This week, we’re handing the mic to Pool Plants for a selection of albums that inspired him long before the term “vaporwave” was ever coined to define the style we all love so much. If you’re not familiar with Pool Plants, allow me to introduce him: he’s an incredible artist, a member of the Children of Vapor collective, and the curator of an amazing blog ! More recently, he also joined Vaporloot whether through his “Album of the Week” picks or the valuable advice he gives me to help improve the site, Pool Plants is truly remarkable, and you absolutely need to listen to his music.
As always these records are making their way into the Dungeon !
The Field – From Here We Go Sublime
This album is all about finding minimalism in microsampling. Underneath the techno beats churn a slowly evolving mix of clicks, whooshes, and bleeps cut from fragments of other songs. My favorite parts of this album are when the samples are allowed to reveal themselves, like on A Paw in My Face when the stuttering guitar licks finally unfold to reveal the guitar solo from Lionel Richie’s Hello. But the best is the closing title track From Here We Go Sublime. The voices of angels break through the clouds, resolving into an echoing refrain of “shabop shabop” before it crawls to a stop. This deliberate highlight of recognizable samples only leads one to wonder what else is concealed behind the curtain.
cLOUDDEAD – cLOUDDEAD
I could go on and on about the surrealist lyrical interplay between Doseone and Why? but for the purposes of this article I will focus on Odd Nosdam’s musical production. A mix of dusty vinyl cuts, thrift store field recordings, and vintage synth sounds is washed over with reverb, tape hiss, and feedback. The end result is somewhere between ambient, horrorcore, and fucking around in the best way. Odd Nosdam excelled at creating the exact kind of uncertain environments for Dose and Why to bounce around their visions. What more would you expect from the only person to remix Boards of Canada and have them include it on an album?
Italians Do it Better – After Dark Vol. 1
Before I knew synthwave as “synthwave,” I knew it as this. Italo disco with an icy ‘80s sheen and pretty much zero irony, this is not just a great collection but almost the definition of a compilation. I’d never heard of any of these bands or the label before it came out and I instantly fell in love with all of them. You simply must fuck with the vibes on this album. Of course, one can draw a direct line between this album and modern synthwave through Johnny Jewel and the Drive soundtrack a few years later. But even at this early stage you can hear all the pieces coming into place and imagine yourself behind your own digital dashboard, cruising down a neon highway.
Grouper – Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
This one for me is all about the reverb. It just echoes on and on. Every song sounds like it was recorded at the far end of an empty hall on a cold winter day. It’s not really a slow album, most of the songs strum along at a reasonable pace. But the reverb stretches every note out, leaving them all hanging in the air to be examined in time. This allows all the spare harmonics to connect between the guitar and her voice, creating a sonic bridge that also stretches out across time. I love to sing along to this album and add my own internal harmonics to the mix.
Earth – Hibernaculum
This is a slow album, a very slow album. Earth (which is to say, Dylan Carlson) are best known as the originators of drone metal, which basically takes a single guitar riff and stretches out it to a glacial pace while cranking up the amplifiers. This album takes the same approach but turns the amplifiers back down, the result coming as close to country as it does to metal. These are the songs that play during a climatic showdown on a dusty alley, guns ready to be drawn. Having seen them play live several times, I can say that the key to keeping the glacial pace is the drummer, whose mastery of restraint and timing is truly something to admire.
I’d like to close out this selection by encouraging you to check out Pool Plants’ new EP: 夜の水泳 . It’s an album with strong signalwave leanings, featuring stunning artwork designed by Zer0 Rei. And while you’re listening to it, I also recommend reading his article about the vaporwave scene in Argentina ! Thanks again to Pool Plants and see you soon !
Follow Pool Plants : https://poolplants.bandcamp.com / https://bsky.app/profile/poolplants.bsky.social
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