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
