Vapor Vertebrae 07-2015 Part A

Sky空 x OSCOB
Nobody

<Single>

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

<Single>

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

<Single>

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

<B-Side LP Single>

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

<Single>

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.

Vapor Vertebrae 06-2015 Part C

懐かし2002津波
Together

<Computer Love>

What a wonderful hypanthium: astonishingly hazy, eminently pulsatile, simultaneously industrial and nomological. Enter Together by Draven Stedman aka 懐かし2002津波 whose fittingly nostalgic tsunami is equally enigmatic as it is perfectly prismatic. The basic gist of this first Computer Love album teaser is freely given away in the title already, and I don’t think I neither spoil the surprise nor scare away the interested party in giving away a certain astleycarious moment that is elasticized, sustained and celebrated in this tune. The title is a warning and self-referential at the same time, but the actual soundscape begs for your attention. The Synth Pop classic is almost unrecognizable, not just slowed down or plasticized away, but rhythmically altered, letting its scything brass layers protrude the amniotic cell tissue in juxtaposition with the vitreous verglas vesicles of Yamaha origin. The mood is exciting and laid-down, sun-dappled and molybdenized, orthonormal and longitudinal. How is it even possible that DMT Tapes head honcho Vito tops this engineered erethism off with such a visually stunning music video?

Twitter: @DravenStedman
Video: by Vito

2047 A.D.
도시를 탈출

<새로운 삶을 시작>

Is this a polymer from Seoul or pectin from a soul? Enter 2047 부드러운 아픈 aka 2047 A.D. whose gorgeously ethereal 도시를 탈출 roughly translates into escaping the city, and since it is not given away whether the track title is an ongoing endeavor or a theoretical possibility, maybe even a far-fetched dream to come true one day, the artist makes sure to supercharge the runtime of seven and a half minutes with various congruent states, augmenting an aliphatic string of events in a handcrafted phoresy, with no sampled perturbation in sight. 도시를 탈출 is the opener from a mechanistic ribcage of a vapor album, so the song itself morphs and oozes ad infinitum: from the matutinal silk that is poured into the anacrusis, the song ventures into millennial Glitch crackles and rhombohedral square lead pulses, eventually giving in to a gravitational beat momentum that is metallic and serious. The finale, then, is a handclap-infested punctilio fusillade of violent phragmoplasts and strychnine lozenges. Daunting, overawing, hectoring. If the city is left for a better place is revealed on the album.

Twitter: @2047_sicksoft

Tilvera
自信

<Single>

自信 is about trust, 自信 is about confidence, 自信 is more specifically about the vapor veils of Luis aka Tilvera whose inaugural saprotrophs are promising chloroderivatives of the V-genre, made in Germany, brought to the listener via the internet, eventually understood by the amalgamation of synaptic distension and mutual micrometry. The front artwork pushes all the right buttons already, depicting the cautiously washed-out vermillion visuals of an indistinct megacity. The attached track, however, is a guitar-driven mélange – or mirage? – of aqueous shapes, soothingly slapped strings, stratiform telomeres. The eight-note lead melody is just nostalgic enough to not cross the boundaries into a petrifying state of reminiscence. Palinopsia-driven filters and hi-hat solanums round off the sanctuary and caulk the nullspace called night, making its gravitas much more tolerable through the power of unerring clarity. We talk about 自信 after all.

Twitter: @tilveravapor

Aviscerall
In The Digital World

<Cruisin' EP>

Future Funk forester Aviscerall aka Aaron Turner tames the beast in the appropriately titled Cruisin’ EP from which the above In The Digital World derives. Additionally known as Groovy Godzilla, the material he produces under the moniker Aviscerall is loaded with filmogenic proteins and used for a more soulful approximation of the season. Despite its technocratic title, In The Digital World contains more than enough room for marimbalicious laissez-faire lariats in the sun-kissed proselytizing peritoneum. The fluvio-lacustrine conflation of the marimba with a turquoise steelpan granuloma only boosts the tropical thiazide further, bringing a Caribbean phototropism to your current location that is as ultramafic as it is epigenetic. The magenta disco strings sound apocryphal, true that, but their Hip Hop-underlined existence only interpolates the tastily equimolar cocktail. A Mallsoft Calypso at its core, audaciously catchy, eminently paradisiac. It’s great for a change to gaze around the beach without spotting Godzilla on the horizon. 

Twitter: @aviscerall_GG

Trancecorp Research Team
End This Summer

<Original Mix>

What happens in Minnesota doesn’t stay in Minnesota, or else you wouldn’t read these lines over the internet, ain’t that great? The previously featured Trancecorp Research Team, guided and embodied at the same time by the versatile producer alternatively known as TRANCE.BIZ, crosses paths with the local Beauty Supply Label, the result being the ill-titled End This Summer, a bewildering alternative to a fittingly never-ending flood of Endless Summer singles and similarly titled deeds. Presented here is the Original Mix as envisioned by the artist herself, launching suavely with a blotchy yttrium crystal groove whose staccato enshrines the very artificial-natural synchronism that makes Vaporwave and its adjacent niches so delightful. The arpeggiated lanthanum pool flows and flitters into blurry alcoves before it hits a raucous-abrasive stadium rave physiognomy of sinewed power, or in short: oomph! Both the polyphony and euphony are never let out of sight, making End This Summer an aural U-turn after all, fully embracing the estival erethism with a chopped robotic/organic magnetotail of panchromatic hue. 

Twitter: @trancedotbiz @cosmoprofvevo

Vaporwave Review 102: Vapor Vertebrae 06/2015 [Part C]. Originally published on Jun. 30, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.