Vapor Vertebrae 10-2015 Part A

「サンセット N ｅｔｗｏｒｋ❾❶」
ハートビート

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「サンセット N ｅｔｗｏｒｋ❾❶」has recently run a condottiere service together with Replica Federation on Florida's vaporcentral, fittingly called Hired Gun [ リーパーのピストル, /vaprev097_sunsetnetwork_replicafederation/ and now it seems to be time for something similarly dark, but more soulful: ハートビート is le rhythm du jour, translating into heartbeat and presenting us the best hook from a Günther & Samantha Fox song. This is both the premise and the promise of Vaporwave: you might like the idea or lump it altogether, fair enough, but you shouldn't rule out, let alone ridicule the enchantment a formerly cheesy Synth Pop serenade can bring you when 「サンセット N ｅｔｗｏｒｋ❾❶」ennobles the fad and encapsulates it within a prolonged state of bliss. Running for only 74 seconds which is all the more at odds with the elasticized, slowed-down viscidity. Günther's wisdoms à la "touch me, touch me, I wanna feel your body, your heartbeat next to mine" haven't lost anything of their nostalgic beauty – or raucous audacity – but for once, his lowered voice works stupefyingly well with the plasticized hi-hat cocktail. Heck, 「サンセット N ｅｔｗｏｒｋ❾❶」doesn't even shy away to make the over-the-top electric guitar solo the exit device of the song. ハートビート is so great because it doesn't overstay its welcome, nor is its augmented nostalgia petrifying enough to crush one's good mood. 

Twitter: @cyberrpunk_

OSCOB
t__ c__ s___

<OSCOB X ART SINGLES SERIES 006>

There’s no brand new OSCOB track available at the time of setting up this Vapor Vertebrae edition? No problem: back to the archives! Back to a time where Max was at least gradually aware of the arty-tarty bluntness his cheeky titles and behavior caused. If you really wanna know what the above track stands for, listen closely to the attached soundscape, then take a look at the pink artwork, or hit over OSCOB’s SoundCloud account to put together the missing pieces. In the, er, meantime, ladies and gentlemen, lets head to the lascivious, libidinous lands of lucidness. After the mechanical introduction of a video tape being inserted into a VHS recorder, the fun begins: wah-wah guitars swallow shallow wordless – and equally slowed down – vocals, all the while the tape hiss continues to send out its soft pink noise. This is porn music, okay? You can hear people moan and whisper, got it? What lets this soundscape tower above related cultural deeds is the melancholic piano. It is certainly a part of the original source, but so sad and dolorous and… somewhat cheap enough to fit in. Play this to haters of Vaporwave, and they will lose their minds. To be honest, this piece is not much more than a mere finger exercise for Max, but, hehe, this only emphasizes the theme of t__ c__ s___ further. Derp.

Twitter: @VirtualPlazaMax

VANTAGE //
Can’t Get Enough

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Previously, debonair Frenchman Vantage // wasn't known for suave Ambient pieces… and the above Can't Get Enough will postpone this – not totally unlikely – endeavor until further notice. But there's something soothingly genre-like in here regardless, and that is the opening section with its cerulean-ecclesiastic diffraction and stokehold-evoking cellar atmosphere. These proselytizing organs are punchy and mellow, and they won't vanish throughout the Future Funk escapade that is about to hit home. Titular sped-up vocals, arpeggiated sun-kissed synth vesicles that feel like lightbulbs and handclap-accompanied ancillary rhythm devices augment the vernal summer vibe. Once the glacial piano hits in the latter half, the dualism is established and probably as profound and infinitesimally thought-provoking as possible in the given framework of Future Funk. While Can't Get Enough doesn't seem to target sophisticated Trap fans, let alone Breakbeat followers, the momentarily arhythmic interceptions and the bubbling main hook make Vantage's piece oscillate closer to their outer shells than before. Carefree, calorific, catchy.

Twitter: @VantageNoise

Future Girlfriend 音楽
Benson Cut 今夜

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Attention Asunción, Future Girlfriend is back with a Paraguayan peritoneum of Future Funk. A genre that shares the emotional highs in supra-saturated colors rather than the more normalized madness of its Vaporwave next of kin, it is certainly harder to persist in the funky side of life when every other artist is keen on similar 4/4 rhythms too. Plasticity and a certain in-your-face euphoria are key features to enchant, and the above Benson Cut 今夜 has it all: right from the sun-dappled piano puissance and the elasticized wonkiness of the hyperpolished synth hula hoop lariats, Future Girlfriend soon tones down the pianos, lets them enter a phase of comparative thermal immersion. The pitched vocals are a given and are naturally much more uplifting than truly meaningful, but still, the injection of doubled vocal tracks and the constant translucency of the shrapnel of aquatic clicks let this midtempo piece transmute into a surprisingly sunset-colored piece of insouciance. Sure, you can – and probably shall – dance to it, but it's more of a susurrant party than a loud spring break flurry. Future Funk as intelligent and simultaneously festival-compatible as can be.

Twitter: @futuregfmusic

コンシャスTHOUGHTS x Groovy Godzilla
Show You How To Love

<Collaboration>

This Vapor Vertebrae edition ends with a good-natured Future Funk fusillade that is dear to my heart, generally because both artists involved have been featured time and again at AmbientExotica, but specifically so due to the stylistic advantages the above song Show You How To Love absorbs and spawns from both producers. It comes down to this: Glasgow meets Long Beach, California when Chrissy's コンシャスTHOUGHTS moniker encounters Aaron's Groovy Godzilla stature. Expect a mightily revved up tunnel vision hued in sunlight as autumn is pushed away for good. Granular Italo piano coruscants waft through classically funky female vox, scattered brass bursts fuel the orthochromatic gradient further, and let's not forget the occasional arhythmic stop-and-go staccato/punctilio notion the two fellows insert for the best of all measures. Granted, there is no hidden meaning, no polysemous portent luring in the darker alleys; everything glitters and is aglow in technicolor. You don't have to love Future Funk in order to enjoy this collaboration off コンシャスTHOUGHTS's forthcoming album, but if you do, you will easily absorb the salubrious hue de soleil.

Twitter: @aviscerall_GG  @ChrissyCray1

Vaporwave Review 130: Vapor Vertebrae 10/2015 [Part A]. Originally published on Oct. 8, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.

Vapor Vertebrae 09-2015 Part C

Cyberlust
Mirrors

<The Music Of The Now Age III>

Argentina's supreme Vaporwave producer Lola aka Cyberlust embraces the slower grooves of the genre and ameliorates them with vestiges of Funk. Then again, she is more than willed to admix synthetic cloudleds to the envisioned sceneries, thus creating an aerial-longitudinal wideness in technicolor. Mirrors, meanwhile, is something special simply because of the surroundings it appears in, namely fortune 500's The Music Of The Now Age III compilation! And Cyberlust succeeds big time, and right from the immediate get-go. The anacrusis already spawns centrifugal yet salubrious wind gusts that fly across multiple stacks of Oberheim synths. These devices won't stand still during the rest of this short vignette which leads to pure Vaporwave lands. Be it the slowed-down soulful vocals, the rising punctilio of the benthic crystal helictites or the reverberated classic drum kit: what you see is what you experience. This is coincidentally the final farewell of the label… it must not be the farewell of Cyberlust!

Twitter: @cyberlusttt

Jude Frankum
Perpetual Never-Ending

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British Ambient musician Jude Frankum is not swallowed by the mighty lure of Vaporwave, at least not at all costs, and especially not officially, but he is willed to let his ethereal compositions come quite close to the mighty V, reassuring everyone and especially so the humble reviewer of the entanglement between the two styles. Perpetual Never-Ending is such a diffeomorphed entity, one which takes the listener back to a time where even the grandfather genre Ambient didn't exist: to the 1930's. Jude ran an otherwise unmentioned folk song from Eastern Europe through a guitar amp thereby distorting it, because this is the now age. Delay and decay meet, mesh and depart in the interim as the producer creates a tawny aurora of distant malleated yearning, eldritch swamp memorabilia in b minor and a curious amalgamation of salubrious light and crestfallen solanums. The base of this track is antediluvian, understood. The means of creation, however, do fall into the vapor veils alright, and make an ecclesiastic syncytium out of a formerly ordinary borscht ballad. Good for us.

Twitter: @Jud3frankum

vladkorotnev
テープレコーダーという物

<テープレコーダーという物 LP>

Russian producer vladkorotnev aka AkR is an admirer of the analog sound and the subsequent analog mastering stage as he freely admits on his SoundCloud page. The above title テープレコーダーという物 is already giving a great hint in this regard and is the fifth song off the eponymous 12-track album which translates into a tape recorder. The aesthetics of tape hiss, chroma keys of the mind and that fuzzy hue are frequently revisited by bedroom producers all over the world, it's a collective heritage. テープレコーダーという物 has its own particular charm: launching with an honest-to-goodness lecture about that new thing called a tape recorder while flangered ophidian snake charmer melodies play over a reversely-played hythm section in the background, vladkorotnev's song eventually keeps this pace and brings the stylophonic device into the limelight where it plays hymnic tone sequences that are pestered by short disruptions, pauses, jitters, each of them purposefully injected. Once a Hammond organ appears at the end, the gregarious atmosphere triples. テープレコーダーという物 never reaches the future, it's like a time capsule viewed through a vapor zoetrope, but that's part of the experience, maybe even its very nucleus.

Twitter: @vladkorotnev 

MARCUS32X
Divine Canon

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"Samples name entry screen from Tekken Tag 1," the description of Divine Canon reads that is so magnanimously provided by Ireland's Artzie AM-illustrating, angelawaving MARCUS32X, and one could leave it at that, for it is true: what you hear is what you expect, and then some. It is the additional adjuvants that make the vignette of approximately 100 seconds a soothing one, especially so since Future Funk is replaced by an alkaloidal Glitch jitterfest and asbestus frequencies. While the whole song shuttles between the wideness of Mallsoft and the narrowness of chamber music – or better still: lift muzak – to equal parts, the amount of glitchy gluons increases; it harms and constitutes the AM radio frequency range at the same time. The laid-back hi-hat galore and chopped shrapnel of trembling shakers round off a diaphanous listening experience, somewhat blurry, but sharp and crisp when it comes to the higher frequency ranges. Divinity without sumptuous ethereality: only in Vaporwave!

Twitter: @marcus32x

STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ
Boundless Informant

<Cloud Expo Compilation>

Our man STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ from Aokigahara Forest is back at AmbientExotica, and the standing invitation turns into a standing ovation more often than not. The same applies to Boundless Informant, a Vaportrap hypanthium that encapsulates forest vibes and bosky elements as it should be. Originally featured on Lost Angles' Cloud Expo compilation, the artist decided to upload the track to his SoundCloud account too. Make no mistake though: this is a mercilessly amicable and benignant Vaportrap song, replacing the grinding sawtooth frequencies of the lower end with shorter beat droplets and even more liquedous water bubbles. Add a potentially pentatonic rising melody to the locale that is as vitreous and crystalline as it is prone to maintain a certain amount of mysticism and clandestinity, and you receive an emerald pond of chirality where the mirrored image doesn't match the reflection you'd expect. The song has a certain MIDI charm to it, but otherwise has a much higher plasticity that is almost tangible. One listen to this aural forest, and you won't forget the principal four-note melody for a long time. Way to go, STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ!

Twitter: @StaqqOverflo  @lostangleslabel

幽霊, TOGETHER!
S U G A R  F R E E

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With the final track in this Vapor Vertebrae roundup, an artist shows you the door, but this evokes entirely empathetic feeling this time, or what else to call the windchime-accentuated bass guitar granuloma of S U G A R  F R E E, a slow Funk peritoneum by 幽霊, TOGETHER! whose clicking claves and immediate lyrics create a dualism that is both aquatic, adiabatic and alatoric. Cerulean cascade coils coruscate in the distance, R'n'B backing vox augment the silkened lure of the lead singer. It is hard to pinpoint what 幽霊, TOGETHER! has changed apart from the clearly elasticized, smoothly floating new physiognomy of the track, but that's for the artist to know and the listener to explore. The artist is keen on letting Funk songs appear in a new light with only the most cautious edits and enhancements. Rest assured that S U G A R  F R E E, while being based on Grand Daddy I.U.'s classic, radiates phantom frequencies and formerly hidden entanglements aplenty. Plus the clear message of the original turns into a sultry massage for what it's worth (hint: a lot). 

Twitter: @GhostsTogether

Vaporwave Review 125: Vapor Vertebrae 09/2015 [Part C]. Originally published on Sep. 29, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.