ECO VIRTUAL
ATMOSPHERES 第1

Esthetics, art, and visual and musical functionality, with feet firmly anchored in the postmodern and eyes set on any possible future. Included, indeed fundamental, are the hypothetical futures imagined in the recent past; those unachievable in our future and unrealized in our present.

Hypothetical futures starting from the eighties: continuously swallowed by the constant acceleration of a society technologically geared towards a feverish upgrade. Flashes of futuristic irrationality like those tiny cell phones with antennas that were produced. Even more unfortunate relatives of the future perfect, at least mentioned in the grammars of our generation. In an irresolvable space-time purgatory between two aesthetic poles that have thrived in literature and cinema: fantasy and science fiction.
Abandoned futures generate melancholy that is more intellectual than emotional.

To the more sensitive, I recommend a simple operation: perform an image search on any browser; better if on Explorer, to place oneself in a meta dimension. Type "internet." There it is, clear and visual: the vaporwave. The futures.
Look at how many shades of antiseptic and futuristic blue. And how much fluorescence. Look at how many stylized little men connected to the world through cables. Look at how many late nineties monitors connected to people, more cables, and http and www floating in hyperspace blue. A thousand conventions mysteriously accepted: between outdated, diacritic futurism, and clear-cut ridiculousness. How much involuntary beauty!

A vaporwave artist extracts beauty from the gold mines of unconscious modernity, creating a suitable framework. Then selects, roughly reworks, institutionalizes, and channels it into the genre.

The first album in the ECO VIRTUAL ATMOSPHERES series is one of the most enjoyable products of this musical current. It consists of ten quick reassuring listens from the speakers of past futures; two minutes on average.
Like the celebrated Tomorrow's Harvest by Boards Of Canada, it is introduced by a sort of theme, an opening jingle. Like a startup overture, but dilated and watery, in full vapor codification.
Cumulus Fractus immediately offers the best one can expect from the genre: it starts on an anthropological percussive base with overlays of synths and soft wind instruments in style similar to weather-television accompaniment. The cover recalls. It quickly grows on garish preprinted rhythms and lands at a repeated ascending pattern finale; each repetition marked by coarse sequencer cuts.

Functionality: pleasant accompaniment with a minimum disturbance rate, conventionally relaxing.
Art: selection from reality and redesignation. Change of context and reworking.
Esthetics: not in a Kantian sense. Here "esthetics" is meant in the strict sense as a system of interdependent signs, to which a piece composed of such signs can be immediately assimilated.

It continues selecting mostly from the ugly and functionally musical par excellence: new age for advertising use. Among suitably slowed-down female vocalizations, then pitched downwards and semi-testosteronized. Like many artificial Smokey Robinsons, in snippets. Lazy and exhausting synthesizers that only lack a soothing voiceover inviting you to buy water cases at 5 dollars a bottle. Tacky wind instruments, pretentious basses, cascading maj7 borrowed from a mysteriously pompous instance of musical ugly-as-sin: lounge genre.

A melancholic and packable feeling from adolescent nights spent with the TV on the void, with one of those portable antennas on top. Bombarded with esthetics, gazing out a window at any future.