Vapor Vertebrae 03-2015 Part C

Floral
Recess

<S/T EP>

A rhizomatic reticulation situated somewhere between pulsatile piano perianths, sped-up mid-90’s Eurodance amanitas and polyfoil pericarps: Recess by the mysterious Floral is one flourishing Funk fusillade, eminently euphoric, always situated on the right side of the sun-dappled meadows. Being a teaser from the self-titled work released on the future reserve label AMDISCS, it obviously needs to cater to the clientele of Electronica-loving vaqueros – fair enough and no harm done – but it also functions formidably as a ventiduct to those plasticized paroxysms of hectic Japanese bubblegum jitters à la Tam Arrow, the centrifugal verglas Teutonic Techno of Germany’s Blümchen (literally translating into floret!) and other helicoidal halcyon heydays. Despite the fitting recess signal amidst the song’s progress, Recess is the wrongest title for this paradisiac avulsion almost to a comical point, but the artist is most definitely aware of the listener-related mobbed-up expectations. In lieu of contemplation, fluorescent fermions await. It’s like one’s playful evil laughter in front of the well-known indicating sign that is so often ignored in view to a good shortcut: "Don’t step on the grass." 

Label Twitter: @AMDISCS

Astroシャーマン
フィールド Forest

<Single>

Moving along with the nomological-phylogenetic agenda of substyle ventricles such as Vaportrap and a pinch of Grime, the musical adventures of Astroシャーマン aka AstroShaman have definitely received a slightly harder but not necessarily belligerent edge. After the purple peritoneum Welcome To The Vapor Age (Dream Catalogue, 2014), the Atlanta-based producer embroiders one key component in all of his tunes: autonomous aureoles, created from scratch, annihilating sample-based protrusions to a bare minimum. Unsurprisingly, フィールド Forest is such a cavernous sparkler as well and the herald to an amniotic aqueduct: annealed New Age synth flumes, the bubbling jungular granuloma of tip-toeing marimba patterns and agglutinated Hip-Hop beats which lack the acidic oomph on purpose in order to not destroy the arcane antrum, this turns out to be a mystical forest alright. The Ambient factor is huge as well, meaning that the song underwhelms at first due to its stabilized translucent form of toned-down existence that is so atypical for Vaporwave’s effulgent flares, but wondrously soothing for followers of perennial New Age capsules. 

Twitter: @Astro_Shaman

Telozkope
庭 {Dribble}

<Single>

There is one reason I haven’t linked Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Telozkope to the above-mentioned organics of Astroシャーマン, and that very reason is a dedicated review of the viridian potassium decortication called 庭 {Dribble} which unites the artist’s coruscating chromaticity of the coppice called Equanaimo (Spectral Blissonance Ltd, 2014) with the seemingly colder but still tropical hoarfrost halides in Frozen Prism (Dream Catalogue, 2014). Right from the get-go, 庭 {Dribble} spawns the polyhedric puissance of a Trinidadian Calypso steel pan and pours it into a chiptune-infested bleep cataract complete with organic estuaries, rubicund bass lavabos and many interstices for the reverberations to reflect the incandescent isospins back into the lacunar physiognomy of the arrangement. Mystical quiescence and jocund scrimshaw remainders coalesce in a harmonious way, nothing feels forced nor de trop. A superimposition of a punctilio suntrap and an oneiric orifice, 庭 {Dribble} exhales Exotica but keeps the tacky tentacles to itself.

Twitter: @telozkope

Renjā
Kanjō

<Dreams Of The Far East>

Nebular dewdrop-wetted panoramas remain Renjā’s forte, so much is clear. Hailing from Warsaw, US, the artist doesn’t shy away from seriously implementing his innermost feelings of nostalgia, reveries and deeply languorous yearnings in his alarmingly unique soundscapes. Ambient is the principal cotyledon amidst the helical hydrazine, and even though Renjā is able to rev up the blitheness in essential genre songs such as the uplifting And If I Don’t See You or the pluvial laissez-faire of Butterflies In The Sky, chances are that the titration is already tightly set in his debut album Lonesome (Dream Catalogue, 2014). Kanjō, however, is part of the album Dreams Of The Far East which also goes by the cryptic name of EICV7" No. 99 due to being released on the Everything Is Chemical label. Kanjō is one of the few instances that doesn’t contain pitched or similarly processed female vox, but what it lacks in human presence, it gains in humane senescence: a real Ambient piece sans beats, the presented cannelure comprises of solemn synth choirs, peaceful glitz protuberances and an overall aerose haze of serenity. I still consider Renjā to be a prominent part of Vaporwave – or whatever it’s called tomorrow – but am fully aware that the young artist ventures into wispy vestibules time and again. Beautiful doldrums.  

Twitter: @Renja1998

(Koi) コイ。
Away From You

<Single>

Hailing from Yokosuka, Japan, (Koi)コイ。delivers a particularly truthful interpretation of the vivacious Vaporwave genre due to his location alone, but since this is unsurprisingly a global movement, chances are that the spheroidal emblems and prismatic landmarks are swallowed by the stream of alluvial sybaritism. That’s why I want to cherish and maintain the versatile progress of the artist’s single Away From You which has to enter the critic’s heart retrosternally due to a supposedly nondescript, ubiquitous title. However, there’s nothing vapid about Away From You which enchants on many superimposed levels, be it the Ambient-focused cherubic anacrusis of faraway synths, the handclap-accompanied frost-covered high-rise translucency or the vernal square lead pads tumbling in the wistful air like omnipresent cherry blossoms. There is something celebratory and ritualistic about this gem. (Koi)コイ。cleverly augments – and eventually overcomes – the petrifying yearning with the oldest trick in the book that is hardest to achieve: prosperous euphony.

Twitter: @Pondofkoifish

Networthy
Phone Clip

<Worthless EP>

It would be easy to attest Ottawa, Canada’s Net Worthy a mercilessly hard-edged approach when it comes to the transformation of the V-genre’s mere concept into a chlorotically gaseous cloudlet of hazardous-histrionic beats, Grime-accentuated leptons and other intended contretemps. But below, within and in front of that orthogonal nucleus, in close proximity to the subcellular steelification is that Ambient-focused allure which occasionally gains a rightful place in these endemic worlds as well. Phone Clip off the cheekily named Worthless EP is a surprisingly polyvalent collaboration with FALCO (thanks to Telozkope for the cue!) that leaves the parochial limit behind in order to supercharge the chromodynamics with nutritious elements. A serene streamlet of benthic Angkor Wat enigmas guides the listener to bass-driven Hip-Hop crevasses; public service announcements, distant shouts and the circadian frenzy are so far away that they cannot possibly contradict nor ostracize the clandestine cloak-and-dagger reciprocation. It is the best tune of the Worthless EP when interpreted from the viewpoint of an Ambient fan. While there are equipollent occurrences spread all over the roster, Phone Clip manages to conflate and transfigure the best of all intrinsic subgenres and incidental accessories.

Twitter: @worthynet @YouCanBeFalco

Ambient Review 421: Vapor Vertebrae 03/2015 [Part C]. Originally published on Mar. 18, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.

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.