Vaporwave History

Vapor History: ░▒▓新しいデラックスライフ▓▒░ (aka Internet Club) - ▣世界から解放され▣ (Jan 1st, 2012)

In the spirit of the New Year, this was a release I couldn't ignore when looking at my timeline of early vaporwave releases...

Created by the legendary first-wave producer Internet Club, the album ▣世界から解放され▣ (translated: “Freed from the World”) by their alias ░▒▓新しいデラックスライフ▓▒░ (translated: New Deluxe Life) was released on January 1st, 2012.

This album is at the root of a certain branch of vaporwave subgenres like vapornoise, signalwave and broken transmission as well as the micro sampling and glitch techniques that continue to show up in contemporary vaporwave to this day! The album was the second of a three part series by New Deluxe Life that was a trilogy of Japanese TV/Commercial focused samples with the other two parts being DELUXE and NHK REMINDS YOU TO BOOST YOUR SIGNAL.

Album Art: a cropped screenshot of Amuro Ray from Mobile Suit Gundam

But the first thing that grabs you when you go to the Bandcamp page is the artwork and intense stylization of the song titles and album title- the album’s visual style and aesthetic undoubtedly influenced a myriad of artists for years to come. This type of “strange poetry” as YouTuber YayText called it, helps evoke “feelings of nostalgia, lost futures and decay”. The text uses the unsettling mashup of English and Japanese characters as well as unusual unicode/ASCII symbols to amplify the emotions and catharsis of the shards of capitalist dystopia found in this album.

You can learn more about unicode, odd characters and symbols in vaporwave by checking out a video by YayText called the Decoding the Secret Language of Vaporwave that I mentioned in Episode 2 of the podcast. The iconic artwork also went on to influence the visual sampling, screenshot-ing and cropping of future experimental vaporwave album art and visuals.

As mentioned earlier, the sonic space this album occupies is on the experimental and noisy side of things, with lofi microsample chops that are repeatedly glitched in a cacophony of mismatched rhythms and structures. It takes digitally degraded samples of television clips to create an inglorious and uncomfortable sound collage of consumerism.

Internet Club has uploaded all their music for free download on MEGA

There is a wide range of opinions on this album but as I re-listened recently, I was taken back to watching the Internet Club set at Flamingo Fest. I was lucky enough to watch from above the stage and see the stark and minimalist techniques used by Internet Club to create parts of their set. They played directly off their laptop, with only DJ software and manual control of loops, rolls and effects- not even using the two decks to blend but repeating and slowly manipulating the treatment of their microlooped samples:

While this may not be an album that everyone enjoys, its influence has certainly been felt over the past decade- regardless of its interpretation as a parody/critique, of nostalgia/capitalist dystopia. The album is an exercise in disorienting plunderphonics- as a keen review on Rate Your Music said, “the samples are fragmentary and looped excessively, avoiding any form of musical pulse or harmony, thus bringing attention to the shape of the sounds themselves and their meaninglessness.”

In some ways the album wants to be impenetrable with its gritty textures and arhythmic qualities. But it's unsettling mystery and unknowability taps into that human curiosity where we can imagine ourselves in a different place, a different time, or a different state of mind that couldn't be achieved without adventurous and experimental music like ▣世界から解放され▣ by ░▒▓新しいデラックスライフ▓▒░ aka Internet Club.

And finally, if you would like to read more about this album head over to Sunbleached.net! Their review is a deeper interrogation of the album than we can provide in our podcast segments and it's a bit more interpretive/polemic than our history segments. Hopefully it will give you a bit more insight and a well-formed opinion of this legendary album!