News at 11 vaporwave paper

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Pedro Maia Lopes Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas Universidade Nova de Lisboa Lisbon, Portugal 25 December 2018

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Post-9/11 experimental electronic music for a post-9/11 society Abstract

This paper explores the main concepts and ideologies of the artistic movement known as vaporwave, as well as its relation to nostalgia and the subconscious memory, all through the lens of a structural, ideological and conceptual analysis of a music album identified to be part of the musical genre connected to the movement, NEWS AT 11 , by 猫シ Corp. (pronounced CatSystemCorp), looking to prove it and herald it as a musical byproduct of a post-modern, post-9/11 society, fixated on its own past, and as a prime example of music and art produced by people relishing in the real and/or idealised and faux-memories of an era by which they were moulded and deeply influenced, directly or indirectly a posteriori. It will also present excerpts taken from a personal interview conducted with the album’s creator that further support and confirm the i deas, concepts, theories and hypotheses presented and developed in the text. Keywords: vaporwave, nostalgia, experience, capitalism, post-modernism, September 11 Introduction

Nostalgia is i s one of the most powerful feelings a person can experience in their lifetime. Unlike screen memory, nostalgia does not relate to one specific memory, but rather to an emotional state. Nostalgia may be viewed, in psychiatric terms, as a driving force for actual behaviour -- the attempt to recreate an idealised past in the present. (Hirsch, 1992). We embrace this feeling not simply because we miss a cherished period of our life, but maybe because we would want to relive it. It could be just out of pure emotional comfort, or maybe even because we may present a dissatisfaction with the current state of our own life, be it socially, emotionally or even financially; it is only natural that, as human beings, we would want to, in some way, try to simulate the experience of reliving the memories that we so deeply long for. It has been done through music, retro-styled motion pictures and television series, clothings and fashion trends, and many more. However, a problem arises: because of the very broadness and vagueness of the feelings associated with nostalgia, there is actually a big chance that we may be longing for a time, place, event or feeling that we may actually have not experienced at all - at least directly, first-hand. This is what can be defined as faux-nostalgia (Chapman, 2013). This pseudo-experience of sentimentality for a past that may not even be our own is not at all hard to relate to. Television series that were popular in the last two decades of the previous century are becoming popular among younger audiences audiences who were born after this period period of time, for example. 1 Clothing and hairstyles 1 See

Jolly (2018) for a general analysis into why younger generations remain interested in, for example, old TV shows, using the sitcom Friends as the main example.

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alluding to 1980’s and 1990’s trends are experiencing a renewed surge in popularity. Everyday, there are constantly new throwbacks to older genres in today’s commercial music (which I believe to be one of the strongest carriers of nostalgic power). Overall, there’s a genuine growing interest in popular culture from a time which is long gone, and that for some was not even their own (Erol & Öz, 2016) - and for those who did indeed experience these supposedly cherished times, it’s more than probable that there are at least a couple of actual memories which are always worth remembering. Nonetheless, there are also memories, individual individual and collective, which may not always be the most positive ones to remember. One so is relatively recent, and is probably one of the most impactful events in human history’s recent past - the September 11 attacks. Now, why would I bring up this topic, seemingly out of the blue? For one thing, it is, I believe, the turning t urning point in collective nostalgia: most nostalgic references and expressions - be them from either older or younger generations (the latter strongly connected to the already mentioned faux-nostalgia) point to a time before this event and not after (may it simply be because of it’s recent happening, for example - or may it be, specifically for newer generations, for the relatively short period of time that these have lived through, possibly inhibiting the creation of a strong nostalgic feeling for posterior times). It is, in a way, the end of an era, of a certain lifestyle. It is also a threshold moment in world history - living l iving the very hour preceding it was like, figuratively speaking, living in a different world from the one we inhabit now. Objectively, this “old world” was probably far from pure or naïve, but by comparison to the mentioned events, maybe it was in fact slightly purer. We idealise a world before these events that probably did not even realistically exist, because we want to find emotional comfort and a narrative that better suits our view of that same world, effectively creating a rhetoric rewrite of history (Horning, 2004). On the other hand, precisely because of it’s marked significance in i n human history, history, it could only certainly change everything that succeeded it in humanity’s cultural panorama. It inspired books, films, articles, texts, paintings, plays, sculptures and, obviously, music - and here I argue that these events, in all their fatefulness, have inadvertently contributed to the final form of an entire artistic, ideological and musical movement called vaporwave. In this paper, I will present a brief introduction about this movement and what it repre11, by 猫 sents, and I will specifically address one musical album in this artistic vein - NEWS AT 11 シ Corp. I will wil l present, in my view, how it relates to vaporwave’s thought thought and ideologies, how its concept is mainly fuelled by allegories to the September 11 attacks, attacks, and why I believe it to be va porwave’s porwave’s musical culmination and realisation, as well as an example of post-modern, post-9/11 post-9/11 experimental and conceptual music. These views will be supported by presenting an interview I prepared and staged with the album’s creator, creator, where his own experiences and thoughts on the al bum are shared, and and by referencing works and texts that that further support these beliefs. Vaporwave: origins and concepts

The word “vaporwave” is a portmanteau of the words “new wave” - the popular 1970’s and 1980’s music genre - and “vaporware” - a business term used to refer to products which are announced to the public but are actually never released or even manufactured. It is mainly a vis-







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bright colours, paradisiac tropical landscapes, Japanese Japanese characters and anime, VHS-styled grainy and blurry images, and many other varied retro trends, mainly taken from 1980’s and 1990’s 1990’s poppop ular mainly Western cultural paradigms - heavily influenced by Asian technological elements, however, as seen in multiple albums and works from different artists (see “ 情報デスクVIRTUAL, 2013). This particular style is dubbed within the community as “aesthetic” (often stylised in fullwidth and double spaced letters - A E S T H E T I C - as way to emphasise the dichotomous split between the pretences of aesthetic studies in general, and the uncanniness of la belling pastiche, almost kitsch visual art as being an “aesthetic”). Ideologically, Ideologically, it presents an ironic, sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek view of modern society - more specifically capitalism, simultaneously and ambiguously criticising it and embracing it, mocking it and using it as its mask (Harper, 2012). Musically, it is heavily sample-based (although, as of the writing of this paper, there has been a rising shift towards original compositions, mainly due to reasons related to copyright, and, also, artistic expansion), basing itself in 1980s smooth jazz, synthpop and funk, muzak-type, corporate “on hold” music, and commercial radio and TV jingles - all in the vein of glorifying and/or vilifying capitalist, consumerist societies and their practices. It is an exposition of the “false promises of capitalism” (Pereira, 2017), a subtle “critique of the salient characteristic of late capitalism, such as pastiche and depthlessness” (Koc, 2017), and a “glorification of stealing other people’s art and marketing it under something else with foreign languages” (Wolfenstein, (Wolfenstein, 2015). Mind you: vaporwave has a deep concentration towards western culture and paradigms, which might eventually alienate cultures and societies not so familiarised and accustomed to it, which is itself a potential topic worthy of study. study. While it has a decidedly political quality to it, not all vaporwave has political or even remotely ideological undertones. Actually, the oldest point to which we can trace the beginning of this movement’s musical journey has nothing to do with politics or philosophy - in fact, it started as a joke. American electronic experimental music producer Daniel Lopatin, perhaps best know by his alias Oneohtrix Point Never, released in 2010 an album entitled Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1. The album ultimately consists of a rehash of popular songs from the last three to four decades, slowed down to a drawl and remixed in a chopped-n’-screwed style, with heavy amounts of echo and reverb effects overlaid on top of the tracks. The album cover is a sloppy, glitchy and confusing rework of the 1992 Sega Mega Drive video-game Ecco The Dolphin. Lopatin has confirmed that this work of his was nothing more than a simple, playful experiment, with no actual serious qualities to it (Lopatin, 2013). However, that did not stop listeners from finding an actual artistic quality to it. The nonstop, slowed down looping samples, drowned in a sea of hazy reverb and echo, with no other variations to them besides occasional pitch shifting, reminded listeners of works from avant-garde, electronic, musique concréte and even minimalistic composers, comparing Lopatin’s style and multiple works to figures such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Roach and even Steve Reich (Pereira, 2017). The result was a hypnotic, discomforting cloud of sound, lost in itself and never seeming to reach anywhere. Copycat albums and tracks started surfacing around the internet, trying to recreate this result of discomfort from hearing familiar voices that, all of a sudden, were distorted and hauntingly eerie, almost like a ghost - a ghost that haunts the machine and communicates with us through its faultiness and glitches, possibly reminding us of a time that went by and we forgot







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ously established on Eccojams, using sampling, the copious amounts of delay and reverb and the same choppy style found in Lopatin’s album - however, the flow of its tracks is much more concise and structured, with an increased compositional variation to them, and an overall more cohesive presentation. What distinctively set Floral Shoppe apart from other similar albums, though, was its full incorporation of globalist, corporate and capitalist themes and references into its tracks and album cover, as well as a retro-inspired style - its cover consists of a bust of Greek god Helios, next to a blurry, VHS-style, almost sunset-like image of New York City’s skyline (with the infamous Twin Towers in the foreground), and both of these images on top of a neon-pink background with bright green lettering and chessboard-like patterns, with the album’s and artist’s name written in Japanese. All of these elements, both visual and conceptual, had been previously explored, in a slightly different manner, in James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual . While its musical style does not have many of vaporwave’s trademark techniques (choppy editing, use of reverb and delay), it does sample cues from electronic sources, or as Colton (2017) puts it, “the grainy and bombastic beeps” of 2000’s 2000’s media, such as Windows Windows XP sound bites, or the Nintendo Wii’s startup sound, creating a very marked electronic and robotic-like presence on the album (most of the work, however, consists of original compositions). More striking than its musical style is its use of technological and futuristic themes in its tracks (such as “Sim”, “Google Poeises” or “Solar Panel Smile”), and the now-standard consumerist and corporate approach - its cover consists, again, of a blurry and pixelated image of one of New York City’s busy avenues, with floating Apple iPads overlaid on top of this background, showing face-likes figures over a dreamlike blue and cloudy sky, crystallising a mixed sense of artificiality and pre-fabricated calmness, safety, or even happiness with the mundane, conformist reality of an imagined (or not) modern society. Vaporwave has since evolved, and it has developed different focuses other than the objective of creating a nostalgic simulation through its self-referential nods to capitalism and postmodernity, as you can see and hear in more recent releases - a change spearheaded by albums like Birth of a New Day, by 2814 - but never losing its retro appeal and nostalgia-centred attitude. However, for the purpose of fulfilling the objectives of this research, I am focusing on vaporwave’s wave’s first form, alluding to capitalist themes and corporate-type soundscapes. soundscapes. In my view, these mentioned things contribute to a very specific, particular feeling. Through the distorted use of songs and sound clips from our both distant and recent past, vaporwave poses a sort of ambiguous and ambivalent stance. Listening to works like Far Side Virtual , we can almost idealise an utopian cityscape, where technology prevails and presides over our dai ly lives, sucking out all possible traits of a human quality from itself - a world where nothing can go wrong, and that’s probably not a good thing either. Contrastingly, Floral Shoppe is a dystopian “mess”, where capitalist ideologies also prevail, but where we find an uncertain and indecisive feeling of comfort or discomfort in the ghostly voices from the past that echo throughout its tracks, surprising us and confusing us in all their disorienting and unsettling glory. It attacks us with a distortion and violation of beloved and calming sounds from our past - sounds that we may not even remember hearing, such as that muzak that you listened to in 1993 on the elevator up to the 47th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Did you experience that first-hand? Were you even in New York City, to begin with? Other albums emulate the experience of a late night drive through a cosmopolitan, well-lit city, such as Luxury Elite’s World Class. Do you







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cape to in our minds (Chennington, 2017), and is, indeed, a rewrite of history, but not in a misleading way. Possibly more in an idealised way, in a very ambiguous way, where we can’t decide if we fear f ear these corporate approaches to memories and emotions that we maybe didn’t even know that existed, if they existed at all, or long for these mundane times when things seemed simpler. And the questions is: were they actually simpler? Or is this an actual result of the emotional manipulation that vaporwave offers to the listener? AT 11 11 as vaporwave’s prime example Post-September 11 music: NEWS AT

Ever since Floral Shoppe’s release in 2011, numerous albums and tracks have tried to replicate this uneasy feeling that results from the mixture of nostalgia and a longing for a time we partially forgot about with the falsity and plastic comfort that capitalism and all its consumerist pleasures offer us (Foster, 2018). Music has been created using commercial jingles as hooks, and even retro commercials themselves have been re-edited and recycled as music videos, in the hopes of maximising its own effect on the listener. However, I believe that no other album has AT 11 11. All because it uses the most powerful captured this feeling better than 猫シ Corp.’s NEWS AT symbol it could use to recreate this bittersweet feeling of desolation and numb pleasure: the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, USA. To better explain and understand the reasons for the setting of this album, I’m going to make a brief analysis of the piece and its structure. structure. The very first thing the listener is confronted with upon the album’s listening is a short sound clip of news anchors Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, hosts of CBS’s Good Morning America: CG: “Good morning, America. I’m Charles Gibson. DS: “I’m Diane Sawyer, and it’s Tuesday, Septemb-.” (sound cuts off, segues into a jazzy, chill-out instrumental)

Given the subtlety of the album’s name, including a picture of the American flag encapsuencapsu lated in a grainy 4:3 TV screen, I believe that the foreshadowing present in the very first seconds of the first track, “Good Morning America!”, is pretty obvious. Musically, there’s not a whole lot to say about the album: it consists mainly of slowed-down loops and samples taken from relatively obscure smooth-jazz and 1980’s funk songs, fully tinged with saxophone hooks and synth pads and melodies. This description is valid for pretty much the entirety of the album. In my view, this is not an album to listen to for its technical value, but for its sonic experience. It is, in a way, a painting of a symbolic day, day, but instead of paint, it uses sound. Like an ambient album, it does not rely on complex segments or intricate harmonies and virtuosic passages, but on mood and the evocation of a feeling, of an emotion, a common trait of vaporwave works (Trainer, 2016). The most notable productional aspect throughout the album is the subtle static-lke distortion in the background, along with the mid-heavy, mid-heavy, boxy quality that shines on its tracks, emulating the experience of listening to a radio station or TV broadcast using a 1990’s car stereo, or on a small television setup, giving the listener the ultimate experience of simulation, of watching the morning







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announced. This is further accentuated by even more subtle, but heavily eerie foreshadowing, as we can hear in the album’s third track: Announcer: “It’s kind of quiet around the country. We like quiet. It’s quiet… it’s good quiet.” (funky, jazzy instrumental plays)

This track is called “8:46 AM”, the exact time the Twin Twin Towers Towers were hit by the first plane. Slowly, Slowly, it starts to dawn on the listener that the t he anchors’ and reporters’ sound sound clips are taken t aken from TV broadcasts of that precise day. The next track, “Downtown”, starts with the anchors describing a “perfect Fall morning”. The fifth track “Channel 4” begins with a small clip of an interview where the interviewer describes “the music that we listen to today [as echoing] music from a hundred years ago or more”, which is an interesting and coincidental tie-in with vaporwave’s entire philosophy of replication and imitation. After the first half’s interlude containing no interviews or news anchors’ voices, “Heli Tours”, an interesting piece begins, called “Financial News”. While all tracks up until this point began with short samples of interviews and news broadcasts, this track has virtually no music for over two minutes, after which another typically 1990’s 1990’s smooth jazz tune plays. Instead, for these two minutes of audio, we listen to Carmax (a car dealer) commercials, a Ross (a fashion outlet franchise) advertisement, and publicity for McDonald’s breakfast, all before a brief weather forecast. This is where the album’s intention as an ex perimental, almost-ambient like, mood piece starts to come together. It does not want us to dissect the music, but instead to make us let the music pass by and enhance the experience of living a calm, serene Tuesday morning in 2001 - arguably a cultural, economical and historical barrier year between both two centuries and two millennia (Cvek, 2011) - as the track’s ending, a financial report about Nokia’s, Nokia’s, Motorola’s and Boeing’ Boeing’ss stock rates and a commercial for financial advising, abruptly cut short by the beginning of the next track, “Tuesday Television”, again prove us. Notice I used the terms “calm” and “serene” to describe the morning this album is based on. I utilised these specific words because, up until now, if we did not know beforehand about the events which the piece is inspired by, there is nothing throughout the work that points us to anything out of the ordinary: that is, no direct reference to the attacks is to be found anywhere in the tracks mentioned up until now. Finally, the album’s first side comes to a conclusion with “Evening Traffic”. This is the turning point on the album. It is preceded by the audio of an interview on NBC’s Today between Matt Lauer and the author Richard Hack, where the latter is presenting his new book about the business magnate, pilot and airline pioneer Howard Hughes. Hack is talking about a detailed part of his book, about Hughes’ obsessive fear of germs, which is bookended by this exchange: RH: “…but on the other hand, he was absolutely the most amazing man that America has ever created, ever.” ML: “Ok… I’ve got to interrupt you right now, Richard Hack… thank you, we appreciate it. The book is called Hughes. We’re gonna go liv-.”









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(and, at this point, obviously) sampled and heavily edited from an 1980’s song, is slow, almost ethereal, and carries an obvious emotional charge on its weight. The interview preceding the track actually started at 8:47 AM, one minute after the attacks occurred, and it was cut short at 8:49 AM, just two minutes into the interview. CNN was the first network to carry news of the event (Stelter, 2013), but, nonetheless, Lauer’s break of the news on NBC is a defining moment of the multiple reports that followed that day. While, in fact, the Towers were not shown on TV until after a couple of minutes later - during which the commercials included in “Financial News” played - and while Lauer did not exactly mention what happened, it was clear that something was going on. “Evening Traffic” games with the listener: as soon as the anchor is about to announce that something is happening at the World Trade Center, it cuts to the powerful, sentimental track, barely giving us a chance to hear and understand what is happening - even though we know bebe forehand what the subject matter is. With the first side of the album finished, the second suite of the work plays, appropriately titled “The Weather Weather Channel”. It consists of eleven tracks, tr acks, all bearing the same name as the suite, and numbered after their exact order on this side of the album. It consists, nothing more and nothing less, of musical samples taken from a lost-and-found VHS tape containing actual weather forecasts from the The Weather Channel (Corp., personal communication, November 3, 2018). Sonically and structurally, there is not a lot to say about this side of the album. The music is, one more time, smooth jazz-inspired and moody, which is actually typical of The Weather Channel forecasts. The flow is sometimes interrupted by pitched-down voices reading out instructions to interpret the weather information that would be shown on a TV screen, including brief cues sim ply announcing the name of the t he channel. This second side might be interpreted as somewhat of a “retreat into safety”. Unlike the start-stop nature of the first side, where unexpectedness and fear of an encounter with the somber reality of that day reign, the second half of the album serves as a low-key media environment, where there are few things to surprise the listener, as they don’t need to worry about any nefarious, outsider action. It represents a sort of cocoon, a mind shield that comforts us and distracts of the horrors of the tragic events that happened that day, as if we were pretending that nothing had happened, which only adds to the spectral, uneasy quality of the album itself. AT 11 and modern society Interview with 猫シ Corp.: understanding understanding vaporwave, NEWS AT

猫シ Corp., whose real name I will not identify by personal request, is a Netherlands

based electronic, noise, dark-ambient dark-ambient and vaporwave music music artist. Initially composing and releas-







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and music sharing communities of the internet. Punk has a cynical attitude towards society and conformism (“Punk ideologies”, n.d.), and vaporwave follows along, incorporating the already mentioned ambiguity towards capitalism and neo-liberalism: “We both mock and love capitalism and use art in a communistic way”, Corp. says. The inspiration for the album came in a peculiar way, as the artist describes: “I found a YouTube vaporwave mix called “ ＲＥＰＴＩＬＩＡＮＴＶ (Vaporwave Mix)” which used feel-good, Weather Channel and easy jazz tracks by various vaporwave artists over a picture of the burning towers to create a very disturbing mix. I don’t know why, but this immediately grabbed my attention. The tracks were made as if you were commuting to work on a perfect September morning through the United States or New York on your way to the office.” This further reinforces the album as a listening experience, rather than an object of formal musical analysis. Corp. explains - and confirms the feelings that the listener may experience throughout the listening of the album - the theory behind the usage of such powerful imagery and symbolism in his work: “9/11 has made a huge impact on me back then. I was 12 years old, fresh into high school, and I was making French homework when my mom suddenly called me to come over to the t he TV on her bedroom (…) and she told me there had been a ‘hit’ on the Twin Twin Towers, Towers, a possible ‘terrorist at tack’. I had never heard these words in my life before. What I then saw was absolutely surreal (…), that day was the day the old world died and the new world began.” On the 14th anniversary of the attacks, in 2015, the artist had an epiphany: “I personally only know America from movies, games and TV, so my image of the country is very popularised. Therefore, to me, the USA is a mythical/mysterious country, almost like a dreamworld. (…) I wanted to experience [that day] again. So I put on a livestream (recorded from TV back then) of 9/11 and watched it evolve. (…) I told you that America is very special to me (…) so the ReptilianTV mix came to mind again, and watching New York just before the attacks made me feel like I was there: driving or walking in New York City listening to The Weather Channel. So then I muted the TV and put on Weather Channel tunes on my PC. That gave me the thought ‘God, I wish this had never happened!’, and the music, combined with the images, was so striking and gave me such an odd feeling, I just felt like I had to use this idea. To To make it as if it never happened!” This explains why the album plays like nothing occurred that morning, at least until the first side’s last track: “At the beginning of the album, it sounds all very fresh and cheerful, but that last track is meant to be emotional. As if you drive away from the scene back home, stuck in a traffic jam and thinking about what just happened.” There’s a certain symbolism in Richard Hack’s last words in the brief interview before the report of the attacks: “You hear [the writer] talking about his new book; now this was an interview that happened minutes before and even during the attack on the first tower, so this mo-







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is, would they find out at first listen? The album was also released on September 11, 2016, when it was 15 years ago. So yes, the samples are meant to be cut off. On one hand, to make it as if it never happened, and on the other hand, as if somebody was recording TV to VHS and he just pressed record and stop a couple seconds too soon or too late”. Meanwhile, the significance of the second half of the work is explained in a brief and summarised manner: “[It] was meant as if you would put in a VHS tape t ape in the recorder, recorder, put The Weather Weather Channel on and press ‘record’. In a way, it’s ‘the day after’, another clear sunny September day and nothing bad happened. Some tracks were constructed to be a bit longer, to make this easy listening, chill out vibe.” As I mentioned earlier in the course of this paper, vaporwave may be seen as a manifestation of the ghosts of the past, speaking to us through the glitches and distorted perspectives offered to us by the machines that we co-habit with in modern times. A term often associated with vaporwave is hauntology. Hauntology is a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Specters of Marx, and can be described as the situation of temporal, historical, and onto logical disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin, represented by the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive (Derrida, 1993). The concept is derived from Derrida's deconstructive method, in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic conditions, thus making “haunting” the state proper to being as such. In the 2000’s, the term was used by critics in reference to paradoxes found in late modernity and post-modernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms, and critics such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term to describe art preoccupied with this temporal disjunction (Reynolds, 2011) and defined by a "nostalgia for lost futures” (Gallix, 2011). If this does ring a bell to you, it might be because vaporwave can be considered an offshoot of hauntological applications to music. While the relationship between vaporwave and hauntology and its assertion that society is too fixated on its own past is a topic too complex and deep to expose here, it is now easier to correlate to vaporwave’s motives. We grab on to the past because its ghosts haunt us in the present day and, in a way, conduct us and drive us to the point of finding comfort not in the present, but in the nostalgia that we feel towards long gone memories. And at the time, many of these now memories didn’t seem to make any impact on us because it was our routine, our daily lives. There was nothing special about watching The Weather Channel in the 1990’s, when all of us were younger, unaffected by a new world and new mentality that would follow that month of September in 2001, given how much it changed culturally not only in the USA, but in the entire planet. As Corp. says: “If you knew the future, would you still want to experience it? We long back to the







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Conclusions

Vaporwave has, as a genre and art movement, a lot of room to grow. What started as a tongue-in-cheek joke on the internet has developed into a remarkably sized community, with hundreds of new threads and posts being published in forums and web groups around the globe, discussing the traits, ideologies and artsy contours that define the movement as it is. Initially shared exclusively through the internet, the musical counterpart has now evolved to even include vinyl records printed by actual record companies, as well as cassettes, CDs, MiniDiscs, floppy disks, and even 8-track cartridges cartridges 2 - and as you can notice, some of these these are ageing, even obso lete, listening mediums. However, that’s all part of vaporwave’s ideology and charm: if we are going to develop a movement recreating a distorted perspective of our own collective memories as a dual eulogy and welcome sign to an era that went by and remained buried deep within our subconscious mind, we might as well distribute it through old mediums, as well. The relationship between vaporwave and the listener, and how they compare it i t other types of music, modern or older, commercial or erudite, as well as the means of listening, is very well a topic of its own merit, and a difficult one to properly study. For all that matters, it stands on its own, being arguably the first music genre to be completely bred through the internet, and to amount to significant popularity and traction. “There are no borders on the internet, we’re all neighbours”, Corp. says; it is a movement born from “nowhere” and “everywhere”. “everywhere”. As I mentioned earlier, there has been a rising trend in the community towards original compositions - for example, Corp., as of the writing of this paper, has recently moved on from sample-based music, and has founded his own record label - most probably due to a desire to ex pand the possibilities of self-composition and truly original input inside the genre, to expand its own horizons, as well as, most definitely, concerns regarding the copyright status of the thousands of tracks that are used daily in vaporwave compositions. To avoid such troubling affairs, the community has preferred to both keep an underground, low-key attitude, as well as careful managing of its works. For Corp., the possibility of NEWS AT 11 - a true testament to the emotional, nostalgic, psychological, cultural, philosophical and ideological power that vaporwave can drop upon a potential listener, and, in my view, sample-based vaporwave’s ultimate milestone reaching the wider audience is narrow: “In a way, we are writing history here, and maybe indeed somewhere in the future, people will analyse us internet punks and vaporwavers , just like we do with other subcultures from days gone by. But I don’t see NEWS AT 11 reach the mainstream public; the topic is too sensitive and the music too niche. (…) Also, [original vaporwave] has possibly a







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its listening is a rediscovering of feelings and real or idealised memories that we probably never knew they even existed. References

· Beauchamp, Scott (2016, August 18). “How Vaporwave Was Created Then Destroyed by the Internet”. Esquire. Retrieved from f rom https://www.esquire.com/ente https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a47793 rtainment/music/a47793/what/whathappened-to-vaporwave/ · Chapman, Cameron (2013, June 4). “The Psychology of Nostalgia”. Web Designer Depot . Retrieved from https://www.webdesignerde https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/06/the-p pot.com/2013/06/the-psychology-of-nostalg sychology-of-nostalgia/ ia/ · Chennington, Pad. (2017, October 19). Vaporwave & 9/11: A Nostalgic Connection . Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/wa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W713p9Ukg tch?v=W713p9UkgZk&t=395s Zk&t=395s · Coleman, Jonny (2015, May 1). “Quiz: Is This A Real Genre". Pitchfork . Retrieved from https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/756-quiz-is-this-a-real-genre/ Vaporwave". The · Colton, Stefan (2017, April 15). "Love in the Time of VHS: Making Sense of Vaporwave". Politic. Retrieved from http://thepolitic.org/love http://t hepolitic.org/love-in-the-time-of-vhs-making-sens -in-the-time-of-vhs-making-sense-of-vapore-of-vaporwave/ · Cvek, Sven (2011). Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive . New York: Rodopi. · Derrida, Jacques (1993). Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge. · Erol, Fuat, & Öz, Murat (2016). A Study on the Increasing Retro Trends of Generation Y. International Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 41 (issue no. 1) . https://www.tijoss.com/ https://www.tijoss.com/ 41st%20TIJOSS%20V 41st%20TIJOSS%20Volume/5fuat%20erol%20p olume/5fuat%20erol%20paper%20full.pdf aper%20full.pdf · Foster, John. (2018, January 1). How 猫シ Corp’s News At 11 Changed How We Look At Va porwave | Influence. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/wa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q23Jhzh tch?v=_Q23JhzhLAc&t=11s LAc&t=11s not-so-new critical manifestation”. The · Gallix, Andrew (2011, June 17). “Hauntology: A not-so-new Guardian . Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.co https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog m/books/booksblog/2011/jun /2011/jun/17/ /17/ hauntology-critical Vaporwave and pop-art of the virtual plaza”. Dum· Harper, Adam (2012, July 12). “Comment: Vaporwave my. Archived from the original on April 1, 2015. Retrieved from archive at https://we b.archive.org/web/20150401 b.archive.org/web/20150401173930/http://www 173930/http://www.dummymag.co .dummymag.com/features/adam-harper m/features/adam-harper-vapor-vaporwave Con· Hirsch, Alan R. (1992). ”Nostalgia: a Neuropsychiatric Understanding”. NA - Advances in Con sumer Research, vol. 19. http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/7326/volumes/v19/NA-19 · Horning, Matthew (2004). "Misremembering 9/11: The Cultural use of Nostalgia in national









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· Pereira, Diogo (2017, February 15). “Vaporwave: A Estética do Vazio”. Rimas e Batidas. Retrieved from https://www.rimasebatidas.pt/va https://www.rimasebatidas.pt/vaporwave-estetica-do-v porwave-estetica-do-vazio/ azio/ Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedi· “Punk ideologies” (n.d.). Retrieved December 24, 2018 from Wikipedia: a.org/wiki/Punk_ideologies Pop Culture's Addiction Addiction to Its Own Past . London: FarSimon (2011). Retromania: Pop · Reynolds, Simon (2011). rar, Straus and Giroux · Stelter, Brian (2013, September 11). “Inside the Control Rooms on September 11, 2001”. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@brianstelter/inside-the-control-rooms-on-sephttps://medium.com/@brianstelter/inside-the-control-rooms-on-september-11-2001-893a2f6dcd0d Vaporwave and the Commodification Commodification of Ghosts. · Tanner, Grafton (2016). Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave Croydon, UK: Zero Books. · Trainer, Adam (2016). "From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of PerVirtuality . New York: Oxford University sonal Memory". Memory". The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality Press. X (2015, June 10). Vaporwave: A Brief History. Retrieved from https://www.yhttps://www.y· Wolfenstein OS X (2015, outube.com/watch?v=PdpP0mXOlWM · "  ". Tiny Mix Tapes. Archived from the original on December 25, 2013. Retrieved from archive at https://web.archive.org/web/ https://web.archive.org/web/ 20131225013707/http://www 20131225013707/http://www.tinymixtapes.com/mu .tinymixtapes.com/music-review/virtual-information-desk sic-review/virtual-information-desk-con-contemporary-sapporo Appendix

News at 11 vaporwave paper

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