Almost as quickly as it emerged, vaporwave is disappearing into the ether. Only a few weeks ago, the mysterious entity behind the New Dreams Ltd. brand family (Laserdisc Visions, Macintosh Plus, 情報デスクVIRTUAL, etc.) announced the cessation of all Prism Corp. activities with the digital release of Sacred Tapestry’s Shader. And this past weekend saw the announcement that INTERNET CLUB is dissolving (or #EVOLVING) with the release of its final chapter in the form of a freely available album entitled FINAL TEARS (along with a brief audio postscript). It’s easily one of the finest INTERNET CLUB newsletters to date, expanding the familiar arsenal of looping and screwing techniques with unorthodox filter fuckery and aggressively jagged editing.
Perhaps vaporwave, true to its name, was never really here at all, but simply a consensual hallucination, a phenomenon that only partially actualized, remaining permanently lodged in the noumenal realms of the virtual. As James Parker noted in his review of VANISHING VISION, vaporwave was conceptually predicated on obsolescence from the start, so we shouldn’t be surprised to have reached the end so soon. And yet there is something melancholy about the dissolution of such a strangely beguiling microgenre. Something tells me we haven’t heard the last from this strange little corner of the underground, but it’s anyone’s guess what form vaporwave might take after undergoing transmutation. In the meantime, we’ll be obsessively listening to FINAL TEARS while keeping one ear to the ground of the internet.
Stream FINAL TEARS below and/or download the album here, courtesy of Ailanthus Recordings.
• INTERNET CLUB: http://internetclubdotcom.angelfire.com
• Ailanthus: http://ailanthusrecordings.bandcamp.com
