On the Genre of Vaporgame Music
I haven't done a blog post in awhile. Been camping and prepping for September. And while I had planned to post the soundtrack for Under Crimson Skies today I instead decided to do this instead.
So I am hoping you know what Vaporwave is. It is a music genre that spawned in the early 2010s and it evokes nostalgia and so on and so forth. Just read the RateYourMusic definition of it. I don't feel that paraphrasing it right now. Vaporwave itself has a number of subgenres from Broken Transmission to Utopian Virtual to Vaportrap and more. The topic of this blogpost is to look at one specific style I don't believe has been categorized.
There is a number of vaporwave releases that do one of three things. Either the aesthetic the album goes for is heavily rooted in video game related imagery (blurred screenshots, promo art, track titles after VG-related stuff), the album heavily samples video games (in the form of sound effects, remixed VGM, cutscene sampling, etc) or uses some combination of the previous two. The earliest vaporwave release, Eccojams by Chuck Person used cover art from the 1992 video game, Ecco the Dolphin. Video game imagery is not new to Vaporwave at all. The specific subgenre I am writing about uses the latter two types I mentioned, video game sampling and a combo of both imagery and music.
This type of vaporwave does not have common name. The most popular name for it is Gamewave. I personally find that name horrendous and do not use it. In fact if I had no issue with Gamewave I would not have even made this post. A big issue with the name is also that Gamewave is the name of a future bass album by Floor Baba.
So I sought out to come up with a better name for it. So after some thinking I came up with two terms: Vapor Game Music and Vaporgames. I quite like Vaporgames so I will refer to it as that. Vaporgames is a subgenre of vaporwave that relies on heavy sampling of video game music and the use of video game imagery. Some albums may use of video game music soundfonts to create entirely new songs inspired by video game music. Artists seek to recreate a nostalgic feeling from playing old video game when the listener was younger. Artists also create soundtracks for fictional video games, often writing a small story or creating assets to accompany the album. On RYM albums in this usually have a combo of Vaporwave, Video Game Music and Sequencer & Tracker.
So yeah, what are some good Vaporgame albums? Here are 5 of my favourite ones.
https://usgolf95.bandcamp.com/album/golf-advance
US Golf 95 takes inspiration from GBA-era Golf games. There's just something about video game golf and its aesthetic that I like. I don't know if its sampled or not but it does a great job at creating that easy listening feel a lot of golf games have. Very relaxing. It's like a lo-fi version of the Hot Shots Golf 3 soundtrack (to be posted later).
I intend to post the actual Runescape soundtrack eventually so I will save my stories for that post. I did play Runescape a lot. I never got far, I never saw the point of grinding. I just liked listening to the music and exploring, occasionally doing a low level quest. While I do adore the actual soundtrack a lot more than this I can't deny these are really good remixes. The stupid cover aside this is actually really good. runescape斯凱利 chops, screws, distorts and quality changes the Runescape songs.
The Fotoshoppe Co. label/collective is the leader of this style. They have countless great releases in the style. I have been slowly trying to go through all of them but doing it slowly. This is on that wowed me. Taking inspiration from Japanese PSX horror games (such as ...Iru! and Hellnight) this album features that dreary hauntological ambiance found in those games. It's been a long time since I played ...Iru! so I don't know if the soundtrack is sampled or not but this evokes the exact same atmosphere.
This one is a little less vaporwave than the others but still fits. Switched On takes the 1970s Moog sound, the compositions from the 1991 game, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and combines them into this anachronistic masterpiece. The Moog sound takes these tracks and 'vaporwaves' them turning the 16-bit sound into this dreamy and lullaby-like atmosphere. Only issue the tracks are too short but that's nothing Audacity can't fix. Get the extended version. It has more tracks from throughout the game. The original record is only like 20 minutes long.
Comments
Post a Comment