Vaporwave Vacation
Enter the idealism of an old era through new impressions.
Summary
Vaporwave Vacation is a multi-part project composed of various music mixes and music remixes that celebrate the genre of vaporwave and its many subgenres such as VHS POP and Mallsoft. It combines chopped visuals with chopped music to really evoke the aesthetics of the not-so-distant past that was characterized by bustling malls, bright TV advertisements, and the balmy sound quality of analog media players. The project contains vaporwave remixes and music mixes of music from various genres such as Synth-Pop, Video Game Soundtrack, Indie Rock, Jungle, etc. paired with visuals of photography and videography capturing the spaces of days gone by. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Vaporwave Vacation YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
Putting together vaporwave remixes was rather simple from the get go for me when I had much less knowledge of audio engineering and music composition in general. Early vaporwave explorations for me was about as in-depth as my earliest attempts at remixing Sonic music. I would take tracks and try to make it sound like they were coming from mall speakers or had been run through a reverb machine for “remastered” effects. Thankfully, the more knowledgeable I became, the more complex the process became as I had a much more comprehensive workflow that included not just manipulating audio, but also pairing it with edited visuals. Projects would start out with me finding a landscape of interest, whether it be a man-made landmark or a spot in nature and then doing field recordings of those locations. Once I had built a library of photographs and videos, I would edit them to align with the visual aesthetics of various vaporwave subgenres. With the visuals on hand, I would then select tracks to manipulate into vaporwave remixes through distortion, chopping, unbalanced panning, reverberation, looping, delay, layering, and more.
Reflection
This project was important in helping me to not only better understand music, but audio in general. Along with Sonic Music Mania, Vaporwave Vacation was crucial in nurturing my desire to build complex soundscapes, mix music, compose music, and being an EMDD in general. The first few steps were long, confusing, and a bit aimless. And of course that is natural whenever you begin developing a new skillset. To be fair to myself, those first few steps took up about seven years of my life from when I was a kid to a teenager where I was trying to get over the initial hurdles that comes with being self taught. Then the other five years have been spent trying to fill in knowledge gaps, create more efficient workflows, and get a stronger understanding of audio design and music composition.