terms of their raison d’etre: a megafauna or big beach-based playground for the listener to dive into. Sky Island is such a magical locale, humongous in its color gamut, ever-shimmering in regard to its uplifting chord progression. I’m not even sure whether this beach stroll is laid-back or magnanimously elevating. The song may reside in upper midtempo regions, but it is the textures, surfaces and patterns that make this salubrious Funk fusillade a demotic one. Be it the spiraling saxophone, the lanthanum-colored coruscation of the Miami-flavored cowbells or the celestial-orgasmic wordless vocal patterns, everything is aglow in sun-kissed colors, and I haven’t even mentioned the laser-sharp sirens and hatched toasts at the end. That this is more of a curating than a creating effort is no iconoclasm: it’s Vaporwave after all. But 幽霊, TOGETHER corrected the tempo of the original and tweaked the frequency range. The ensuing phantom freq macula, then, is the actual gold.

Twitter: @GhostsTogether

Telozkope
Yume

<Grape Steam>

Telozkope from Winnipeg, Manitoba holds up the Vaporwave flag for Canada together with his fellow artists, but regardless, this sentence is wrong on one particularly grave level. The artist’s music shouldn’t necessarily be attached to the V-genre at all costs, even though it doesn’t hurt at the end of the day. But no, the above Yume from the pink full-length cotton candy helix Grape Steam showcases the artist’s focus on nomological zoetropes built from scratch. The sensorial apprehension between sound, sustain and silence is celebrated in this particularly rustic-bucolic telomere. Yume inherits traces of Trap basslines, true enough, but the remaining rotoscoping punctilio is much more Mediterranean than tech-affirmative. Rubicund Flamenco guitars, crimson-colored ligneous ancillary aureoles and cytoplasmatic chime vesicles meet, mesh and depart, providing a stop-and-go notion in which the micrometry of silence is as important as the angular momentum of the slapped faux-strings. Telozkope’s music sounds purposely moss-covered; at least for once an artist of the wider V-spectrum neglects chirality in favor of chivalry.

Twitter: @telozkope

STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ
Always

<Single>

One of the attached Hashtags of STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ’s bosky chaparral serenade Always is as follows: #vaporwave? Indeed, the question mark is willfully included here, and it’s for the artist to know and us to find out whether this short vignette of 63 seconds incorporates V-power, and if so, whether the aurally painted baroclinic boundaries belong to a forest or a megacity. I have revealed my personal sentiment of this situation with the signal term incorporate in the previous sentence, and a sense of corporate endeavors cannot be denied, even though the works of STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ are so closely tied to the Occidental woods. Here however, the glade flutes and polyphonous purity are encapsulated in the frequency range of transistor radios. Their spiky-incisive hi-hat galore and lilting-adiabatic subzero temperature allow a gravitational microlensing that puts the sylvan effulgence into the well-architected marble syncytium of a mall. The fluctuation in volume as well as the laser interferometry near the end beg for the question whether the best woods are displayed on widescreen television sets… or in the mind of the connoisseur. Don’t tell me you want to opt in for the third possibility and go out into the vaporless world aka reality, do you?

Twitter: @StaqqOverflo

Vaporwave Review 110: Vapor Vertebrae 07/2015 [Part B]. Originally published on Jul. 16, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.