Psychic LCD – Nexxware [EP]
Recommendation: ✂ (“Ident Dream,” “Doorway”)
[Originally posted to the SongSavers music blog on 10 April 2016.]
Nexxware is a short, sweet extended-play of hypnagogic vaporwave. Released on the now-defunct Fortune 500 label,1 Psychic LCD’s only extant release2 is a fifteen-minute exploration of ambient loops and vague washes of sound through the imagery of “futurevisions,” which describes a largely niche (even for vaporwave) area of music devoted to the creation of relatively serious music devoid of memes to evoke a cinematic outlook of the future.
The loops are decent, but relatively basic; there is nothing here that those already introduced to Oneohtrix Point Never, Shader, and ２８１４ have not already heard. Futurevisions has a peculiar place in vaporwave subculture in that its use of samples and rhythm are not to create a nostalgic or ironic vibe, but to create a deliberate – even somber – exploration of future aesthetics. That’s hard to do that in other genres of music – much less vaporwave – especially when the parent genre simultaneously attempts to sound both futuristic and dated; the latter of which carries hard-to-shake undertones of irony.
Nexxware is a occasionally curious: “As One” and “Ident Dream” are genuinely provocative, almost solemn peaces of music; yet “Doorway” and “Downtime” sound like any old ambient-electronic sound made in a post-Selected Ambient Works 85-92 world. “Cleanse” is a pretty opening, sounding like a start-up greeting to a lost brand of noughties entertainment systems; “Doorway” is Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack if the film depicted a utopia.
Tracklist
1. Cleanse – (0:44)
2. Ident Dream – (3:12)
3. Doorway – (2:52)
4. RE-fresh – (2:05)
5. As One – (4:37)
6. Downtime – (2:04)
1Access to which may be found through mirror links on the respective Bandcamp pages.
2… at least, under this moniker. Knowing vaporwave, there could be any number of aliases used by the same artist.