Asura Revolver releases “Even the Gods May Cry” by Origami Girl
At the end of 2015, a movement/subgenre of music known as hardvapour erupted in the vaporwave scene. Spearheaded by artists like HKE and wosX – not small names by any means within the community – this genre was informed by industrial techno and noise music while using thematic imagery from Eastern European and former Soviet Bloc countries such as Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine. This enough would be revolutionary (insofar as such a world may be applied to vaporwave), but where hardvapour really made its psychological mark was in its belligerence toward vaporwave, which practitioners labeled as “softvapour”. This antagonistic attitude ripped apart some areas of the vaporwave community, with the hardvapour producers pulling the it’s-a-joke-but-not-really attitude familiar to Internet trolls and dark web humor.
Well, it’s been a few years since that went down (hardvapour arguably peaked in popularity and creativity from November 2015 to December 2016), and the main labels like Antifur and HVRF have all but stopped releasing music, much less within the hardvapour milieu. Vaporwave continues on, but the reaction to hardvapour still runs deep. Here is where Even the Gods May Cry comes in – a new release on the Asura Revolver label. Released by Origami Girl (who is also behind the aliases EIGHTXNIGHTS and DJ RAY-XANS), this album was “designed as a fuck you and a exploration of the hardvapour movement” per the accompanying press release. The album contains a smattering of hardvapour tropes, especially the genre’s heavy utilization of distortion and hard-hitting beats (e.g. “Moondust”). It has a wonky, sardonic personality that matches (and therefore parodies) the braggadocio associated with hardvapour artists like the Krokodil Krew, eliciting an attitude built “out of pure defiance saying “I can do what you guys do, and I can do it better”.
Even the Gods May Cry is available for £4 GBP as a digital download and for £8 GBP on purple cassette in an undisclosed edition.
Check it out below: