Infant—Turning My Tongue Out

Turning My Tongue Out updates the transhumanist cool of Ghost In the Shell for 2020. It’s bio-organic suite where human voices are ever-present but distorted beyond reality, and notes shatter and fragment beneath trills of digital percussion.

At times it is starkly human—early track ‘child phalanx/apnea’ begins with the dislocating cry of a child at play, casting the relentless energy of kids into terrifying relief.  But moments like these are often supplemented with distance and inhumanity. Here, the track collapses into its ‘apnea’ section. A lumbering, mumbling instrumental ambience sputters in and out of existence until unprocessed human voices feel like a distant memory.

‘tracing myself’ travels with the opposite trajectory as in its tail end it becomes a spoken word piece. The words themselves are confessional, even a little trite, but their delivery and treatment adds intrigue. What’s ostensibly emotive personal information is rendered robotic and fractured—a contrast which, whether intentionally or not, engenders discussion on own fragmented, contradictory natures.

In fact, this theme seems to permeate the entire album. Is our desire for self-actualisation really the fear of a lack of self? Is identity something we just hang ourselves on; the umbrella we use to avoid describing ourselves as interlocking but only tenuously related collections of systems?

These vocals are, it’s worth stating, just one of many elements of Turning My Tongue Out which feel disintegrated and disparate. But it’s interesting how much emphasis artist Infant gives them. The result is something that feels like it was once a collection of ballads—but one that has been saved, deleted and recovered hundreds of times until it’s shot through with digital rot.  Like a Oneohtrix Point Never release, this feels like an relic of mass culture, dust-covered and dug up for future historians to try and piece together—our private moments seen through someone else’s eyes.

Turning My Tongue Out is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

haircuts for men—nothing special, nothing wonderful

There is a quintessential vaporwave sound, informed largely by Vektroid’s genre-defining Floral Shoppe, which non-listeners will forever associate with the genre. That nothing special, nothing wonderful (the new album from haircuts for men) fits this formula so snugly is not to its disservice. Rather, the album spools out like a virtuosic jazz cat playing standards.

The fundamentals—screeching saxes and looping, apathetic, and beat-driven funk riffs—are executed in great style here. Dreamy synth tones waver subtly below the surface of tracks, deepening their texture. Samples are selected and deployed well. The album keeps a bitter-sweet edge, rather than suffusing to sardonic, insufferable cynicism. Beats are littered with just enough frills, fills and flourishes to maintain interest for the duration of nothing special….

On tracks like ‘my wife is on tinder’, the combined effect of these elements is something that sounds like an MF DOOM beat. Funky, but a little jagged and misshapen. Rich, warm; shot through with the tension of balancing humanity and inhumanity. It also boasts a deep house feel which is continued throughout the album—something like Coil’s recent reissue of The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex, and many a porn soundtrack of yesteryear. The track is sensual but oddly disengaged (something you could say about a fair few vaporwave tracks). It benefits from an unusually powerful mix, which emphasises some massive kicks without losing high-end clarity. It’s not the shopping centre’s tinny ceiling speakers—it’s a boombox across the street.

Elsewhere, ‘sweatpants’ combines its samba beat with vast reggae dub bass—a pool of sampling material almost unheard of in a genre defined by 80s pop and funk—to magnificent effect. And some soaring, disconnected vocal samples carry the album’s house throughline for some internal consistency.

nothing special, nothing wonderful attempts to nullify its own existence with that title. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking or unfamiliar on the album. But if that’s what you came to vaporwave for, maybe you’re missing the point. As haircuts for men says, “everything is plundered.” But, as plundering goes, this is more of a casino heist than a drunken scrump.

nothing special, nothing wonderful is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Macintosh Plus—'Sick & Panic'

Ramona Andra Xavier has adopted many personas throughout her career. She is most prolific as Vektroid, but those with a more casual interest will know her as Macintosh Plus. In 2011, Xavier presented Floral Shoppe under this moniker, an album which enjoys status as the definitive work in the genre of vaporwave.

The world of 2011 was at the threshold of a general cultural shift. Apathy and self-deprecation are so entwined with millennial culture it’s hard to remember what came before. But the most successful meme of 2011 was Nyan Cat—something which, now, is unimaginably earnest. While baby Yoda has enjoyed some recent success, the current meme-sphere is almost invariably a more detached, surreal place now than that of a decade ago.

Floral Shoppe half-anticipated, half-engendered the swelling detachment of its time. In clear terms, it parodied the seductive shallowness of mass culture, the emptiness behind the face of everything. The supreme irony of Floral Shoppe is that its enduring appeal is the result of its assimilation into mass culture. Its aesthetic was cribbed by advertisers, bastardised, turned “cool”. Floral Shoppe became every bit as vapid and redundant as it was shooting for.

Millenials have since been supplanted by zoomers as the most prolific meme builders. Zoomers are considerably braver, more openly satirical and politically-charged in their humour. Occasionally some empty surrealism will slip through the net (anyone remember “they did surgery on a grape”?)—but young people now are generally more open, self-assured, and self-righteous. The rallying call of climate change helps, of course. Aside from in some virulent sects of neo-conservatism, the world is being repositioned as a good place—there's a fight, and it's worth fighting once again.

Xavier finds herself similarly emboldened on ‘Sick & Panic’—her first release as Macintosh Plus in nine years. It’s more forceful than anything before it, Autechre-like in its brutal stochasticity. 'Sick & Panic' is so ambitious, so stuffed with ideas, that anyone still saying vaporwave is “80s music but slowed down” looks even stupider than they did before.

The work is no longer diffuse, hazy, or rambling. It is combative and fervent. On ‘Sick & Panic’, Xavier takes more inspiration from her contemporaries PC Music, brostep, and the acousmatic experimentations of the 1970s than the Muzak of Floral Shoppe. To describe this work as vaporwave is both reductive and inaccurate—but what’s new there? Vaporwave is a label which, since its conception, has had artists labouring to shed it.

Instead, ‘Sick & Panic’ is work which exists outside of genre. It is indefinable because it responds to a society which we have yet to define. But that’s the thing with vaporwave—even when it was “80s music but slowed down”, it was at the cutting edge.

‘Sick & Panic’ is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

II nøthing II — higeki

The ungenerous among us would describe higeki as background music. And on paper, that's exactly what it is. Narcotic, downtempo beats lift spectral horn samples into life. Delicate, modal keyboard phrases sing from the back of the room. There's a sleepy easiness to it all.

But it's deceptively melodic and full of rich textures. The sheer craft and attention to detail makes you lean in; savour every second. That's what keeps you up. Figuring how washes of funk, vaportrap and trip-hop intertwine into a seamless whole.

And what a whole it is — this is a hauntological treat. Vaporwave which recalls the mysticism, melancholy, and wonder of Boards of Canada — not the arch jokiness that keeps outsiders standing in the rain. Listen to the echoes of Photek's 'Rings Around Saturn' in the weightless opener '疼痛'. There is a sincere artistic ambition here, often lacking in a movement which can fall foul of its own cynicism.

Wonderful ephemerality disintegrates this trio of tracks even as you listen. The dream upon waking, the hand curled around smoke. This music is substantial and insubstantial all at once. Like a daydream it's come and gone; it conjures itself from nothing, and on ending vanishes somewhere you cannot follow.

Like receiving a garbled fax from Boards of Canada, Black Moth Super Rainbow and Oneohtrix Point Never. Available to stream and purchase here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe