Vapor History: :​:​:​:​:​蒸​気​:​:​:​:​: Compilation curated by Hi-Hi-Whoopee (Nov 11th, 2012)

For the month of November were heading back to 2012 to explore what might be the very first curated vaporwave compilation. We’re discussing the compilation by tumblr blog Hi-Hi-Whoopee that came out on November 11th, 2012 with a title in japanese that translates to “vapor”: Jōki. It captures a snapshot of the early era of plunderphonic and experimental internet music that would go on to birth a nu-age of vaporwave. It also pointed to what might come next after the era of seapunk, witch house, chillwave and other internet music that was picked up on (and overhyped) by the music media.

I found this album during one of my many deep dives, pouring through RateYourMusic lists and Discogs releases related to early vaporwave. A mysterious release caught my eye that wasnt attributed to any single artist and had three interlocking triangles with some foreign characters on top of them. Strangely, the characters in the title were flanked by colons- 5 on each side- and the title translated to "Vapor" or "Steam".

Scanning through the 40-artist-deep tracklist, I saw many familiar names that people in the post-pandemic vaporwave scene might recognize, such as luxury elite, bodyline, mediafired, and Wakesleep. But there was also some names I had encountered throughout my time researching the early evolution of newbreed and vaporwave music like FutureFunkRocker, Sunup Recordings regular MJ Linkoln, VERACOM, police academy dropout- who helped form the early facebook group Xerox Fax Machines Super Heroes, Transmuteo- who played SPF420 shows, and Splash Club 7- who were primarily known for being seapunk-as-fuck but also cavorted around with producers in the early vaporwave scene. There is even an Amun Dragoon side project on it and supposedly an anonymous submission from Vektroid which was mentioned in another post on the tumblr blog.

This compilation was not just a collection of vaporwave tunes, rather it encompasses a lot of sounds that were being explored by folks in the Internet Music and Facebook group hivemind. There are moments of degraded eccojams, screwed loops, and hazy nostalgia but there is also minimalist inspired IDM, plodding witch house, chillwave, plunderphonic noise experiments and liminal new age music. We also get glimpses of future subgenres: wistful late night lofi, fidgets of glitchy vapornoise, skittering drums of vaportrap, moody ambient music ala dreampunk, and mashed together commericals, tv and movie clips like signalwave. However, the term “vaporwave” doesn’t actually appear in the original tumblr post about the compilation, nor its tags. Instead it’s tagged “webwave”. There is no content provided in the post, except a simple “enjoy” and on the bandcamp it just mentions the curator @hihikun_ [ed: although it seems like the Twitter account was taken over by someone else in the 2020s]. However, a later post on the tumblr clarified that it was the administrator [ed: another dead Twitter page] of the blog who put it together.

In order to find out more, I had to reach out to some of the artists and folks who were involved in those early, messy, days including luxury elite, Nmesh, Keith Rankin of Giant Claw/Orange Milk Records, VERACOM, and the person who helped me the most- Robin Burnett aka INTERNET CLUB and Wakesleep, whose track closed out this compilation. Most of the folks mentioned pointed me toward a person that goes by Kenji Yamamoto who ran Hi-Hi-Whoopee, and had many artist aliases like DJWWWW in addition to running a netlabel called WASABI Tapes. The tumblr blog was known for covering internet music, especially vaporwave, alongside many other experimental genres. It was a cooperative blog, a multi-writer affair, that had contributions from many people and it's content was all in japanese- which has necessitated a lot of translation during my research. However, between conversations with Robin and reading other entries on the blog, it does seem that this fascination with vaporwave and curation of this compilation was propelled by Kenji.

At 40 tracks long, it would take forever to go through each artist and the wandering storylines of each, but as Robin told me: “it captures so much possibility, so many different directions and connections, post-the Dummy article, pre-'aesthetic', pre-fifty-thousand subgenres with no actual differences.” In a later post about the first Fortune 500 compilation, another writer for Hi-Hi-Whoopee also noted that the compilation “firmly captured the web underground scene as a whole, including vaporwave”. It sits alongside other compilations we have covered like the Sewer Greats series which also had an eccentric tracklist, compiled by a curator enmeshed in the up-to-the-minute happenings of this international internet music community.

luxury elite alos mentioned that: “Hi-Hi-Whoopee was a really great underrated part of the scene who doesn't get a ton of attention but his blog was such a great time capsule in general regarding things happening online at the time, especially in a time where vaporwave's second wavers were peeking through in a way that was really exciting and fun.” And Kenji aka HiHiKun, wasnt the only one writing about vaporwave- other writers went under twitter handles like La_Reprise, y0kotestu, and az_ogi.

This was a compilation with purpose and curation, even down to the name. It’s formatting and use of non-standard characters reflects what YayText describes as the “feelings of nostalgia, lost futures, and decay” with “text itself [that] appears glitched, degraded, and echoed”. (You can read more about that in the YayText article and video “Decoding the secret language of vaporwave” which we talked about in Episode 2 of the podcast). The choice of the singular word “vapor” is also unintentionally significant- it's just “vapor” suggesting an umbrella or meta-genre that unites around the digital appropriation of recontextualized signifiers and sounds. It points to something greater than the formation of a static music genre- it’s like a cloud of particles that when grouped together form something you can almost see, feel, and touch but is also destined for entropy and will eventually scatter into many different directions.

Funny enough the compilation itself has faced a similar fate, being all but forgotten by most people in the contemporary vaporwave scene. Heck even some of the artists on the compilation could not recall the details about it, incorrectly asserting it was “unofficial”, or just a bunch of existing tracks pulled from various Bandcamps. Regardless of its fate, this poignantly curated set of tracks captured a moment in time as a group of internet renegades took inspiration from various microgenres, chopped-and-screwed production techniques, and hauntology to blaze new trails on the information superhighway.

You can listen to the compilation “Jōki” aka “Vapor” on Hi-Hi-Whoopee’s Bandcamp page. You can still access the Hi-Hi-Whoopee blog as well to scroll through their humongous archive of posts related to internet music and experimental music on Tumblr. The album is also available on YouTube thanks to the user Sigmund Generous (who also has a ton of early/archival vapor releases):

Thanks to Robin Burnett aka INTERNET CLUB, Datavis, Wakesleep amongst other aliases, for their help in researching this compilation and for their quotes related to its importance. Shouts out to luxury elite for also helping me with some information about the compilation and its relevance to the second wave of vapor producers. Both of these folks provided more quotes/info than we cited in the article and we might release those mini-interviews for our members in the future!