DREAMS WEST SELF TITLED

Mix tape from producer James West’s Dreams West project, a now classic and slightly forgotten cut of plunderphonic early vaporwave breeze. Ludicrously warped pastel delirium, vaporous and effervescent tape deck 90’s Pop loops embellished with intoxicating and absorbing sequencer melody, saturated and filtered to haze heaven. Microwaves of nostalgia…luminescent Pop Muzak, lo-fi Chillwave, vaporous recontextualization of Funk grooves, filter house claps for days of the dying sun. How absurd to think that this is already older than a decade, a shimmering simulation of pre internet music and muzak, a simulacrum now conjured and consumed ad infinitum to both greater and lesser result… interesting to note, Dreams West was using original melodies in their compositions right off the bat,  something that many of the first wave Vaporwave artists eschewed in their wake. Shitfaced hammered on screwdrivers, making meaning of a completely dead two dimensional capitalist consumer reality, Dreams West and their ilk render me to tears. So awash in narcotic emotion are these utterly ‘meaningless’ works, so flat and circular are these saccharine experiences as to become cartoons, revelations of truths so brazen as to require constant inebriation and euphemism to manage them. Keep on dreamin’, meat puppets. This has all got to mean something.

Bandcamp

FAT MAN MIAMI – ‘INNER CITY PARADISE’

A particularly smoooooth blend of atmospheric Funk House and sumptuous Vaporwave from the Fat Man dealer, effervescent shimmer beats and rolling electronic Basslines induce the nostalgia and bittersweet depression. This EP leans a little further away from Yacht Rock and into filtered, hazy House, sumptuously funky beats beneath a gated filter shimmer and sizzling Bass sounds, with the middle track acting as a downbeat interlude between velvety Future Funk-y numbers, each replete with lush nostalgia mania sampling of impossibly sacharine sizzlin’ Pop, Funk and Rock – pink and purple neon lights obscuring the contours on unknown faces in the tropical rain. Calming and introspective, very listenable and groovin’. Altogether too short.

CompactWave

AFRIKAN SCIENCES – ‘GENOME BENTLEY’S HERITAGE DRUM CORP’

In the domain of left-field electronic music, few artists cut such an elusively idiosyncratic figure as Eric Douglas Porter aka Afrikan Sciences. His recondite, Afrofuturist slant on house and its adjacent forms positions him in the exalted company of individualists like Jlin, Zamilska and Sam Shackleton whose work bears such a unique stamp of provenance, it practically births its own subgenre. Following hot on the heels of February’s astonishing ‘2220022 (Tiger Dynamics)’ (which, in typically capricious fashion, Porter deleted from his catalogue three days after it was released), ‘Genome Bentley’s Heritage Drum Corp’ is another fabulously out-there portfolio of possibility that reconfigures house to the point where it’s easier to describe in architectural rather than musical terms. Of course, this being Afrikan Sciences, the geometry of these precarious constructions is strictly non-Euclidean, each track a jazz-gilded labyrinth of illusion and improbability, like an M. C. Escher lithograph brought to angular sonic life. Booby-trapped with rapid-cycling time signatures (nothing so trite as a four-on-the-floor DJ tool here) and sampledelic whorls of every conceivable abstraction, this is music that, even at its most minimal (‘3 Things’, for example, is little more than an acidulated rumble of bass and percussion that spools out for almost 11 minutes), remains as resistant to decryption as the Voynich manuscript. It’s also an absolute fucking blast. If you’re an Afrikan Sciences virgin, pop your cherry with this then work back until you hit 2014’s twin masterpieces ‘Theta Wave Brain Sync’ and ‘Circuitous’. Trip isn’t the word.

The Student Body Presents

TM404 – ‘ACIDUB’

2016 release from mysterious trip entity TM404, released by Kontra-Musik in Sweden. Slimy, decaying, outsider acid Techno saturated in heavy Dub and born of low-tek process, shimmering caustic wet work sounds to soothe and sicken. High minded sound design and resultant smooth-brain groove and thump, each maligned kick/hat/sequence is drenched in ectoplasmic/xenoplasmic slime production and dripping with acidic melted Dub and Techno textures, glistening details bouncing light from the rotund edge of near-formless gelatin Bass pulse, ambient wet electronics and tunneling entropic Techno, drooling in corroded satiation. Stalking the acid rain soaked alleyways of sense and sobriety, solitary bad ass vibes, peripheral to Dub Techno and Acid House, sideways ketamine wonk vision. Pass the petroleum jelly.

Kontra-Musik

SILVER RICHARDS – ‘VOLUME 128’

Shimmering grooves and anonymous styles from Silver Richards, originally released digitally by luxury elite’s legendary Fortune 500. ‘Volume 128′ covers a lot of ground across the various smaller sub-categories of Vaporwave, combining styles and vibez from track to track to create a kind of mix tape feel. Lots of sensuous/cheezy late-nite lo fi loops, vapid and wide-eyed vaporfunk refrains and super-screwed piano slow jams sway behind a thousand filters. Track 3 is a 2013 Cloud Rap type banger with leanin’ sample feed, spacious clap-drenched beats, and purple spittin’ on the right side of marble mouf from Gold Midas, an interesting addition to the track list which well exemplifies Silver Richards varied/scattered VHS mixtape approach. In here it’s always a simulated summer’s day, getting supremely baked and sunbaked at the edge of the pool, or is that just an ephemeral screensaver in the mind’s eye? An advertisement for the nostalgist’s impossible product.

Palm ’84

FAT MAN MIAMI – ‘FAT MAN’S MIAMI’

The Fat Man’s first foray, registered in frosty Norway but psychically and sonically channeling the Miami haze windz –  An amalgam of miasmic Vaporwave and bombastic Synthwave blizzard, Future Funk/AOR adjacent super-soft rock chops and Smooth Jazz piano licks appropriated from the forgotten realms of commercial music and thoughtless Muzak, drifting melodies and repeated hooks sizzling and degrading in loops in your headphones, plumes of crispy elite beats romanced by unfurling ketamine haze diapason, slow and overdriven, drowning in numbness and the sense that things could have been better – illusory and saccharine sweet, a vaporizing, unreal delight of filtered as fuck Vaporhouse radiance. Killer.

Bandcamp

FAT MAN MIAMI – ‘CODENAME: FATWAVE THERAPY’

Vaporwave House cassette/minidisk. Sizzling, shimmering, narcosis and neuralgia, palm beach mental desertion, super 90’s cyber  cool/lame, a smorgasbord of sampling, the Miami coke dealer blizzard of ethereal vaporhaze and e-vacuation, nostalgia endusing PSOne aesthetics with the cream lined dinner jacket Yacht Rock vibe too, succulent silken Bass and crisp clean Guitars, sampled and filtered synths and keys and pert beats, upbeat and cocaine stoned around the edges, effervescent and vaporous, combining French House and Chopped and Screwed Lean dynamics right on the palette. Myself and the abominable FuzzWhore recently enjoyed a shared Gonzo listen of ‘Codename: Fatwave Therapy’ with a tampon bomber spliff under a tree during a hailstorm. It was simply marvelous. I’m new to the Fat Man and I’m digging this shit big time.

Palm ’84