The current musical canon that my adult brain has been marinating in is very different from the last two. The first was a product of happenstance - the library of idle hands and a CD-ROM drive. The next was a product of following what I felt was a succession of "real" music: classic rock, modern rock, and then modern progressive metal, music that I found to have very pure and elevated qualities. That was where I was as a teenager.
Then something very noteworthy happened. I found something called Vaporwave. This was antithetical to every rule I thought music had and every raison d'etre that I had for each album in my collection. Vaporwave was, in the traditional sense, I think, unmusickable music - it cannot be performed, it cannot be shared by sitting next to someone in a room and judging their facial expression. It was intentionally detached from how music typically conveys emotion. The sounds were unnatural, there was a cheapness to the presentation and intended discovery process.
This was all a preamble to my thoughts on electronic music, internet music, vaporwave and its myriad cousin -waves, house music, noise music, and a lot of what occupies my ears today. Will formulate part 2 of this post soon.Will formulate part 2 of this post soon.
soon
Published on July 17, 2024
I feel compelled to start this post by talking about something from an old edutainment game from my childhood. I couldn't find a screenshot, and I couldn't be fucked to set up an XP VM, so pardon me for relying on text to describe something obligatorily visual. This was in Stuart Little in Wordland, released by ThoughtMakers in 2002.
A chunky 3D bee flies on screen, in front of what can only be described as a '90sly-cartoonish collection of Rorschach patterns. "Can you see a sound?" the voice asks. The sound of baby lambs plays. My eyes are drawn to one of the patterns, baby-pink tufts of something on the grass. I click on that one, and then a tiny circle, like the one that hops over words in old sing-along videos, traces the outline of the tufts from left to right. Each clowlick in a tuft makes it hop, in sync with the peak in the a-a-a-a-a of the braying.
I don't remember the other sounds, but I vaguely can make out some of the themes. Metallic spirals for brass sounds. Spiky shapes for staccato ones. It's a very abstract "game" and yet I can't imagine seeing it today, even with all the fuss about sensory learning. I don't know if the space exists for such a thing to be made now. But this is not today's topic.
I actually just went down a rabbit hole to find a disk image online, as I remember being able to browse the game files. Behold, a selection, as I see them for the first time in almost two decades, and even the bee's idle animation, for your viewing pleasure:
The panels are dated around September and October 2001, and the bee's cycle is dated June of 1999. God I miss digging through assets!
I think you can see why this stuck in my head. This is a step away from the monotonous fare of the middling edutainment stuff of the time, this wasn't school questions, it was quite literally a question you'd never been asked before. Made possible thanks to this new exciting age of multimedia. May it last forever.
Well, the music I want to talk about today has a special look too. I'm a pretty visual person, so even music and sounds have to conjure some kind of image in my mind. Here's the image:
Not very exciting stuff, is it?
Today's post is about one out of an infinite musical niches from the internet. I came across something called Vaporwave, like many others did, as more of a meme than anything. I listened to a bit of it, sometimes as a joke, sometimes to hear some interesting sounds. Looking back, I distinctly remember some of the explainer videos I watched missing the point, in retrospect. I gave a lot of tracks a serious listen eventually, looking at this crunchy audio directly in the eye, putting aside the memetic nature of it, putting aside my distaste for overly sampled music, putting aside a lot of presuppositions about where music ought to come from. This was not as raw or emotional as people playing their hearts out on their instruments, cutting up feelings or a story into lyrics. This was different.
There are a few competing definitions of Vaporwave out there. I personally think defining it is as abstract as defining Jazz! Instead of trying to give a short explanation of it musically, I'll give a short description of what it is to me, sonically. Otherworldly memories of familiar music. Musical emotion told not through lyrics and melody, but through soundscapes of distorted instrumentation and voices. Vocals are broken up and become percussion, melodies are reshaped to form backgrounds, basslines are recontextualized into leads. Small flourishes become refrains.
French House music from the early aughts was a manipulation of song to distill out entrainment, to use it to create an ebb and flow of energy in an inebriated crowd, to create a bubble of dynamic dialogue between the music and the dancer. Vaporwave is an opposite manipulation, a distillation of loss, of paradoxical stillness, and its contrast with the superficiality that makes up most of the sound. The distorted vocals are unnerving when you first hear them, because this is not music where the vocals are vocals for the most part. They're another out of tune instrument, in an out of tune world. Then again, a lot of Vaporwave does hold onto the vocals of the music it cannibalizes, and uses it at face value - a lot of it is even danceable! It's a very heterodox (don't hit me) musical movement (don't hit me!).
I eventually settled on a favorite playlist on YouTube early on. The thumbnail is of an old racing game (Out Run, as I came to learn). Vaporwave / Chillwave - Ultimate Mix is not the selection that many purists (and boy are there purists) would choose as an entry point. Many of the songs in there are categorically not Vaporwave. But I can take this selection and see it as an accessible, if dated, entry point to a specific musical corner of the internet. Saint Pepsi, HOME, Macintosh Plus/Vektroid, Lazerhawk, Kodak Cameo are all on here - this was the first place I'd seen some of these names, which I'd eventually seek out as an indicator of quality when seeking new music. I'd be pleased to listen to a playlist, and check the tracklist when a bit of music stands out to me, and find that the song I'm looking for is by a familiar name. In this collection is Vector Graphics - DESTINE, literally just slowed, unrelated tracks from Mike Francis and Paul Hardcastle, cutting between each other with brief flashes of static. But glued together, presented as a whole, it tells a short story. It has some interesting sounds. It makes you look into the distance as an interesting instrumental interlude goes on. Isn't this the purpose of music?
For a more orthodox recommendation, I'd suggest the Prose ザ•リズム EP by Literature. I think the venerable Vaporwave Essentials Ultra guide has it under Future Funk (my favorite subgenre - very bouncy and fun!). The guide can still be found online, thankfully. The EP itself is pretty short, and the final few tracks are the same song remixed by a few different folks, including マクロス MACROSS 82-99, with each one a different take on the same idea from different vapory perspectives. It's not for everyone, but I promise it's interesting!
Within a year of looking into this stuff and getting used to digesting it, I had a new musical canon in my head, wholly distinct from what I was listening to regularly only a year or two earlier. And I very much did (and kind of still do) look at it in terms of separate canons. There was Arabic music, it existed in a world of its own. There was a canon of pop culture music, and a canon of Real (Real-western) Music - and while this was pretentious, it came with the important caveat that good enough pop culture music could find itself reified into Real Music. Religious music was separate. Chants from the hard work in camps were separate. My old interest in "traditional" electronic music was still there, and still separate. But now this new canon was here. Weird internet music. And this is what I want to write about.
Isn't this the purpose of music?
Well, this is the part that's hard to analyze at all. I'm sure there's a lot of literature out there about exactly this, and the little that's found its way to me through cultural osmosis is enough to make me think about things when I should be enjoying the here and now of music.
One thing that's stuck with me, that I've written a fair bit about in Part 1, is musicking. The action of doing music, be it performing, practicing, and especially sharing moments with others. In a previous era, giving this a word on its own would have been preposterous. But the experience of music has been widened significantly with the creation of recording technology, mostly for the better of course. But it has cleaved apart experiencing music and musicking completely. I'm sure when gramophones started proliferating, a small number of people took offense to the thought of music being taken out of the hands of musicians. The thought of a song existing when it is not literally being sung.
I do not digress. What perplexes me about my canon of weird internet music, as my exploration and taste continued beyond Vaporwave and to its myriad sister -waves, is that all of it is totally unmusickable. I cannot do this music. I had spent maybe two or three years listening to not much else; then when I had an unexpected evening a few years back with a dear friend and a guitar, for the first time in years, I did not have anything new I wanted to play. I had not been singing for a long time either, and my voice was not in a good state. I found myself, musically, at a loss for words, and quite annoyingly, tried to make do with simpler songs that weren't right for the moment. An annoying memory, particularly in the context of these musical moments being fewer and farther between than ever. Particularly given where that memory stands in each of our musical journeys. Ok, now I digress.
Two+ weeks pass between writing sessions
The story of weird internet music, for me, weaves into a lot of the tech-doomerism that I'm experiencing these days. Every week there is a new identity verification scheme, something new that's no longer accessible via VPN. The inescapable horror of people around me, people I work with, people I love - so many people just abdicating their better judgment because a piece of software can create authoritative-sounding statements. I feel compelled to compare it to looking into a bonfire or a furnace at an irresponsible distance, face painfully contorted into a twitching squint, overwhelming heat feeling like a taste of death radiating through the air into my skin. Technology was, to me, a prophesized liberator, a replacement to petty politics. Cyberspace as a liberator as a concept now looks to me like those old sci-fi drawings of rocket-propelled Art Deco trains.
First: Why does this canon of music look like a command line window for me?
I live in Lebanon. The internet, put simply, is catastrophically shit. And I found myself putting on a playlist to listen to on YouTube, and the sound quality noticeably dropping (this is for crunchy, low-fidelity sounds. that bad.). Sometimes the internet went out entirely while I needed some weird internet music to keep my ears busy as I studied. And I was at a phase in my education where I had to sit my ass down and study, something I just about got by without doing at school level.
Enter youtube-dl. Within weeks of getting into it, I had automations set up to just add playlist videos on YouTube to watchlists on the site, and they'd just get archived as audio files in full quality on my computer. I just went ham, ripping this stuff left and right on my university's comparatively excellent network. I had a grand old time. And I listened to them offline.
So yes, for a few hours per week, as I diligently hit the books (the books hit back pretty hard), I could be found around my university, tabbing over from textbooks to an ugly PowerShell terminal for about a second to make sure the downloads were still running.
A lot of Chillwave, a lot of Lo-Fi stuff. HOME is probably one of the musical artists I now respect the most. A lot of it wasn't quite relaxing either, there were some pretty out there playlists by ThePrimeThanatos with some super aggressive heart pounding electronic music by the likes of Volkor X. My favorite selector must have been SoulSearchAndDestroy, but there were so many others: Asthenic, the Bootleg Boy, Neotic, the fucking Jazz Hop Cafe, Odysseus, and later channels like Kiffen Beats. I think my archive ballooned from five or six repeat playlists to 10 or 20 GB within the first few weeks.
There were bits I remembered hearing that I couldn't find in my archive, and I found myself spending days searching for playlists that had been taken down. Now, many of the files I still listen to regularly offline have been removed from YouTube, some of these had tens of millions of views, and others had only a few thousand. Others have bits muted on the site now, likely due to copyright issues. It's kind of jarring to see a familiar thumbnail while on the site now, for a playlist I must have heard a few dozen times in all these years, and to have one or two songs just excised from a familiar flow of beats.
And this weird tug of war between the archive and the supposedly calming loops that my cursed brain decided to turn into earworms had dimensions. I would spend half an hour hunting for a sound that I could hear clearly in my mind's ear but I needed to know the name of, or the playlist for its context, or who made it.
I found myself hunting for playlists I knew I liked but didn't archive in time: these things were getting taken down in real time! The most important ones were Morning Coffee, once again by SoulSearchAndDestroy, and one of the numbered Buddha Beatz playlists (14?), by Azul Horizon (a super different playlist to anything I've mentioned here - this one was just damn good hip hop). I think I got the tracklists back from Internet Archive pages of the YouTube uploads.
To this day, I will put on Morning Coffee when I know I feel like shit on a morning I need to focus in. The opening track is all lighthearted, the whole thing is half an hour long and just makes me feel 1% more comfortable, more ready to face the day. I was heartbroken when it disappeared, and it just happened that someone had shamelessly reuploaded it. I think it's scummy to do that kind of thing on YouTube, given that this reupload was dated well before the takedown, but hey. Piracy is archival after all. I have my playlist back. It's fucking great.
YouTube is a problem. Its size is a problem. The sheer difficulty for a viable alternative to even exist is a big, big problem. But at least during those few years, their music recommendation algorithm was stellar. I think it's still pretty damn good.
Second: How does this factor into tech-nihilism? Specifically? Copyright issues are tech-adjacent in the content age but are not a cause for listless philosophizing on technology.
Well, if you wanted to download a few AMVs of your favorite songs in 2011, you downloaded a little program called RealPlayer. A popup would show from the corner of every YouTube video, and most videos on the web, and you could just click one command and have the video on your computer. Granted, it was a proprietary, shitty file format. But it was that easy.
When I first started using youtube-dl (now yt-dlp), it was pretty straightforward. You punch in a link, or a list of links, and some parameters, and your terminal fills up with the logs that betray all the internal hoops that need to be jumped through to download a video from that one site. Or audio, in my case. These days I have much less use for this stuff, since I don't really download playlists from there directly as much. However, any time I do need to do so, it's much harder.
For one, I no longer use a direct connection, I'm almost always on a VPN. There are reasons for this, some paranoia, some practical, but I don't have to explain myself. YouTube, much like the internet at large, has been pretty strict in blocking VPN users, at least those that aren't logged in. Sure, I can log in on my browser, and pass the session cookie to the downloader, but I don't want my account to be flagged by downloading dozens of hour-long videos in one hour either, you know? I'm actually not completely sure if it even lets you download with my network settings at all any more. I probably need to get back into batch downloading, just to feel a tiny bit of that reasonable control again, but I don't know.
Part of why this blocking has gotten so extreme is that any piece of "content" (my favorite word of course) has become mineable to train machine-generated "content" extruding models. That's why there's so many Cloudflare/Anubis/Haphash checks now, that's why you get hounded to log in on sites you browsed anonymously five years ago. For smaller sites, that's innocuous, they're "only" protecting themselves from having their servers be pummeled by the chatbot companies' relentless crawlers. For the giants, it's because they want to sell this data or train models internally on it, a bit less innocent. So any fun you wanted to have with the data, very often your data, even any legitimate archival work, that's no longer an option.
I won't rewatch it now, but I think most people's introduction to a similar idea was Tom Scott's landmark video "This Video Has X Views". This isn't the first wave of things (APIs) getting closed off as interoperability ceased to be this utopian necessity for online services, Web 2.0 has been getting strangled for well over a decade at this point. But this "AI" thing we're living through is unprecedented, not because it's making us smarter (it's not) but because it's poisoning the well of information - even the clean data is harder to access because of it.
Mandatory tech-nihilism break over, back to the music.
Over time, my interest in Vapowave and its cousins has gradually moved over to one singular adjacent "genre": Barber Beats. A lot of people consider Barber Beats to be a direct descendant to Vaporwave, and the controversy of this being pretty blatantly plundered music feels stronger than ever. Barber Beats music is much closer to the songs it samples, often with more subtle reworking. The samples are usually uncredited. The artwork tends to be very garish, graffiti or zine-inspired art, sometimes crude, sometimes political (the cool kind mostly). Some of it can be found freely published to download by those who make it, others are sold outright on Bandcamp, which raises some eyebrows. It's kept me sane in a corporate hell routine though, so I'll take it. Macroblank, slowerpace 音楽, Modest By Default, the legendary Haircuts for Men, just a few names of the good stuff I pump into my ears every week.
Mostly, it's laid-back or brooding music, that feels like it always marches forward. It's distinctly atmospheric: if you consider Lo-Fi Hip-Hop a way to spoonfeed yourself the vibe of a cafe in an active-but-not-crowded city street, I consider Barber Beats its less Rockwellian bastard cousin: the entrainment and unrelenting march of urban manual labor, the grind of warehouses, barbershops, food service, bus driving, with a little sprinkle of the banality of clerical work. And while some whimsy is still there, it's really not the same. I spent an hour looking for and stitching together some album art (and playlist video thumbnails) for both spheres of music, and I think the art itself represents the divide quite clearly:
The colors, the themes, the break from pop culture and surface level urban glamor to what I think is a more direct confrontation about what it means to feel, and to do what is right. The political undercurrent of a lot of the art and distribution of Barber Beats is undeniable - and to me it's much more meaningful than a simple "Hey, consumerism sucks right? Don't we all miss the visual arts aesthetics of the previous quarter century?". Yes we still have this in the world of Barber Beats, such as the bottom left image (a screen grab from Macroblank's Void Television Mix visualizer, made by the amazing @iwantmycctv), but the purpose feels different. It's less of the late-millenial remixing of '90s culture, and it feels much more like genuine yearning for lower-fidelity media, for the crudeness of paste-up, the obligate abrasiveness of the stencil poster era of political messaging. Maybe I'm projecting a bit now, but it feels like an embrace of how "worse" technology complemented life, rather than outright taking bites out of it.
I like this stuff. I enjoy it. It's supposed to be something you just put in the background, and I even find myself losing my thoughts in a cool groove - and this is supposed to be focus music that you don't focus on! The taste of these selectors is pretty damn good, the way it's packaged gives it a novelty - and the actual remixing can go from unobtrusive to subtle genius in a few cases (I'm looking at you, slowerpace 音楽). I genuinely enjoy this stuff as music, even if I just wish it was a little better attributed. I've even looked at buying a tiny MP3 player just for this stuff for work, so I can untether a bit more from my phone. But there's a problem. Take a good look at that bottom right album cover.
I'm on my computer, as I often am. I'm probably looking for ostensibly-disposable background music, to work or do the dishes to. I look at the thumbnails that illuminate the screen.
One of them is different. A gentle amber monochrome drawing of a pyramid, almost 1-bit looking. It looks solemn. Beneath it, it just says "desert sand feels warm at night - 夢の砂漠". Oh, and it's four hours long.
The name of the album translates to "Dream Desert", so that's what I'll be calling it from here onwards.
I've decided to cut out this last piece into its own self-contained post, I Have No Song and I Must Sing. It has more to do with me than with the throughline of the Eternally Incomplete Library.
While looking up the old Stuart Little game, I came across some info on other games from the era. I saw a screenshot for a Mulan game, showing a dress-up screen. Way to hit the Mulan nail on the Mulan head, Disney!
I also went down a rabbit hole looking into ThoughtMakers. I guess we now know why the bee cycle is so much older than both games. I have to dig more into this. The feeling that they were being more thoughtful about the games than other studios can't just be childhood memories talking.