Vaporwave turned elevator music and Windows graphics into an internet art movement
Take smooth jazz or a forgotten 1980s pop hook, slow it to a crawl, drown it in reverb and loop it past the point of usefulness. Pair it with Greek statues, glitchy 1990s web graphics and anime stills. That recipe, born online in the early 2010s, is vaporwave, a genre declared dead almost from birth.
The name plays on vaporware, software announced with fanfare that never ships. Musically the style is built almost entirely from slowed samples and needs only basic production skills, though some artists, such as Dan Mason, compose from scratch. Critics have pointed to its fondness for corporate mood music, the stock soundtracks of infomercials and product demos, and academic Laura Glitsos notes that it reverses the usual priority by treating the visuals as inseparable from, even equal to, the sound. Artists often limit sources to the span between Japan's 1980s boom and the shocks of 2001, and some covers show the Twin Towers still standing.
Its roots lie in chillwave and hypnagogic pop, terms coined almost simultaneously in mid-2009. Daniel Lopatin, better known as Oneohtrix Point Never, released Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 in 2010, dressed up like the 1993 game Ecco the Dolphin, while James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual in 2011 mined the beeps of Skype, Windows XP and the Nintendo Wii. A Turntable.fm circle including Internet Club, the alias of Robin Burnett, who is credited with the name, gave the scene a home.
Ramona Langley's Floral Shoppe, issued under the alias Macintosh Plus in December 2011, is considered the first album to contain every core element of the genre. Through 2012 the style spread across Last.fm, Reddit, 4chan and Tumblr, with anonymous acts under pseudo-corporate names flooding Bandcamp. Blank Banshee's debut that September leaned towards trap and away from political undertones.
Offshoots multiplied: future funk, mallsoft, hardvapour and more, most since faded. Later came the viral Simpsonwave, renewed interest in Japanese city pop, and in the early 2020s so-called barber beats. Much of the public treats vaporwave as a joke, to the frustration of producers who want to be taken seriously, yet it continued to evolve and sell albums healthily well into the 2020s.
Source: Vaporwave
