Here's the recipe.

First, get a DAW, that's a digital audio workstation. If you're in the Mac ecosystem even a little bit, congratulations, GarageBand is right there; the iPhone you had three iPhones ago is as good a drum machine as you can get. If you're on a Windows machine, Reaper will probably get you where you need to be. What I'm saying is that you're going to need a way to manipulate sound. You're going to want to get cool sample libraries; you probably don't have the yearly income to have a jam room full of Moogs and Mellotrons and vintage Soviet synthesizers and Eastern European rhythm boxes, but you can buy their recordings and feed them into your DAW. There's a small archipelago of drum machines ready to be programmed in your browser window, some of them based on tech that's been the backbone of pop music for what I'm wagering has been your entire life. If you're really committed to this project, you can get a MIDI keyboard (your regular computer keyboard will do in a pinch), but all the gear in the world won't be able to replace the key element of your project. If you set out to create the next great eccojam, you need a golden flip. You need a worthy sample.

The backbone of vaporwave is the sample, the disfigurement and recontextualization of a pre-existing piece of music. This isn't a new idea. It didn't come out of nowhere; specifically, the germ of what would become vaporwave's core moveset likely comes out of Houston rap, thank you DJ Screw. There's a lot of literature about the headier side of vaporwave, about its use as a vector for anticapitalist critique (see the work of James Ferraro) and its progressive collapse into empty signifiers and aesthetic choices as the world burns to the ground around it. But in all its guises, vaporwave is, in a sense, about The Past, where the detritus that marked an amorphous Then gets twisted into oblong shapes in the Now, because memory and creativity are distortion fields. When something is powerful but loves shortcuts, like, say, one's memory, details get blurred, sounds start to smudge and smear. At its best, or at least its most effective, vaporwave captures the sound of trying and failing to remember something you've forgotten. You know that something used to occupy this space, and you can still see the shape of it, but the act of trying to remember sends your thinking into a labyrinth of locked grooves.

Fittingly, I can't remember where I first encountered “I Hope You Remember Me,” the sixth track from Heavy Systems, Inc.'s 2020 album Vape Sessions for Alexander. That's a hell of a sentence to read with no context, I apologize. Let me break that down. Just who is Heavy Systems Inc. (or HSI henceforth)? I couldn't tell you, really. Like the umpteen bedroom producers who post their experiments and otherwise for public consumption on YouTube and Soundcloud and such, I can't pinpoint exactly who HSI is. From what I can tell, they are American, but I don't know where they're from; some places say Tampa, some places say San Diego. That's just as well, because what is San Diego if not the Tampa of California, and what is Tampa if not the San Diego of Florida. They draw; their Blogspot is full of digital illustrations. Best I can tell, they've been making music for just over a decade, a lot of it I'd perhaps ignorantly file under drum & bass. There's a breakneck remix of the all-time Ginger Root banger “Loretta” on their Soundcloud nestled between a sprightly D&B number called “Pimp Tight” and a lurching space-disco number spliced with movie dialogue called “Guns Can't Help You Now.” They 100% know their way around a groove, around a flip, around a sample.

If I were the betting type, I'd wager it was the YouTube algorithm that served "I Hope You Remember Me" up to me. YouTube is probably the world's single-largest repository of vaporwave and post-vaporwave, and by post-vaporwave, I mean music that presents itself as its own found-object artifact from the aforementioned nebulous Then. Think Barbershop Simulator, the genre-codifying 2023 effort from producer slowerpace. I like slowerpace's work, especially the design element. I love the attention to detail and clear care taken in designing the album art, in the naming of the tracks. slowerpace's angle is, so far as I can tell, to fill the void left by objects we can't remember, a kind of ontological samizdat with cool grooves. It's a cool design project but I couldn't point to a single flip that stays lodged in my head the way the one in "I Hope You Remember Me" does. It's the difference between isolating a vibe for effect and isolating a hook for effect.

The sample “I Hope You Remember Me” is built around, the sliver of the thing we're trying to remember, is from a song called “Not Me,” the title track from the 1987 album by singer Glenn Medeiros. Wait, who? To be fair, only a very specific kind of music nerd remembers who Glenn Medeiros is, specifically the kind of chart-watching dorks who concern themselves with Billboard Number Ones. He did have his moment in the sun, so to speak, riding a new jack swing beat and a big assist from Bobby Brown to the top of the charts in 1990. He also knocked on the Top 10's door in 1987 with his first single, a cover of George Benson's “Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You.” But unless you were a turbo-permed European housewife in the late 80s, you probably don't know who Glenn Medeiros is. He is an adult contemporary that-guy, a dependable soft rock bench player. If Richard Marx and Michael Bolton were the Bash Brothers of adult contemporary, Medeiros was, uh... Stan Javier? Rick Honeycutt? Why yes, I did look those up on Baseball Reference; I was barely alive when the Oakland A's were rocking the house. Point is, Glenn Medeiros was a working musician, and the uncut, unabridged story of American popular music can't be written without him, the same way erasing Javier or Honeycutt from those Athletics teams could butterfly-effect that 1989 World Series win away.

“Not Me” is 1987 as hell, built around synthesized chimes and oozing a very 1987 brand of mystique, the kind that wears a silk shirt in chiaroscuro lighting for the bordering-on-avant-garde music video. The parent album's credits are stacked floor to ceiling with session aces on shore leave from the Good Ship Yacht Rock, and the credited songwriters here specifically are Paul Anka (Canada's first pop star and an Ottawa legend, lest we forget) and Deke Rivers, aka Richard fucking Marx. There I go namedropping Richard Marx again. I need to impress upon you just how huge Richard Marx was in 1987: his self-titled debut album went triple-platinum and had four singles crack the top 3, including a Number One single, his first of three. He was the Jose Canseco of the most uncool genre of music on Earth, but the thing with professional songwriters, which Marx was prior to his breakthrough and still is to this day, is they have this shit down to a science. Pair that professionalism and craft with the looping, hypnotic structure of vaporwave, and you have a song (or two songs, I suppose) that I've thought about every day since I first heard it.

“I Hope You Remember Me” isn't a drastic reworking of “Not Me” in terms of sonic manipulation; HSI doesn't warp the track that much or make Medeiros sounds like he's a wailing, melting demon (cf the Chuck Person and death's dynamic shroud records embedded above). The effect is more akin to listening to a CD that has chosen to skip in a few very opportune places. Maybe it's the alchemy of the smooth groove, the deep-cut nature of the sample, the moody song title, and the sense that this was created with one specific person in mind that makes “I Hope You Remember Me” so memorable to me. I can't prove it, but I think the album title gives it away: I want to believe that HSI has a friend named Alexander who likes to chill out and hit the vape, and since it's 2020 and we're in the dog days of COVID, and since one latches onto the small pleasure we can still give ourselves, healthiness be damned, maybe HSI made this album for their friend. Maybe this was a gift, in the figurative sense if not the literal, since it isn't available on HSI's Bandcamp or Soundcloud (though it is on Spotify and YouTube). It feeds into this sense that creative types, like me, like you, like HSI, are all just trying to make something at least one other person likes, whether we're toiling in obscurity or playing arenas. And I guess, in a way, this whole essay is my way of letting one other person know that I like and cherish a thing they've created from the ashes of something else.

#music

Someday I'll be enough of a physical media die-hard that I'll start making tapes the old-fashioned way again. But for now, these will have to do. RIYL: loud trebly guitars, unexpected drum machines, unexpected saxophone, music to sit on your porch to.

A1 Ween, “Did You See Me?” (Shinola, Vol. 1, 2005) A2 Peter Cat Recording Co., “Memory Box” (Bismillah, 2019) A3 Cootie Catcher, “Friend of a Friend” (single, 2024) A4 Liquid Mike, “K2” (Paul Bunyan's Slingshot, 2024) A5 Double Dagger, “No Allies” (MORE, 2009) A6 Metallica, “Master of Puppets” (Master of Puppets, 1986) B1 The Decemberists, “January Hymn” (The King Is Dead, 2011) B2 Cake, “Italian Leather Sofa” (Fashion Nugget, 1996) B3 Pearl & the Oysters, “Side Quest” (Planet Pearl, 2024) B4 Dan Seals, “Bop” (Won't Be Blue Anymore, 1985) B5 Kiwi Jr., “Norma Jean's Jacket” (Cooler Returns, 2021) B6 MJ Lenderman, “You Don't Know the Shape I'm In” (Manning Fireworks, 2024) B7 Neil Young, “Down by the River” (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

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The Clientele. Hot off their sprawling comeback album I Am Not There Anymore and a opening slot for another pantheon band of mine (The War on Drugs—at Royal Albert Hall, no less! Of all the shows for me to miss!), these lads had another strong showing this year in my stats, bolstered by the fact that I made a sprawling playlist and accompanying zine for my dear friend Sarah. I leaned heavy on B-sides and assorted ephemera this time around.

Where should I start with them? If you aren't hooked within the first ten seconds of “Since K Got Over Me,” the leadoff track from the band's masterful third album Strange Geometry (2005), I fear this band might not be for you. But if you, like me, love swirling, reverbed-out fingerpicked Stratocaster in your swoony, literary English indie-pop, keep listening to Strange Geometry, then listen to their first two albums, Suburban Light (2000) and The Violet Hour (2002), then pick back up with their fourth album, God Save the Clientele (2006).

The Isley Brothers. Funk-rock godfathers, the ultimate R&B chameleons, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. These dudes wrote “Shout” in 1959 (which would cement anyone's legendary status, so unkillable is that song) and got Beyoncé to feature on one of their songs in 2022. They have been sampled by Biggie Smalls, the Beastie Boys, and Kendrick Lamar. Ernie Isley's guitar tone is one of the greatest sounds I've ever heard, guitar or otherwise. These guys are legends in the field.

Where should I start with them? I'm partial to the sextet era of the group that starts proper with the totally awesome 3 + 3 (1973), also known as “the one with 'That Lady' on it.” It’s my favourite Isleys albums, but the one I gravitated towards in 2024 was The Heat Is On (1975), which is more groove-oriented. Another Isleys track I had on repeat was “It's Alright With Me,” from The Real Deal (1982), which sees the brothers bringing in an electro influence.

Kiwi Jr. Last year, my friend Ross, who works at a record store in Jolly Ol', sent me a wonderful care package consisting of Kiwi Jr's second and third albums on 12” vinyl. Sometimes my friend spoil me rotten. He sent me the records in part because I've been singing the praises of this band ever since I listened to “Leslie” over and over again in 2019. Jeremy Gaudet is one of my favourite active rock lyricists, and not just because he obviously likes some of the same movies I do.

Where do I start with them? Since the Kiwis only have three albums, I'd recommend just starting with Football Money (2019) and working your way forwards. If you miss college rock like they did it in the 1990s, you'll love Football Money, which is catchy, breezy (10 tracks, 28 minutes), and a total blast to list to. There's a lot of Pavement in their DNA, but they love Guided by Voices and the Kinks, too. Cooler Returns (2021), my favourite Kiwi Jr. album, introduces a broader sonic palette, while Chopper (2022) is stacked floor to ceiling with cool, moody synths.

Peter Cat Recording Co. The few, the proud, the contemporary sophisti-pop bands. I stumbled upon these guys while browsing the album art for 2024 releases on Rate Your Music, which I acknowledge is the most deranged way to find new music to listen to. But the experience isn't unlike browsing the stacks at a record store, where you have little to go on but a genre and a piece of album art. I can't claim this is the most effective way of finding cool music, but it worked this time, because I found a cool band that was able to answer the question “What if Prefab Sprout were from New Delhi?”

Where should I start with them? Beta (2024) is the record that hooked me. The cinematic atmosphere, the long, languid melodies, Suryakant Sawhney's weary croon: at the risk of sounding too abstract, this record has fantastic vibes. The opening avant-chamber waltz “Flowers R. Blooming” is kind of a fakeout, since the album twin centrepieces of “21c” and “Black and White” are brooding dancefloor bangers.

Ween. I've loved these bastards since I was in high school (I once did an oral presentation on “Push th' Little Daisies” in English class), which puts them in the hallowed company of bands like Rush and They Might Be Giants. And let's face facts, Ween is They Might Be Giants for edgelords (I know Ween bristles at being compared to TMBG, but how many prolific genre-hopping alt-rock duos from the Northeast founded in the 80s whose members met in high school can you name—I'm gonna dedicate a blog post to this one day) and now I'm at the point where I'm the kind of sicko who listens to bootlegs. Never mind that, I have preferred bootlegs (check out Central Park 2010/9/17, which closes with the best version of “Doctor Rock” I've ever heard).

Where should I start with them? I'd recommend non-heads start with the excellent White Pepper (2000), Ween's most approachable album in that it has the fewest voice filters and the least off-putting imagery. There's a lot of cool psychedelia and Beatles-y pop, and ends with a three-song run that wouldn't sound out of place on a 70s country rock record. That run includes “Stay Forever,” a song so lovely it fries your brain knowing that these are the same guys who less than a decade earlier recorded a song called “Touch My Tooter.”

#music #tenthings

Some of these are things everyone's favourite video game plumber has said over the course of his storied career. Some of these things are shouted by Mark Morrison at the end of certain lines of his immortal 90s R&B hit “Return of the Mack.” Your job is to figure out which is which (and also imagine “Return of the Mack” with Mario ad libs instead). I'll say this: there's more overlap here than you think.

1. “It's a-me!”
2. “Hold on!”
3. “Come on!”
4. “Boy oh boy!”
5. “Round and round!”
6. “Here I go!”
7. “Once again!”
8. “Here we go!”
9. “Oh my God!”
10. “Oh yeah!”
11. “All right!”
12. “Be strong!”

This way to the answer key. How did you do?

#music

Memory's funny. I have forgotten key facts about the people I love and cherish the most, but somehow, I still remember the eight seconds of Canadian basic cable where the Beastie Boys dissed Al Di Meola. If memory serves, and it may well not, it was on MuchMusic (i.e. Canadian MTV). The context for this cross-genre drive-by has been lost to time, but I distinctly remember there being a cutaway from the Beasties to a dude who looked like a bad guy from RoboCop twiddling knobs while strip-mall martial artists and tech demo assets dance around him. It's a baffling cultural artifact from an era thick with them.

The video for “Sequencer,” and its parent album Scenario, were unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 1983, the year jazz fusion broke on MTV. This wasn't because of Di Meola: the video for “Sequencer” is, charitably, the dorkiest thing I've ever seen. Di Meola is doing is best Rick Wakeman impression throughout, what with the capes and synthesizers and all. It is the visual equivalent of a katana hanging on an otherwise bare apartment wall (and not only because there are literal katanas in this video). No, jazz fusion broke on MTV because that same year, Herbie Hancock took over MTV with the funky avant-garde nightmare fuel of “Rockit.” This was not a fair fight. Hancock was filtering his sound through the nascent idiom of hip-hop; Di Meola filtered his through Miami Vice, which makes sense, since the credited songwriter is the smuggler himself, Jan Hammer. So while “Sequencer” isn't great jazz fusion, it is superlative arena-rock cheese.

I still don't know a ton about Di Meola or his work. I'm familiar with Friday Night in San Francisco, his landmark live album with fellow guitar wizards John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía, because every used record store on Earth is legally required to have one copy of it in stock at all times (see also: August and Everything After, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and that one ELO compilation, you know the one). I'm not a big Chick Corea/Return to Forever guy; my taste in jazz fusion runs funkier, towards Casiopea or, say, Herbie Hancock. But the main lick of “Sequencer” is catchy, the synthesized percussion in the middle reminds me of Hiroshi Sato's work (consider this my plus for his wonderful 1982 album Awakening, and the music video is an all-time piece of kitsch, memorable enough to appear on my brain's front door last month after literal decades of not thinking about it.

#music

Okay, this one requires a little table-setting.

There's this cartoonist/animator from South Korea who goes by Ramdaram. If you've encountered any of her stuff in the wild, it's likely one of her animated music videos starring her OCs, one for Jack Stauber's “Two Time” (24 million views at time of writing), one for Tim Legend's “Soda City Funk”^[1] (52 million views). The OC lore is extensive and cryptic in the way these self-contained universes tend to be (no doubt exacerbated here by my inability to speak Korean), but the videos are fun explosions of Gen Z webcore energy. “Poison” is a newer, moodier entry in Ramdaram's “Underfity Friends” story cycle^[2], soundtracked by Evgeny Bardyuzha's “Tastes Like Poison.”

There isn't much online when you search Bardyuzha's name, which leads me to believe he's just a dude out in Chelyabinsk who likes making electronic music, sometimes for clients (those motivational business videos don't score themselves, shout out to the library music producers out there), sometimes for fun. “Tastes Like Poison” is indeed fun in a club-goth Drive-core kind of way. It sounds like the Weeknd and M83 trying to write a crossover EDM hit. Ramdaram seems to be doing well for herself as well: just south of a million YouTube subscribers, a handful of viral videos, a steady stream of new work on Instagram (movie dork bonus: her most recent piece at time of writing contains a nod to Chungking Express). There's something heartening about stumbling onto the work of people plugging away on the other side of the planet.

[1] It is absurd how hard “Soda City Funk” goes. I mean, it's just “Got to Be Real” plus “Do You Wanna Get Funky?” at 1.7x speed, but it works.

[2] Perhaps sensing there were a bunch of non-Korean goofballs like yours truly among her subscriber base, Ramdaram released an English-language lore explainer last year with the circuitous, oddly poetic title of “Story of a city where it's not strange for a person to go missing.”

#music

Continuing from last time: “The Surfer” sounds like Vampire Weekend's version of a lo-fi hip hop song, down to the drum machine, leisurely tempo, and woozy processed piano. But “The Surfer” also has Ezra Koenig singing and some sick George Harrison-esque guitar, which, honestly, more lo-fi hip hop should have.

As indie-heads of a certain vintage shuffle towards middle age, one question lingers in their hearts: does Vampire Weekend pass the Five-Album Test? I couldn't hum you a single bar of anything on Father of the Bride right now, so I'll have to revisit it before I set my take in stone. But to hear father of the Five-Album Test Steven Hyden say it, the band has sailed over the crossbar with room to spare. This discusson can be heard on a recent episode of Hyden's Indiecast podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow music writer Ian Cohen. It's a banger of an episode: they talk about that one time Pitchfork reviewed a Jet album with no text, just a video of a monkey pissing into its mouth, but they're dead wrong about Good News for People Who Love Bad News being overrated.

But there's at least one thing my fellow greying Xillennials and I can agree on: Only God Was Above Us is awesome! It rocks hard! The workrate has slowed down (Koenig was otherwise busy daisy-chaining hyphenates in the five years since Father of the Bride was released, just as he was in the six years between that album and Modern Vampires of the City) but the work, crucially, is still good.

#music

I want to invoke a gentler version of Sturgeon's law: 90% of lo-fi hip hop sounds interchangeable. That's not a knock against the genre: I, along with tens of thousands of people this very second, have chosen lo-fi hip hop (or its hacker cousin, synthwave) as my ambient music of choice. It's what courses through my ears when I read on the couch in the wee small hours. The idiom is still in its infancy, still evolving out its clichés, making it reasonably easy for an artist to stick out. One of my favourites, the Finnish musician Kupla, sets himself apart with waltz times and free reeds. “just can't help it” by Vancouver-based producer Ngyn grabbed me with a simple, evocative vocal hook. Sometimes that's all it takes to end up on a playlist.

Lo-fi hip hop's fuel is nostalgia. Yours, someone else's, real, fictional, it doesn't matter. Now, if I were younger and more guileless, “just can't help it” would have 100% inspired me to make my own track, one sampling, say, Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea saying “I can't beat it,” so I understand the impulse to make of this kind of art. It's the same impulse that drives people to make AMVs soundtracked by “Somewhere Only We Know” or similar, nightcore versions of Rural Alberta Advantage singles, or sadboi moodboards set to the score of Minari (I believe the technical term is “webweaving,” which appears to be the Tumblr arm of the TikTok Sadposting Industrial Complex). People on the internet are often sad, so they create these digital pamphlets and readymades that are conduits for their own aches and lightning rods for those of others, all refracted through the lingua franca of a pop culture, if not the pop culture. The only difference between then and now is the tools used to perform these microcultural emotional exorcisms got easier to use.

In other words, lo-fi hip hop at its worst is kitsch, gunning for unearned pathos using trite shorthand. But at its best, it can evoke a whole world, not just your childhood bedroom. It can come by its resonance honestly like any other kind of music: through the alchemy of instrumentation, performance, arrangement, and production. Hell, even a good song title can help; “Rat Salad” kicks ass in no small part because it's called “Rat Salad.” The same is true for “Mist Beneath Your Apartment.”

#music

I wanted to post my monthly mix for April (here it is, by the way) but decided I wanted to go long on each of the songs. So now you know what the next dozen of so posts are going to be about.

One of my absolute favourite bands got namechecked by the biggest pop star on the planet on her last album. Could this be the bump the Blue Nile needs to grace the world with their presence once again? Unlikely. I've written about the cult Scottish sophisti-pop group before, so I've definitely mentioned their slow workrate; their fourth and presumably final album came out two decades ago this August.

But bands with small outputs sometimes pad their discographies out with live records and odds-and-sods collections, catnip for the hardcore faithful. The Blue Nile have neither to their name, but deluxe versions of their four studio albums have been released with supplementary material. “The Second Act,” the b-side of the band's first single, was included in the new version of their great 1984 album A Walk Across the Rooftops. It's an unrepresentative track of the band's output, but the bare production and frail lead vocal by Paul Buchanan make it a perfect candidate to kick off any budding bootlegger's hypothetical Decade-esque career-spanning Blue Nile compilation.

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• Here's a take: things that sounded like shit 40 years ago can still be novel because the mid-to-late 1980s were the last monoculturally uncool era, but things that sounded like shit 20 years ago still sound like shit because culture is stuck in a tightening recursive loop. In sartorial terms, I'm not saying I wouldn't wear Crocs, I just never thought I'd see the day they'd become de rigeur.
• Do not judge an album by its eight-minute second track, as I foolishly did with Wednesday's Rat Saw God.
  • If you're a band, and you're recording an album, and you have an eight-minute track with an extended coda where your lead singer sounds like they're getting sucked into a black hole made of tar, their shrieks and screams getting more and more muffled in the mix as the song reaches its conclusion, my advice is to make that song your closer. This has been Thoughts on Album Sequencing.
• I now know approximately 1,500% more stuff about the Smashing Pumpkins than I did at any previous point in my life, stuff like “holy shit, Tommy Lee drummed on their 2014 album Monuments to an Elegy” (shout out to Sarah).
  • The best recommendation engines have always been and continue to be your cool friends and your own curiosity. Link-hopping can lead to some weird and beautiful places.

• No not that Molly Lewis, the other Molly Lewis, the Paganini of whistling.
• Is “Susanne” the best Weezer song? Maybe!
• Dude I spent hours trying to find the specific mix of “Smooth Operator” that I got off LimeWire in college, and I don't think it's on Spotify. It might be the 12” single mix.
• Kiwi Jr. are the leaders in the clubhouse because I still believe in the 12-string electric guitar.
  • Jeremy Gaudet, if you see this, drop the Letterboxd, brother!

#music