Music Thread

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Augustus
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Re: Music Thread

Post by Augustus »

Will do!
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Sublevel 113
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Re: Music Thread

Post by Sublevel 113 »

Hey, Sunday!

How is life?

Never listened or heard of this type of music before.
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Augustus
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Re: Music Thread

Post by Augustus »

It's inspired by pop-culture from the 80s. The synth music and a odd feeling of nostalgia combined with a reality that never actually took place. The best example was when people started adding VHS textures to empty screens of the ''set'' of simpsons episode without any characters and make them feel endless. It's called Simpsonswave and it's beautiful. And weird.
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sundayfever
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Re: Music Thread

Post by sundayfever »

Sublevel 109 wrote:Hey, Sunday!

How is life?

Never listened or heard of this type of music before.
Hey Sub!

Im doing great. Currently at year 4 of uni, happily quarantined with my hobbies once again being a priority. :D
Thought of you guys after I saw a post on facebook from Mat's page. Love his recent drawings.

How are you doing?
all memories are lost in time...
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Jatsko
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Re: Music Thread

Post by Jatsko »

Hey sunday nice to hear from you. I've gotten into some bits of vaporwave over the last two years or so via the work of 猫 シ Corp. Started on News At 11 and then began to work through his early catalog a bit and have downloaded several of his albums. Palm Mall Mars and Ocean Beach are two of my favorites.

Yeah vaporwave is great; especially with News at 11 it gave me really good insight into the concept of nostalgia for a fading time period expressed through music. I've had a lot of fun proselytizing a bit to my friends and family about it :D That and visuals of empty shopping malls and anything else that deals with that post-consumer culture and 80s-90s media burnout is very intriguing.

I think it was o7 that shared News at 11 with me, but he also showed me Liberated from the World by Internet Club which is also a nifty thing.

I'm going to recommend that if you're interested in exploring more ways that the concept of nostalgia for past times that you may or may not have lived through, you may want to also check out the work of The Caretaker. The Everywhere at the End of Time project focuses on describing dementia using degrading and broken-up records from the '30s, and a lot of people get those similar nostalgia hits found in vaporwave.

Good to see some more fans out there :)
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sundayfever
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Re: Music Thread

Post by sundayfever »

Hi Jatsko!

News at 11 is a really interesting take on a history event. Im really not a big history lover, but I appreciate these artistic interpretations of real life events because thats much more approachable to me.

I suppose youve heard of t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 as well, now that youve mentioned 猫 シ Corp.? He is my favourite vaporwave artist. His style is just so special and ethereal.

I will definitely check out your recommendation on The Caretaker. It sounds amazing.

Also, given that the central focus of vaporwave is on 80s and 90s nostalgia experience, what is your take on the fact that a lot of listeners were children or not even born during that time?
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Jatsko
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Re: Music Thread

Post by Jatsko »

I think I've heard of t e l e p a t h but haven't as of yet looked into his work.

You ask a good question there at the end. For a bit of background, I'm 23 so I was 4 when 9/11 happened. My mom told me about what happened that day: basically I got picked up from preschool early. So yeah, basically no connection to the event and I definitely haven't been around long enough to experience the 90s and 00s on that deep a level or anything. However, I distinctly remember watching a LOT of The Weather Channel and Local on the 8s as a kid, so I can still channel (HA) the sort of warm familiar-ness of the music and visuals through that avenue if nothing else.

That being said, I don't know. I think on a certain level people who haven't lived through the time itself won't have the same fundamental connection to the music as it was originally presented as people who did. I got a really good example of this via my dad, because I was showing him a Corp album and one of the sample is ripped straight from a very famous Madonna song that he picked up on instantly. That connection cannot be really imitated I think from people who didn't grow up in that time period. Same if you were to ask a 70-or 80-year old about growing up in the 40s.

However, I still think determining "legitimacy" as to who can fully enjoy it or appreciate it is mostly a waste of time, because I support the freedom of people to attach meanings to stuff like these genres in any way they please. So I wouldn't call it like a false or lesser sense of appreciation if someone today likes vaporwave or The Caretaker while also not having grown up in the 80s-90s or 30s-40s respectively. What I'm more interested in is figuring out why people cite feelings of nostalgia for time periods and environments they've never been in the middle of. Is that a property of the music itself, like can it be broken down and analyzed from a technical melodic level or something? Is it the texture of the recording itself that scratches a memory from somewhere else in their early life? Does a melody sound familiar because it was repeated subconsciously in another song that stuck with you a few years back that you've consciously forgotten about? Are melodies throughout time much more unintentionally repetitive than people typically think? And then you could address it metaphysically if you cared to. (Which I tend not to do because I'm not serious about anything metaphysical in the traditional sense, in terms of religion or spirituality or whatnot. But still, it's fun to poke at sometimes; maybe the fact that we get nostalgia from it is due to a past consciousness or something, who knows) That sort of thing is better for conversation, I think, than trying to determine whether or not someone's appreciation is legit or not based on when and where they were born compared to when and where the media was produced in history. I don't know if that's what you were getting at with the question but that's the first area of discussion I thought of.

In general, if someone appreciates media due to being exposed to it in a context that's not the "traditional" context or whatever, I think that's completely fine.
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ENIHCAMBUS
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Re: Music Thread

Post by ENIHCAMBUS »

I was born in 1996 but pretty much grown listening to 80s/90s music, that was a good part of my childhood.
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sundayfever
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Re: Music Thread

Post by sundayfever »

I wasnt trying to criticise or question anyone's experience of the music or judge the value of their interpretation of it. I think people experience music in different ways, they all have different lives and memories, so its logical that they will react differently to the same things. That being said, I was wondering will they ultimately have similar feelings when hearing certain tunes, despite the fact that some of them have heard the original unprocessed tracks (e.g. Madonna song you mentioned) and some have not.

What Im getting at is, can vaporwave have the same meaning for younger listener like yourself and I, and older listeners who recognize the songs in their original forms? I think yes, on some level, because music is composed in such a manner that it evokes specific feelings the author intended it to. Then again, is age even a relevant component of music listening? Is vaporwave a special case scenario where it becomes more important in the previously mentioned sense? For example, you dont have very strong memories of 9/11 attacks, but your parents do. Will News at 11 have the same meaning for you and your parents? Doubtfully. However, you can still both appreciate it for its musical properties and enjoy it equally in that sense.

And then what about the fact that people who have never even been to America, let alone been its citizens, still find News at 11 striking? Does it even matter if the memory that the music is evoking is real or not? The intensity of feeling can be similar or the same. People all over the world enjoy vaporwave and mallsoft and yet, they have never seen a proper American mall or any part of that culture, at least in real life. For example, on the topic of mallsoft and the theme of stores appearing in vaporwave, I understand what type of feeling it must evoke in people who remember the experience of roaming through a well stocked store while listening to cheesy music that must've been playing on the radio, even though Ive really got that feeling as a kid since we had completely different music where I live!

I wonder what it would be like to have some Croatian songs Ive heard as a kid remixed into vaporwave tracks. Would I enjoy it more because it sounds more familiar? I will probably never know. But I think the important thing here is that many vaporwave artists use well known songs that were heard globally by a lot of people in all different countries because that means odds are that we've all heard many of these songs sometime in our lives, we just dont remember it.

Ultimately, we can discuss this for hours, and still not reach a conclusion with certainty. Its fun to talk about these kinds of things, but sometimes its better to just enjoy the music and not over-analyse it.

By the way, Ive taken a look at The Caretaker, and I have to say its glorious! Thank you for mentioning it.
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Jatsko
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Re: Music Thread

Post by Jatsko »

I agree that on a fundamental level people can have a shared experience of vaporwave even if they're not in touch with the cultural backgrounds specific to it. What you're pointing out about just the fact that people have shared experiences of going through stores with cheesy music universally is important, I think. Ultimately I'm sure that the same sort of thing works with familiar melodies; maybe we did hear actually hear the same song at one point, or maybe we heard a very similar melody in a completely different context and that's enough for our brains to sound the alarm.

Actually, I think there's a track on News at 11 that contains a quote that might relate to this:
Channel 4 wrote: I know that you have said that much of the music we listen to today echoes...some of the music that we heard, say, 100 years ago, or more.
That by itself seems to want to open up the conversation that these little triggers like familiar melodies or the feeling of going through a shopping mall get recycled much more often than we maybe think they do.

A video tribute to the album online shows that quote being lifted from a TV interview with Harry Belafonte: https://youtu.be/89G749GrtBQ?t=5883

Belafonte is talking about how the American music culture is deeply rooted in African/African-American music culture. So perhaps that relates somehow?

I don't know. I appreciate the conversation surrounding this music, if there's nothing else to take away from this. :D By the way, I forgot to mention before that I was peripherally aware of Chad Pennington's channel (through an apparel deal that I think he did with Corp) and I've started to check him out and he's got me interested in the TOWERS album, so I might check that out and then do a label binge on bandcamp or something.
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