Vaporwave

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2011 · Bandcamp, Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan, growing out of small experimental music scenes · Also known as ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ; A E S T H E T I C; Vapourwave

What it is

Vaporwave is a style of music and pictures made by people on the internet from about 2011. The music is mostly old recordings (1980s pop, smooth jazz, the background music played in shopping centres and lifts) slowed down, looped and given heavy reverb, a sound effect that makes it seem played in a big empty room. The pictures pair Greek and Roman statues with pink and teal grids, palm trees, early Windows computer graphics, Japanese text and the blur of worn videotape.

Where it came from

Around 2010 a few experimental musicians started slowing and looping old pop and corporate music. Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010) and James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual (2011) came first. Then in 2011 the producer known as Vektroid, using the name Macintosh Plus, released Floral Shoppe: a Roman bust on a pink cover and a slowed Diana Ross song, "It's Your Move". It became the template. The name is a pun on "vaporware", software that's announced but never released. It spread through Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan, and hundreds of anonymous producers sold albums on Bandcamp, a site where musicians sell downloads directly.

How people used it

Making it was cheap: take an old song, slow it down, loop a few seconds, add reverb, and give it a title in Japanese or wide letters. Cover art was built from stock statues, old Windows screens and drinks cans. Outside the music, people typed words in spaced, wide letters (Ａ Ｅ Ｓ Ｔ Ｈ Ｅ Ｔ Ｉ Ｃ) to call anything nostalgic or tacky "aesthetic", and put pink, glitchy filters on photos. In 2016 people cut slowed music over tinted clips of The Simpsons, which got called Simpsonwave. The standard reply to any new album was that vaporwave was dead.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first music genres that lived almost entirely online, made by people who never met, under names no one could trace, and sold for a few pounds on Bandcamp. It gave a look and a sound to nostalgia for the malls, adverts and computers of the 1980s and 1990s, which many fans were too young to remember properly. The look outlasted the music: pink grids and Roman busts turned up in fashion, adverts and other memes. Its slowed sound also fed later "slowed and reverb" song edits on YouTube and TikTok.

The jokes around it

• Ａ Ｅ Ｓ Ｔ Ｈ Ｅ Ｔ Ｉ Ｃ: typing a word in wide, spaced letters to mark it as vaporwave.
• "Vaporwave is dead": said about the genre almost from the start, and still said.
• Simpsonwave: clips of The Simpsons tinted pink and blue over slowed music.
• Mallsoft: a subgenre meant to sound like music playing in an empty shopping centre.
• Future funk: the upbeat offshoot that sped up Japanese disco and city pop samples.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People online took the cheapest music around, the stuff played in lifts and adverts, and treated it as worth collecting. Some fans meant it as a joke about shopping, others loved the sound, and plenty couldn't have told you which group they were in.

What noah is not sure of

The 2011 start year is approximate: earlier slowed-loop albums came out in 2010, and who first used the word "vaporwave" is unclear. The Floral Shoppe producer has gone by several names (Vektroid, Ramona Xavier, Ramona Langley). The link from vaporwave to the later "slowed and reverb" edits on TikTok is likely but loosely documented, and filing it under TikTok hits is a loose fit for a genre that began years before the app.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.