I discovered Vaporwave seemingly by chance. I saw a WatchMojo video on Youtube titled "Top 10 Weirdest Music Genres", and the first genre mentioned was Vaporwave. Even WatchMojo prefaced its explanation of the genre with the phrase "some of these genres will be difficult to classify", and it seemed that the showing of the music and its associated visuals did more to explain Vaporwave than WatchMojo's actual explanation did. I didn't think much of it, aside from the fact that the music they played sounded a lot nicer than any of the other genres on that top ten list. Not more than a year later, I was listening to whichever albums I could find, attempting to educate myself on the music, its origins, and the community which had formed around it.
Vaporwave is, as described by its official reddit thread, "music optimized for abandoned malls". In its simplest form, it's an electronic music genre which originated on the internet, whose songs typically contain all or some of these elements (samples of old pop songs, lounge music, smooth jazz, 80's or 90's synths), and which is accompanied by a particular set of visual elements (shopping malls, Japanese text, neon colors, greek statuary, 90's computer graphics, corporate advertising, glitch art). It typically relies on composition techniques that take samples of other songs, chop them up, and pitch them dramatically up or down, to the point where the sample is entirely removed from its original context and becomes something entirely different.
It's aesthetics (or rather, A E S T H E T I C S) that primarily define the curious variety of music that falls under the umbrella of the Vaporwave genre. Some of the music is almost ambient in its smooth synth transitions and ghostly samples of crowds of people, and some of it is indistinguishable from either old commercials jingles or EDM (or both at the same time). However, no matter the context, style, or composition method of the music, there's uncanny unity in the visuals which accompany it. Glittering neon collages of pristine artificial environments combine with the garish color schemes of advertising from another time, both dystopian and blissfully transcendent. At times, this is satirical, meant to display the over-boiled nature of future consumerist society. At other times, it is nostalgic, reflecting on the idea of a future imagined by a previous generation that now can never be.
The internet-founded nature of the genre leads to some interesting idiosyncrasies demonstrated in the Vaporwave community itself. As an online community, its members are deeply connected to each other, but many have never met each other in person. Localized Vaporwave scenes are few and far between, making isolation the norm in the physical world, and deep familiarity the norm in the digital world. Beyond that, the youthfulness of many of its members demonstrates a curious disconnect between the world the Vaporwave community feels nostalgia for and the world in which they actually have lived. Nostalgia at this point becomes an escapist drug made to transport the user to another time and place of which they have no memory, but which their imagination has transformed into a paradise of sorts. The paradise illusion is quickly broken by the lack of physical artifacts from that imagined time, which may be part of the reason that Vaporwave artists work hard to produce vinyls and cassettes of their work. Thus, one could conceive of the world of Vaporwave as a spectacular illusion projected by the internet, a common vision of utopia elevated to ethereal transcendence because whether we can go there or not, the music of that place remains here with us, allowing us to visit whenever we wish.
As a filmmaker, I see this as a world entirely worthy of exploration and story.
The Broken Electric Dream project is Pantokrator Films' foray into the world of Vaporwave music and aesthetics. The project will include a larger body of work across genres and formats. I'd like to be able to connect and collaborate with music artists from within the community. If all goes according to plan, the project will include a number microfilms and small vignettes, with the final stage being a more substantial short film that acts both as its own story and a summary of the rest of the project. I'll be starting work on the project at the end of the month, and I'd like to finish the project by the end of the year.
For Pantokrator Films, 2020 will be wrought in shades of neon purple. Let's see what we accomplish!
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