satellite cult 63.63
satellite cult 63.63
climatewave, mainstream vapor, massage your cat
welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will drop you in the middle of low-poly street in a low-poly city, surrounded by NPCs who will never be able to drink from the paper coffee cups in their hands or unzip the backpacks slung over their shoulders. in time, you will become one of them, but that’s okay. you’re ready to experience humanity’s final form.
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overcast
it’s a Sunday afternoon and you’ve got a book open on your lap or a Game Boy in your hands with The Weather Channel humming on low volume in the corner of the living room. your eyes flash to the forecast every once in a while, just to check and see if the rain’s any closer to stopping. it rattles off the rooftop above you, and the cool autumn air drifts in through the open window. when it clears up, you’re supposed to meet your friend for a walk in the park. if it doesn’t stop, you’ll probably channel surf until it’s time to make dinner.
SimCity3000.wave
when you get down to it, SimCity 3000 is the definition of utopian virtual. in 1999, it was the second best-selling computer game, only being beaten out by another building simulator: Rollercoaster Tycoon. building simulators as they are lend themselves perfectly to utopian virtual——the utopia built is the utopia of the player’s, though not necessarily utopia for the subjects of the simulation, with every aspect of the world being controlled by the player as deity, similar to the corporate overlords in utopian virtual landscapes, with their sleek aesthetics and modern conveniences, all at the expensive of your privacy and autonomy. and the aesthetics of SimCity 3000 are especially fitting for an album that feels like a relic of that deceptive utopia, found amid the ruins and rubble of a world that once was, existing only as a few files on the hard drive of an old beige IBM PC.
city_cybernetics.observations
this excellent marriage of cyberpunk and afrofuturism utilizes the stylings of drum and bass and vaportrap to build a soundscape complete with overheard conversations and barely there radio broadcasts, all culminating in something that feels both harrowing and optimistic, like a hero approaching a terrifying trial, unsure if they’re destined to return triumphant.
terrified of the real fucking
this album won’t be released until October 3rd, but the two tracks currently available to listen drew me in with their push and pull——there is so much violence in both of them, but also moments of (forgive the cliché) calm before the storm. if tension and release are foundational concepts in music, rash3ns has an expert grasp. the second of the two tracks, “war isn’t over,” even lulls the listener into a deceptive state of peace before evisceration. the DJ, according to Bandcamp, is Ukrainian, but it’s unclear if the war in this case is the literal one or a metaphor. either way, it’s really. good. shit.
SHOPLIFTER (EP)
made in 2022 but released just this week, this icy and choppy jungle release is a jungle lovers jungle album, accosting the listener (in the best way possible) and drawing from the most classic iterations of the genre in the 90s while sharing an aesthetic sensibility with more recent developments in electronic music like sextrance and depressive breakcore.
a masterlist
meanwhile on tumblr dot com, user syn4k (with an addition in the reblogs by foon) has provided a list of resources for generating text and graphics ideal for Neocities and other indie web platforms. a few of these generators were new to me, like the 3D gif maker, but a few have actually been featured here before!
void dive
on the precipice of mainstream resurgence
vaporwave is back on the cultural map. it’s been creeping up for a few years, as the aesthetics of Y2K nostalgia have merged with with it alongside a small seapunk revival, but now? people outside the scene are buzzing about vapor and writing (kind of bad?) articles in magazines even your mom has heard of.
in this Jacobin article from last month, vaporwave isn’t named, but the author spends most of his word count discussing fashwave, connecting the symbolism of VHS aesthetics and Greek statues to restorative nostalgia for the Reagan administration, writing in conversation with Svetlana Boym’s book, The Future of Nostalgia. i found this piece somewhat odd——the author makes no meaningful differentiation between vaporwave and fashwave, connecting the aesthetics of vaporwave directly to fascism and far-right extremism, and ignores the context of vaporwave’s origins, which are ultimately ani-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, and diy.
the relationship between the larger vaporwave scene and fashwave is analogous to the relationship between the punk scene and neo-Nazi punks; in general fashwave utilizes the same signifiers but exists in opposition to the values of the wider community. i completely agree with the author about why young internet fascists are drawn to vaporwave, but the Jacobin article seems to imply that the aesthetics of vaporwave are inherently the aesthetics of online fascism, instead of correctly identifying that fascists have appropriated the aesthetics of vaporwave.
the author of the Jacobin article has a public-facing Bandcamp page with a collection of music including vaporwave icons like 猫 シ Corp. and waterfront dining, so it’s puzzling why he doesn’t make the differences clearer——i guess we can’t know for sure what happened during the editorial process (maybe those details were cut), but the result is an examination of the relationship between vaporwave and online fascism that tells only half the story.
on a different note, this week Wired ran a piece about the relationship between weatherwave (aka climatewave) and climate change anxiety. it reads like the author just discovered vaporwave yesterday, or at least that assumption was made about his audience——did you know vaporwave artists sample music without permission? shocking!
he interviews Jennifer Ladino, author of Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature, and while she observes that the images and music in weatherwave videos build tension by being at odds with one another, she concludes that probably weatherwave videos are an escape from the anxiety of climate change rather than a call to action. overall i found the connections made between the music and climate change loose, but certainly present——the piece could have gone much deeper.
it seems to me that if vaporwave continues bubbling back to the surface, we’ll see more writing that either takes advantage of political situations for clicks or simply skims the surface despite the fact that the genre is 15 years old at this point.
one thing is certain: those of us who stuck around all this time, for the love of vapor, have seen it pay off in ways a resurgence of mainstream interest will never be able to capture.
this week, i’ll leave you with the revelation that your cat doesn’t want to be pet——it wants a massage:
thanks for being my acolytes. catch you at the next ritual.
