新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day): The Improbable Made Possible
By Thomas Fraki.
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
Ray Bradbury
There has always been a dimension within artistic expression that has sought to reach out into the foggy distances of the future and bring back something prophetic. Music is no exception to this. Musicians have always strived to be on the bleeding edge of what is next sonically, and up until the mid-to-late 20th century the scope of those predictions was fairly limited. The advent of synthesizers, electronic music, and digitally produced sounds extended that theorizing farther out, making sounds that would otherwise be impossible possible. But nothing comes out of a vacuum, and that is where Vaporwave makes its place, reaching back decades to arrive at what could be decades ahead.
Birth of a New Day is not the epitome of the vaporwave genre. What it is is an elegant, palatable distillation of the ideas that the genre is built on. The album has a singular vision of the world as it may exist, and works to set the scene of how that possibility would look and sound. The result is what could be described as the soundtrack to a film that does not exist, yet at the same time is instantly recognizable and imaginable. It transports the listener to a cross-section of space and time replete with the sounds and voices of that sliver. It opens up rain-soaked streets etched in neon light and leaves you there to breathe in every inch of them.
Not A Future That Will Be, But One That Might Be
Like other microgenres, vaporwave evolved as an offshoot of intersecting artistic trends. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a rise in synth-focused, hypnagogic pop music evoking art styles of the 1980s and ’90s. Initially, musicians and producers took a subdued approach to these types of tracks putting emphasis on slowed-down rhythms, heavy reverb, and prominent synthesizers. Dubbed chillwave, this style was eventually pushed to its limits by producers like Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, and Ramona Xavier. Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus (Xavier) would become one of the prime examples of vaporwave as a distinct genre with identifiable characteristics in terms of both music and associated visual art. The popularity of this album in particular in 2011 would later be seen as the high-water mark for the style as a whole.
Saying definitively what vaporwave is as a genre is a difficult thing to do. It encompasses a wide array of styles and ideas between music, digital art, and an entire subculture. At its core, it takes chopped-and-screwed samplings of muzak, R&B, smooth jazz, and new age and slows them down, reworking them into something completely separated from what they were originally. Vaporwave is deliberately nostalgic. It relies heavily on plunderphonics concentrated around pop culture, particularly the early internet, consumerism, and stock music. Visually, it incorporates aesthetics from early web design, computer-generated objects, cyberpunk tropes, and VHS degradation. Alongside cyberpunk and futurism themes, vaporwave also leans on imagery from Japan’s economic prosperity of the 1980s. This led to a reignited interest in Japanese city pop and ambient music following the vaporwave trend.
As quickly as vaporwave flashed into existence, it faded away. Mainstream recognition by music critics and wider audiences, mostly helped along by internet exposure, led to an explosion in the popularity of the scene. But as with any fad that flares up, it rapidly became a parody of itself, leaving many fans declaring the genre “dead.” By the mid-2010s the mania had come and gone, but not before leaving a slew of microgenres in its wake. Many of these sub-genres focused on particular aspects of an already niche style and were, not surprisingly, very short-lived. However, the broader interest in downtempo, synth-directed pop did not die away.
A Weird Time In Which We Are Alive
2 8 1 4 was the creation of producers Luke Laurila (aka t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者) and David Russo (aka HKE). The project blended vaporwave stylings with ambient structure and sampling. Their first, self-titled album was released in late 2014 and was quickly followed by their second, Birth of a New Day (新しい日の誕生), in January of 2015. The accolades quickly came in for their sophomore attempt. By this point, vaporwave was on its way out. With this project, the duo wanted to cut away the muzak, samples, and aesthetics that had been recycled over the past years. They opted to create something original that still held on to the same surreal thematic foundations.
Russo said that he and Laurila went into production of the album knowing that they wanted it to have a definite sense of place “without being too direct about where that is.” In interviews, Russo has also stated that his own obscure worldviews lend to the direction of the music, but he would rather let the listener interpret the themes for themselves. Apart from two tracks, each song on album is based in a repeating loop that is built upon as it progresses. The effect is hypnotizing and adds to the music’s transportive quality. In the Bandcamp listing for the album, the duo included this description:
“Birth of a New Day ended up becoming a radiant realisation of the original project’s intention, as both artists expertly mixed and matched ambient palettes and styles to create the vague and distant neon utopia – a sense of romantic melancholy and longing peppered by the suggestive sounds of the world the music inhabited.”
The outcome of this was remarkable. The album plays like the score to an ethereal, dreamlike cityscape. The downtempo rhythms and synthesizers are expansive, spilling out over the minutes. With each song, a new dimension of its world unfolds. It is wholly atmospheric, drawing on urban noises, rain, and even pieces of dialog. The space the album opens up is full of wonder. Yet, at the same time, it feels lonely and the rare moments of humanity are either sudden or fleeting.
A Sound of the Future
In an interview with the Library of Congress, electronic producer Giorgio Moroder said that his work as far back as 1977 was an attempt to “imitate what people would do in 20 or 30 years.” As it turns out he was right, more or less. But in making that bet, his work became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the burden of any work that tries to speculate on what comes next. In becoming part of the artistic lexicon, it influences what follows and sooner or later comes back around.
The type of future foretold by Birth of a New Day is nothing new. In fact, it’s been contemplated in popular culture for decades through books, movies, visual art, and now music. I have a sense that this vision of the future will continue to be a part of the cultural vocabulary for years to come. Whether this dark prediction is where we find ourselves is beside the point. This place invades the collective imagination because we can see ourselves there. We can visualize the roadmap of choices and events that make this place a reality. Perhaps this is what makes it so compelling, feeling like we have a grasp on our fate, no matter what that might entail.
- Side One
- “恢复” (“Recovery”)
- “遠くの愛好家” (“Distant Lovers”)
- “新宿ゴールデン街” (“Shinjuku Golden Street”)
- Side Two
- “ふわっと” (“Drifting”)
- “悲哀” (“Sorrow”)
- Side Three
- “真実の恋” (“True Love”)
- “テレパシー” (“Telepathy”)
- Side Four
- “新しい日の誕生” (“Birth of a New Day”)
- “余波” (“Aftermath”)
Thomas Fraki is a Minneapolis-based journalism grad, music aficionado, book nerd, hiker, amateur photographer, and beer drinker with an overgrown wall of records.