2814 (aka HKE and Telepath) -新しい日の誕生/ Birth of a New Day (2015)

Just that name “Vaporwave” was enough to turn me off. The aging hipster within making it very clear that I would have nothing to do with this internet creation. “Just a shiny plastic container with nothing inside”, I said defiantly. Without depth or feeling or humanity, this music was nothing I would be interested in absorbing. It was an interesting internet meme, but certainly not real music (I really should have known better by now).

The entire philosophy of Vaporwave reeks of a late night chat-room on Reddit, full of self-satisfied messages about the irony of manipulating copyrighted music as a criticism of our capitalist landscape. “Oh boy, the fucking irony”, said the aging hipster as my eyes rolled back. The Vaporwave movement started around 2010 as a way to subvert the mainstream music of (mostly) the eighties: smooth jazz, soft rock, AOR… Muzak. The sampling and manipulation of these tracks was just the starting point for the birth of something entirely new and different. And the banality of the original songs made them ripe for a parody of our consumption society which is obsessed with shiny product and ownership. The resulting music was a satire of the commercialization of music (and everything else) in societies were the bad guys won and the class struggle has resulted in the capitalist values finally achieving complete domination.

Only a strange and beautiful thing happened with this music that was born as a troll. What started as a fake sub-genre about aesthetics with an ironic punchline had given rise to a number of albums that go far beyond the political or ironic. Vaporware actually resulted in some genuinely interesting and uniquely beautiful music.

Birth of a New Day (新しい日の誕生) is a collaboration between the duo of Telepath and HKE. The album and concept differ somewhat from most Vaporwave titles. Namely, Birth of a New Day is one of the few albums not to use copyrighted material as a production technique. It’s also ambivalent in its philosophical architecture, creating a world that is both beautiful and hopeless and leaving much of its story open our interpretation.

Birth of a New Day begun life as the cold dream of a digital, highly commercialized society. It certainly doesn’t feel like a warning of a not-so-distant totalitarian future but the environment described is our world today. We are not slowly walking toward commoditization of human life, we are living it. And, for many, embracing this goal. The atmosphere of the music simply envelopes and creates vivid and ghostly street scenes that pulsate within your head and neck like a good opioid buzz. We are, in fact, lost and homeless. The synthetic sounds sparkling with loneliness and loss, with layer after layer of sound disintegrating into the dark background. The thick, wet neon fog of our night has a sleepy beauty, but it is also without hope. Purple and yellow street lights flash against the windows of the towering corporate monoliths above us. They are ultimate symbols of the modern and scientific destruction of the spiritual man.

Birth of a New Day is beautiful in its cinematic scope, its textures and colors vibrant and occasionally lush. Unlike so many electronic or ambient albums these days, the album doesn’t struggle to find a balance between the organic and the synthetic. The sound is entirely artificial. In some ways this is liberating for both the artist and the listener. There is no attempt at deception. The music’s sadness and humanity comes with a realization and acceptance of what has happened to our home, our atmosphere, our world. It’s gone. We have lost everything in the overwhelming responsibility of our own liberation and enslavement.

by Shawn Ciavattone