This week, we’re handing the mic to .mp3neptune. He’ll talk about the albums that inspired him and left a mark on him. He’s the founder of the music label slowinternet. Based in Salt Lake City, his work spans vaporwave, dreampunk, ambient, plunderphonics, drone, and a lot of experimental subgenre. With a career spanning over ten years, he’s an artist I truly appreciate he played a big role in how I came to understand alternative music. I discovered him through Plutonian Reveries 9 years ago, a collaboration with Kierious that holds its own against any current IDM production.
As always these records are making their way into the Dungeon !
Boards of Canada – Music Has the Right to Children
For a very long time in the early 2010s (probably precisely 2011-12), I had an exclusive fling with dubstep music. As in, it was the only kind of music I listened to regularly for about a year and a half. This was coming off of a childhood diet of mostly techno and house music, which, in combination with dubstep, informed nearly all of the music I made back then. Now, I try to refrain from talking badly about my older music, even if I don’t particularly like it anymore. Someone out there enjoys that, and that deserves respect. That being said, the music I was making in 2012 was… not incredibly high in quality. I was just starting out! But the fact is, I didn’t yet have a good frame of reference for any music outside of the kind that you might hear muffled in the distance as you hold your retching friend’s hair back in the festival Port-A-Potty. Boards of Canada changed this for me.
The first thing I noticed about this album was its most obvious appeal, which is its adoration for the distant past. This album came out in 1998, meaning that the ’80s wasn’t quite the mystical, aesthetic-ridden fantasy decade that it would become a little later. Instead, this album feels like the late ’90s reaching back to the ’70s. Many of the samples featured come from the 1970s — films, documentaries, Sesame Street, etcetera. Beyond just that though, the sound of this record seems, in part, pulled directly from someone’s vintage synthesizer recordings.
“Hauntology”, a term popularized by philosopher and writer Mark Fisher, among others, was a term I hadn’t heard of when I first listened to Music Has the Right to Children, but it ended up being a thread that this album would cause me to follow for the next decade and beyond. I don’t think I would have ever given vaporwave a shot if this album hadn’t lodged itself into my mind like it did. This album is required listening, especially if you find yourself reading this and somehow haven’t given it a whirl.
Remember – Route Back Home
I remember having synesthesia as a child, being able to associate a particular sound to a specific shape and color. I don’t remember ever thinking much of it, or utilizing it creatively in any way. As I got older, this quirk of my mind quietly went away, and these days it’s about as inaccessible to me as it ever has been. Even though I no longer have synesthesia, I’ve found that certain sounds, when paired with a narrative, can still evoke strong imagery for me. This is the crux of dreampunk music, and it’s what makes Route Back Home especially potent.
When this album came out on Dream Catalogue back in 2015, I had yet to really throw my hat into the vaporwave ring. Anyone who recalls what the genre was like back then can tell you that it was in the middle of a metamorphosis, with dreampunk and slushwave making a proper, well-established name for themselves as stylistically distinct things for the first time. Along with this came a shift in how many people viewed ambient music as a whole in regard to its relationship with vaporwave. Vaporwave became a medium for telling serious stories, and while albums had done so in the past, this one felt like the first to truly connect with as many people as it did. It was an event, the likes of which aren’t as common in the vapor sphere these days. It was like a blockbuster film, and everyone was talking about it.
To make a long story short, this album is likely the main influence for my project from November of the same year, I Love You, Saturn City. In all honesty, I may have even bitten this record a bit for its overall subject matter, which is of love, and notably love lost. Once I had seen how emotionally effective Remember had built this album to be, I couldn’t help but to shift my project closer toward that concept. Not only did I alter the trajectory of ILY,SC because of Route Back Home, but the completion of the album signaled to me that this was territory I was keen on exploring more of, and I still try to mine narrative emotion through sound to this day. It turns out, sounds can still create images in my mind, if not in as untethered of a way, at the very least in the classic form of telling a haunting story.
Ｗｅｓｔｅｒｎ Ｄｉｇｉｔａｌ – Ｗａｓｔｅｄ Ｄｉｇｉｔａｌ
I’ve invented a genre of music that only exists to me, in my own head. Does anyone else do this? A style so distinctly personal that I wouldn’t expect anyone else to pick up on it, but a style that absolutely has defining characteristics. I call it “lowpasswave” (an incredibly catchy name that just screams “I don’t spend too much time in the online music space!” to be sure.) It is defined by its intentional lack of any high frequencies. As far as I know, nobody is making this genre on purpose, but they’re definitely making it.
In a nutshell, an equalizer is basically a volume knob for every frequency in a piece of audio. You can raise or lower any frequency band, and affect the tone of the sound that comes out the other end. When you cut out all of the high frequency information, things like cymbals, buzzy synths, guitar plucks, and vocal sibilance, you’re left with a sound that is similar to listening to music underwater, or through a brick wall, or from the other room across the hallway of your flat. This is called a lowpass filter (I’m simplifying, please do not come after me music producers, you know what I’m talking about lol) and Ｗａｓｔｅｄ Ｄｉｇｉｔａｌ uses this effect to achieve a sound that is beautiful and distant, with a laidback and stoned-during-the-day quality that is so uniquely addictive to me.
While there are plenty of other examples I could give of vaporwave made in this style (Weather by Aloha, Myriagon!, Augilio 音楽 by ダンケ Vibes, and Nomad City by Flight✈Journey all fit the bill in certain ways), however, Ｗａｓｔｅｄ Ｄｉｇｉｔａｌ was the album that initially got the gears in my head turning. “How could I use this in my own work?” And from mainline albums of mine like Field Guide, to more obscure side projects like Caldon Film Institute’s Fragments of Eden, I find myself coming back to the technique demonstrated on this record to curate an ambiance all of the time.
Vektroid & New Dreams Ltd. – Fuji Grid TV II: EMX
When fuji grid tv by prism genesis was released, it undoubtedly changed the trajectory of signalwave to come. Many of the techniques frequently used in crafting appealing sounding signalwave were, if not coined, at least canonized by this album under one of Vektroid’s numerous early monikers. Needless to say, that album is probably highly influential to most vaporwave musicians, myself included, whether they realize it or not. As if to prove that, a refined and expanded version, Fuji Grid TV EX, was released almost 5 years later, and still sounded as mesmerizing and relevant amongst its contemporaries then as the original did back in 2011.
EMX is a different sort of album, though, and I think a much more interesting one. What inspires me about this record is just how far Vektroid is willing to venture away from what made the original so appealing, and how deeply she explores the alternative possibilities within the samples she’s manipulating. This album escapes from the containment of signalwave, and instead chooses to spend time in a much stranger, noisier, and more opaque place. It was a shocking first listen. For the longest time, the idea of expanding upon any given sound I was used to doing seemed inaccessible, but this album knocked me out of that mindset. I came to realize that I needed to exit my comfort zone a bit, and to investigate just how tied I was to the way I was producing music, which is a somewhat rare kind of personal insight for me to take away from an album.
Outside of the musical inspiration I’ve wrung from this album (and I certainly have wrung quite a lot of that out), I find myself thinking about Fuji Grid TV II: EMX when I’m stuck staring at FL Studio, unsure of how to proceed. I remember that there are an innumerable amount of possibilities, and that I just have to discover one of them.
Also please listen to CHANNEL3, it’s one of the best vaporwave tracks I’ve ever heard in my life.
Fortune 500 – Music of the Now Age III
“There will be one compilation on this list.”
This is one of the thoughts I first had when approached to share a few vapor-y albums that inspired me on my musical journey. The tough part was choosing just one. I wanted to pick one that was relatively tight, something that I would actually recommend someone with a job and a typical sleep schedule go and listen to from front to back. (So no Eternal Dream System, though that one I could write about for ages!) It also needed to be representative, a compilation that features some of the best artists in the scene, delivering their sounds in a way that truly demonstrates what vaporwave is to me, and how many forms it can take.
Music of the Now Age III is the compilation. It’s the one that blew the doors open for me in terms of gaining a focused understanding of vaporwave in its totality. From the very first track, Video 2000’s Saw You Last Night / Madison Avenue, the portrait of the genre is painted in vivid color. The sampled lyric “Let love into your heart…” stands out as an emotional mantra, turning an intro track into a love letter to internet music. This is easily one of the best vaporwave tracks ever released.
From SYLLABUS’ liar, to Hong Kong Express’ Days of Being Wild, to NYKDLN’s admirably bizarre BLESS U <3, the variety on this compilation revealed to me that there was far from one “sound” one could explore within vaporwave, a fact that I try to keep in mind when I’m making any music. It helps this album’s case that it allowed me to discover a slew of people whose music I now adore and admire, many of whom are still around to this day making waves and further inspiring me to play in this space.
식료품groceries – 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open
I have a personal definition for the term “mallsoft”. “Mallsoft” is any vaporwave that explicitly attempts to place you in a particular location. Importantly, that location can be a mall, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve heard mallsoft albums that take place (and they all do “take place” in a setting, after all) in craft stores, schools, public restrooms, and of course, grocery stores.
슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open was not the first mallsoft album I ever heard, that honor goes to Disconscious’ Hologram Plaza. However, it is the first mallsoft album I ever heard that wasn’t set in a mall. At the time, I didn’t even consider this as an option, and I truly felt a bit foolish for not thinking of it first. After all, I certainly spent a lot more time in grocery stores than in malls; I worked at a grocery store during the early days of my vaporwave endeavors. This obviously had an enhancing effect on my experience with this album.
Something 식료품groceries, who also goes by the name JPEGSTRIPES, taught me is the importance of ｓｐａｃｅ. The samples used on this album are kitschy to say the least, bordering on cornball levels of saccharine muzak at times. And while a loop will often be repeated, there is, relative to other releases in the vaporwave genre, somewhat little in the way of noticeable chopping and rearranging. The thing that makes this album brilliant, and what has influenced my own work, is its attention to sound design by way of effects. You’ll hear phasers and reverb, of course, which add to its ambiance, but it’s really the use of stereo space that gets me excited. Very few other mallsoft records manage to successfully achieve the impression of actually being inside of a strange and massive store, where turning your head near a PA speaker might change the character of the sound, and its location in 3D space. The result is one of the most immersive albums I could ever recommend, and a vibe that I still try to achieve in my music, sometimes with some success! Wear headphones while listening to this.
Infinity Frequencies – The Computer Trilogy
https://computer-gaze.bandcamp.com/album/computer-death
https://computer-gaze.bandcamp.com/album/computer-decay
https://computer-gaze.bandcamp.com/album/computer-afterlife
I have very specific, decade-plus-old memories of being in my high school computer lab. The carpet was dark brown and worn. The room was clean, save for inaccessible areas up near the fluorescent lights and behind seldom used interior windows into the storage room in the back, which is where dust and sometimes bugs would lightly accumulate. I think there was even wooden panelling on the walls, but my memory might be lying to me. The point being, even though I went to high school in the 2010s, the fact that many schools in the USA remain underfunded results in the buildings being chock full of anachronistic interior design, supplies, technology, and architecture well into modernity, such as what could be found in this computer lab. This is the setting where I first really remember becoming enamored with this trilogy of albums.
I’m sure most people reading this will forgive me for placing these three projects under one heading. After all, I struggle to think of a more influential and well-respected trilogy of consecutive albums in the genre. (ECO VIRTUAL’s ATMOSPHERES trilogy comes to mind as a contender, at least up until that fourth one, but I digress.) Placing these albums into one continuous playlist leaves you with a little over an hour and twenty minutes of mysterious, beautiful, and haunting signalwave loops, which present themselves in stark, straightforward repetitions, simply happening over and over and over again. Computer gaze, as the term was coined.
What drew me to this trilogy, and what continues to influence my work, is Infinity Frequencies’ insistence on staying in the moment. The music is about what’s happening right now, and progression usually only occurs when the next track comes in to take over the previous. This ability to sit with one sound for a while has always informed my thoughts about what it means to be patient when listening to, and making, music. Each time I listen to these albums, I’m reminded of that computer lab, and just as I wanted to sit in the sound of Computer Death, I also wanted to sit in that old room for just a while longer. Infinity Frequencies has taught me the value of slowing down to observe my work. Maybe if I allow that ambient drone to last a FEW seconds longer, I can learn new things about it that I may have missed. Maybe if that loop repeats one more time, someone might hear something in it that they hadn’t noticed before. This has been an indispensable mindset in my creative process. Sometimes, it’s better to let an idea play out. No distractions. That’s what the Computer Trilogy is for me.
A huge thank you to .mp3neptune for taking part in this article series and for adding so much depth and detail to his selection. Don’t forget to check out his label, slowinternet, and dive into his own music !
Follow .mp3neptune :
https://mp3neptune.bandcamp.com / https://bsky.app/profile/mp3neptune.bsky.social
Follow slowinternet :
https://ssslowinternet.bandcamp.com / https://bsky.app/profile/slow-internet.bsky.social
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