Lol

It makes no sense how they spend a ton of this review talking about Macintosh Plus/Vektroid the person when the entire ethos of vaporwave comes from anonymity. I think she does deserve credit and they sorta touch on this but a big focus of this review should've been on how vaporwave's identity was not tied to musicians but to the internet and the people that surf it. This entire review, including how they reference a TinyMixTapes (a website that had been with vaporwave since day one) reviewer's concept of vaporwave, shows how little Pitchfork even cared about vaporwave until it was seen as nostalgic and important.

Go to bed Chris Thott

>In a 2011 interview, Claire Boucher described her then-new project Grimes as “post-internet,” an attempt to put a name on the unique experience of discovering and making music in the digital age. “The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything,” she said, putting into words something an entire generation raised on Napster, SoulSeek, LimeWire, and other file-sharing programs was beginning to realize they had in common. To young producers, “everything” quickly proved to be a winning formula as the internet compressed every imaginable genre of music into an easily accessible folder.

>By 2019, that optimism has long faded, and the internet’s sense of access has turned on us in ways that range from existentially overwhelming to outright terrifying. Social media has distorted reality with global consequences, giants like Spotify threaten to reduce music to Muzak one mood-generated playlist at a time, tragedies are live-streamed, and we all get battered into numbness by a feed we can’t really turn off.

>Not long after Grimes’ 2011 interview, the album Floral Shoppe first surfaced online and everything about it felt utterly incomprehensible. Credited to the mysterious Macintosh Plus, it was festooned in garish Pepto Bismol-pink art with mint green Japanese type, a glossy cityscape, and a marble bust staring vacantly upward —the music inside only made less sense. Cheesy saxophones melted into ooze, easy listening skipped and tripped over itself like a buffering YouTube video, and vaguely human voices were slowed into breathy, bland moans. The first time I hit play in the spring of 2012, it stopped me in my tracks. I stared at my iPhone wondering if it was broken or if the file was corrupted. It sounded like the musical equivalent of a computer virus, as if all the exciting ideas at the time about “post-internet” music had soured and gone flat.

>By no conventional logic should Floral Shoppe have made it beyond the deep-internet realms it emerged from. But like candy-colored mold, its power has rapidly spread while its then-teenage creator Ramona Xavier, the Portland artist now known as Vektroid, has remained an elusive figure, simultaneously a pioneer and an outlier. Her album remains one-of-a-kind in its depiction of anxiety and crisis rendered through waves of numbness that range from deeply unsettling to artificially ecstatic. Now approaching its 10th anniversary, Floral Shoppe stands as a touchstone of millennial art. Every year the world slips a little further into chaos, it only seems to make more sense.

>Vaporwave, the genre Floral Shoppe came to define, is music designed to be ignored. Often built from corporate Muzak samples, it lingers in your perception, the way something might flicker in the corner of your eye. If Brian Eno conceived ambient music as something one could choose to focus on or comfortably let slide into the background, vaporwave turns that prescriptive power against the listener. It pushes you out with banality only to pull you back in, creating a trancelike state truer to the grind of daily life. As critic and early vaporwave champion Marvin Lin wrote in 2012, “It doesn’t matter whether or not you think you’re heard ‘vaporwave’ before. Trust me, you have—in hotel lobbies, in the opening sequence of a training video, over the phone waiting for a customer service representative.” For a younger generation raised in an increasingly corporatized music culture looking to rebel, creating a self-sustaining, defiantly unmarketable scene of literal Muzak feels like one of the most punk acts of this era, even if the music was anything but.

>Floral Shoppe reflects a mind raised on IDM and classic Warp records. In a 2015 conversation, Xavier explained to me that by middle school, “I’d listened to all my Autechre and Boards Of Canada and Squarepusher and my Aphex. Then I tried to get into the finer points.” The album also feels like a natural progression of what was called hypnagogic pop at the time, impressionistic, hazy tunes that recalled the state between waking and sleeping. As some streamlined the style to find genuine pop success with what was cynically rebranded as “chillwave,” others looked for darker avenues.

>Leading the scene with their explorations of dystopian Muzak jingles were L.A. experimentalist James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never with the surreal, endlessly looped Top 40 song samples he nicknamed “eccojams.” Both are musicians whose influence is felt far beyond their divisive initial reception, but their conceptual ambitions feel small against the pure emotional impact of Floral Shoppe. The album’s sample sources include Sade, cheap New Age, Diana Ross, forgotten AOR, and the soundtrack to a Nintendo 64 game, all tuned to Xavier’s own, surreal frequency. If hypnagogic pop was often described as listening to a cassette tape melting on the dashboard, Floral Shoppe is like calmly listening to a Spotify playlist while your computer is on fire.

>The album begins with “Booting,” a cut-up of Sade’s “Tar Baby” that loops like a GIF and builds into a spiraling anxiety attack. If hypnagogic pop or chillwave utilized loops as windows into a blissful eternity, Xavier cuts hers disorientingly short, turning them into walls gradually closing in on you. In its final moments, the track unspools even more violently, simultaneous slowing down further as sped-up versions echo in the background. It’s the musical equivalent of hyperventilating and it’s Floral Shoppe’s bleakest moment, broken just as abruptly by its most ecstatic.

>The title to the following song, “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing,” fits like a mood board for Floral Shoppe as a whole, and its chirpy, euphoric groove has become its calling card. It repurposes Diana Ross’ version of “It’s Your Move,” but Xavier pitch-shifts the pop icon’s voice to a murky smear, draining its flirtatiousness and amplifying its desperation. The song is appropriately druggy, but in a way that feels more out of a necessity to insulate, a dizzying nosedive into a painful euphoria. It inadvertently recalls dub, where the mix functions as the lead instrument, building in echoes and dizzying audio pans as sounds bounce erratically from channel to channel. In a curious moment of vaporwave infecting the real-life corporate world, the luxurious track even became a viral hit appearing in countless email chains as the soundtrack to hypnotic footage of factory assembly-lines simply dubbed “The Most Satisfying Video In The World.”

>Floral Shoppe’s transformative power only grows stronger as the songs it samples get more obscure such as a handful from Pages, the unsuccessful first band from Mr. Mister co-founders Steve George and Richard Page. Their 1978 song “If I Saw You Again” aims (and misses) for the kind of chart success Supertramp were enjoying, but Xavier is only interested in its short intro, a bouncy flutter of synths and drums. It get turned inside out over the three minutes of Floral Shoppe’s title track, where she bends and folds the sample in on itself until it becomes labyrinthine. “Library” meanwhile zeros in on the hook taken from the group’s “You Need A Hero,” turning its breathy sensuousness into a hot night in the uncanny valley. It works in other ways too, like when the panic attack which opened the album bubbles back to the surface on “Geography,” a musical snippet from N64 shooter game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter stretched to eerie, unsettling lengths.

you forgot to mention said tranny looks like motherfucking gollum

>From there, Floral Shoppe passes a point of no return. The majority of its final tracks all sample the same early ’90s New Age group Dancing Fantasy, unifying the second half into a suite. The sprawling “Chill Divin’ With ECCO” repeats faceless synth washes and empty guitar riffs ad infinitum, but the result is stunning and Floral Shoppe’s peak balancing act of banality and transcendence, like taking MDMA only to stare at a Weather Channel forecast. It’s followed by the soothing comedown of “Mathematics,” a scrambled fog of synth bleeps and pillowy saxophone that floats for over seven mind-clearing minutes. “I Am Pico” and “Standby” are both immaculate hold music, short vignettes that seem to drift even further into a faceless oblivion, before the closing “Te” anchors Floral Shoppe with a return to reality.

>“Te” is the only track on Floral Shoppe without samples and hits like a breath of fresh air after staring at a computer screen too long. Its melody shows no signs of the elongated slowdown or scrambled editing that preceded it, and as birds chirp in the distance it brings a sense of peace and balance the rest of the album dismantles so expertly. It also suggests the direction Xavier would begin to move in the future. She followed Floral Shoppe with increasingly dense projects under other one-off names such as 情報デスクVIRTUAL and Sacred Tapestry that dove even deeper into Muzak before evaporating altogether. When she returned on New Year’s Day in 2013 under her earliest moniker Vektroid (the name she continues to use today) it was with “Enemy,” a 10-minute colossus of a track that brilliantly fused Muzak, industrial, IDM, and video game music with distorted vocals coming from an actual human collaborator, Moon Mirror. Abandoning samples almost completely, Xavier’s work has only grown more potent and exciting, including an ongoing hip-hop collaboration producing for Houston rapper Siddiq.

>It all stands as a reminder that for the tremendous power Floral Shoppe commands, it was the work of a very talented young producer finding her voice and at times its reception threatened to overwhelm that voice. Though Vektroid has reimagined and fleshed out some of her early work, Floral Shoppe remains untouched and the Macintosh Plus moniker hangs on the shelf for good reason. Nothing could change or improve its sound which, even after thousands of soundalikes, has lost none of its perception-shattering power. Its ability to channel personal ennui, despair, isolation, hope, and stupefying overstimulation into a new musical language once felt like looking at a funhouse mirror, but years later feels as crisp as an iPhone selfie. The thing about growing up in the heyday of internet file-sharing is that for all the isolation it instilled, it was easy to forget that there really was a person on the other end of the screen. We were separated, but connected, in the same paradoxical way that makes Vektroid’s masterpiece as personal as a diary and as universal as a meme. Floral Shoppe is no longer just hers, it belongs to an entire generation.

sigh

what a fucking awful review.

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This shit makes it sound like the Nevermind of the millennial generation

greentext is hard on the eyes

didn't james ferraro say verbatim that this shit is for bronies

>Its ability to channel personal ennui, despair, isolation, hope, and stupefying overstimulation into a new musical language once felt like looking at a funhouse mirror, but years later feels as crisp as an iPhone selfie

people get paid to make these series of words happen?

content farms barely pay their hack writers
call it karma

absolutely based

actually this is nice coming from p4k
anyone notice p4k has kinda been trying to regain their cred lately?

hey Antoine what up vro

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all good
stop posting your pics, you will cringe years later when you look back

but you were posting yours too or wasnt that you? also how did you know it was me? couldve been a random user who saved it

>but you were posting yours too or wasnt that you?
no I haven't posted pics
>also how did you know it was me?
just took I guess I guess

shut up it's good
actually made me want to re-listen to the album

nah

>only an 8.8

>p4k spends the entire decade ignoring vaporwave and then finally gives one of its break out albums a score as the decade is ending

This is why everyone hates you faggots you know

I can't wait until Shitfork goes behind a paywall

it makes me want to toss a plastic grocery bag of diarrhea at pfourk headquarters

You should have stayed anonymous. Booo.

The entire 2010s to me were me being a neet learning about philosophy through pirated books i learned about on lit, reading Syrian civil war update threads on pol and listening to vaporwave/citypop/lofi hip hop/future funk mixes

While p4k was like "OH MY GOD QUEEN BAY SLAYYY DONT YOU KNOW TAYLOR SWIFT IS LIKE DA BEST XD KANYE GETS A 10"

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>Now approaching its 10th anniversary, Floral Shoppe stands as a touchstone of millennial art.

I didn't need this feel.

yeah i don't need to be irrationally angry this early in the morning

maybe I'll go back. who knows. but for now I'm keeping it.

Hey cut them a break, they were busy frothing at the mouth and lubing up their anuses over Kendrick Lamar and his midget clones

omg. Totally deserved though.

You don't get it

Poptamism and corporate intrests infected p4k in the 2010's. They killed rock music off, an they spent the entire decade ignoring vaporwave and other micro genres, while over promoting mediocre top 40 pop and pop rap. They were still coasting on the coolness from the 2000s.

Now we live in this hell world were nothing new is ever made and its no longer about art, but the profit motive and identity politics

The reason p4k is going to die in the 2020s. Its no longer cool, and its going behind a paywall

the most iconic album of our decade
HAVE SEX BIGOT INCELS

lookingthroughsheets.bandcamp.com/album/melissa

>implying vaporwave isn't one of the most philosophically important movements of the modern age in its explorations of contemporary hauntology and internet culture, and that Floral Shoppe is not one of its most important documents
it deserves a 10. a classic.

vaporwave is shitty DJ Screw 20 years too late

This but unironically
It's actually a major milestone in electronic music

>gives beyonce live album 9.3

yeah man that's some street cred right there woke af

Um why
Your opinions suck as much as every other user of this site and you’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

Care to back that up with an actual argument? One involving music theory and historical context, not just your pathetic opinion on a laughable genre.

probably the most satisfying thing to listen to if you're a fan of floral shoppe

Vaporwave is basically the kids who grew up on the pre smart phone internet and grew up watching toonami and the 2010s turning into a corporate neoliberal wasteland of poptamism with nothing to say politically or of importance turning into 20 year olds.

Its the millinal answer to mainstream music being stripped of artistry and politics and turned into YASSS SLAY BEYONCE (which p4k took full part in, while ignoring the weird pop underground of microgenres)

its dionysian, it takes pop music and warps it. It fuses the chaos with the stablity

Yeah and that doesn't remotely describe tripfags. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

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This

Waiting

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This is a great write up. Y'all are just jealous you couldn't write something like this

>music theory
LOL

fucking cringe

The death of rock as a popular form of music was the worst thing to ever happen to america. Pop music is not artistically valid. It is a product, entertainment, Its lip synched by coked out whores who have been raped by jewish executives and who sing music written for them by swedish AI programs

The forefronting of top 40 pop in the 2010s was the forefronting of neoliberlism. Beyonce is politcal alright. But she sings about making dat money and how all women need to be da boss bitch. Its pure capitlism.

Vaporwave was the true rebellion, the true originality of the 2010s'. It was the siren scream of the lowerclass smothered under p4ks and the mainstream media fully buying into the obama narrative. Vaporwave is a hauntolgical attack upon capitlism. It does not give up on the future. And it was not made to be sold, it proliffrated for free on the internet.

The dionysian spirit of rock transferred into pop. Warping and melting what the capitalist scum value the most

The true hero of the 2010s not rap or pop rap or kanye or tay tay.

Its the weirdos in their basement watching anime and slowing down 80s muzak

there is no jealousy i feel they are pathetic

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If they covered vaporwave as it was happening you would hate them too, they can't win.

the damage p4k has done to the world of music is too massive for me to ever forgive them. I just await their death (soon) as a form of catharsis

Meme tier

The music and the site

I'll bite, I'd recommend Babbling Corpse by Grafton Tanner, it gets shilled a lot, but if you want to know where vaporwave came from and what it means for music it's an indispensable resource.

The context in which vaporwave manifests. Obama had won, the mainstream media got in full boot licker mode. Rock music was killed. The only music allowed to be discussed is top 40, also you can only discuss it through a neoliberal lens in which the most important things are chart topping, identity politics, and profit.

The thing that died with rock music, its spirit of rebellion against the values of the elite. Rap could never capture that because it embodies the values of the elite (making money)

Vaporwave was the dionysian spirit of rock manifesting itself in a world were rock have been killed off and the mainstream music press had become neoliberal poptamist bootlickers who fully bought into the obama era narratives about diversity and inclusive and how the best answer to the problems of the marginalized is more capitalism. And how somehow we were supposed to pretend that this disposable product called pop music was worthy of any merit. What vaporwave basically was Dionysus taking his revenge by taking everything capitlism, neoliberlism, and top 40 pop values, warping and melting it and then giving it away for free on the internet. Now this is a dangerous idea in this neoliberal hellscape. No wonder p4k ignored it.

based

>made by a tranny
>8.8
checks out

People attempting to intellectualise vaporwave are insufferable
DUDE LATE STAGE CAPITALISM LMAO
It's a dumb fucking genre with some vague nods to hauntology, which Ghost Box had already done years before

Holy shit it's real!

>album made by a minority or tranny or queer
>BNM
Select two (2).

nice effortpost

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>all the music snobs like bitchfork and fantano coming around to admit vaporwave was good after all

sweet victory

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This was actually the first pitchfork review I've ever read and all I got from it was that they can't separate the artist from the art. What a load of bullshit.

they used the 8.8 meme score/ Iove everything about this.

This

It's incredible really. The were pushing cooperate shit like PC Music

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F

Deathconciouness is coming in the next 10 years, The review for their last album pitchfork did said DC came on incredibly strong and they retreated for 5 years, and they were right. The "legendary" status about that album, lost masters, heavy depression, people thinking the Antiochus was real etc etc

For an album this good to be largely ignored by press then rise through the ranks is incredible.

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go back to vaporwave amino

>they only talk about fs
mission failed, we'll get em next time

Blank Banshee is obviously next.

its 4 in the morning, im smoking my cigarette after eating my mcdonalds cheeseburger, in my cramped apartment, but i dont mind the size. i look outside my window and look onto my city. i reminisce on my old days thinking about how beautiful things were. all thats left are the memories. i daze onto the city lights desperately searching for an answer. i will never fell the way i used to feel in the R E T R O days. I T ' S A L L I N M Y H E A D

accurate score desu

I genuinely enjoy floral shoppe and have came to a similar conclusion years ago. However, most of this feels dragged out, overly focused on who Vektroid is as a person, and like they're trying to catch onto the wave

Yeah, and then corporations stole the image as soon as they possibly could. For something that started around 2010~2011, they started taking from the aesthetic in about 2013 or 14, and in recent years, it's only grown in popularity, but not as an actual genre. Artistically, there still remains good vaporwave being made here and there, but it's all been overshadowed by an exaggerated and post-ironic version of the aesthetic, that these companies really don't understand. However, to say pop music isn't something artistically valid (where Clarence Clarity and Björk are pop) while rock is totally different (considering Kiss and Limp Bizkit were rock) isn't very fair. Both can be very artistic in their own respects, it's just that the mainstream is seeing more and more simple solution to past formula, so industry plants can be shelled out at a faster rate than ever.