Draft:Macroblank

Macroblank (Japanese: マクロブランク, Makuroburanku) or sometimes simply Macro is a recording artist. They are known for frequent releases, often releasing multiple albums in a single month. . Their music includes influences from jazz, lounge, lofi and vaporwave. Their music is largely instrumental, rarely featuring vocal elements. Most of Macroblank's album and track titles are written in Japanese kanji, a choice the artist made to drive the focus of the albums more towards the music and less towards the name of the releases.

Macroblank is signed to the London-based record label Aloe City, through which they have released physical copies of their music on cassette, cassingle, vinyl and MiniDisc.

On September 27, 2023, Macroblank announced through twitter that their Bandcamp page, the medium through which they had mainly been releasing music, had been taken down. While a temporary replacement page - named michealblank - was launched, this was soon after removed as well, at which point Macroblank announced a definitive parting of ways with Bandcamp. Since then, music has been released through the artist's Soundcloud and Patreon pages.

Reception
Writing for The Rensselaer Polytechnic, Vaughn Greason compared Macroblank's body of work to that of Haircuts for Men, describing the former as having a more "calm and comfortable quality" than much of the latter's work.

These Nights Are Ours reviewed the album 絶望に負けた and placed on their list of best albums of 2021, calling it a "vaporwave masterpiece."

Macroblank's highly sample-based body of music has seen some controversy, with some claiming the music put out by the artist is not their own. The francophone music publication tsugi magazine speculated further on this idea, asking if Macroblank was "an artist, a group of producers, a curator or… an artwork thief?"

ANALOG レ​ア​リ​テ​ィ
The release of ANALOG レ​ア​リ​テ​ィ, which Macroblank describes as a concept release, consisted of the release of 3 hours of music (36 tracks) distributed among three analog units (CD/tape). The purchasing of these units was limited to one per person, to encourage trading between fans in order to complete their collection. Macroblank stated they would never publish these tracks digitally. On Macroblank's Bandcamp page, there is a single track assigned to the release, titled "READ CAREFULLY BEFORE PURCHASING".

The full collection of all tracks from the A, B and C tapes was quickly compiled by the Subreddit dedicated to Macroblank and is publicly available through a third party on soundcloud.

The Arts Fuse compared this fabricated analog scarcity to the concept of fabricated digital scarcity associated with NFT's.