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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. The vaporwave song structure is usually 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 memory 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-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...