Vaporwave

Vaporwave is built almost entirely from sample manipulation. Producers take short loops from 1980s-and-90s easy listening, smooth jazz, R&B, Japanese city-pop, corporate-video music, and shopping-mall radio, then slow them down, pitch them down, add reverb, and loop short sections into pieces that can run between two and ten minutes. Original instrumentation is rare; what you hear is mostly the source material reprocessed. The mood is melancholy and dissociated rather than danceable. Album artwork — pastel grids, Roman busts, Japanese kanji, Windows 95 user interface — is treated as part of the work.

Vaporwave emerged on Bandcamp and Last.fm around 2010-2012 through Daniel Lopatin (working as Chuck Person on 'Eccojams Vol. 1' in 2010), James Ferraro's 'Far Side Virtual' (2011), and Macintosh Plus's 'Floral Shoppe' (2011), which became the genre's most-streamed release. The scene's commercial position has always been ambiguous because much of the music is built on uncleared samples, which has periodically forced removals from streaming platforms. By the mid-2010s it had splintered into adjacent subgenres including future funk, mallsoft, and vaportrap, and it has continued as a small but persistent producer community rather than a chart phenomenon.

Notice the sample treatment: tracks usually pitch the source down by a semitone or two and slow it to between 70 and 90 percent of its original tempo. Loops are very short — often four to eight bars repeated for the whole piece. Reverb and chorus are added heavily, so even a clean original record sounds like it is being played in a half-empty department store. The original artist's voice is usually still audible, which is part of the aesthetic.

For the canonical release, Macintosh Plus, 'Floral Shoppe' (2011). For the prototypes, Chuck Person, 'Eccojams Vol. 1' (2010) and James Ferraro, 'Far Side Virtual' (2011). For the more upbeat offshoot, Saint Pepsi, 'Hit Vibes' (2013).

Macintosh Plus, the producer of 'Floral Shoppe', is Ramona Andra Xavier, who was around twenty years old when she released the album. The record's most-streamed track is built on a slowed sample of Diana Ross's 'It's Your Move' (1984), and the album has been removed and reinstated on streaming services multiple times because of the uncleared sample.