Rain Temple - 2814 (2016)

I’m gonna skip the “dreampunk” tag because I find it unlikely that I’ll put much else under that banner. I am not the guy to go into minute detail about the 800 “microgenres” generated from the original vaporwave movement. Feel free to spelunk that rabbithole if you like.

One of the things that fascinates me about vaporwave and its offshoots is the context of the art. Here’s a thing that more or less started as a joke on soundcloud and youtube and bandcamp, participated in by all sorts of people with various levels of talent and know-how, sometimes ironically and sometimes not.

But then there was just so much of it, and so much crossover and borrowing and entirely new concepts of what music was that you end up with some really interesting, engaging releases by people who might never have gotten heard otherwise.

You don’t have to spend much time hunting to find that 80% of the genre is uninventive crap. But aren’t a lot of genres like that? The engaging stuff is amazingly engaging, and sorting through the dross is the cost of paying attention.

Oh, what does it sound like? It sounds like you live inside the Blade Runner universe and you took a wrong turn and now you’re stuck in an abandoned subway station.