Another post already? Yep, and we're looking at 2011 this time. The year march onwards at a speed of 12:1.
ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER – REPLICA (Software)
The irony of boundaries is that they look more logical the further away from them you are.
Imagine someone being gutted at not being allowed to buy a single beer one day before their 18th birthday who would have shrugged 12 months before. By the same logic a hair metal band would be perfectly happy about what constitutes grindcore, whereas a Carcass acolyte might well laugh at you for suggesting that they should be filed under this heading, sniffily asking whether you’ve even heard of goregrind. Seems like the only thing more contentious than trying to define the stylistic edges of a genre is trying to pinpoint where it began.
However, if you wanted to find one of the main tributaries that fed into what became known as vaporwave - God, how I hate leaving out that U, but I guess if there were ever a movement where tiny branding decisions were significant, vaporwave is it – watch a brief 2009 video by sunsetcorp, a YouTube account with a whole 8 videos to its name, entitled ‘Nobody Here’. It’s a tiny, misty loop of Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady In Red’ accompanied by a video of a cheap feedback effect from the VHS era. It’s a beautiful piece of work, somehow heartbreaking because the source material is so hackneyed...but having said this, a fresh listen reveals that musically ‘Lady In Red’ is actually pretty great, though De Burgh’s vocal is pompous and preening, and the lyrics are trite (plus if he “hardly knows” the woman why is he surprised he’s “never seen” her looking so nice and so many people asking her to dance? Unless he’s a stalker. Which frankly I wouldn’t put past De Burgh (Legal note: I would put it past De Burgh)). It turns out that this video was the work of Daniel Lopatin, AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – I won’t tell you the derivation of this stupid name because it just makes it even stupider – and he released the audio with a generic matrix title on his 2010 album Chuck Person’s Eccojams Volume 1. This album effectively marked the dawn of vaporwave, though a thousand people will argue that I’ve got this wrong. From my own point of view, vaporwave is intriguing as it’s the first time a retro, nostalgia-driven cultural form was too recent for me: yes, I recognised what they were talking about, but I never experienced it. I didn’t use CD-ROMs at school, I’ve never played Ecco The Dolphin. I understood the glances backwards, but I didn’t feel them (the –algia suffix in “nostalgia” denotes pain, but my memories of the mid-90s Gap website, or whatever, are fully anaesthetised).
Anyway, although the Chuck Person release got lots of trendy column inches (digital or otherwise) it was the following year’s Replica that made more of an impact (everything’s relative, mind, Lopatin is hardly Bono). It is primarily built on small, looped synth or piano elements, some of which are so short I’m certain they are supposed to evoke skipping CDs, enshrouded in slightly degraded tape sounds (though it’s all for textural effect, if you want to hear some true crumbling tape noise check out The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski from earlier in the millennium). Listening again now, I’m surprised at how lovely this album is, and it achieves something far beyond a knowing wink towards the reference points.
Highpoints include the opener ‘Andro’ which features a tumble of percussion above a wistful fuzzy synth which sounds like the quiet intro to a happy hardcore banger, and as such is a little reminiscent of V/Vm’s Death of Rave project from a few years earlier; the minuscule fragments of Romantic piano that make up ‘Power of Persuasion’, which are overlaid by an epically melancholy Blade Runner synth; the big low vox-humana keys and loud crunchy eruptions of ‘Remember’, which sound like someone striking giant matches in a robot monastery; the title track’s little aspirated vocal sounds, which could equally be Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Rolf Harris; the little repeated moment in ‘Up’ which sounds like a snatch from a corporate ident, making us feel as though we’re digitally flying repeatedly between two vast chrome letters in a hangar made of clouds. If there’s a low point it’s the beat-em-up FX as semi-rhythmic percussion on ‘Child Soldier’, which become a tad annoying.
The album ends with ‘Explain’, a pleasing group of FM-synthesis angels crooning. Eno’s first ambient album was subtitled Music for Airports, but this actually sounds like being stuck next to a tiny looping digital billboard in a busy duty-free perfume concession. Except, you know, really lovely. How Lopatin managed to take such annoyingly naff material and make it sing is the alchemical mystery at the heart of this record. This may be all tarnished rubbish, but I’ve never seen it shine so bright.
It was amazing.
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