Vaporwave is dead. Long live vaporwave! What does it mean when a genre reaches its maximum saturation and influence to date long after its obituary has been written? Especially when that genre is so closely related to hauntology? And when its methods are so easily replicable? Or appear to be? At what point is a replica of a genre entirely premised
on the logic of the replica (which is also to say its impossibility) no
longer good enough? Which of vaporwave’s many afterlives will endure?
And which will fade into the ether?
By pushing the genre’s techniques in new and interesting directions, Vektroid
has already begun to answer some of these questions. With ECO VIRTUAL,
things are less clear. On one level, this is total vwave boilerplate, a
perfect clone. And yet there’s something really nice about the
conceptual integrity here (the videos, courtesy of EcoVirtualTV
work particularly well). Not so much innovative as a perfect
realization of the genre’s already extant associations with weather:
both its corporate soundtrack and the connotations of climate, ambiance,
mood alteration, biomanagement, and perhaps even the stratospheric or
transcendent.
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