satellite cult 22.22

officewave, final floral experience, abandoned web radio

Apr 07, 2023

welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will render you slowly and leisurely, giving you time to adjust before you’re spit out as an .mov file. let the codec cradle you and wrap you in its soft, blankety love.

please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs. if you’re viewing this on the website, forgive the way Substack formats some Bandcamp embeds.

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Divinity

slushy, reverberating, and dreamy, Chrome Theory’s Divinity is the echo of mineral water dripping from the stalactites in a crystal cave. the listener is guided from remote depths all the way out into a liminal, dreamcore valley, the Microsoft XP Bliss background draped in a light fog, where each particle of vapor catches a little bit of the sun.

i miss 99th street

this single by internetspacecowgirl💫 hits if you’re looking for some smooth, French house-influenced future funk. it plunders from “High Hopes” by The S.O.S. Band.

CHAMPION NIDOKING V.S

VaporPony’s CHAMPION NIDOKING V.S is a dreamy, slushwave-inspired barber beats journey through the Kanto region with a feral Nidoking at your side. A must-listen for Pokémon fans who are in it just as much for the gameplay as they are for the nostalgiacore. i can’t help hoping that Pokéwave will take off the way Simpsonswave did. there’s so much untapped potential.

Places for People Volume 6

businesswave, or sometimes officewave, is a largely underappreciated aesthetic-as-genre (or is it genre-as-aesthetic?) niche in vaporwave that balances the oppressive mundanity of the nine to five worker with the comfort and familiarity of routine. it’s off-white walls and light grey copy machines, boxy beige computer monitors and mustard yellow floppy disks. it’s cubicles and water coolers, motivational posters and pagers and paperwork.

Places for People Volume 6 by Places for People puts a utopian virtual spin on the whole thing, with touches of barber beats and trip hop. it’s the soundtrack to the training video you’re shown on your first day in the sales department at Utopian Data Systems Inc. just don’t piss off the boss.

Final Floral Experience

a prank tribute to Updated Floral Experience by MACマイナス, which itself is a tribute to Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus, Final Floral Experience by MACマルチ, an alias of シェルSHOKKR (who, according to Discogs, is a thirteen-year-old boy), isn’t half bad.

it also serves to remind us that even now, all these years later, Floral Shoppe remains one of the most important and enduring releases under the vaporwave umbrella. is it cliché to call it my favorite album? of course. but that doesn’t make it untrue. i hope Vektroid’s having a good day.

XII SOCIETY UNDERGROUND RADIO

if you’re a regular in certain circles, this isn’t news—XII Society Underground Radio is a popular Neocities web radio page with almost twenty-five thousand views. but the site hasn’t been updated in about a year, and all four radio streams are dead.

sounds useless, right? i disagree. it’s more fun once you know which corners to investigate.

Interface Age

there’s something about the aesthetic of retro electronic and computing magazines. primary sources from a world experiencing the technological revolution that would come to change everything are fascinating enough, but the aesthetics of early home computing, rudimentary graphics and grids, all feel somehow still futuristic despite their places in the past.

you can read old issues of Interface Age on the Internet Archive here.

the 88x31 GIF Collection

the Internet Archive has a pretty well-known collection of GIFs scraped from Geocities pages, but did you know about the The 88x31 GIF Collection? it’s a collection of buttons from old web-era pages, all reformatted as GIFs. have fun.