Do you remember when FDR said “the only thing vaporwave has to fear is vaporwave itself?” Well, he spoke the truth. If a vaporwave artist produces vaporwave just to release it, we’ve only got more vaporwave. But if they try to challenge what the genre signifies, then it gets interesting, and for a listener, very rewarding, because the path opens up and we lose ourselves instead of arriving at our destination safe and secure. This kind of navigation happens on Magazine, an album released on Business Casual by HELLCOM.
I love it like I love vaporwave, which means I love how it transports me to places I want to metaphysically exist in, but only for a little while, like malls, internet cafes, endless Chinese cities and luxury apartments. But it does more than that. It exposes the material from which the music came from the same way some poets will question what it means to write poetry in a poem. It takes the motifs of vaporwave and throws them out the window, and then goes out that same window to pick up those motifs on the ground and bring them back in the building again, back in the window. It guides you along a narrow sidewalk of grid-like sameness and says, let’s go somewhere else. Essentially, it feels like HELLCOM—with great ease and soaring assuredness—fucks around with the typical symbols of vaporwave, embellishing the genre with new methods until the tag falls off, letting it wiggle and jiggle around and then, whoa, are we listening to a porn sample? Yes, we are.
Full of little worlds, little fighter jets of sound, sculptures in hidden war vessels and little screens of invisible vistas, Magazine definitely excites, as your gaze constantly adjusts to what you think you hear rushing up to your side and the ethereal, outer chaos coming from downtown. Go download it for free on Business Casual’s website, or better yet, make a donation. It comes with a PDF of a magazine that describes HELLCOM’S “vapor trip” philosophy. In brief:
Many vaporwave producers sought to integrate their work into pre existing bodies of knowledge. Vapor trip positions itself as a study of how and why knowledge is produced.”
More about: HELLCOM
