This will be a dense one so I won’t waste words up here. In this edition, a deep dive on a music genre that I think is more prescient now than ever before, and what from it we can learn and take for ourselves to hopefully progress forward.
Hats are on the way, they’ll be dropping Saturday, November 30th. As per usual if you’re reading this, you will have early access on Black Friday. Also, for any holiday jewelry commissions, get them in to hello@marksabinodesign.com by December 15th, and mention the newsletter for a discount.
As social media deteriorates and splinters into lost nomadic tribes, I want to again share my appreciation for the continued support. It can sometimes feel like the expression of ideas is a losing battle in the slimy gig economy we find ourselves in, and being able to keep making things, keep thinking about the shit I love in my free time is something I’m endlessly thankful for. If I could be cynical for a moment, I’ve noticed a real, near exponential dip in cognitive function on social media apps, way more than previously, and it brings me a lot of solace knowing there is still a digital world that wants to think about heady shit in semi-casual ways. The people that understand that yes, sometimes it is “that deep” and also thinking about it in that way can be just as much fun. As unhealthy behaviors become more and more championed by victims of the consumerist echo chamber, I hope this can at least be a momentary break. More on the way for the newsletter, might experiment with a restock of a best seller sometime in the future for those that missed out 🚲. -ms
Table of Contents
“You Know What’s Sick?”: An Anti-Trend Report
The Vein of Vaporwave Playlist
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“You Know What’s Sick?”: An Anti-Trend Report
The zeitgeist may feel ever-shifting, but in our current time, there is still a feeling of stagnation woven throughout, underscoring seemingly everything in our culture. Concurrently, we are addicted to nostalgia, using it to escape, to cope, to distract, to manipulate, and more. Like any other potent addiction, this builds both a dependence and a tolerance over time. Eventually, you need it stronger, more concentrated, and in higher doses. What was once something we experienced as a rare treat has now become the nerve that we incessantly tap in order to maximize its warming, sedating effect. To quote Don Draper in the Carousel episode of Mad Men, “nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” The problem with continually mainlining the euphoria of revisiting that wound however, is eventually it begins to run dry. After the well of one era has been tapped, we scramble for a new source to get our fix. This leads to a complete rose-tinted wash over everything from a certain time, so long as it reminds us of something. A more recent example of this would be people celebrating the “return” of waiting in line for hours in the cold for the chance to buy general release sneakers. Something that on paper is so optically bleak, so shamelessly emblematic of late stage capitalism, that it was viewed as something needing to be addressed when it was first occurring. In 2024 however, people are so helplessly caught up in gooning to their own hazy half-memories that it has been easily repackaged and re-presented as every billion dollar company’s favorite buzzword, Culture, simply because it was something that happened when we were younger.
As we further cannibalize our own memories, particularly without learning anything new from them, our hunt for nostalgia grows more and more recent. Already we are seeing people start to romanticize the “simpler times” of 2020, the year defined by a deadly worldwide virus, violent police abuse, mental degradation, and so on. Everything has always trended cyclically yes, but these cycles have not yet fully adjusted to the maw of modern consumption. In other words, we are burning ourselves out much faster than ever before from both sides of the temporal spectrum. There is only so much of our own memory we can regurgitate and re-consume before we run out, and by doing so we rob ourselves of distinct future memories. Don’t take this as me dismissing the past entirely, I’m actually arguing the opposite. There is so much to look back on, study, and pull from, we just need to do something new with what we take, instead of using it as a mental numbing agent. With that in mind, I’d like to talk about a music movement that dealt with these themes of nostalgia and commodity fetishism during a period of time that is ironically currently on the cusp of its own turn in the “remember when?” machine. I believe that within this genre, and more importantly the history leading up to it, there are lessons to be learned that have never been more prescient, that can hopefully make us all more conscious consumers, and even maybe help us move forward.
You know what’s sick? Vaporwave. Before you laugh and close this essay, just hear me out. I’m not talking about the late period derivatives or the soulless feeling Fiji water and Arizona iced tea image macros (those belong to Yung Lean anyway), I’m not talking about the 2017 edits of Bart Simpson riding a skateboard with a pink filter over it, I’m talking about the core, primordial attitudes and projects that inspired the genre way before it even had a name. Back when the thesis was based primarily around probing and analyzing our obsession with and dependence on nostalgia, capitalism, and consumerism through reclamation of the bits and pieces of media that helped push those agendas. For this write-up, I’d like to focus on some of the crucial points and ideas that created the vein of Vaporwave as a genre, as well as speculate on how a modern interpretation could make more sense than you may think. For better or worse.
Let me preface all of this by saying I am not a musical theorist nor historian, so consider this a slightly abridged version of these key moments from my own perspective, and how they relate to subjects I know a lot more about. Any topic discussed here has a bounty of fantastic articles written about them if you are interested in doing your own deeper dive. Additionally, the discographies and philosophies of the people mentioned are all worth checking out in-depth. I’ll be using them to tie a continuous vein together that can be used as a sociological reflection of our attitudes as consumers expressed through art. With that out of the way, let’s enter the vaporspace.
Plunderphonics
Some have argued that the proverbial Big Bang of Vaporwave came from Canadian composer John Oswald with his dual thesis/EP Plunderphonics. The 1985 essay is nothing short of prophetic, recognizing early on the power of sampling in music, as well as the tactile, textural properties that come from the physical equipment we use to record, reproduce, and make sound. He argued for the inherent art present in sampling, how a sampling machine is its own viable instrument just like a guitar or piano, further evidenced by the early rap music of the time. The noises produced from the sampler become their own notes, chords, and percussion both removed from, and forever linked to, their origin. It is a form of temporal blurring, using recognizable relics of the past as jumping off points for the present, literally mutating and recontextualizing them for new, reflective purposes. Oswald himself described the phenomenon of Plunderphonics as a series of “recognizable sonic quotes”, stating “Taking Madonna singing "Like a Virgin" and rerecording it backwards or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you can reasonably recognize the source. The plundering has to be blatant though.” By using pieces of something already recognizable as a starting point, the new context of the fragments remain tied to and haunted by (more on that later) the old, creating a through-line to follow. One of the best examples of him proving his thesis comes from the track Dab off of the 1989 expanded edition of Plunderphonics, in which he completely blends up the iconic Bad by Michael Jackson into a barely recognizable visage of the original, warping, chopping, and smashing pieces of it together to create a 7 and a half minute sonic tapestry that really does sound like the blueprint for some other artists I’ll be talking about later on. There are echoes of this practice in modern musicians of other genres as well. For example, the contorting of Jackson’s words to trick your brain into thinking he’s saying something new distinctly brings to mind the way Kanye would grab samples and warp the lyrics to match his own. Dab eventually gives way to a haunting ambient second half that gradually vaporizes into a dense cloud of noise and fades away like it was never there. These two elements, the dissipating ethereal sound, and the stark recontextualization of something so ubiquitously recognizable (in this case MJ vocal chops) into something with an entirely new statement, are the keys to proto-Vaporwave. Another huge factor that would eventually become one of the core statements behind Vaporwave is how the Plunderphonics EP was released. Notably, given only to press and radio stations, never sold in stores. Listeners were encouraged to tape their own version of the music off the radio, in turn creating their own unique version of it every time. As expected, this was quickly pounced on by labels that demanded every copy of the EP be destroyed. This anti-industry, pro-art mindset would ripple throughout the next few decades eventually forming the backbone of the anti (or at least conscious) capitalist sentiments of Vaporwave. For the sake of time I’ll have to move on, because I could go on for way too long about how fascinating his work is, but I highly recommend doing your own deep dive on Oswald and Plunderphonics, because it is one of the most rewarding and inspiring rabbit holes I’ve ever found myself down.
Negativland
Similarly and around the same time, in Northern California a group of radical, freaked out musicians were devising their own statement towards sampling and how we consume media. Negativland is an always shifting experimental music project that like Oswald, focuses heavily on repurposed sample based compositions that play with the ideas of consumerism, copyright law in art, and more. In 1987, they released their infamous project Escape from Noise, which contained original songs that range from upbeat pounding synth numbers to distorted, hazy ambient tracks, all of course laden with thematic vocal samples grabbed from TV, radio, and more. It feels like an early, even more pointed version of the album construction that was a signature for MF DOOM, using sampled bits and pieces of existing stories to tell a new one with new intention. They called the term for this style Culture Jamming, or reclaiming and repurposing the symbols, language, and tools of mainstream mass media to in turn make a statement against it. Essentially harvesting the detritus of consumer culture and spotlighting it, consciously drawing attention to the media that we normally just let pass through out ears and eyes like nothing. Their reclamation of media for use as a statment against media is easily a predecessor for the future cut-out style of proto-Vaporwave. There is an attitude of radical antagonism towards all types of industries that flows through their music, and as such it creates beautiful meta-narratives between the band, their art, and media itself. In one instance, they synthesized their own controversy when they sent out a press release denying any of the “wild claims” that their song Christianity is Stupid inspired a real life murderer. All the supposed “claims” that they were preemptively denying however, never actually existed. It was all part of the act and the dance with media. That didn’t stop the hoax from making it all the way to larger news outlets, who’s reports on it were then resampled for the band’s next project Helter Stupid, a cautionary concept album about music and media’s influence on young people.
DJ Screw
In the vein of American experimental music, especially in relation to what would become Vaporwave, one would be absolutely remiss to not mention the immense impact of DJ Screw and his style of Chopped n Screwed music. Sonically, as well as visually, you could say that Screw was the largest nexus point and translation between earlier experimental sample based music and modern aesthetically focused iterations. Whereas earlier projects like Plunderphonics and the work of Negativland had a searing critical take on the transformative power of recontextualizing samples, Screw used it to build worlds to live in. Instead of sharp, jarring fragments of samples, songs were flipped whole, with the slowed BPM, cuts, scratches, skips, and analog noise from his recording setup providing thick, ambient textures that gave it such a distinct, rich sound. Where past sample artists’ compositions felt stilted, anxious, packed with tension, Screw’s highlight the baroque beauty of the music, a blown out celebration of artistry itself. Highlighting both well known and deep cut tracks while morphing them into his signature modus operandi, he turned songs into sprawling soundscapes with a course, tangible topography. A perfect example of this would be his remix of Phil Collins’ monumental track In the Air Tonight. The original version is as iconic and memorable as it gets, one of the most monolithic songs ever. However, even it isn’t immune to the dominance of the Screw sound. What was already a moody, dramatic song gets completely transfigured into something that sounds like we are overlooking the end of the world. The heavy pops of grain and distortion from the tape only provide further texture and depth to the sonic chiaroscuro being composed in real time. By the time the famous drum fill comes in, it sounds like a long dormant volcano has finally erupted, black and white turns to technicolor, life gets breathed back into the world. Future Vaporwave sounds owe an incredible amount to the cinematic, dreamlike quality of the worlds Screw would make through his songs. The music creates mental vignettes that feel so distinct, so tangible, that they begin to bleed into and interact with real life, simultaneously scoring, and being influenced by, the environment around them. The song that I believe best encapsulates this transformative phenomenon, that perfectly represents Screw’s temporal and artistic thesis, is his flip of Guerilla Maab’s Fondren & Main. What was originally a smooth, heartfelt ~4 minute song gets drawn out to a hulking 15 minute near-operatic epic. Long stretches of instrumental roads are peppered with precisely added stuttering chops and cuts. Screw himself acts as a sort of guide, dropping adlibs, shoutouts, and more all throughout. I personally believe the song is his magnum opus, a manifestation of all of the thought, texture, care, passion, and transformative artistry that went into his music. Additionally, there is something to be said about the DIY aspect of how Screw put his music out into the world. What began as mail orders for physical “grey tapes” eventually grew into an entire storefront in Texas, laying the blueprint for the more covert DTC methods that would define later Vaporwave, as well as the emphasis put on the staggering power of physical, tangible media in a growing digitized world. Similarly…
The Disintegration Loops
If there is a recurring theme throughout this deep dive, something that ties all of these artists, albums, and ideas together, it should be the potential power of recontextualization, particularly through media sampling. To me, there is absolutely no better, more poignant, more world shatteringly potent example of this power than multimedia artist William Basinski’s 2002-2003 series of releases, The Disintegration Loops. For those that are unaware of the infamous story behind this project, I’d recommend doing a full deep dive yourself in order to get enough context to properly experience the magnitude of it, but for the sake of discussion, I’ll do my best to give the short version. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Basinski amassed a collection of recordings of radio frequencies, samples from the Muzak radio station, the buzz of his fridge, and other found sounds. He would then take those sounds and draw them out to their absolute maximum, stretching 1-2 second loops with reverb and echo effects into long stretches of droning, dark noise. Crucially, these loops were recorded to physical magnetic tape. After years of experimentation, Basinski decided to archive them digitally and store them away forever. In the process of doing this, he noticed that dust was coming off of the tape as it was winding through the recorder, and that after so many years, the tape was degrading and falling apart. What was coming out of the machine was a low, solemn, haunting drone with growing cracks and pops with every loop. He was moments away from losing his job and being evicted from his Brooklyn apartment, and he felt that this noise was the perfect representation of how he was feeling. He decided to leave it recording overnight and let the tape loop over and over until it would eventually disintegrate, a soundtrack to things falling apart. The night he began this process was September 10th, 2001.
By the next morning, the world had fallen apart along with the tape. Throughout the day, that low drone soundtracked what felt like the end of days. Basinski said himself, “Here it is, Armageddon…the greatest show on earth. Here we go.” With a clear view of downtown Manhattan, Basinski eventually brought a friend’s camera up to his roof, set it up on a tripod, and recorded the last bits of sunlight of the day until the camera died. The next day, Basinski combined the footage of the sunset with the droning, deteriorating loops, and created a haunting tribute to the people and innocence lost the day prior, the crushing anxiety of what the future would hold, and the disintegration of a country. There is a haunting, somber nostalgia that is attached to The Disintegration Loops that I believe laid the groundwork for later experiments in Vaporwave. The dark, ethereal sound of the tapes is quite literally attached to the pain of an old wound, existing almost as a stepfather to the nostalgic melancholy that would define Vaporwave sonically. Over the course of the next decades, tragedy on our own soil would be something that Americans would grow all the more numb to, with trauma becoming more and more the norm. In a post-Sandy Hook, “post”-pandemic America, the question I find myself asking is, do we as younger people have our own Disintegration Loops? Is there a piece of art out there, or yet to be made, that perfectly encapsulates and distills our new moments of shared trauma to its rawest, most guttural feeling? Something that feels like a radical statement of our current time? Or are we forever stuck with the ghosts of what already was?
Hauntology
Let’s take a quick break from music to talk about a philosophical theory that is arguably the driving force of our modern culture, and without a doubt the beating heart of Vaporwave. The term Hauntology can be first accredited to philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, originally posing the idea that ideologies such as Marxism can exist essentially as ghosts, occupying both their original time and the time after their “death” simultaneously, casting a long, abstracted shadow that binds the two together, despite not being present. Using the example of Marxism, although the idea has been essentially “killed” by the dominance of Western capitalism, it still remains to this day, returning to debates and the minds of theorists as if it never left. The more widely known definition however came later, from philosopher and critic Mark Fisher in the mid 2000s into the 2010s, primarily through his books Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life. Fisher describes Hauntology as essentially remnants of the past never leaving us, never fully being exercised, so we live with them as spectral projections that haunt us, never fully disappearing. Primarily, we are haunted by the ghosts of futures that never came, the futures that we were promised through each new “innovation” but never reached. The miracles of tech and efficiency never brought us the sparkling, idealized world we were promised, so we obsess over what could have been. This leads to a depressive obsession with nostalgia, constantly picking at our old scabs, never letting them heal, never fully progressing. Both our lived past and our idealized one coexist as shadows in the present that we can’t let go of. The recurring romanticization of the “Good Old Days” that never really existed.
Capitalism discourages actually learning from the past because if that were to happen, those ghosts would be exercised. They would stop being exploitable for profit or manipulation, and allowed to finally rest in peace. That of course, cannot be allowed to happen, so nostalgia fetishization keeps these specters trapped in a state of purgatory, always present without being present, waiting to be re-harvested until the cycle slowly moves forward (a shift from 2000s to 2010s nostalgia for example). As long as we are continually mainlining and overdosing on nostalgia, we will always find a new source to tap from, scraping the bottom of the barrel for any bits of things we remember that can be used to sell us something. Eventually however, there needs to be a creation of something new, otherwise we won’t have anything to remember our current time for other than remembering other times. Fisher claims that the future, or at least our idea or perception of it, has disappeared. The forward momentum of culture has halted, and even begun to reverse, while time feels like it’s speeding up. These temporal shifts have caused a wave of melancholy to possess an entire generation, and in turn, they look to what is comfortable, nostalgia. As we see from what Vaporwave eventually turned into, it is really hard to fight that familiar, sedating, alluring commodification of nostalgia.
I personally believe another factor in our obsession with the past is a thick air of humiliation that permeates through so many aspects of modern culture that we recoil away from. From Hawk Tuah branded AI powered dating apps, to crypto gambling watermarks decorating inflammatory or recycled memes, to the incessant need to self exploit and self mythologize for digital gain. Like poet laureate Sky Ferreira put best, everything is embarrassing. There is a sense of shame that comes from the neo-American experience that all at once patronizes, infantilizes, and antagonizes the population. Additionally, that same experience preaches the virtues of shamelessness, both in behavior and in ruthless sycophantic thirst. All sides of the political spectrum blame different people for this humiliation felt, but it is ubiquitous, and the reaction to it is the same, trying to bury our heads in the past rather than face that sting of the present. Now more than ever we would rather dwell on and pursue what has already happened rather than think about what may lie ahead. We find comfort in the past’s ideas of the future and try to live there, because our own current vision of it is terrifying.
Eccojams/Oneohtrix Point Never
If there is a single project that could be considered the thing to directly birth Vaporwave, it would absolutely be Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never aka Chuck Person’s Eccojams. A 2010 collection of semi-named flips of both famous and obscure pop songs from the 60s through the 00s, chopped and warped into barely recognizable hypnotic sonic motifs. Lopatin had been putting out experimental noise based electronic projects since the mid 2000s, and eventually adopted the OPN moniker for his 2007 release Betrayed in the Octagon, a powerful blend of drone, ambient, and arpeggiated synths, initially (and importantly) released only via hand numbered cassette tapes. This DTC emphasis on physical media would be a staple of his early career, while simultaneously laying some of the groundwork for the hauntological values of future vaporwave. Additionally, much like William Basinski before him, the texture and physical imperfections of the tape were just as important to the sound of the project as the music itself, allowing the experience of listening to become dynamic, changing ever so slightly every time you rewound the tape. The next few years for Lopatin would be prolific, putting out a bevy of mini-projects, EPs, and collaborations, all again dropped via cassette. These projects again still focused more on complex MIDI synth compositions, hypnotizing ambient and desolate drone tracks. Some personal favorite EPs are Russian Mind and A Pact Between Strangers. However, fast forward to 2009, when a series of experiments would come to define both the sound, and the aesthetics of entire genres, forever.
On July 19th, 2009, he would upload a music video to his Youtube channel sunsetcorp simply titled angel, a 90 second glitchy, lo-fi, but shockingly emotional composition made up of jittering chops of Only Over You by Fleetwood Mac. The track fades in and out, morphing and distorting periodically to give the music a rich, experiential depth that draws you into the world it’s creating for you in real time. The slowed and cut-up vocal samples transform from their original bluesy swing into desperate, fading pleas for connection. Just as crucial as the music though, was the video itself, comprised of vintage commercials, vector graphics, and other grainy vignettes with a focus on 80s retrofuturism all blended into a nostalgic blast. There are a ton of similarities between earlier Plunderphonics and his style, deemed eccojams. For one, he encouraged others to try his motif of chopping and warping short samples to let the overlapping and clashing create the textures that define the piece. Also like Oswald before him, there was a statement of caution or at least consciousness towards the very things he was sampling, both in audio and visually. Lopatin has described his work as almost nightmarish, like the concentrated soundtrack to being barraged with info, ads, news, and more as a kid and adult. angel was what many consider to be the first true modern Vaporwave experience, followed up by similarly powerful tracks like the haunting, forboding Michael Jackson flip/tribute demerol, and what is potentially the first “big hit single” of proto-Vaporwave, nobody here. nobody here is a moody 2 minute microballad that feels like cruising through an empty city hours after the apocalypse, half hazily calming, half hauntingly desolate. The visual accompaniment is just as liminal feeling, nothing but a crushed, low res rainbow road and a characterless city skyline, apparently from a video game that is considered to be lost media. The audio and visual combination has a melancholic, hypnotizing effect that would come to define Vaporwave, unlocking feelings of both nostalgia for a time that never existed, and a sense of almost optimistic longing. It put the idea of Hauntology right in our faces.
I believe that this style of eccojam sampling is also making a statement about sincerity in our post-ironic world. On tracks like nobody here or the Jojo flipping a3, the chops that are sampled are less than a few seconds long, stretched and looped continuously to blow out the words they’re saying, analyzing them at almost a cellular level. The potent sincerity of the original songs maximized into a full on rush that blows out the irony receptors, even if viewed from a detached postmodern pedestal. I think part of the nostalgic appeal of the music and visuals is this palpable genuine sincerity. In our irony poisoned world, the idea of melodrama or emotions that aren’t slightly detached from ourselves in some way feels like a vacation. Like the burden of self-awareness can be lifted off out shoulders, if only for a few seconds.
The eccojam/sunsetcorp era was finalized in a special DVD exclusive release titled Memory Vague, which consists of a collection of original tracks once again set to the now signature sampled commercial visuals. This method of release once again embraced the power of physical media and the flourishes that come from the medium something is presented in, things that would be coopted and eventually lost by the generations of derivatives after. The last OPN project that I’d feel irresponsible if I didn’t mention comes in the form of what some consider the magnum opus of the proto-Vaporwave era, 2011’s Replica. Replica can be seen as the final form of the sunsetcorp/eccojam style, featuring some of the most otherworldly and densely atmospheric flips of samples so seemingly insignificant that I was genuinely floored when I heard them in context. Those samples are of course mixed with stellar synth work and beautiful original compositions, which tie everything together into a piece of music that fully embodies the soothing terror of Hauntology. A soundtrack to accompany The Sprawl à la William Gibson. There is something incredibly beautiful and endlessly inspiring to me about this album. Making gorgeous, rich art out of the runoff detritus of TV commercials feels both like a parallel and a blueprint like what our version of modern futurism can be. Crafting something shockingly new by recycling the waste.
Vaporwave and the Present
