I want you to post Welcome to the board.
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as an aesthetic genre, emerged alongside its musical counterpart in the early 2010s. It is characterized by a distinctive visual style that often incorporates elements of early internet culture, 1980s and 1990s nostalgia, glitch art, and surrealism.
Let's listen to Veins Real Cold by Contact Lens while we view this thread.
Images often blend elements of reality and fantasy, creating dreamlike or disorienting scenes. There is a heavy emphasis on retro technology and media, such as old computer interfaces, VHS tapes, and early 3D graphics.
Influences from Japanese pop culture, anime, and consumer products are prevalent. It is common to create collages from various digital resources such as old computer assets, memes, and other internet artifacts. There is often an underlying sense of melancholy or irony, reflecting on the ephemeral nature of trends and the passage of time.
Vaporwave explores the blurring lines between reality and virtuality, often creating a sense of disconnection or artificiality.
Vaporwave often critiques consumer culture by repurposing commercial imagery and advertising slogans.
Outrun, also known as synthwave, is another aesthetic that overlaps with vaporwave. Both share neon colors and retro-futuristic elements, but outrun is more focused on high-energy, 1980s-inspired car culture and synth music, often featuring sleek sports cars and nighttime cityscapes.
The aesthetic oscillates between idealized, utopian visions of the past and dystopian, decaying representations of the future.
Images of CRT monitors, early Macintosh computers, floppy disks, and other obsolete tech are common.
a e s t h e t i c
Palm trees, beaches, and tropical drinks are frequently depicted, adding to the escapist, utopian feel.
Ancient Greek and Roman statues, architecture, and busts are frequently used, juxtaposed with modern digital elements.
Not everyone is aware that slapping a waifu on some grid lines is not objectively vaporwave, but we won't talk about that.
It's weird to think about how we used to feel about technology back in those days.
This song paired with this video really conveys the sadness that I feel about it now.
System Focus by Internet Club
New vaporwave artist, released a single just today
nice posting gais :)
>>0x00001c
what makes one sample free and one sample free adjacent?
>>0x00001d
> what makes one sample free and one sample free adjacent?
or more importantly, is it even possible for vaporwave to be sample free at all...
the world may never know.
>>0x00001d
I'd say the biggest difference is sample-free vaporwave actually samples their own original music whereas sample-free adjacent is just stuff that sounds like vaporwave sample material
>>0x00001f
it seems kind of a joke to me that artists who did not traditionally make vaporwave have re-marketed their music ideas as "sample free vaporwave" and then have the audacity to list real vaporwave albums beneath them saying, "this stuff is adjacent to what we do"
>>0x00001c
when in reality it's the other way around.
but to each their own. I'm sure whatever artists did not make these kinda graphics themselves.
>>0x000020
>literal synthwave, chillsynth, and hypnagogic pop is "vaporwave" now
>but music that sounds indistinguishable from 99% of any other vaporwave isnt vaporwave now just because they happened to sample their own original music
bump
>>0x000021
sadly, yes
tho these are l efforts, i did them as meme/neoprotovapor (or not and i am in point of self-irony for sake of hiding emberassment...)
also, calling this genre "zoomerwave/zilleniwave" unless it might be anything-but what you, than me, would have in mind under that (term) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESmZKFe6B0Y&list=PL9CUfp200TTO8MkvJCkBMsV7g1QhDaroz
enjoy (or cringe, idk anyway)
>>0x000026
> sadly, yes
> tho these are l efforts, i did them as meme/neoprotovapor (or not and i am in point of self-irony for sake of hiding emberassment...)
> also, calling this genre "zoomerwave/zilleniwave" unless it might be anything-but what you, than me, would have in mind under that (term) :
>
> enjoy (or cringe, idk anyway)
sorry for killing this, its your turn to post some tunes you made/sampled! (maybe)
>>0x000027
> sorry for killing this
don't worry
you can't kill this board more than it already is
https://powerlunch.bandcamp.com/album/downstream-integration
>>0x000028
> don't worry
> you can't kill this board more than it already is
> https://powerlunch.bandcamp.com/album/downstream-integrationBandcamp Album
https://powerlunch.bandcamp.com/album/downstream-integration
slaps! you made?
A lot of the images posted above are post-vaporwave, which is a genre defined by the influence of vaporwave long after it has been and gone. You'll find the Helios head and major 80s icons mixed with liminal spaces and neon pink. It is big in AI generated content and Instagram filler, which is like the fleamarket of the internet. If this sounds like a value judgement it's because it is.
Vaporwave was initially a spur of plunderphonics, a sort of shitpost subgenre of sample music. The genre of Vaporwave diversified into further subgenres like signalwave. Early vaporwave is best defined by Macintosh Cafe - Floral Shoppe and Eccojams Vol 1. This was experimental music with heavy reliance on familiar materials warped and distorted. The familiar was the canvas upon which the distortion became the feature.
Most notably, vaporwave is anti-commercial and stirs up questions of ownership and commercial failure, which is not something that can be done when making commercial-friendly music (i.e. using "original" samples to avoid takedown requests). By making remixes of commercial music it is making a clear statement of intent - this music is not for sale.
This movement into commercialising a hobby saw the rise of the Slushwave genre, spearheaded by "Desert sand feels warm at night". He conducts slushwave parties, which have a wide selection of sample-based artists. The Slushwave parties are good fun, but the artists are rarely vaporwave or vaporwave adjacent, with the majority using their own original samples, or masking as related in order to sell to a new audience.
This says something wider on the topic of the art as a whole. Initially vaporwave asked "what can music and ownership be?". Post-vaporwave says "these are the icons of vaporwave, you must use them as symbols - but you must only reference them by their shadows in order to keep the lawyers placated".
Vaporwave was pottery. Post-vaporwave is the endless recreation of legally distinct Ming Vases.
>>0x00002a
I agree with your sentiment abour vaporwave as a music genre. It's incredibly disappointing to see not just how vaporwave is used as a vehicle for people trying to push commercial music and commercial record labels in this day and age, but also how people who were on the cutting edge of the genre in the early twenty tens shed all their scruples and race to show their faces as fast they can to capitalize on it.
As a visual aesthetic I tend to be more forgiving. The worst crime that visual artists commit when doing vaporwave is copying people before them, or often times, not being aware of the genre as a sonic movement at all. There is arguably a problem with people not knowing the difference between synthwave aesthetic and vaporwave aesthetic, but overall I'm not as strict in my critiques of the visual aesthetics.
Despite sharing the same name, they don't always have that much in common (the visual and sonic). A lot of times the visual representations had more to do with the early 2010s than with vaporwave in particular, which just happened to blossom at the same time as those visual aesthetics.
Because it's an imageboard, I thought it would be cool to gather a collection of art to put into the thread and show off the image displaying functionality of the site. But I agree completely that vaporwave is more important as music genre than a visual art genre, as iconic as the aesthetic is at this point. It is sad that the majority of people will never know or care about that.
