Vapor Vertebrae 09-2015 Part C

Cyberlust
Mirrors

<The Music Of The Now Age III>

Argentina's supreme Vaporwave producer Lola aka Cyberlust embraces the slower grooves of the genre and ameliorates them with vestiges of Funk. Then again, she is more than willed to admix synthetic cloudleds to the envisioned sceneries, thus creating an aerial-longitudinal wideness in technicolor. Mirrors, meanwhile, is something special simply because of the surroundings it appears in, namely fortune 500's The Music Of The Now Age III compilation! And Cyberlust succeeds big time, and right from the immediate get-go. The anacrusis already spawns centrifugal yet salubrious wind gusts that fly across multiple stacks of Oberheim synths. These devices won't stand still during the rest of this short vignette which leads to pure Vaporwave lands. Be it the slowed-down soulful vocals, the rising punctilio of the benthic crystal helictites or the reverberated classic drum kit: what you see is what you experience. This is coincidentally the final farewell of the label… it must not be the farewell of Cyberlust!

Twitter: @cyberlusttt

Jude Frankum
Perpetual Never-Ending

<Single>

British Ambient musician Jude Frankum is not swallowed by the mighty lure of Vaporwave, at least not at all costs, and especially not officially, but he is willed to let his ethereal compositions come quite close to the mighty V, reassuring everyone and especially so the humble reviewer of the entanglement between the two styles. Perpetual Never-Ending is such a diffeomorphed entity, one which takes the listener back to a time where even the grandfather genre Ambient didn't exist: to the 1930's. Jude ran an otherwise unmentioned folk song from Eastern Europe through a guitar amp thereby distorting it, because this is the now age. Delay and decay meet, mesh and depart in the interim as the producer creates a tawny aurora of distant malleated yearning, eldritch swamp memorabilia in b minor and a curious amalgamation of salubrious light and crestfallen solanums. The base of this track is antediluvian, understood. The means of creation, however, do fall into the vapor veils alright, and make an ecclesiastic syncytium out of a formerly ordinary borscht ballad. Good for us.

Twitter: @Jud3frankum

vladkorotnev
テープレコーダーという物

<テープレコーダーという物 LP>

Russian producer vladkorotnev aka AkR is an admirer of the analog sound and the subsequent analog mastering stage as he freely admits on his SoundCloud page. The above title テープレコーダーという物 is already giving a great hint in this regard and is the fifth song off the eponymous 12-track album which translates into a tape recorder. The aesthetics of tape hiss, chroma keys of the mind and that fuzzy hue are frequently revisited by bedroom producers all over the world, it's a collective heritage. テープレコーダーという物 has its own particular charm: launching with an honest-to-goodness lecture about that new thing called a tape recorder while flangered ophidian snake charmer melodies play over a reversely-played hythm section in the background, vladkorotnev's song eventually keeps this pace and brings the stylophonic device into the limelight where it plays hymnic tone sequences that are pestered by short disruptions, pauses, jitters, each of them purposefully injected. Once a Hammond organ appears at the end, the gregarious atmosphere triples. テープレコーダーという物 never reaches the future, it's like a time capsule viewed through a vapor zoetrope, but that's part of the experience, maybe even its very nucleus.

Twitter: @vladkorotnev 

MARCUS32X
Divine Canon

<Single>

"Samples name entry screen from Tekken Tag 1," the description of Divine Canon reads that is so magnanimously provided by Ireland's Artzie AM-illustrating, angelawaving MARCUS32X, and one could leave it at that, for it is true: what you hear is what you expect, and then some. It is the additional adjuvants that make the vignette of approximately 100 seconds a soothing one, especially so since Future Funk is replaced by an alkaloidal Glitch jitterfest and asbestus frequencies. While the whole song shuttles between the wideness of Mallsoft and the narrowness of chamber music – or better still: lift muzak – to equal parts, the amount of glitchy gluons increases; it harms and constitutes the AM radio frequency range at the same time. The laid-back hi-hat galore and chopped shrapnel of trembling shakers round off a diaphanous listening experience, somewhat blurry, but sharp and crisp when it comes to the higher frequency ranges. Divinity without sumptuous ethereality: only in Vaporwave!

Twitter: @marcus32x

STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ
Boundless Informant

<Cloud Expo Compilation>

Our man STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ from Aokigahara Forest is back at AmbientExotica, and the standing invitation turns into a standing ovation more often than not. The same applies to Boundless Informant, a Vaportrap hypanthium that encapsulates forest vibes and bosky elements as it should be. Originally featured on Lost Angles' Cloud Expo compilation, the artist decided to upload the track to his SoundCloud account too. Make no mistake though: this is a mercilessly amicable and benignant Vaportrap song, replacing the grinding sawtooth frequencies of the lower end with shorter beat droplets and even more liquedous water bubbles. Add a potentially pentatonic rising melody to the locale that is as vitreous and crystalline as it is prone to maintain a certain amount of mysticism and clandestinity, and you receive an emerald pond of chirality where the mirrored image doesn't match the reflection you'd expect. The song has a certain MIDI charm to it, but otherwise has a much higher plasticity that is almost tangible. One listen to this aural forest, and you won't forget the principal four-note melody for a long time. Way to go, STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ!

Twitter: @StaqqOverflo  @lostangleslabel

幽霊, TOGETHER!
S U G A R  F R E E

<Single>

With the final track in this Vapor Vertebrae roundup, an artist shows you the door, but this evokes entirely empathetic feeling this time, or what else to call the windchime-accentuated bass guitar granuloma of S U G A R  F R E E, a slow Funk peritoneum by 幽霊, TOGETHER! whose clicking claves and immediate lyrics create a dualism that is both aquatic, adiabatic and alatoric. Cerulean cascade coils coruscate in the distance, R'n'B backing vox augment the silkened lure of the lead singer. It is hard to pinpoint what 幽霊, TOGETHER! has changed apart from the clearly elasticized, smoothly floating new physiognomy of the track, but that's for the artist to know and the listener to explore. The artist is keen on letting Funk songs appear in a new light with only the most cautious edits and enhancements. Rest assured that S U G A R  F R E E, while being based on Grand Daddy I.U.'s classic, radiates phantom frequencies and formerly hidden entanglements aplenty. Plus the clear message of the original turns into a sultry massage for what it's worth (hint: a lot). 

Twitter: @GhostsTogether

Vaporwave Review 125: Vapor Vertebrae 09/2015 [Part C]. Originally published on Sep. 29, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.