Youtor
The Haunted Aesthetics of Vaporwave
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The popular music and aesthetic “Vaporwave” offers glimpses of lost futures and possible pasts through a fuzzy digital amalgam of seemingly ancient advertisements and audio samples. The sounds of vaporwave are lo fi, offering an incomplete vision of the music itself. This aesthetic choice is fundamental to the beautiful and tragic philosophy of vaporwave, as the quality of audio is akin to the ethereal calls and moans from dead spirits, barely audible cries that echo through a haunted house. And as for the dated visuals, they too are spectral traces of lost time. • • He writes: 'comments on half-erased or never-quite-attained songform': perhaps Ariel Pink's appeal is that his sound musters the sonic equivalent of the 'corner of the retina' effect that the best ghost stories have famously achieved. To understand what this entails, we need to reverse, or at least nuance, the commonplace which has it that the ghost is at its most scary only when it can't fully be seen. To say this implies that the ghost could be made the positive object of apprehension. Yet spectres are unsettling because they are that which can not, by their very nature (or lack of nature), ever be fully seen; gaps in Being, they can only dwell at the periphery of the sensible, in glimmers, shimmers, suggestions. It is not accidental that the word 'haunting' often refers to that which inhabits* us but which we cannot ever grasp; we find 'haunting' precisely those Things which lurk at the back of our mind, on the tip of our tongue, just out of reach. 'Haunting refrains' we are compelled to simulate-reiterate are sonic objets a around which drives circulate. • • Blade Runner and the Possible Future • One of the major influences on vaporwaves aesthetic choices has been the 1982 classic, Blade Runner, which takes place in a fictional 2019, this world is an interplay of Japanese culture, sickeningly bright neon, omnipresent ads, advanced technology, and a dull wretched city. All of which provide an ideal palette from which new aesthetic dreams can be woven. • Phillip K Dick, the author of the story Blade Runner is based on, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was a precognitive, someone who had visions and dreams of possible futures, his own and distant. These are what gave birth to his brilliant and influential literature, much of which consisted of visionary environments, technology, and especially people who live within dreams. • On his precognition he writes: • “This is a disturbing new view but oddly enough it coincides with my dream experiences, my precognition of events moving this way from the future; I feel them inexorably approaching, not generated from the present, but somehow already there but not yet visible. If they are somehow “there” already, and we encounter them successively (the Minkowski block universe; events are all already there but we have to encounter them successively), then this view might be a correct view of time and causality.” • This is Dick experiencing Carl Jung’s Synchronicity, in which the relative unconscious has already perceived the future. • “The absolute knowledge which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence. Such a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a psychically relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time continuum.“ • It is in this disjointed time that we find the womb of Hauntology, the mother of Vaporwave is someone who hasn’t even been born yet. As Hamlet says, the time is out of joint. The Los Angeles of Blade Runner’s 2019 is the very place where vaporwave is created, crisp and high fidelity, but on it’s way back to us, it loses clarity and becomes a bit fuzzy. • The Truly Haunting Artist • Earlier, Mark Fisher described Ariel Pink as a primary example of hauntological music, but the true heir apparent to this title, is the obviously, but severely underappreciated Spookey Ruben. A contemporary of Ariel Pink, his 1995 masterpiece Modes of Transportation Vol 1 offers a sublime, lofi vision. The album was critically acclaimed, and had a major MTV hit in “These Days Are Old”. But tragically his talent and critical achievement did not translate to popularity. • But it is in this state of unfulfilled potential that Spookey’s vision remains literally potent. • The iconography around Spookey is even a synchronistic or hyperstitional expression of Hauntology. His symbol is a man in a trash can. Cast aside by the present, but fully formed in a lost future. • Patreon: / memeanalysis • Twitter: / thegoddisk • Instagram: @thegoddisk and @aeoniccomics
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