猫 シ Corp. – OASYS 博物館

Recommendation: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ OASYS 博物館1 is one of, well, quite a few albums by 猫 シ Corp.2, whose various collaborations and features – in addition to solo material – amount to over seventy releases since Global Catwork dropped in the summer of 2013. Many of these releases swim about in the realm of “hypnagogic drift,” a style of swirling, mostly ambient […]

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Disconscious – Hologram Plaza

Recommendation: ☀☀☁ There are two albums of required listening for the burgeoning mallsoft fan: 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open by 식료품groceries and Hologram Plaza by Disconscious. Whether or not the former album is a humorous parody is debatable, but that’s certainly not the case for the latter: like computer slime’s ミスト, Hologram Plaza is some of the emptiest music ever put to […]

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Golden Living Room – Post-Internet

Recommendation: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Golden Living Room’s Post-Internet is an excursion into hyper-produced ambient computer music, with birdsong faintly sitting on the threshold. The seventeen-track, hour-long album is the fifth full-length by the father and professional music teacher, who first became active with 2013’s Plug In, Drop Out. This will well-please fans of spacey video game soundtracks such as Portal, Kairo, and […]

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いすゞ・ピアッツァ ENTERPRISES – ISUZU PIAZZA

Recommendation: ✂ (“1981 Isuzu Piazza XE,” “Tokyo Motor Show,” “Tape Start B”) The only extant album of いすゞ・ピアッツァ ENTERPRISES1 is textbook vaporwave in the sense of almost entirely unedited samples put together in a package meant to elicit nostalgia and set up as if it’s from a promotional cassette tape for the titular vehicle. It does what it does well, and those looking for nothing more than […]

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Skoddie – Biaxially-Oriented Polyethylene Terephthalate

Recommendation: ✂ (the first eight tracks) Ever been interested in what early Autechre’s take on vaporgoth or dark ambient would sound like?1 That’s Biaxially-Oriented Polyethylene Terephthalate by Skoddie, also known as Skoddie the Cat, whose late-2015 album is a two-and-a-half hour odyssey through various forms of lowercase, dark ambient, drone music, and field recording; with disordered album titles that evoke […]

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チェスマスター – 天使

Recommendation: ☀☁☁ At the risk of sounding totally pretentious, 天使1 is チェスマスター’s2 most “important”3 album, as it heralded a serious stylistic change in the producer’s approach to subsequent works. The previous three – 真の愛,4 Night Drive and The Games We Play – were primarily hypnagogic drift albums with some elements of late night lo-fi; 天使 somewhat continued this, but with […]

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Vektroid – Color Ocean Road

Recommendation: ☀☀☁ Color Ocean Road may not be vaporwave in the strictest sense, but as a part of the Vektroid project by Ramona Xavier, it’s one that would not be fair to skip in the discussion of the genre and its evolution. This was the final album released under Vektroid, before the mid-2016 triple-release of Big Danger, RE•SET, and Vektroid […]

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