luxury elite – moods

Recommendation: ✂ (“hurt”, “sweetness”, “rain”, “bayside”, “elegance”)


To many, luxury elite is the figure of vaporwave, equally if not more so than Vektroid, HKE, and Daniel Lopatin. Although the slowed-down jazz thing was pretty well disseminated through vaporwave by the time she came around, luxury elite is mostly responsible for inserting other sources of old media into vaporwave production and furthering the careers of like-minded artists through the Fortune 500 label. These include adult contemporary sources, instrumental AOR, R&B, and semi-corporate muzak produced for radio filler. Instead of slapping on a pitch/tempo-shift and calling it a day, luxury elite took samples in their virgin state and tried to make them sound their age. She served as a foil to the hyperreal state of perfection that is modern music, where every click, hiss, and crackle can be easily ironed out, if not avoided all together with the advent of purely digital music platforms like Ableton and FL Studio. So of course, luxury elite added back in all of that click, hiss, and crackle, giving her tracks a thick layer of dust that transport the listener back to that strange era of consumer technology where everything had a wood grain. Such production became the foundation of Fortune 500, which closed in 2014 but whose spirit lives on in labels such as Elemental 95, Plastic Response, and DMT Tapes FL.

moods is luxury elite’s 2015 album, and if her music sources haven’t changed, the production sure hasn’t either. It’s thirty-five minutes of pure synth funk that’s smooth, slick, and kind of sexy (e.g. “bayside”). Each of its sixteen songs are entirely 80s, sounding like the soundtrack to some romantic comedy set in the Florida Keys where champagne is a supporting actress. Don’t take it all that seriously; luxury elite’s music is for fun and for nostalgia. Perhaps you weren’t around for it to actually occur, but listening to moods might make you feel as if you were – and isn’t that half the point of this kind of classic (and classic-style) vaporwave? moods does not hit as strongly as luxury elite’s collaboration with Saint Pepsi back in 2013 or he 2012 trilogy, but there are several songs that are excellent additions to one’s late night playlists. Give them a try; if you like them, then keep on exploring, because there’s a whole world where luxury elite is concerned.

 

Tracklist


1. moods – (2:16)
2. girl – (2:27)
3. first kiss – (1:36)
4. crime scene – (1:28)
5. hurt – (3:11)
6. sweetness – (1:48)
7. hot springs – (2:11)
8. decadence – (2:21)
9. rain – (2:34)
10. bayside – (1:30)
11. your mission – (1:54)
12. kimmie – (1:51)
13. elegance – (2:56)
14. café lux – (3:44)
15. fancy – (2:31)
16. sdoom – (1:23)1


 

1Sodom?

0

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