Vaporwave & fdsdf

What I was hearing was a cross between Muzak and futuristic synth-like sounds overlaid with discordant beats and rhythms.  I wasn’t sure what to make of it since so many of us are conditioned to think of and or listen to music in a certain way. Harmony, beats, fluid, and congruent melodies are what we expect listening to tunes. I’m partial to soulful rhythms as they are what have always captured and held me in time, but this piece was different. The sounds on this track were dissonant, a tad jarring yet stirring in parts, interspersed with odd loops and crossfading that felt like a journey down the rabbit hole in song. It was nothing like I’d ever heard before. I learned this music is called Vaporwave, and with artist names like The Darkest Future, HKE, and Telepath, it piqued my curiosity. I knew I wanted to learn more about it and I knew just who to ask. 

My source on all things Vaporwave is a relatively new artist whose nom de guerre is fdsdf. Just a few years out of high school and five years as a music creator, including this genre, he’s quite passionate about his music. He spends much of his free time tapping into his creative side by churning out tracks on his computer, and distributing them online, while he simultaneously pursued a college degree in audio and music production. A bookish lithe twenty-three-year-old, his real name is Jeremy Tyler. A native New Yorker,  fdsdf  doesn’t necessarily fit the archetype of a musical artiste. He’s low-key in manner and appearance and definitely not an attention seeker. He’s yet to perform his music publicly or promote it heartily, per se, but he has put it out into the other world known as the internet with the help of a network of other like-minded artists and producers. There his tracks are borne on the wind by a growing number of fans and fellow composers.  On most days,  fdsdf  is introspective, but on the day, we spoke, he was quite garrulous addressing a topic he knows well.  Fortunately for me, he was more than willing to provide an overview of Vaporwave, answer what attracted him to this genre, and share why he’s taken this musical journey.   

Fairly new to the artistic process of music,  fdsdf’s interest began to grow during his sophomore year of high school. Listening to album commentaries on YouTube, a reviewer named Anthony Fantano introduced him to an album by Vaporwave artists Nmesh and Telepath. Originally titled in Japanese letters, the album translates to “The Path to Lost Eden,” which one fan described as “completely captivating for the imagination and saturated in dream layers.”  fdsdf recalls listening and being completely amazed by what he characterized as one of the most affecting and enthralling experiences he’s had thus far in song. Like me, he was struck by the layers of sound upon sound, the effect upon effect, and remixes and manipulations resulting in a singular almost dreamlike audio experience. fdsdf’s journey from listener to the creator of Vaporwave didn’t take shape until his senior year of high school when he took a music production class and discovered he had a latent talent for it.  

Vaporwave, an electronic music microgenre that came to be in the early 2010s, holds an appeal to fans and creators like fdsdf  for its ability to allow listeners to immerse themselves in sounds and textures they describe as “surreal soundscapes.” They define the genre as a sort of critique on consumerism because it seeks to explore and re-contextualize other known musical genres like Muzak, Funk, Smooth Jazz, etc. through innovative audio techniques.  They lift these out of their mall space existence and morph it into something else through the introduction of audio samples from existing songs, which they stretch, slow down, pitch shift, and layer, adding modulations that create a new articulation of the known genre. The tracks can range from short, less than a minute to an opus almost 30 minutes long, and unlike other genres, Vaporwave creators take great care to conceive and nurture their tracks, so it’s more than sounds the listener hears. What you hear is meant to transcend, elevate, and reveal an event. fdsdf and his fellow artists, he notes, also take great care to create concept art to go along with their tracks to bring the project altogether in one distinctive, lo-fi retro, visually beautiful auditory experience.   

fdsdf’s early Vaporwave tracks were more ambient in nature filled with elongated sounds, rhythms, and effects that seem to drift along in time. His purpose in creating his version of the genre was to offer his listeners what he’s derived from listening, which is an immersive experience into the original, the unexpected, and the hypnagogic. Like his peers, his sojourn into music is less about consumerism and more about creating new surreal soundscapes with the purpose of exploring the limits of the concept. Like him, many of his Vaporwave peers are also new to music production, and this was a motivating factor in his taking the leap and creating his tracks. There’s not a whole lot of commercial recognition for Vaporwave, as yet, though some producers have been able to attain some success beyond the community. For the most part, it’s still evolving, and like many of his contemporaries in the genre, fdsdf is now branching out into other iterations of this and other forms of electronic music, including experimental electronica and ambient music under his other artist name, Crystal Warmth.

For now, fdsdf is content to continue the path he’s currently on, which in order of priorities is finding a job now that he’s completed his music degree and working on solo and or collaborative projects. I gained something valuable in my conversations with fdsdf and in listening to his tracks and other Vaporwave artists. Once I got past my ingrained notions of what music should be and or sound like and allowed myself the experience, I found Vaporwave to be oddly satisfying, and enjoyable, gaining an appreciation for it I might not otherwise have had if I had not opened myself to this new adventure in song.

*For more on fdsdf, follow him at https://twitter.com/fdsdf123456789 and check out his tunes on Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/fdsdf12345