Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls

Abstract

In this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak ® , 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave's ‘memory play’ is a project that takes remembering as its audio-visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave's memory play using the terms of Chris Healy's ‘compensatory nostalgia’, as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’ as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym.

Full text

Vaporwave, or music optimised
for abandoned malls
LAURA GLITSOS
Curtin University, Media, Communications, and Creative Arts, Kent St, Bentley, 6102 Perth, Australia
Email: Laura.Glitsos@curtin.edu.au
Abstract
In this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to
explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory
play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely back-
ground musics such as muzak
®
, 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave’s‘memory
play’is a project that takes remembering as its audio-visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is
therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To
explore this theme, I examine vaporwave’s memory play using the terms of Chris Healy’s‘compen-
satory nostalgia’, as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and
Svetlana Boym.
In this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a
case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes
pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music col-
laged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak
®
,
1980s elevator music and new age ambience. The vaporwave song structure is usu-
ally short and repetitive, often slow (sitting around 60–90 bpm) with vocal samples
positioned low in the mix saturated with heavy reverb and often slowed down to
produce a ‘stretched out’effect or a ‘melting’quality. Vaporwave forms part of a
style ‘family’, comprising genres such as witchhouse, chillwave and seapunk that
are popular in online forums. Vaporwave has been labelled as a kind of ‘hypnogogic
pop’, a term coined by David Keenan (2009), as a result of its sedative and surreal
quality.
Vaporwave patches together its sonic and visual aspects from generic forms of
mass media. As Adam Trainer explains in his chapter ‘From hypnogogia to distroid’,
vaporwave and associated genres of music tend to be ‘informed by this new era of
cultural and informational oversaturation’(2016, p. 409). Trainer asserts that these
digital creations are the result of a coming together of ‘both collective popular mem-
ory and the personal histories of their creators’(409). He continues:
Driven by technology but steeped in a desire to revisit the past, these styles celebrated personal
attachments to past forms while pushing the sources of that nostalgia into less recognizable
musical performances.
I extend Trainer’s discussion of memory and nostalgia in this article in order to
explore vaporwave’s‘memory play’as a project that takes remembering as its audio-
100
Popular Music (2018) Volume 37/1. © Cambridge University Press 2017, pp. 100–118
doi:10.1017/S0261143017000599
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of
remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself.
To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave’s memory play using the terms of
Chris Healy’s‘compensatory nostalgia’(2006), as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’
as discussed by Arjun Appadurai (1996) and Svetlana Boym (2007). I then move on to
examine the case study in terms of a kind of memory play that is produced through
representations of repressed trauma. To do this, I draw from Clara Latham’s work
which explores the way trauma or loss can be expressed through musical form as
a process of catharsis. Finally, I look at memory play in terms of the reassembly of
fractured memories by analysing the work of 18 Carat Affair in relation to the art
of collage.
In examining 18 Carat Affair as a case study, I synthesise the musical analysis
with a language analysis from online discussions that are extrapolated from the
Reddit.com community. I have chosen Reddit.com as a resource because it provides
a navigable way to analyse how users discuss, exchange and share their sentiments
about music listening practices. Reddit.com is an open source, user-driven commu-
nity in which pseudo-anonymous users, called ‘redditors’, can create threads or com-
ment on existing threads under a ‘handle’.
1
Comments are then voted up or down
and appear closer to the top of the thread depending on their popularity. The voting
system naturally moderates content but there are also volunteers who moderate con-
tent based on etiquette and relevance. Any registered user can also start their own
‘subreddit’built around specific themes. Subreddits act as independent communities
and have their own ‘reddiquette’or community values. According to Reddit, there
are more than 9000 active communities built from subreddits and in 2015 there
were more than 82 billion pageviews on the Redditsphere (‘BlogReddit’2015).
To perform the language analysis, I systematically collated 13 major subreddits
that directly discuss vaporwave (see Appendix A for list). These 13 subreddits are not
the total amount of vaporwave-related subreddits but they form the bulk of subscri-
bers who discuss vaporwave directly. I searched through these 13 subreddits in order
to pinpoint any discussions which used language that pertained to different ‘categor-
ies’relating to memory, remembering, nostalgia, childhood trauma, loss or the past.
These comments were then input into a spreadsheet based on each of these categor-
ies. It must be noted that I do not draw from Reddit.com in a quantitative sense but
rather a qualitative sense. That is, the comments I draw from the platform are not
deployed in order to illustrate the prevalence or repetition of certain words.
Instead, I examine these comments in terms of the quality of language that is used
to describe the ways in which vaporwave is shared as popular material through
digital relations. In terms of gathering the comments, I operated only as an observer.
What is vaporwave?
I approach vaporwave as a popular music genre in the terms of Theodor Adorno’s
characterisation of the popular as a model of ‘standardisation’(Adorno 2006,
p. 73). However, the over-standardisation of popular music is, in a sense, exagger-
ated in the structures of vaporwave through the use of repetitive sampling. As a
1
For the most comprehensive work on Reddit.com to date, see Adrienne Massanari Participatory Culture,
community, and Play: Learning from Reddit (2015).
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 101
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

result, the genre appears self-conscious of its function and role as popular music. In a
cross section of 10 vaporwave tracks (Soundstation 2015) all tracks sit between a slow
and sluggish 70–90 bpm (beats per minute) and all tracks remain at their introduc-
tory speed for the duration of the entire track. Each track in the list of 10 runs for
2–3 minutes and features keyboard synth or representations of synthesised textures.
As I note in the introduction, the basis of vaporwave tracks is borrowed sam-
ples. The tracks are then ‘chopped in’and remixed with slowed-down repetitive sam-
ples and drowned heavy reverb (Wolfenstein 2015; Galil 2013). As a result,
vaporwave has been described as a type of ‘plunderphonics’, a term coined in the
mid-1980s at a conference by composer John Oswald to describe music made
through sound collage, or ‘plundered’from other sources (2008). Vaporwave’s plun-
derphonics is representative of the digital incarnation of the long-standing practice of
musical intertextuality that became most distinct after the Baroque period. Robert
Hatten points out the intertextual resonances found in works such as Mozart’s
‘Requiem’and Beethoven’s‘Missa Solemnis’. In these cases, the practice of intertexu-
ality centred on borrowing styles from the Baroque period from which to construct
new pieces (Hatten 1985). However, by the 20th century, intertextuality became
inflected with irony, such as in the use of Stravinsky’sL’Histoire du Soldat (1918) in
which an older context is not so much absorbed into the newer context of the
piece as illustrating the ‘collision of two contexts, generating a third meaning from
the interaction’(Hatten 1985, n.p.). As Hatten points out, this collision produces
irony at this ‘higher-level trope’(n.p.).
Coming into the postmodern era and the age of sampling techniques, Alan
Kirby explains that intertextuality took on new meanings with the expansion of
home recording technologies. He writes:
What the sampler permitted, in a shift anticipated by Walter Benjamin, was the cannibalization
of recordings rather than simply of songs, a process that yielded contemporary pieces from
sonic components clearly created at a range of past times. The sense of hearing something
utterly ‘now’formed at many different periods ... was uncanny, dislocating, evocative, and
exciting. (Kirby 2009, p. 88; original emphasis)
From the 1980s to the contemporary period, we see another shift in the expression of
musical intertextuality, reflected acutely in the style of vaporwave and made possible
by MP3 technology, which can be rapidly exchanged and remixed using home com-
puting software. In this sense, vaporwave can be understood in the context of what
Aram Sinnreich calls ‘mash-up culture’(2010), the unadulterated collision of any and
all materials into what Ann Kaplan calls the ‘flattening of historical frames into one
continuous present’(1987, p. 144).
With these characteristics in mind, vaporwave can be read as a genre that
emerged from a host of heavily intertextual electronic musics available since the
turn of the millennium, such as ambient, chopped and screwed, electro, lo-fi, Italo
disco, hauntology, synthpop, witchouse, seapunk, ethereal R&B, cloud rap, hypno-
gogia and distroid (see Trainer 2016). What makes vaporwave most distinctive is per-
haps the community of artists and listeners who use the same platforms on which the
music is exchanged to discuss the ‘meanings’of the music itself and the kinds of
affective strategies involved in its production and consumption. For example, accord-
ing to artists involved in the genre, the vaporwave project seeks to produce music
that ‘satirises the emptiness of a hyper-capitalist society’(Ward 2014), through repeti-
tive appropriation of phonic and visual aesthetics of 1980s American ‘mall’culture.
102 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

In a 1989 research paper, George Lewis had remarked that ‘over the past three dec-
ades, the shopping mall has evolved into a sort of civic centre for many suburban,
middle-class Americans. More than just central locations for shopping, these covered
and climate-controlled monoliths have become meeting places’(p. 881). Vaporwave
exploits the lingering representations of this period, challenging contemporary neo-
liberalism with the resonating cultural cringe of 1980s aesthetic. The satirisation of
the emptiness of ‘mall culture’as a shadow of neoliberalist fantasy connects partly
with the notion that vaporwave music is cobbled together through a patchwork of
found sounds, not its own thing but echoes of other things, and ultimately, empty.
In a sense, vaporwave’s‘mall aesthetics’mimic sedative tones of the shopping centre
soundtrack that accompanies the consumer in that soundscape (Trainer 2016, p. 421).
It is for this reason that vaporwave is described, on its ‘official’Reddit thread dedi-
cated to the community, as ‘music optimised for abandoned malls’(https://www.red-
dit.com/r/Vaporwave/), suggesting a kind of ‘consumption lubricant’that ‘coats’
spaces of consumption.
Vaporwave is often referred to as an ‘Internet genre’because it emerged solely
on and through digital platforms. With the exception of one instance that may or may
not come to pass,
2
it continues to be played and shared exclusively through online
networks (mainly Reddit, YouTube, Bandcamp, Tumblr, 4Chan and Soundcloud).
Vaporwave emerged in the early 2010s through online sharing platforms and it
has a special relationship with Tumblr. It has been suggested that vaporwave origi-
nated from the Tumblr platform and spread out into other sites from there
(Wolfenstein 2015; Lhooq 2013), although most likely, it emerged from several plat-
forms simultaneously because social networking sites are ultimately all connected
(Wang et al. 2010). The year 2013 is generally considered the ‘popular’explosion of
vaporwave with more material flowing into the song-sharing communities such as
Bandcamp and SoundCloud (Harper 2015). The main artists lauded in the genre
are Chuck Person, James Ferraro, Skylar Spence and Macintosh Plus,
3
who released
a seminal album Floral Shoppe (2011) that generally stands as the epitome of the style.
For example, countless memes, tributes and homages to the ‘vaporwave aesthetic’
borrow directly from Floral Shoppe ‘album cover’themes: a Roman bust against a
neon pink background featuring a city skyline at dusk adorned with Japanese lan-
guage characters. However, while Floral Shoppe is the quintessential vaporwave
album, I have selected 18 Carat Affair on which to base a case study because this art-
ist is highly prolific, with 12 albums accessible online, which all, in some way, touch
on the specific kinds of memory play I discuss in this article. As per the trend of artist
anonymity in the vaporwave community, little is known about the identity of this
artist, including age and gender. However, on the artist’s Facebook page, the
home town is listed as ‘KCMO’, which is the AM broadcaster for Kansas City,
Missouri, and therefore likely to be where the artist is located and suggesting they
are a US national too. The band members that are listed are names of production
equipment (Juno 60, Tape Loops, etc.), implying that this project consists only of
one member.
2
In early 2015, an event called ‘Boogie at the Hypermall 20XX’was announced which would be the first
live vaporwave event. While there is some support, the event has not yet taken place.
3
Macintosh Plus also goes by Vektroid, New Dreams Ltd, PrismCorp, Virtual Enterprises, Laserdisc
Visions and 情報デスクVIRTUAL.
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 103
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

Vaporwave artists rarely emphasise their locality (in contrast to most music
groups who maintain an identity of their ‘hometown’). This is probably because, geo-
graphically speaking, vaporwave has no material origin. As vaporwave commenta-
tor ‘Wolfenstein’(2015) suggests in his brief documentary, vaporwave ‘distinctively
has no set location as to where it originated [instead] it started online, making it the
first genre of music to be completely globalised’. While Japanese characters and
Japanese Internet aesthetics
4
are deployed in vaporwave artwork, this is probably
born from a trend to ‘kitsch-ify’Internet aesthetic (by ‘Japanese Internet aesthetics’
I mean the graphics imitating 1990s Japanese websites characterised by bright col-
ours and ‘busy’text [Francisco 2012; Kulka 1996, p. 21]). Vaporwave is constructed
as a globally ambiguous and an ostensibly ‘anonymous’phenomenon in that the
artists generally identify themselves using ‘handles’rather than real names.
Memory play through nostalgia
Memory play through ‘compensatory nostalgia’
Vaporwave music plays with feelings of nostalgia, or more specifically, it plays with
the idea of nostalgia for ‘something that never happened’. Being nostalgic for ‘some-
thing that never happened’can be understood with reference to Chris Healey’s con-
cept of compensatory nostalgia. As Chris Healy explains, ‘compensatory nostalgia’
(2006) stems from the paradox between remembering and forgetting that is ubiqui-
tous in contemporary Western culture, and which occurs as a result of media satur-
ation (p. 222). Healy formulates this position from Andreas Huyssen’s work (2000) in
which Huyssen suggests that the ‘relationship between memory and forgetting is
actually being transformed under cultural pressures’(quoted in Healy 2006,
p. 222). Huyssen questions whether this occurs as a result of ‘new information tech-
nologies, media politics, and fast-paced consumption’(2000, p. 27). ‘After all’,he
writes, ‘many of the mass-marketed memories we consume are “imagined memor-
ies”to begin with, and thus more easily forgotten than lived memories’(p. 27).
Huyssen’s assertion resonates with the comments from redditor ‘SockMice’who
writes:
Vaporwave to me, is a fuzzy memory. Being born in ‘98, I don’t remember the 90’s, and only
vaguely remember the early 2000’s. Therefore, most of my knowledge of what life was like is
based off of assumptions and blurred memories. (Sockmice 2015)
SockMice points to the ways in which memory can be produced by, and through, the
media system, particularly in ways that feel personal and individualised but which
are in fact amalgamated through collective production and media saturation. In
Simon Reynolds’view, this kind of compensatory nostalgia is a process particular
to contemporary pop culture. As he says, ‘Where pop nostalgia gets interesting is
in that peculiar nostalgia you can feel for the glory days of “living in the now”
4
Throughout this article, I will also deploy the term in its most common usage to refer to the sounds and
images of vaporwave as an aesthetic, in which the term differentiates the genre from other genres. For
instance, the ‘vaporwave aesthetic’will be described as it relates to the types and timbres of images and
sounds used in the mode, as opposed to other forms of artistic expression, which we could describe as
‘gaming aesthetic’(Dickey 2005)or‘MTV aesthetic’(Calavita 2007).
104 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

that you didn’t... actually ... live through’(Reynolds 2011, p. xxix). For example, 18
Carat Affair’s track ‘Home Box Office’(2011) exemplifies this kind of confused play
between personal and collective memory that references nostalgia in an exaggerated
gesture. The track begins with a lo-fi sample featured prominently in the mix that
recalls the sound of television theme songs from the 1980s that ‘digital natives’
(those born after 1980; Prensky 2001) might ‘remember’only as a result of the airing
of re-runs, mostly on daytime television programming schedules –or perhaps experi-
enced indirectly as children while older guardians were watching television in other
rooms. This notion fits in with the sound aesthetic of most vaporwave tracks, of
which the reverb produces a ‘faraway’quality that sounds as if it is floating in
from another space, or non-space.
The specific track that is sampled by 18 Carat Affair in ‘Home Box Office’is dif-
ficult to identify but has similar characteristics to the Dynasty theme song, with synth
keyboard, low-density spacing, and an exaggerated romantic melody pouring over
99 bpm. According to one redditor, ‘arleybob’, vaporwave ‘brings up a weird old
feeling of being nostalgic for something that never happened’(arleybob 2015;my
emphasis). ‘arleybob’s’sense of nostalgia for something that never happened exem-
plifies Healey’s notion of ‘compensatory nostalgia’. Vaporwave nostalgia is therefore
not about processing a personal displacement, in the sense of ‘authentic’nostalgia
that originated from the medical condition in 17th century Switzerland, in which sol-
diers fighting abroad would miss their homes (Boym 2007, p. 7). Rather, in vapor-
wave listening experiences, the listener draws upon their own repository of past
experience but only in order to ‘plug into’the complex and collective (re)production
of memory as a form of play, albeit one that is produced within the margins of
liminality.
Memory is ‘crowd-sourced’to and from the vaporwave aesthetic to produce
this form of compensatory nostalgia. In another track by 18 Carat Affair, entitled
‘New Jack City II’(2011), the artist slows down a sample from the soundtrack to a
Sega Mega Drive videogame released in 1992, Streets of Rage II. Early 1990s video
game soundtracks are highly distinctive and yet highly generic, as they were built
from what is called ‘chiptunes’. As Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz explain:
The term chiptunes refers to music composed for the microchip-based audio hardware of early
home computers and gaming consoles. ... Born out of technical limitation, their soaring
flutelike melodies, buzzing square wave bass, rapid arpeggios, and noisy gated percussion
eventually came to define a style of its own, which is being called forth by today’s pop
composers as a matter of preference rather than necessity. (Driscoll and Diaz 2009, n.p.;
original emphasis)
Chiptunes came to define the video game musical aesthetic of the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Vaporwave deploys these generic and broad cultural artefacts to gener-
ate the sense of shared memory for times and places that one may recognise but can-
not quite place. For redditor SockMice, ‘Vaporwave represents a fogged window
reflecting snippets of childhood memorie [sic] (2015). Redditor joshuatx says vapor-
wave is able to tap into music he once loved but had ‘literally forgotten or discarded
in terms of memory’(2015). joshuatx goes on to say that:
it reminds me of living in Okinawa as a kid, a time which I hadn’t really fixed with a specific
artist or music (like I did as a teenager later) but is instead framed by background music and
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 105
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

the aesthetics of toys and tv [sic] and other commercial media I was surrounded by at the time.
(joshuatx 2015)
In these comments we see the relationship between media and the production of nos-
talgia without ‘real’memory, or what Arjun Appadurai describes as ‘ersatz nostal-
gia’–a kind of ‘nostalgia without memory’(1996, p. 82). Svetlana Boym also
refers to pop culture’s preoccupation with nostalgic sentiment as a kind of ‘ersatz
nostalgia’(2007, p. 10). She writes that ‘technology and nostalgia have become
co-dependent’and that this spurious form of nostalgia is a product of the promises
made by technology which were never fully realised –a sentiment echoed in the
name vaporwave, drawn from the term vaporware which refers to products, usually
technologies, that were advertised to the public but were never manufactured or
released (Trainer 2016, p. 420). As Boym writes,
The ambivalent sentiment permeates popular culture where technological advances and
special effects are frequently used to recreate visions of the past, from the sinking Titanic to
dying gladiators and extinct dinosaurs. While many nineteenth-century thinkers believed
progress and enlightenment would cure nostalgia, they have exacerbated it instead.
Technology that once promised to bridge modern displacement and distance and provide
the miracle prosthesis for nostalgic aches has itself become much faster than nostalgic
longing. (Boym 2007, p. 10)
This is evident in the vaporwave aesthetic, which borrows from a range of disparate
times and places that become conflated by contemporary media mechanisms. In
doing so, vaporwave is undoing and deforming memory in order to construct a
phantasmal and liminal remembering experience in which memory both happens
and does not happen.
Time and temporality are used as tools with which to play with the constructs
of memory. In this sense, the construct of time becomes absorbed into the mediatic
system. In Appadurai’s approach, time itself is commodified and becomes ‘the
daily practice through which nostalgia and fantasy are drawn together in a world
of commodified objects’(Appadurai 1996, p. 82). For vaporwave, memory is only
another commodifiable object, one that is endlessly generated and reproduced in
varying iterations, which produces this sense of nostalgia for something that may
or may not ‘belong’to any particular past.
There is also a paradox at play in vaporwave because the style recalls material
from the past –outdated VHS tapes, old pop songs –yet so much of vaporwave pro-
duction relies on extant sounds as well as cutting-edge means of production, such as
crowd-sourced software (padurdur 2015) and the adoption of digital platforms for
circulation. In doing so, the vaporwave genre both constructs and represents the anx-
ieties in digital communities that emerge from tensions between memory and
amnesia. As Huyssen explains:
contemporary culture is relentlessly cast as forgetful, its historical consciousness lost or
anaesthetised. Yet on the other hand there is a seemingly endless proliferation of discourses
of the historic, of commemorations, of memorialising, of genealogical and local historical
enthusiasm, and an unceasing escalation in the desire to preserve, record and document ‘the
past’. It seems that Western society’s memory culture suffers from a hypertrophy of both
remembering and forgetting. (Quoted in Healy 2006, p. 221)
106 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

Vaporwave ultimately plays upon and expands liminal space in which the past, the
present and the future coexist. It performs a kind of ‘retro aesthetic’, but one that is
produced through contemporary data systems. This ultimately pulls together the
contradictory powers between old and new and between remembering and forget-
ting, creating tension in the listening experience. For Simon Reynolds, ‘On the
Internet, the past and the present commingle in a way that makes time itself
mushy and spongiform’(2011, p. 63). Vaporwave, as an exclusively online genre,
plays with this ‘mushy’time in a way that confuses and confabulates the past, and
in many ways exposes the slipperiness of time itself and the subjective experience
of the past as memory, which become a creative resource for so many collective stor-
ies. For Reynolds, the processes of contradiction played out in contemporary music
enact a kind of ‘retro-futurism by imagining that this music still is the future, some-
how: a bridge to tomorrow that was never finished but just hangs there in space,
poised, pointing to something out-of-reach and unattainable’(p. 394). Reynolds’
assertion is a fitting tribute to the tropes of vaporwave that exaggerate these anxieties
through the power of contradiction.
Rather than being opposites, remembering and forgetting are inextricably rela-
tional, as Huyssen writes: ‘memory is but another form of forgetting, and forgetting a
form of hidden memory’(Huyssen 2000, p. 27). In line with this paradox, vapor-
wave’s memory play is both a form of remembering and forgetting, in that the mater-
ial that vaporwave deploys is ‘archived’but does not make any coherent sense of the
past. Nothing is remembered ‘properly’so to speak, but is layered in obscurity and
drenched in processes that make the original barely recognisable. Huyssen suggests
that ‘psychic processes of remembering, repression, and forgetting in an individual
are writ large in contemporary consumer societies’(p. 27), an assertion with which
I would agree. I add to this that vaporwave is an exemplary manifestation of contem-
porary music consumption in which these psychic processes produce paradoxical
results. This leaves the listener, like the contemporary subject, with feelings of ‘nos-
talgia’to compensate for the fracturing of traditional modes of memory.
Memory play through the representation of repressed trauma
Trauma, cultural memory and catharsis
Vaporwave also enables memory play through the processing, or reprocessing, of
mediatic artefacts which represent moments of cultural trauma. Jeffrey Alexander
et al. (2004, p. 1) describe cultural trauma as a kind of residue that remains in the
social psyche ‘when members of a collectivity feel that they have been subjected to
a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness,
marking their memories forever’. I suggest that, as a popular form, vaporwave
recycles and repurposes this traumatic residue. For example, the song ‘Jon Benet’
by vaporwave artist 18 Carat Affair (2012) features the generic characteristics of
vaporwave audio-visual aesthetic. The YouTube clip features outdated spa imagery
in which a woman gently bathes in flower water while hollow beats are overlayed by
the bright tones of keyboard synth. However, in stark juxtaposition, the title ‘Jon
Benet’inescapably draws reference to the 1996 assault and murder of JonBenét
Ramsay, a six-year-old girl found dead in her parents’basement. The murder of
JonBenét Ramsay, in Colorado, became a well-known tragedy throughout the USA
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 107
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

(and which resonated throughout international media systems, particularly in
Australia where, in 2016, World News Australia SBS featured a segment on the 20
year mark of Ramsay’s murder). The case was sensationalised by media speculation
and the fact of JonBenét’s participation in child beauty pageants, which many believe
constituted abuse in itself (Pannell 2007). The crime was never solved and so her
killer was never brought to justice. There continue to be specialised television presen-
tations on the murder and revived discussions of the crime. For nearly two decades it
has haunted the Western psyche. I read the track ‘Jon Benet’in a similar way to Clara
Latham’s analysis of the vocal performance of Albertine Zehme in Alfred
Schoenberg’sSprechstimme, that is as a technique that expresses a range of affects,
particularly those produced by repressed trauma. In Latham’s examination of affect
in Schoenberg’sSprechstimme, she writes:
When the subject does not release the trauma by purging the affect through the acts of
mourning or revenge, the affect remains attached to the memory of trauma. By speaking of
the trauma, the subject recreates the affects that were originally associated with the trauma.
This gives the subject the chance to adequately release the affects: to abreact them. (Latham
2013, p. 107)
In a similar reading, I suggest that vaporwave calls forth collective trauma through
the empty sound of tinny beats and hollowed out drum tracks, to express forms of
anguish that alienate and isolate the individual. It is an empty soundtrack for the
emptiness of an innocence destroyed, one that cannot be ‘made sense of’by the
media or by the community. 18 Carat Affair also juxtaposes the track against out-
dated video of random spa imagery. The track and video synthesis highlights the
absurdity of the criminal justice system as it played out in the case of JonBenét
Ramsay, as well as the lost-ness of an event that the culture cannot put to rest. As red-
ditor RightError put it, vaporwave represents and constructs ‘lost worlds’(2015). 18
Carat Affair’s track can therefore be read as a moment in the articulation of repres-
sion and the trauma associated with loss.
Vaporwave digs up those waste products of consumer culture, that which cap-
italism discards, and brings them to the fore: old VHS tapes, technologies that never
reached the market, the grating tones of corporate instructional videos, advertise-
ments from the 1980s. In doing so, vaporwave serves as a type of cultural purge
of old material. Vaporwave seeks out that which is stripped away in order to recap-
itulate the chronic obsolescence permeating contemporary consumer culture.
Vaporwave’s‘pure creepiness’and ‘hollow white nothingness’(Abridge27 2015) ref-
erence this sense of loss. One redditor describes listening to vaporwave as a sense of
‘fleeting melancholy’(DoFDcostheta 2015). In fact, the ‘hollow’and ‘generic’sound
aesthetic is achieved in many vaporwave tracks by stripping the mid-section of the
tones. The term ‘mid-section’is a cognitive metaphor used in sound mixing that
represents the middle range of frequencies that can be manipulated in the mix. In
the language of sound engineering, mid-section tones are often anthropomorphised
as a ‘body’(‘Secrets of mixing: Resolving midrange conflicts’2013). For instance, if
the mid-section frequencies are full and privileged in the mix, the sound will be
referred to as having ‘good body’. Conversely, vaporwave strips these frequencies
out and, as a result, vaporwave mixes generally have no mid-section –no body, pro-
voking a sense of hollowness or melancholy that connects readily with loss in
trauma.
108 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

However, is it the remixing and repurposing of muzak
®
that undergirds the
vaporwave project (see Trainer 2016), and this ties in with the repurposing of dis-
carded material as a form of purge or catharsis.
5
For one redditor, vaporwave is
‘the most cathartic’music s/he has ever heard (joshuatx 2015). However, as a
genre, muzak
®
has ‘long been considered the scourge of ‘good music’because it
has been stripped of any musical identity for the purpose of manipulating indivi-
duals into buying products’(Jones and Schumacher 1992, 156). For these reasons,
Simon Jones and Thomas Schumacher call muzak
®
‘an instance of cultural totalitar-
ianism, reproducing an ideology of bureaucratic rationalism and perpetuating alien-
ation and false consciousness’(Jones and Schumacher 1992, 156). Muzak
®
points to
the obfuscation of horrors by capitalism’s insistence on superficial pursuits. Muzak
®
,
from the outset, has been an imposter in the musical and artistic field. It has always
been alienating and alienated. Vaporwave artists essentially work with and base their
art upon a genre that nobody ever liked in the first place. This is because vaporwave
artists choose to focus on those parts of our culture that are uncomfortable or that
have been buried in order to excavate the dregs of cultural production and the
uneasiness that those aspects produce.
Applying Eldritch Priest’s work on experimental music is pertinent here. Priest
notes that muzak is ‘the public shame of good taste’(2013, n.p.). As Julia Kristeva
notably put forth in Powers of Horror (1982), shame is representative of that which
is abject, those materials that a body (or a cultural body) seeks to rid (p. 8). Yet vapor-
wave takes this ‘shame’as its launching point. As Priest explains, recent experimental
compositions have repurposed many of those sounds which have been thrown away,
made disposable, or discarded as waste material (or as he calls it, that which has been
made into ‘shit’). Experimental music calls forth these obsolete sounds in order to
‘fertilise the wide field of listening with a farrago of attentional spores that sprout
gnarled shoots of interest to see new aesthetic sensibilities’(Priest 2013, n.p.).
Following along these lines, I suggest that vaporwave, as an experimental form of
music, repurposes those long ‘dead’artefacts that our culture has sought to forget
through their disposal. The nature of repression, however, is not an eradication of
material. The material lingers, biding its time to re-emerge. Vaporwave seeks out
that which has been lost and that which, in itself, has been alienated, in order to char-
ter those lost affects. This process enables listeners to articulate ways of feeling which
are otherwise difficult to express because they are the very moments that culture tries
to erase –from 1980s haircuts to more sinister phenomena such as the AIDS epi-
demic. Priest explains that those ‘habits of inattention developed around the use of
ubiquitous audio media forms’have helped to create music that ‘replicates and
warps the drifts and digressions that constitute those habits’(2013, n.p.). In a broader
sense, Amit Pinchevski discusses in his work on archive and trauma the ‘persistent
preoccupation with traumatic memory, that is, with the ways past episodes, which
have been blocked out of private or public consciousness, return to haunt the present
in various displaced manifestations’(2011, p. 253). In relation to vaporwave’s blend-
ing of past and present artefacts of archive, I suggest that the genre satirises the aes-
thetic of muzak in order to excavate the uneasy feelings that commercial culture
seeks to repress and silence. Memory, in this sense, is entirely audio-visual, or as
5
The word muzak is often used to refer to a ‘genre’of music, but the term muzak
®
denotes a registered
trademark belonging to the company Muzak Holdings.
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 109
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

Pinchevski describes it, it the digital medium serves as the ‘technological unconsciou-
ness’(2011, p. 258).
Loss and the impossibility of memory in postmodernity
Vaporwave also capitulates to the impossibility of memory in postmodernity, and
thus attempts to redefine the very essence of memorialisation in order to destabilise
what has come to be concretised as The Past. In ‘Memory as forgetting’(2003), Eric
Berlatsky draws on a Lyotardian framework to posit that postmodernism ‘takes place
in the realization that Enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism are not tied
to objective truth and reality’(2003, p. 101). Instead, the contemporary context is
defined merely by ‘“language games”, like narrative itself, creating “the effects of
reality”, that, in a postmodern age, become “the fantasies of realism”’ (Lyotard
1984, p. 74 quoted in Berlatsky 2003, pp. 101–2). Here I apply Berlatsky’s reading
to vaporwave because, in a similar sense, vaporwave undermines traditional narra-
tive structures that give rise to any sense of a coherent past. Symbols and sounds
from a wide variety of artistic and commercial forms come together in often nonsens-
ical ways that serve to undermine holistic accounts of historical record and to satirise
formal narrative structures. In doing so, vaporwave exemplifies ways of feeling in the
digital listening context as a complex phenomenon that imbricates both intimate and
social affective dimensions of memory as a fractured picture trapped in lost or liminal
space.
Memory play through reassembly of fractured memory
I suggest that vaporwave is a project that plays with the idea of postmodern frac-
tured memory, the ‘schizophrenic’mode of remembering in contemporary schemas
which results in the search for totality in a world of chaos. The tensions apparent in
vaporwave lend themselves to a preoccupation with the desire for totality and coher-
ence born out of a discontinuity with the past and the anxieties of fractured memory.
Vaporwave, in effect, comprises sound and image collage: sounds collaged
together; images collaged together; sound and images collaged together. Therefore,
to read vaporwave as a case study in contemporary listening practices, we must
trace what role ‘collage’plays in wider implications of aesthetic experience. The
word ‘collage’is the French noun that is drawn from the verb coller, literally ‘to
glue’or ‘to stick’(Taylor 2004, p. 8). The verb coller is used in French in a variety
of idioms: eyes ‘glued’to women, backsides ‘glued’to seats, and later, as Taylor
explains, ‘To be collé to a woman was to be married to her ...or, from the early twen-
tieth century, to be living with her “in sin”’ (p. 8). Collage connotes a type of confu-
sion of boundaries through ‘stickiness’. For Brandon Taylor, collage is associated
with ‘indecency, paradox and perplexity –as impurity by any other name’(p. 8).
In aesthetic terms, when an ‘imported object’imposes itself on another surface on
which ‘it does not belong’, the new relationship brings forth a type of inappropriate-
ness that is, in Taylor’s words, ‘jarring or wrong’but at the same time cultivates a
‘frisson of excitement at the sight of a coupling which is illicit, discontinuous, at
the very limits of aesthetic decency’(p. 8). Collage has always been about pushing
uncomfortably against that which contains it. By doing so it often blurs the very
rigidly held boundaries between low and high art, further exacerbating its
110 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

experimental and marginal status (p. 9), ‘as Marcel Duchamp did in his readymade
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) by adding a delicately drawn moustache and a goatee to a com-
mercial reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa’(Judovitz and Duchamp
2010, p. xv). Vaporwave’s collage aesthetic therefore follows on from a historical tra-
jectory of the ‘ready-made’conceived by the Dadaists and Surrealists launched in the
early 20th century (Judovitz and Duchamp 2010, p. xv) and later expanded upon
through Pop Art (p. 220). There are deep resonances between vaporwave’s artistic
irreverence and the Dada movement, for example, Hannah Höch’s later work fore-
shadows vaporwave’s‘garishness’(Taylor 2004, p. 196). There are distinct similar-
ities between 18 Carat Affair’s visual tropes and Höch’s hallmark practice of
drenching collages of women’s bodies, from various contexts, with ‘faded cheap
printing colours’(p. 196). For example, the video art for 18 Carat Affairs track
‘ΔΔΔ (MV)’(2014) features women dressed in gaudy, typical 1980s fashion and float-
ing inside sharp cut-and-paste triangular shapes. The 39-second track is short but dis-
comforting, and draws reference to Höch’s use of sharp cut-and-paste corners, her
use of women’s bodies, and a similar use of colours in the form of mustard-yellow
gradients. Vaporwave’s aesthetic can be read as a culmination of a variety of contem-
porary forms that have come together in the digital medium, collapsing together
tropes evident in early 20th century avant-garde with later movements in collage
art, and combining this with a layering of plundered and pirated sounds. The result-
ing effect produces a flattening and conflation of memory, which exaggerates remem-
bering as an imperfect and confabulated process.
Vaporwave also references aspects of Surrealist collage which gained attention
in the mid-20th century, and in particular, that of Czech poet and artist Jiří Kolář
(1914–2002) who led the Czech Surrealist movement ‘Gruppe42’during the 1940s
(‘Jiri Kolar, 88, Czech Collage’2002; see also jiri-kolar.com). For example, 18 Carat
Affair’s track ‘Promethazine’demonstrates similarities to Kolář’s style of collage: a
woman in a neon pink tank top dances slowly and seductively; overlayed on this
moving image are contoured lines of burnt orange and deep purple which fall into
transparency as they shift. This clip can be read as an audio-visual remediation of
what Jiří Kolářdescribed as a prollage (Taylor 2004, p. 181). Prollage, a form of collage,
is a method that involves two or more images cut into strips and then reassembled in
a staggered sequence (p. 181). Taylor explains that ‘prollage stretches images length-
ways, giving a behind-bars appearance that is also a simultaneity-effect whose pur-
pose is to tease the mind and the eye’(p. 181). In this instance, the whole is suggested
as a Gestalt that is just out of reach. The mind and the eye are teased, seduced
towards the desire for the wholeness of the image that is never realised. However,
it is not only the visual aspects of the clip that form its totality, our perception enfolds
that which we hear and read. ‘Promethazine’, the title of the track, refers to an anti-
histamine drug used to treat allergies and motion sickness and because it has a seda-
tive effect it is often used to induce a light sleep (‘Promethazine HCl’,n.d.). The beat
pushes along at a sluggish 65 bpm while a synthesised saxophone-style keyboard
produces a hypnogogic effect. The track mimics the sensation of non-presence, of
somehow being ‘out of one’s body’or under a thick drug-induced stupor that creates
a confusion. The self is in negation. Thusly, the track implies a wholeness, a coher-
ence, that is always just out of reach.
Another variation on collage that is credited to Kolářis the practice of rollage
(Taylor 2004, p. 181). In this method, several copies of the same image are cut into
strips and mounted in a staggered sequence (p. 181). This specific effect is deployed
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 111
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

in another video, also by artist 18 Carat Affair, entitled ‘Mirror Mirror’(2011). A
woman with startling red lips and a matching red top is dancing against a grey back-
ground. The moving image is cut into vertical strips that are staggered against each
other, producing a rollage effect in motion. These scenes are then cut between other
types of effects, such as a kaleidoscope, and edited with another video of a well-
dressed woman smoking a cigarette in a mirror. This rollage presents to us one of
the major themes of Gestalt particularly in a psychoanalytic sense (see Woldt and
Toman 2005), which is the confrontation of the shadow self; the merging with the
self in the mirror –hence the title of the track ‘Mirror Mirror’, the word mirror
repeated. The self is cut into strips which exist against each other but never meet.
It is for these provocations that vaporwave is often referred to as ‘eery’or ‘unfamil-
iar’. In a Freudian sense, feelings of eeriness are related to a meeting of the unfamiliar
and the familiar, or what Freud described as ‘the uncanny’(1919). In his essay, Freud
writes that ‘those properties of persons, things, sensations, experiences and situations
which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, ... lead to the same result: the
“uncanny”is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long
known to us, once very familiar’(1919, p. 1). Through the rollage in ‘Mirror
Mirror’, a resolution is suggested but never achieved through the suggestion of the
double in the mirror. The uncanniness lingers and is not resolved but in constant
play until the end of the track. The image in the mirror longs to be resolved into
the self; longs to be authenticated (intensified by the fact that the mirror image per-
forms slightly different gestures from those of the woman looking into the mirror).
However, resolution never occurs. The strips never meet and the double continues
its irreconcilable shadow play.
In his essay, Freud points to the work of Otto Rank, who also connected ‘the
double’with a desire to be reflected, i.e. seeing the reflection of the self in mirrors
and shadows. This is because ‘the double’provides the individual with an immortal-
ity through preservation of the self: ‘doubling as a preservation against extinction has
its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by
a doubling or multiplication of the genital symbol’(Freud 1919, p. 9). Although the
‘twin’emerges from the stage of infantile narcissism, once ‘left behind the double
takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he
becomes the ghastly harbinger of death’(p. 9). (Interestingly, in the very end of
the track ‘Promethazine’, childhood toys are featured through a blurred lens, but dis-
appear within three to four seconds of their appearance.) As the self emerges into
adulthood, into the social structures that require the condition of phallic rule, the
double becomes that which threatens the total destruction of the ego. It must be
repressed, pushed away. Of course, the ‘double’never truly leaves, which is why
the effect of ‘doubling’in media images harks back ‘to particular phases in the evo-
lution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego was not yet
sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons ... these fac-
tors are partly responsible for the impression of the uncanny’(p. 10). The doubling
‘effect’is a preoccupation in vaporwave aesthetic
6
and I suggest that this preoccupa-
tion both reflects and constructs an emotional architecture of the digital listening
experience in which layers upon layers are available for production and
6
See the vaporwave mix ‘Subconscious Browsing’and ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’for more examples of the
use in the double effect overlayed on vaporwave playlists.
112 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

consumption. Kolar once wrote that rollage enabled him to ‘see the world in at least
two dimensions’and that the ‘the stratifications made [him] realise just how many
unknown layers make up life and just how many unknown deposits exist within
each of us’(quoted in Taylor 2004, p. 181). Vaporwave uses the effect to a similar
end, whereby the rollage (of images, but also of sound and image together) enables
vaporwave consumers to explore the multiplicity of these ‘musical dimensions’
and experience an effect in which different time periods and contexts appear to coex-
ist in chaotic amalgam.
Vaporwave can also be examined in relation to the genre of Video Art, in its
use of audio-visual collage technique. Video Art has its roots in the 1950s–1970s
Fluxus movement established by a loosely connected group of artists, such as
Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell (Meigh-Andrews 2006, pp. 10–11). According to
Chris Meigh-Andrews, the group was interested in undermining the art establish-
ment, and drew inspiration from preceding subversive art movements such as
Dadaism and the Ready-Made (pp. 10–11). Most importantly, the Video Art move-
ment developed a special relationship with minimal and experimental music. For
instance, its video artists were influenced by the American composer John Cage
and drew heavily from his work, which was used to texture video installations
(pp. 10–11). In addition, Meigh-Andrews explains that Fluxus artists adopted collage
techniques by ‘overlapping media technologies and strategies [and] engaging in a
blurring of categories that established a dialogue between artists’(p. 11).
Vaporwave, while not necessarily a proponent of Video Art in a strict sense,
does borrow from the Video Art paradigm in several distinct ways that provide
insight into the vaporwave project as an exercise in memory play using audio-visual
collage. Take Woody Vasulka’s piece ‘Art of Memory’(1987), which Meigh-Andrews
describes as ‘flowing and scrolling documentary images of the historical past ... the
images becoming “time-energy”objects removed from their conventional chrono-
logical, historical and conceptual framing’(Meigh-Andrews 2006, chapter 10). As
Meigh-Andrews continues, the video becomes a space in which sequences emerge
‘before being re-submerged into the undercurrent of history and memory’(citation).
In an echo of the spirit of this work, vaporwave video sequences closely resemble this
metaphor of tide and time. For example, 18 Carat Affair’s track ‘Pretty Girls I Don’t
Know Anymore’(2011) features floating images of women drenched in purple gra-
dients, who move in and out of frame only to vanish and melt into the next
image, a sequence which references the title, suggesting that these are memories
not fixed in time nor space. In a similar sense, in an analysis of Woody Vasulka’s
piece ‘Art of memory’, Raymond Bellour proffers the notion that the work functions
as:
decoupage and memory device, for the contemporary spectator as well as for the spectator
whose mind scans the history of wars captured by cinema in this century, which has
become a history of cinema itself. (Bellour 1996, p. 57)
Bellour’s description of Vasulka’s video resonates with the thrust of the vaporwave
project, in the folding together of spectacle, history and memory as both personal and
public practice. In a fitting description, Bellour describes Vasulka’s video as enduring
while also ‘split, fractured, and, as it were, vaporised’(p. 157). The work of more
traditional forms of Video Art has clearly been translated into a new practice of
popular music consumption in a way that appears to completely collapse the
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 113
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

distinctions between the two, and in doing so, also appears to transform understand-
ings of how memory can be used through both production of art and in consumption
of popular music. In a sense, memory as a site of knowledge is recapitulated as a site
of borrowed and reconstituted stories and sequences.
Perhaps the most pressing link between vaporwave and Video Art is the pre-
occupation with video itself. Video Art was most predicated on, and produced
through, video tape technology which developed through a wide variety of formats
including the most widely accessible VHS format in the 1970s. In a paradoxical twist,
vaporwave is produced through digital media but is reworked in order to mimic the
video tape and VHS aesthetic, often directly using cuts from VHS tapes with the
flaws and imperfections particular to tape. In doing so, vaporwave recalls not only
the memories and floating signifiers of late-20th century consumerism, but also the
history and trajectory of video as it has been reimagined through artistic sites. Of
course, Video Art itself has developed and changed since its initial emergence on
video tape and VHS formats and, as a result, the distinctions between Video Art
and other genres such as vaporwave are perhaps redundant. For example, the
distribution company Video Out has recently put forth a call for submissions for
‘experimental or feature-length video work that relates to the aesthetic theme
“Vaporwave”–an internet art aesthetic phenomenon that invokes a pastiche of
imagery’(vivomediaarts.com). According to Meigh-Andrews, who approaches
Video Art as both an academic and as an artist, the current array of presentation for-
mats provides the viewer
with challenging spatio-temporal experiences that require constant re-negotiation from work
to work. ... The digital convergence of audio-visual technologies and the interrelationship
of physical, acoustic and digital space have created new aesthetic challenges for
contemporary artists, curators, critics and audiences alike. (Meigh-Andrews 2006, 335)
The lines between vaporwave and more formal Video Art projects have become less
rigid. This movement suggests that vaporwave, as a popular music genre, is expand-
ing its role in popular culture, which also demonstrates the variety of expressions of
memory play available to contemporary artists. Vaporwave transgresses boundaries
between the past, the present and the future, as well as boundaries between audio
and visual expression. In doing so, the genre proposes a particular kind of Internet
Art that mocks popular music as well as conforms to it.
Conclusion
This article presents the genre of vaporwave as a process of audio-visual collage that
deploys the act of remembering as a central feature and concern. This reveals a play-
ful but, at times, sinister and self-conscious aesthetic, which is tied to the recycling of
the past through both artistic and musical forms. The vaporwave project is therefore
about slippages between spaces –spaces of form, of consciousness and of memory.
Through a language analysis, I have presented some experiences of listening to
vaporwave as simultaneously alienating and endearing. In particular, redditors have
characterised the vaporwave listening experience as the longing for ‘something that
never took place’, which I have tied to Healey’s‘compensatory nostalgia’and the
‘ersatz’and ‘spurious’forms of nostalgia described by Appadurai, Boym and
Reynolds. However, this language analysis works in conjunction with the case
114 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

study I have presented above, which features tracks from the vaporwave artist 18
Carat Affair. I refer to this case study to describe vaporwave as an artistic project
characterised by contemporary forms of media that draw from a legacy of 20th cen-
tury movements such as Dada, Surrealism and Video Art. Most importantly how-
ever, I propose vaporwave as a process of remembering for the sake of
remembering itself, but one that is deformed and confused by the postmodern disas-
sembly of memory and the evaporation of history into the chronic amnesia of post-
capitalist structures. In the vaporwave aesthetic, boundaries appear to collapse on
themselves in the half-remembered moments of popular culture and the collective
traumas which become subsumed back into the mediatic system of corporate capit-
alism, in a satire of both muzak
®
and memory.
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the support and editing suggestions of Professor Suvendrini
Perera and the guidance from Professor Peter Beilharz in the completion of this
article.
References
abridge27. 2015. ‘Creepy, weird, bizarre, dark vaporwave releases ... and some reviews’Reddit comment.
https://redd.it/3ikqft
Adorno, T. 2006. ‘On popular music’,inCultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. J. Storey (Harlow,
Pearson Education Press)
Alexander, J. et al. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley, CA, University of California)
Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN, University of
Minnesota Press)
arleybob. 2015. ‘What vaporwave is to me’, Reddit comment. https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/comments/
33zdbc/what_vaporwave_is_to_me/cqsdv4r
Bellour, R. 1996. ‘The images of the world’,inResolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed M. Renov and
E. Sunderburg (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press), pp. 149–64
Berlatsky, E. 2003. ‘Memory as forgetting: the problem of the postmodern in Kundera’s“The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting”and Spiegelman’s“Maus”’,Cultural Critique, 55, pp. 101–51
BlogReddit. 2015. ‘Reddit In 2015’,http://www.redditblog.com/2015/12/reddit-in-2015.html
Boym, S. 2007. ‘Nostalgia and its discontents’,Hedgehog Review, Summer, pp. 7–18.
Calavita, M. 2007. ‘“MTV Aesthetics”at the movies: interrogating a film criticism fallacy’,Journal of Film and
Video, 59/3, pp. 15–31
Dickey, M. 2005. Aesthetics and Design for Game-based Learning (New York, Routledge)
DoFDcosthetatheta. 2015. ‘Why does Vaporwave seem so “lonely”to me?’, Reddit comment, https://www.red-
dit.com/r/Vaporwave/comments/3ohulh/why_does_vaporwave_seem_so_lonely_to_me/cvxs2ju
Driscoll, K., and Diaz, J. 2009. ‘Endless loop: a brief history of chiptunes’,Transformative Works and Cultures,
2. doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0096
Francisco, A. 2012. Why is Japanese web design so different. Tofugu, 15 May. https://www.tofugu.com/japan/
japanese-web-design/
Freud, S. 1919. The Uncanny, trans. A. Strachy (Albury Thame, Imago)
Galil, L. 2013. ‘Vaporwave and the observer effect’,Chicago Reader, 19 February. http://www.chicagoreader.com/
chicago/vaporwave-spf420-chaz-allen-metallic-ghosts-prismcorp-veracom/Content?oid=8831558
Gregg, M., and Seigworth, G. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC, DukeUniversityPress)
Guyer, P. 2005. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (New York, CambridgeUniversityPress)
Harper, A. 2015. ‘Pattern recognition vol. 8.5: the year in Vaporwave’,Electronic Beats.http://www.electronic-
beats.net/vol-8-5-the-year-in-vaporwave/
Hatten, R. 1985. ‘The place of intertextuality in music studies’,The American Journal of Semiotics, 3/4, pp. 69–77
Healy, C. 2006. ‘Dead man: film, colonialism, and memory’,in Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts, ed.
K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction)
Huyssen, A. 2000. ‘Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia’,Public Culture, 12/1, pp. 21–38
‘Jiri Kolar, 88, Czech Collage Artist and Poet’. 2002. The New York Times, 23 August. http://www.nytimes.com/
2002/08/23/arts/jiri-kolar-88-czech-collage-artist-and-poet.html
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 115
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

Jones, S., and Schumacher, T. 1992. ‘Muzak: on functional music and power’,Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, 9/2, pp. 156–69
joshuatx. 2015. ‘Has 2814 completely ruined vaporwave?’Reddit comment. https://www.reddit.com/r/
Vaporwave/comments/3kw49p/has_2814_completely_ruined_vaporwave/cv28avl
Judovitz, D., and Duchamp, M. 2010. Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company (Minneapolis, MN, University of
Minnesota Press)
Kaplan, E. A. 1987. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York,
Methuen)
Keenan, D. 2009. ‘Childhood’s end’,The Wire, 306, pp. 26–31
Kirby, A. 2009. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern And Reconfigure our Culture
(New York, Continuum)
Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York, Columbia University Press)
Kulka, T. 1996. Kitsch and Art (Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press)
Latham, C. 2013. ‘Listening to the talking cure: Sprechstimme, hypnosis, and the sonic organisation of affect’,
in Sound Music Affect, ed. M. Thompson and I. Biddle (New York, Bloomsbury), pp. 101–16
Lewis, G. H. 1989. ‘Rats and bunnies: core kids in an American mall’,Adolescence, 24/96, pp. 881–9
Lhooq, M. 2013. ‘Is vaporwave the next seapunk’,Thump Vice, 28 December. https://thump.vice.com/en_ca/art-
icle/is-vaporwave-the-next-seapunk
Lyotard, J. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota
Press)
Macintosh Plus. 2011. Floral Shoppe
Massanari, A. 2015. Participatory Culture, Community and Play: Learning from Reddit (New York, Peter Lang)
Meigh-Andrews, C. 2006. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function (Oxford, Berg)
Oswald, J. 2008. ‘Le plunderphonique ou le piratage audio comme prérogative compositionnelle’,Circuit:
Musiques contemporaine, 18/2, pp. 27–38
padurdur. 2015. ‘Best software under $100 to make vaporwave beats?’Reddit comment. https://www.reddit.
com/r/Vaporwave/comments/3bhopp/best_software_under_100_to_make_vaporwave_beats/
Pannell, S. 2007. Mothers and Daughters: The Creation and Contestation of Beauty and Femininity (Nashville, TN,
Vanderbilt University)
Pinchevski, A. 2011. ‘Archive, media, trauma’,inOn Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, ed.
M. Neiger, O. Meyers and E. Zandberg (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 253–64
Prensky, M. 2001. ‘Digital natives, digital immigrants’,On the Horizon, 9/5, pp. 1–6
Priest, E. 2013. Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (New York,
Bloomsbury)
‘Promethazine HCl’. n.d. Rx List: The Internet Drug Index. http://www.rxlist.com/promethazine-hcl-drug/
indications-dosage.htm
Reynolds, S. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past (New York, NY, Faber & Faber)
RightError. 2015. ‘Has 2814 completely ruined vaporwave?’, Reddit comment, https://www.reddit.com/r/
Vaporwave/comments/3kw49p/has_2814_completely_ruined_vaporwave/cv1g3j2
Rothschild, B. 2000. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (New York,
Norton)
‘Secrets of mixing: Resolving midrange conflicts’. 2013. Delicious Audio, Deli blog, 11 June. http://audio.thede-
limagazine.com/secrets-of-mixing-resolving-midrange-conflicts/
Sinnreich, Aram. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture (Amherst, University
of Massachusetts Press)
SockMice. 2015. ‘Vaporwave represents a fogged window reflecting snippets of childhood memories’, Reddit
comment. https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/comments/33zdbc/what_vaporwave_is_to_me/cqpwld6
Soundstation. 2015. ‘Assorted Vaporwave Mix/Compilation #2 2+Hours’, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ea_UOPzuyZU,AssortedVaporwaveMix/Compilation#2|2+Hours
Taylor, B. 2004. Collage: The Making of Modern Art (London, Thames and Hudson)
Trainer, A. 2016. ‘From hypnagogia to distroid: postironic musical renderings of personal memory’,inThe
Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, ed. S. Whitely and S. Rambarran (New York, Oxford University
Press), pp. 409–27
Wang, X., Tang, L ., Gao, H., Liu, H. 2010. ‘Discovering overlapping groups in social media’,IEEE International
Conference on Data Mining, December, pp. 569–78
Ward, C. 2014. ‘Vaporwave: soundtrack to austerity’,Stylus, 29 January. http://www.stylus.com/hzwtls
Woldt, A.L., and Toman, S.M. 2005. Gestalt Therapy: History, Theory, and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage)
Wolfenstein. 2005. ‘Vaporwave: a brief history’. YouTube. 10 June. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=PdpP0mXOlWM
Worldwide News Australia. 2016. ‘It’s an unsolved mystery that has captivated America for decades’,
SBS Television, 13 September. http://search.informit.com.au.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/documentSummary;
dn=TSM201609130231;res=TVNEWS
116 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

Discography
18 Carat Affair, ‘ΔΔΔ (MV)’, YouTube. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRisLJF4nkA
18 Carat Affair, ‘Jon Benet’, YouTube. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBRLbDzZ_yk
18 Carat Affair, ‘Mirror Mirror’, YouTube. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWqZ1H9a6YY
18 Carat Affair, ‘New Jack City II’, YouTube. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDlfheLBeTg
18 Carat Affair, ‘Pretty Girls I Don’t Know Anymore’, YouTube. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wYiczcg9NK8
18 Carat Affair, ‘Promethazine’, YouTube. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmUjtU_YGew
Appendix A
List of vaporwave subreddits examined for the language analysis:
Vaporwave inspired art, etc.: /r/VaporwaveArt 7,202 subscribers, a community for 1 year
Music optimized for abandoned malls: /r/Vaporwave 37,169 subscribers, a community for 4
years
vaporwave_irl: /r/vaporwave_irl 156 subscribers, a community for 8 months
Where Vaporwave artists discuss production: /r/makingvaporwave 917 subscribers, a
community for 8 months
proto-Vaporwave: /r/protovaporwave 102 subscribers, a community for 11 months
Album cover of Macintosh Plus album, Floral Shoppe (Strawberry Illuminati 2015).
Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls 117
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

Aesthetics 美学: /r/VaporwaveAesthetics 12,982 subscribers, a community for 1 year
Vaporwave: /r/VaporwaveCSS 176 subscribers, a community for 2 years
Vaporwave Cassettes –post about upcoming Vaporcassettes or Post your collection: /r/
VaporwaveCassettes 239 subscribers, a community for 6 months
A Vaporwave Contest: /r/Hyperbattle 153 subscribers, a community for 6 months
Nujabes and Vaporwave: /r/nujavape 25 subscribers, a community for 1 year
vaporwave 2.0: /r/vprwv 16 subscribers, a community for 1 year
Vaporwave History: /r/vaporwavehistory 12 subscribers, a community for 6 months
Vaporwave for Sleep: /r/SleepVaporwave 13 subscribers, a community for 10 months
Add your Vaporwave music that would make me fall asleep (in a good way).
118 Laura Glitsos
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143017000599
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 185.234.145.101, on 19 Mar 2020 at 01:23:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available