8 Tracks: Of Genre Defiance With Glok
The North London electronic producer GLOK announced his arrival at the end of 2016 with the incredible 20-minute genre-mashing epic, ‘Dissident’, which married synthwave, Detroit techno, krautrock, ambient and even funky ‘Fools Gold’-era John Squires guitar riffs. Realising he had amassed a huge catalogue of tracks, he started releasing them one by one, with five so far having seen the light of day and more to follow. ‘Kolokol’ will be out in June, by which time, his identity, having been kept under wraps thus far, will be out in the open.
The most recent offering, ‘Cloud Cover’, which came out at the beginning of April, was reminiscent of Boards of Canada circa-‘The Campfire Headphase’, with softly strummed acoustic guitars, melodic flutes and dissonant shoegaze vibes. “It started life from a sample of a child's musical toy with a worn out battery. So it’s natural that it became a warped, sleepy lullaby," he reveals. As an artist who primarily embraces analogue gear, GLOK’s love of Vaporwave, which is the theme of this 8 Tracks, might seem rather incongruous; its synthetic artifice and reliance on digital technology completely at odds with his approach to making music. Or maybe not… “I love the homemade nature of Vaporwave,” he explains. “The humour in it and the deep emotional resonance of it, which possibly exists as a by-product of the casual way it is produced, which ironically makes it more melancholy and moving.” There is also appeal in “the fact that it existed out of the mainstream of what my normal sources for finding music were at the time (iTunes/record shops), instead using Vine, Tumblr, YouTube and Bandcamp.”
His 8 Tracks reflects the hours he has spent down the “Vaporwave YouTube wormhole”.
Find out more HERE.
I’ve been interested in Vaporwave since June 2016 when I saw an article on Vice about something called “Simpsonwave”. My expectations for the article were low, the kind of thing you click on to pass the time, but I found it very funny and kept thinking about it, and kept coming back to watch the links in the article over and over, especially a Vine that used a snippet of music from ‘Resonance’ by Home. In the words of the article, Vaporwave “exists specifically to mock the commercial and corporate vibe of mall-type music”.
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Home - ResonanceI’ve been interested in Vaporwave since June 2016 when I saw an article on Vice about something called “Simpsonwave”. My expectations for the article were low, the kind of thing you click on to pass the time, but I found it very funny and kept thinking about it, and kept coming back to watch the links in the article over and over, especially a Vine that used a snippet of music from ‘Resonance’ by Home. In the words of the article, Vaporwave “exists specifically to mock the commercial and corporate vibe of mall-type music”.
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Chuck Person - Nobody HereI found a video on YouTube by a guy by the name of FrankJavCee. He’d made a razor-sharp, piss-taking set of instructions on how to make Vaporwave. It’s not clear whether he actually likes it or not, but I suspect he does because as much as he is being sarcastic (“So basically, it’s 80’s elevator music, slowed down, with effects”), there is also some love there for the genre. There is certainly a lot of material online which seems to follow the method he lays out in the tutorial. This is essentially –
1) Look for the most obscure sounding 80’s soft jazz rock instrumental. 2) Stretch it. 3) Phase it. 4) Loop a certain section. 5) Add some long delays.
Any genre needs a few definable qualities so that it can spread, and to my ears the stretched out, phased, delayed style DOES add something pretty cool to that kind of music. So from here I tried to figure out who originated this sound. I may be wrong but it seemed to have two albums at its source. Chuck Person’s ‘Eccojams Vol. 1’, and ‘Floral Shoppe’ by Macintosh Plus. Chuck Person is Oneohtrix Point Never and I’ve chosen ‘Nobody Here’, which loops a vocal sample from Chris De Burgh’s ‘The Lady in Red’.
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Macintosh Plus – Lisa Frank 420 / Modern ComputingMacintosh Plus is a pseudonym for Vektroid. ‘Floral Shoppe’ is her seventh album. This track features a stretched sample of ‘It’s Your Move’ by Diana Ross.
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Mediafired // PixiesAnother similar track loops a section of ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush. With these last three tracks, the visuals are very important. Also, as far as I know, none of them are available on iTunes or Spotify, only via Bandcamp.
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Blank Banshee - Lsd PolyphonyFor my final four selections are I’ve moved away from the tracks that sample of old tunes, into music which is now created by the artists. I don’t know much about them other than I like the tracks! This is taken from ‘Blank Banshee 1’, an album released in 2013 by the Canadian producer Patrick Alexander Driscoll. Another song from the album, ‘Teen Pregnancy’, was part of the Simpsonwave trend.
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Vektroid - TerminalTaken from ‘Neo Cali’, Vektroid’s sixth album, considered by many to be the pinnacle of Vaporwave.
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Oneohtrix Point Never - Chrome CountryFrom the 2013 album, ‘R Plus Seven’, Daniel Lopatin’s first release after he signed to Warp Records.
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Renja - Discovering MyselfThis is from a track on the album ‘Lonesome’, which came out on the UK’based label Dream Catalogue in 2014.
