User:Pdougherty1/sandbox

The term Y2K Aesthetic describes a visual style prevalent in the late 90s and early 2000s. Examples of the Y2K Aesthetic in commercial and industrial design, architecture, fashion, music, and art have been collated by the Tumblr blog Institute for Y2K Aesthetics.

Characteristics
Even Collins, founder of the Institute For Y2K Aesthetics Tumblr blog, outlines a set of key identifiers of the Y2K Aesthetic in an interview with Paper Mag:


 * Translucency
 * Gradients
 * Motion
 * Overlays
 * Warping/Perspective
 * Curves + Blobs
 * 'Futuristic' / Techno fonts, shiny sleek 3D text and interfaces
 * Technological motifs
 * Synthetic feel, shiny materials, metallics
 * Alien / warped human / sleek-cyborg imagery
 * Rave culture influence
 * Future-optimism
 * Tribal/World influence, with a futuristic twist
 * Space themes
 * Revival of 60s space age & 70s futurism
 * 'Surreal' CGI

2009–2011: Origins and early scene
Vaporwave originated on the Internet as an ironic variant of chillwave, drawing on the retro style's "analog nostalgia" as well as the work of hypnagogic pop artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, who were also characterized by the invocation of retro popular culture. "Hypnagogic pop" was coined by Wire journalist David Keenan in August 2009, only a few weeks after "chillwave", to describe a host of new underground acts who were inspired by the memories of their childhoods in the 1980s. The two terms were often used interchangeably with each other. According to Vice, vaporwave was one of several short-lived internet genres to emerge during the era: "there was chillwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, vaporwave, cloud rap, and countless other niche sounds with gimmicky names. As soon as one microgenre flamed out, another would take its place, and with it a whole new set of beats, buzz artists, and fashion trends." Ash Becks of The Essential notes that sites like Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound "seemingly refused to touch vaporwave throughout the genre’s two-year 'peak'."

The template for vaporwave came from the albums Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (Daniel Lopatin as "Chuck Person", August 2010) and Far Side Virtual (Ferraro, October 2011). Eccojams featured chopped and screwed variations on popular 1980s pop songs with album artwork that resembled the packaging of the 1992 video game Ecco the Dolphin, while Far Side Virtual drew primarily on "the grainy and bombastic beeps" of past media such as Skype and the Nintendo Wii. According to Stereogum's Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin's "chopped and screwed plunderphonics" and the "nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro’s Muzak-hellscapes". A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton's Holograms (November 2010), as "proto vaporwave".

Inspired by Lopatin's ideas, suburban teens and young adults used Eccojams as a starting point for what would become vaporwave while drawing on the postmodern, surreal themes explored by Far Side Virtual and Eccojams. Vaporwave artists were "mysterious and often nameless entities that lurk the internet," academic Adam Harper noted, "often behind a pseudo-corporate name or web façade, and whose music is typically free to download through Mediafire, Last FM, Soundcloud or Bandcamp." According to Metallic Ghosts (Chaz Allen), the original vaporwave scene came out of an online circle formulated on the site Turntable.fm. This circle included individuals known as Internet Club (Robin Burnett), Veracom, Luxury Elite, Infinity Frequencies, Transmuteo (Jonathan Dean), Coolmemoryz, and Prismcorp. Following the release of Ramona Xavier's New Dreams Ltd. (credited to "Laserdisc Visions", July 2011), a number of producers took inspiration from the style, and Burnett used "vaporwave" to tie the disparate group together. Xavier's Floral Shoppe (credited to "Macintosh Plus", December 2011) was the first album to be properly considered of the genre, containing all of the style's core elements.

2010s: Popularity
Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan. After a flood of new acts turned to Bandcamp for distribution, various online music publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Dummy and Sputnikmusic began covering the movement. In September 2012, Blank Banshee released his debut album, Blank Banshee 0, which reflected a trend of vaporwave producers who were more influenced by trap music and less concerned with conveying political undertones. Bandwagon called it a "progressive record" that, along with Floral Shoppe, "signaled the end of the first wave of sample-heavy music, and ... reconfigured what it means to make vaporwave music."

Following the initial wave, new terms for offshoot genres were invented, some of which indicate the non-seriousness of vaporwave, such as "vaportrap" and "vaporgoth". Vice writer Rob Arcand commented that the "rapid proliferation of subgenres has itself become part of the "vaporwave" punchline, gesturing at the absurdity of the genre itself even as it sees artists using it as a springboard for innovation." In 2015, Rolling Stone published a list that included vaporwave act 2814 as one of "10 artists you need to know", citing their album Birth of a New Day (新しい日の誕生). That same year, the album I'll Try Living Like This by Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv was featured at number fifteen on the Fact list "The 50 Best Albums of 2015", and on the same day MTV International introduced a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk, Tumblr launched a GIF viewer named Tumblr TV, with an explicitly MTV-styled visual spin. Hip-hop artist Drake's single "Hotline Bling", released on July 31, also became popular with vaporwave producers, inspiring both humorous and serious remixes of the tune.

Critical interpretations
Vaporwave was one of several microgenres spawned in the early 2010s that were the brief focus of media attention. Pitchfork contributor Jonny Coleman defines vaporwave as residing in "the uncanny genre valley" that lies "between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real." Also from Pitchfork, Patrick St. Michel calls vaporwave a "niche corner of Internet music populated by Westerners goofing around with Japanese music, samples, and language". Michelle Lhooq of Vice wrote that "according to commenters in various music forums, it's 'chillwave for Marxists,' 'post-elevator music,' "corporate smooth jazz Windows 95 pop". She explained that "parodying commercial taste isn't exactly the goal. Vaporwave doesn't just recreate corporate lounge music – it plumps it up into something sexier and more synthetic."

Music writer Adam Harper of Dummy Mag describes vaporwave as having an ambiguous or accelerationist relationship to consumer capitalism, writing that "these musicians can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound." He noted that the name itself was both a nod to vaporware, a name for products that are introduced but never released, and the idea of libidinal energy being subjected to relentless sublimation under capitalism. Music educator Grafton Tanner wrote, "vaporwave is one artistic style that seeks to rearrange our relationship with electronic media by forcing us to recognize the unfamiliarity of ubiquitous technology ... vaporwave is the music of 'non-times' and 'non-places' because it is sceptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space".

Speaking on the adoption of a vaporwave- and seapunk-inspired rebrand by MTV International, Jordan Pearson of Motherboard, Vice technology website, noted how "the cynical impulse that animated vaporwave and its associated Tumblr-based aesthetics is co-opted and erased on both sides—where its source material originates and where it lives". Xavier described her 2012 album Contemporary Sapporo (札幌コンテンポラリー) as "a brief glimpse into the new possibilities of international communication" and "a parody of American hypercontextualization of e-Asia circa 1995". Critic Simon Reynolds characterized Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person project as "relat[ing] to cultural memory and the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities, especially those related to consumer technology in the computing and audio/video entertainment area". Speaking about the "supposedly subversive or parodic elements" of vaporwave in 2018, Reynolds said that the genre had become redundant, in some respects, to modern trap music and mainstream hip hop: "What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Their role is redundant. Rap and R&B ... is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence."

In 2017, The Brooklyn Rail's Scott Beauchamp proposed a parallel between punk's "No Future" stance and its active "raw energy of dissatisfaction" deriving from the historical lineage of Dada dystopia, and vaporwave's preoccupation with "political failure and social anomie". Beauchamp writes that vaporwave's stance is more focused on loss, the notion of lassitude, and passive acquiescence, and that "vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online". He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave.

Offshoots and subgenres

 * Vaportrap integrates trap beats.
 * Mallsoft magnifies vaporwave's lounge influences. It may be viewed in connection to "the concept of malls as large, soulless spaces of consumerism ... exploring the social ramifications of capitalism and globalization".
 * Future funk expands upon the disco/house elements of vaporwave. It takes a more energetic approach than vaporwave. It incorporates elements of French house, albeit produced in the same sample based manner as vaporwave. Most of these samples are drawn from Japanese city pop records from the 1980s.
 * Simpsonwave was a YouTube phenomenon made popular by the user Lucien Hughes.  It mainly consists of videos with scenes from the American animated television series The Simpsons set to various vaporwave tracks. Clips are often put together out of context and edited with VHS-esque distortion effects and surreal visuals, giving them a "hallucinatory and transportive" feel.


 * Fashwave (a portmanteau of "fascist" and "synthwave" ), is a largely instrumental subgenre of vaporwave and synthwave that originated on YouTube circa 2015. With political track titles and occasional soundbites, the genre combines Nazi symbolism with the visuals associated with vaporwave and synthwave.  The offshoot Trumpwave focuses on Donald Trump.
 * Hardvapour emerged in late 2015 as a reimagination of vaporwave with darker themes, faster tempos, and heavier sounds. It is influenced by speedcore and gabber, and is viewed as oppositional to the vaporwave aesthetic. According to Vice's Rob Arcand, the genre lies somewhere between vaporwave and distroid, writing that hardvapour uses similar music software tools "not out of any special fixation with them, but simply because they're now the cheapest and most accessible tools around."
 * According to Bandcamp Dailys Simon Chandler, as of 2016, there also existed "broken transmission" (or "signalwave"), "utopian virtual", "post-Internet", "late-night lo-fi", and "vapornoise'".

Notable artists

 * 2814
 * Blank Banshee
 * Daniel Lopatin (Chuck Person, Oneohtrix Point Never)
 * Giant Claw
 * James Ferraro
 * Ramona Xavier (Macintosh Plus, Vektroid, Laserdisc Visions)
 * Ryan DeRobertis (Saint Pepsi, Skylar Spence)

Key Selling Points
The MOST popular classical guitar piece THE most talented, charismatic and hottest guitarist of the day!

Marketing Notes
ARANJUEZ will be advertised as a February SBS product:
 * 15" TV spot x 4 week campaign
 * Weather Watch - full CD played on rotation
 * Video Clip	- used a interstitial material plus OnDemand
 * Radio mentions / giveaways in language stations
 * SBS Homepage bean
 * Online (ad banners)

Linked Documents

 * Images
 * Audio
 * Marketing Plan
 * Press
 * Retail