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
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.
yeah i know its all aqua
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.
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
Virtual environments virtual rewards
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.
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
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.
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
THIS ALSO RELATES TO GREEK SCULPTURE WHERE FACES ARE PLACID SMOOTH AND NO FURROW MARS THE BROW THE MOUTH IS NOT TWISTED INTO SUFFERING GRIMACEnothing captures alienation under capitalism like smoothness
seduction by glossy image and so on.
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