Vapor History: REDEFINING THE WORKPLACE by INTERNET CLUB (April 21st, 2012)

For our Vaporwave History segment in Episode 16, we’re revisiting a seminal 2012 album that was the apotheosis of artistic, critical, and philosophical interpretations of early vaporwave. REDEFINING THE WORKPLACE by INTERNET CLUB came out on April 21st, 2012 and was the follow up to their album WEBINAR, released the year prior in October 2011. It’s an album of hazy and warped samples that touches on many musical and thematic elements that would make up the cornerstone of vaporwave and it's future subgenres.

The album was a curiosity at the time it was released, and was namechecked in Adam Harper’s notorious article Vaporwave and the Pop Art of the Virtual Plaza. In a recent interview, Robin Burnette, the person behind INTERNET CLUB and many other aliases, said “I was making the peak of my very concretely situationist and marxist plunderphonics phase”, referencing the verbiage used in Harper's article.

While Harper also connected vaporwave to social critique of corporate culture and the infamous “all that solid melts into air” quote from Marx, Burnette mentions in an interview from the article that they are trying to achieve “the defamiliarisation of things we’ve become so use to that we don’t notice them any more”. They were recontextualizing something familiar by presenting it in unfamiliar or strange ways.

While people have used vaporwave to make social or cultural critiques of a political nature, it’s the bigger picture of taking signifers of the past and re-using (or re-creating) them in a new, unfamiliar way. This has given vaporwave a deep wellspring to draw from- and continues to open new conceptual planes for creators in the scene.

The hyperreal, digitally touched up office building in the album artwork is wholesale appropriated with its awkward non-standard aspect ratio (for music album artwork), pixelated just enough to hint at the false reality behind it’s glossy facade. The name of the album even came from a tagline at the Hall Office Park, the place which inspired the album and it’s spiritual predecessor WEBINAR.

Non-standard artwork shapes and appropriating or remixing existing images has long been a hallmark of artistic productions in the vaporwave scene, not only for album artwork but also visual art, music videos and live/livestream performances.

Artistically, the album has been influential for it's production techniques and how it uses sound to transport the listener to somewhere unsettling but familiar. It's noted for its use of effects, which Robin said they “went absolutely bonkers in Ableton and just fucked with the effects to a revolting level”. Specifically naming the Ableton Crystal Reverb as a big part of this album and its predecessor WEBINAR.

This contrasts to Far Side Virtual and the glitchy releases INTERNET CLUB had been experimenting with in the early days. As Sunbleached.Net pointed out in a 2017 review:

“REDEFINING THE WORKPLACE mixes new age music with modern electronica, occasionally using the samplism techniques of classic-style vaporwave but in a way far removed from FLORAL SHOPPE or DERELICTメガタワー. Burnett utilizes a wall-of-sound production style that foresakes brickwalling for the kind of enveloping ambiance that accompanies new age music playing in a waiting room. The goal is to evoke those environments but not to impress them upon the listener, which are two very different (but difficult to distinguish) goals.”

This sort of production would be emulated in slushwave, vapornoise, not to mention the wild experimentation with effects that would influence many future producers in the scene.

This longform conceptual work is a landmark and although parts of it can be challenging for listeners, the album paved the way for new modes of artistry and production in the burgeoning vaporwave scene. On the critical side of things, it redefined the emerging genre as writers and cultural critics struggled to parse this unique form of art appropriation and cultural recontextualization.

You can listen to the album on INTERNET CLUB’s Bandcamp page or download it from their Mega.nz Discography archive. There is also a great interview by Nick Caceres that I cited as well as our feature on the Adam Harper article from Episode 6 of the podcast.