I'm just gonna throw this out here, without getting into too much details. I am not an "expert" on the topic, the man, by any means. There are a lot of people WAY more obsessed with Danel Lopatin, aka OPN than this. Seems like all my posts recently have to do with showcasing other people somehow! That's cool, however it may be true; if the inspiration is there I'm just gonna roll with it.
Th genre is a musical one but it's equally as much a 'visual aesthetic' as an auditory one and I'll cover that too, briefly. There's lots of great videos on the topic of #vaporwave explaining how the history and the evolution of the genre/style if you really want to delve in. The style came about around early 2010. Many people attribute it to Daniel (who predominantly is releasing music under the alias of Oneohtrix Point Never aka OPN. In August, 2010 Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 is released and people go crazy over it. It was like a casette tape full of songs that were just like short 4-8 bar slowed down and reverberated 1980-2000 tracks on loop.
Track listing[s] widely available from OPN's website, wikipedia, discogs etc... Since this was a casette and no track listing was given, the tracks were only known by the casette side and track no. hence the A1...etc. But the songs titles came to be interpreted by the fans and I have added that information in the table.
Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 by Chuck Person
GENRE: Vaporwave/Plunderphonics
| No. | Title (Sample(s)) | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | "A1 She's Waiting" "Africa" by Toto | 2:36 |
| 2 | "A2 Angel" (alternatively known as "Angel"[42]) ("Only Over You" by Fleetwood Mac) | 3:48 |
| 3 | "A3 Be Real" ("Too Little Too Late" by JoJo "Castles in the Sky" by Ian Van Dahl feat. Marsha) | 6:04 |
| 4 | "A4 Dreams" (alternatively known as "Demerol"[43]) ("Morphine" by Michael Jackson) | 1:55 |
| 5 | "A5 The Door" ("Everybody's Been Burned" by the Byrds) | 2:51 |
| 6 | "A6 Alone" ("Lonely" by Janet Jackson) | 2:46 |
| 7 | "A7 Horsemen" ("The Four Horsemen" by Aphrodite's Child) | 2:17 |
| 8 | "A8 Make U Mine" ("My Love Is Waiting" by Marvin Gaye "Hearsay" by Alexander O'Neal) | 4:46 |
| 9 | "B1 Information" ("Sweet Little Mystery" by John Martyn "Don't Give Up" by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush) | 4:33 |
| 10 | "B2 Letters" ("Love T.K.O." by Teddy Pendergrass "Gypsy" by Fleetwood Mac) | 4:36 |
| 11 | "B3 Never Been Easy" ("Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty "Separate Lives" by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin) | 4:16 |
| 12 | "B4 Let Her Go" (alternatively known as "Nobody Here"[44]) ("The Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh) | 2:10 |
| 13 | "B5 Lightning Strikes" ("Me Against the World" by 2Pac) | 2:51 |
| 14 | "B6 One More Year" ("These Dreams" by Heart) | 2:23 |
| 15 | "B7 Nobody Here" ("Letter from Spain" by Electric Light Orchestra "Catch and Don't Look Back" by Womack & Womack "Woman in Chains" by Tears for Fears) | 4:08 |
Total length: 52:07
Admittedly, it's hard to say what is good about this release; Not really saying it's bad, but it's just hard to say what is good about it. To some people it would almost seem like their cd player is just skipping and he took that an turned it into a track and added reverb and called it a day. Lots of people saying, I could have done that! But the thing is - he did. And it was a sort of 'exercise' for him, these ECCOJAMS as they came to be known. Just short 4-8 or so bar loops of popular or not so popular tracks, anything from electronica to elevator music to 1970s soul etc... It was about taking a loop of anything and turning that into a track and it is this type of experimentation of adding reverb/delays/filters etc and seeing what one can come up with. I guess this is the idea behind the term coined in 1985 by the composer John Oswald in Plunderphonics: "a music genre in which tracks are constructed by sampling recognizable musical works." In an interview Daniel (who if it wasn't clear already is highly, highly revered by many fans) even recommended this as a way for people to create their own works, even if it was highly derivative.
Originally a casette-only release, whom Daniel allegedly encouraged his fans to make copies of and distribute. The original castte is valued now well over $300-400 for an original copy of the release. "Chuck Person" a one-time moniker adopted by Daniel, the casette artwork and release title referenced the ECCO the Dolphin imagery from the 90s Sega Videogame:
Much of this release both sonically and visually set the stage for vaporwave, a genre heavy on the faded nostalgia of the 1990s, when we had grown up on and immersed in with the whole corporate culture mediated society, the glitz and glamor, miami, luxury, the neon lights, city skylines, vhs, television, commercials.. now that I am writing about it I'm finding it quite difficult to descibe vaporwave without resorting to making videos about it. The vaporwave genre, like Chuck Persons Eccojams, not surprisingly since it was one of the defining 'releases' of the genre, is a mishmash of broken dreams, corporate idealism, the 'fakeness' or 'hollowness' of american life, the lack of meaning, direction experienced by many today. We grew up on the idea of what was supposed to be the american dream, but somwehere along the line working corporate jobs, living just to make ends meet, instead leaving people feeling devoid of meaning in what to many already was a meaningless universe, life, existence etc. Maybe the american dream did have meaning one day, a white picket fence and 2.5 children in the perfect suburban neighborhood, but somewhere along the line the dream seems to have blurred into a false glimmer or promise, faded and now we we are just running on fumes, the empty promises and surrogate dreams of corporate america, hollywood, disney, pepsi, coca-cola, sony, sega, nintendo, wal-mart, the feel-good jingles of corporatism always trying to sell you something. The liminal spaces left behind with the recession of americas malls and retail spaces echoed the empty sentiments within with the now faded neon-colours of the flashy 1980s/1990's futurism leaving people with a sort of comfort and yearning for those days just as the internet was really starting to take hold of our attention. Pastel tones would often come to predominate the color schemes of vaporwave releases, often reaching for Palm Trees, Beaches, Clear Turquoise waters, Roman and Greek Busts. Vaporwave visually and sonically was a mishmash of all of this, the depleted hopes and dreams of generation xyz'ers. Rebranded FIJI visuals(Actually the FIJI Waterbottle itself) would often be a common theme:
Here is one of Daniels more recent works under the OPN
For now I will leave on that note, perhaps there will be a part two vaporwave post because the genre has occupied quite a bit of my listening space over the past few years but yeah. Let me know what you think of these tracks, what are your impressions, good or bad I want to know!
