VAPORWAVE
When [Daniel] Lopatin [who records as Oneohtrix Point Never] was still living in Boston, and working at a textbook-publishing company, he started making what he called “eccojams”—essentially, chopped-and-screwed remixes of treacly ballads, paired with videos that featured strange repeating imagery. The publishing gig was stultifying. “I was nothing,” he said when I asked what the job entailed. “I was a piece of furniture. I could just feel the life draining out of me.” Lopatin began uploading the videos to YouTube, and in 2010 he put out a hundred copies of “Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1” on cassette. “B4,” the most beloved of the eccojams, features a mesmeric sample of “The Lady in Red,” an awful song recorded by Chris de Burgh in 1986. On its own, de Burgh’s voice has a weird, cadaverous quality; when Lopatin loops an isolated bit from the chorus (“There’s nobody here!”) nineteen times in a little more than two minutes, it becomes a kind of surreal Mayday call, lonesome and eternal. The video features a reiterative graphic—a pulsing stretch of rainbow-colored highway—from Laser Grand Prix, an eighties arcade game. Watching it made me think of ancient Gregorian chants, and the droning, pentatonic laments of northern Greece, and certain Indian ragas, and, eventually, any sort of music that makes your vision blur, or gets the mind soft enough to see God.
Both the song and the video were assembled entirely from found material. Yet the release of “Eccojams” was also a Big Bang: it was the dawn of vaporwave, a genre of electronic music obsessed with aestheticizing relics of the recent past. Attempting to define vaporwave is sort of humiliating: like most Web-based phenomena, it deploys an idiosyncratic grammar that remains mostly inscrutable to anyone who has recently gone outside. The visuals tend to involve 3-D graphics, screen savers, dolphins, dead malls, VHS tapes, corporate training videos, bad graphic design, and Greco-Roman statues. The primary instruments are synthesizers and YouTube. There’s a kind of aching pathos to some of it. If you’ve ever wandered around a flea market and felt a peculiar pang after coming across, say, an inkjet printer from 2008, an old cable box, or an unopened Sony MiniDisc player, you know what I mean: the accelerated obsolescence of commercial technology can feel like a kind of memento mori. Nothing is relevant forever.
Lopatin is credited as one of vaporwave’s earliest practitioners; he is probably its inventor. The genre had an oddball moment in the sun in 2012, when Rihanna performed her hit “Diamonds” on “Saturday Night Live” before a projection of vaporwave-ish graphics: a weird neon peace sign, a ceramic bust, a checkerboard, a spinning globe, fractals, palm trees. The fact that “Diamonds”—a pop ballad—is not a vaporwave song, in any sense, doesn’t matter. Boundaries, systems, context: these are also relics of the past.
–Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, October 2, 2023
Daniel Lopatin photo by Pat Martin
another eye opens 