come discuss something on /mu/ with me real quick

[Corpsey]

What is vaporwave

 

[thirdform]

dunno why other_life thinks we allow people to listen to dubstep. ive talked loads about what i admire about vapourwave but the problem for me is that the music itself gets on my nerves mainly becasue of the annoying channel surfing thing it does can you stop changing the channel please i was just getting into that

As a dubstep fan I find your antipathy to dubstep interesting. Cos I get it. Like, compared to other forms of music I dislike I really do get why you hate its surly, anhedonic vibe.

And yet i can't not but feel that todays age is an anhedonic age. so much of our daily life is geared to pleasure maximisation and dopamine hits that eventually you become numb to it.

There's literally no pleasure in this, not even the punishing psychedelic pleasures of hard techno. Now a night of this would be too much to take but this is where I disagree with @blissblogger - not all things one can be interested in (musically) have to be pleasurable.

 

[luka]

well im hardly going to get into it at this stage am i. but also you have to factor in historical context and the importance of partisanship in music fandom.

 

[thirdform]

well im hardly going to get into it at this stage am i. but also you have to factor in historical context and the importance of partisanship in music fandom.

Sure, and i have no real need to convert you to dubstep, unlike gabba.
But it's kind of interesting how in some ways the criticisms nailed against dubstep are nostalgic for an age when music could take more liberties at being euphoric.

 

[luka]

probably but as i say for me its tied to its historical context and im not really interested in untethering it for a repappraisal.

Listen to This Listening Club

If you want to give me your best gabba song of all time I will play it the whole way through for you @thirdform because I value our friendship. No. He needs to learn restraint. One gabba song. tonight we are all going to listen to this forensically, with passion and minute focus, again...

www.dissensus.com

 

[thirdform]

like it's not as if todays hyperpop/pc music is qualitatively hugely different from 90s eurodance/dance pop. It's just now reviving those aesthetics in a pastiche, cute way which is horrifying, in a way jungle revival is not.

 

[luka]

yeah i know its all aqua

 

[thirdform]

yeah i know its all aqua

I mean a lot of this vapourwave stuff is that isn't it, except for the 80s.

What changed in our collective psyche from 1997-2002?

 

[luka]

a lot of vapourwave is that early 90s period that seems like the 80s in retrospect because its not sufficiently differentiated from what preceded it. but broadly speaking its obsessed with being inside the screen and a paticualr variety of haunting disembodied alienation

 

[thirdform]

1997 for @chava

Aqua - Barbie Girl (Official Music Video)

REMASTERED IN HD! CELEBRATING ONE BILLION VIEWS!!Official Music Video for Barbie Girl performed by Aqua. Listen to “Barbie Girl ” here: https://aqua.lnk.to/B...

www.youtube.com

 

[luka]

It's Deckard falling in love with a replicant. This was the video that clued me in, or crystallised a perception
Oneohtrix Point Never - Nobody Here [1:06:07 Edit…:

In that it nailed the feeling of absence. None of this is new of course but I do think it's where we we've ended up. Vapourwave doesn't interest me as music but as diagnosis I do think it's perspicacious. I get the same feeling from the Haim song I'm always referencing. All the pastiche threads I try and fail to get off the ground are really about the same thing.

The replica that is so real you can fall in love with it, the robot which simulates feelings so perfectly you believe it really cares for you.

And I think it's a response to this nonspace of the Internet

Which is why there's all these images taken from early computer games because those were the early nonspaces or simulated spaces that we were immersed in. And that feeling of immersion and hollow yearning they conjure up is so familiar

You're missing the point

It's a sophisticated and subtle point so that's understandable

No, that's not it. Keep trying.

 

[thirdform]

a lot of vapourwave is that early 90s period that seems like the 80s in retrospect because its not sufficiently differentiated from what preceded it. but broadly speaking its obsessed with being inside the screen and a paticualr variety of haunting disembodied alienation

this is really haunting. 90s trance copied this and took all the refractions out of it. suddenly it no longer became strange but all too familiar.

 

[luka]

Virtual environments virtual rewards

 

[luka]

Dematerialisation.

And you can see this also across the alt right in tge way history is used. If you read the comments beneath Mongolian throat singing videos or Altaic music videos, a harking back to the great nomadic tribes of central Asia. The thunder of massed hooves and the clouds of disturbed dust.

www.dissensus.com

Vapourwave is definitely relevant to this thread and as I've said before it seems significant in as much as it is the first real attempt to consciously evoke the affects and sensations of a life lived on computers. The hollowness in the stomach. The wired disembodied feel. Hooked up. The weightlessness. The background anxiety. They evoke a time when the illusion was less seamless, a pixellated space, but it only looks naive in retrospect, the illusion was no less absorbing and total then. You still enter inside the space.

Ive always read the classical busts more as corporate kitsch than pre industrial yearning.

the default windows xp desktop

View attachment 1352

the apple desktops are all mountains and nature and all that too

Yes those are great. Almost trolling given its mostly office workers who have to stare at those hyper real pastures

Like those billboards of tropical beaches they put on the walls of the tube tunnels to taunt commuters.

that vaporwave aesthetic of making things look like windows 95 is harking back to when computers were quite blocky and clunky. there was a sense of architecture and weight to their interfaces.

 

[luka]

it's also about the specific realm of affect conjured up by computer games and the spaces they create

im not sure. theres something about not being able to take your body with you that i think is important

there's probably something in that. but it misses the gnawing sense of hollowness that digital spaces give you. television can too. and some sorts of music. and some

 

[luka]

it's also about the specific realm of affect conjured up by computer games and the spaces they creat

there's something about the spaces themselves and how they act on us, the states they engender. my eye has always been very attracted to the sloping entrances to underground carparks. there is something about the formal rigour, the smootheness and regularity of poured concrete, the strange murky yellow light. a geometric cave.

emptying them of people emphasises what is inhuman about them. lifeless moons. extinct planets. hotel carpets. magnolia paint. how corporate space is desinged to be radically impersonal. even the prints on the walls are a kind of alien anti-art. nothing is allowed to match up with any known personality type or preference.

what is distinct about the world we have created is that it is not for people. it is for people in the abstract. Ballard in Shepperton was savouring these sensations.

it correlates on the one hand to alienation, but on the other hand to a radical kind of freedom. the freedom from affect. the freedom from personality.

naked in your Travelodge room, a huge weight lifted from your shoulders, no identity, no history, no self.

and this is wehere it links to vapourwave and finding affect in the affectless. in the synthetic corporate jingles that correlate with no known emotional state, that serve no human need.

in an office after dark and banks of computers displaying the same screensaver

computer spaces are evocative in some of the same ways and are information poor in the same way. there's no grain. they aren't spaces that repay study. you can't zoom in. you can't trace their history. they don't have a story.

the photographs on the wall are randomly aquired, no one knows who that is staring out of the frame, or if they even existed. the books were not collected by anyone, don't represent a set of interest. they're just props.

none of the things you are looking at function as clues. they will not yield any information.

To disappear, arrive in another place, with no name and no past. To say, hello, my name is Anthony, I work in auto insurance. All sins deleted. Lime soda at the bar of a Holiday Inn, at the edge of the orbital road.

 

[luka]

smoothness in general has been reappraised over the last decade or two. one of those reversals in taste which are enacted every once in a while.

against an expressionist or romantic angst

yacht rock, japanese city pop, vapourwave etc

nothing captures alienation under capitalism like smoothness

THIS ALSO RELATES TO GREEK SCULPTURE WHERE FACES ARE PLACID SMOOTH AND NO FURROW MARS THE BROW THE MOUTH IS NOT TWISTED INTO SUFFERING GRIMACE

seduction by glossy image and so on.

 

[luka]

affectlessness produces its own disquieting affect

it's like when you talk to a company representative and can't forge any human connection. they use the guidebook and company policy to short circuit any possibility of rapport.

and of course smile as they do so. this is the kind of experience smoothness soundtracks.

smoothness is a kind of conspiracy of repression

the violence takes place off-screen

View attachment 3775

 

[luka]

the best body of writing on low resolution worlds and what it's like to live in them but no, nothings ever good enough! fuarkin ell

 

[Corpsey]

Nobody will ever read your gigantic posts quoting yourself 50 times

You need to write a structured essay like craner, which again nobody will read