emperor tangerine – my empire

Recommendation: ✂ (“daisy”) emperor tangerine’s debut album for TKX Vault (formerly known as Tokyo Exchnage) demonstrates the label’s early predilection for not fucking around when it came to the most extreme avant-garde music in sampling, to the extent of rivaling Scolex Recordings in terms of music associated with the vaporwave scene. Released nine days after the similarly-chaotic label debut Y.2089 […]

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AIR Japan – Summer of Love

Recommendation: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ AIR Japan’s Summer of Love extended-play is hyperactive vaporhop – a big difference from the avant-garde side with which TKX Vault is typically associated. This release is a short nine tracks in ten minutes, with ultra-smooth/ultra-light songs that recall the multifaceted instrumental microsong utilized by artists such as J Dilla. There are a couple particular highlights in the […]

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Penthouse Apartment – Y2K Millenium Nightclub

Recommendation: ☀☁☁ Penthouse Apartment’s debut for TKX-Vault (then known as “Tokyo Exchange”) is an album of ambient techno that anticipates the ghost tech movement by almost two years. Tracks are skeletally rhythmic and often feature little more than sparse clicks and cuts that evolve into something akin to old-school IDM. It’s an unsettling release, but it’s not disturbing: Y2K: New […]

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ЖЫ – Huylowave

Recommendation: ☀☁☁ Huylowave is part of a sub-subgenre1 of vaporwave called “Ruskevapor,” a highly specific movement that seeks to highlight economic, social, and political issues of the former USSR states through Slavic socialist aesthetic and sampling techniques of experimental electronic music. Most songs utilize a harsh blend of broken transmission, noise music, glitch, and digital manipulation, to create a sound […]

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Unknown Artist – Question 4

Recommendation: ☀☁☁ Unknown Artist’s1 thirty-minute single-track Question 4 is a dreampunk odyssey of vague sound and hazy electronic music that will fit the bill for anyone interested in exploring that curious region of mental awareness in between sleep and awake. It calls to mind the NASA Voyager Space Sounds as interpreted by Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, whereby real-time electromagnetic data recorded […]

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The Tree of Life – Psalm 23

Recommendation: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ TKX Vault tagged Psalm 23 as “torahvapour” on their Bandcamp page, which is an entirely accurate description for this dreampunk release. The album’s eponym is one of the most famous passages in Judeo-Christian texts, that which begins “The LORD is my shepherd, I shalt not want.”1 Likewise, the artist’s moniker The Tree of Life does not refer to […]

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UNFR – Holy Forest

Recommendation: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ UNFR’s Holy Forest consists of a single seventeen-minute long track called “Scripture,” out on the experimental label TKX Vault (formerly known as Tokyo Exchange).1 The album is dreampunk, a specific style of ambient vaporwave that utilizes drone music as its musical foundation as opposed to chopped-and-screwed techniques, sample curation, or trap beats.2 Expectedly, Holy Forest has no percussion, […]

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