Sometimes you just want to listen to a track titled with extra spaces and misused Japanese characters.
I like to define “vaporwave” as an impressionist retrospective of the 90s and the dawn of the Internet. It’s more than a genre of music: vaporwave has a distinct color palate of neons and conflicting pastels and recurrent visual signifiers of anime and glitchy images from Windows 95. The sampled sounds are often heavily slowed down, chopped and screwed to a point of tangent familiarity. It’s an aesthetic that fascinates and eludes me (I’ve previously made a playlist here).
新しい日の誕生 is a collaboration between t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 and Hong Kong Express whose synthesis has given us a curious and singular interpretation of vaporwave. 新しい日の誕生 is different from its genre in that the sampled sounds are unrecognizable and weaved into a hazy ambient tapestry, rather than chopped and screwed or slowed to a glacial pace. The heavily reverberated piano and synths make the track a hypnagogic echo chamber, sounds floating ambiently through stereo space in a quiet dystopian lull. The mix is very quiet at times, effectively using almost-silence to make the carefully chosen sound collage more poignant against the empty space. 新しい日の誕生 even manages to make a police siren sound soft and pleasant: the album transitions seamlessly from song to song, making it perfect for sleeping or passive listening. 恢复 is a dreamy circuit through a surrealist Japanese cityscape.
