Dear 108 mics (vapourwave)

Fan mail and an eccojam

Dear 108 mics,

Hope you’re doing good and you don’t mind me writing you out the blue!

Recently I watched your video guide to oneohtrix point never and i learned a lot (Strawberry Skies has been in my most played list ever since.)

I’ve been a fan of vapourwave and other incredibly specific internet micro genres for a while (during the pannetone I wrote a piece on chillwave). What attracted me to vapourwave was the ironic hijacking of pop cultural artefacts (and winding up my friend Sean by slowing down tracks, adding reverb and declaring myself a music producer).

I also liked this academic idea from Grafton Tanner’s Babbling Corpse that, ‘Whether they are requiems for early capitalism or glaring reflections of our own moment in late capitalism, the majority of vapourwave albums can be read as indictments of life under the sign of consumption’.

But what I’d missed, and what your video made me reconsider, was the uncomplicated, joyous aspect of it, like when you quote OPN describing ‘Eccojams’ as

a really simple kind of practice that anybody can do, grabbing a phrase from a track slowing it down and putting echo on it. Each piece reveals something about what its producer likes about it. I'm always searching for the juiciest moment in a pop track to sample and get into this hypnotic state with it.

I love your idea about ear worms being hyperextended when you say that ‘There's something really brilliant and intoxicating about hearing a single part of a song reimagined in this way over and over again, as it recreates the feeling of having part of a song randomly pop in your head and it's repetition only serves to hold this feeling in place for minutes at a time.’

‘more than just a shirt, it's a statement about youth, rebellion, and the enduring power of the North’ — Calvino Jilani

You video has so many fun little turns of phrase — ‘a perfect song to complement the feeling of riding the bus home at night while it's raining outside’ — and I love these descriptions, in part, because of the built-in ridiculousness of trying to use words to describe music, as language seems always doomed to fall short — if that makes sense to you.

Anyway, some of your ideas and phrases got stuck in my head, a bit like the juiciest moment in a pop track, and my favourite line is when you say you ‘especially like meta concrete because it makes me feel like I'm watching the opening scene in Up on a Nokia flip phone.’

What a great, funny line, and it’s stayed with me, so — forgive me — but I thought I would have a go at vapourising it. I would to try to hold the feeling in place for minutes at a time. Then, when my friend Jack introduced (or reintroduced?) me to ‘It Takes a Muscle’, we decided to put my text to a baby eccojam.

Enjoy — or, do feel free to ignore!

Thanks for the video and all best wishes,

Sammi

Muscle


makes me feel i'm leafing through the yellow pages 
the word 

 on a calculator
your socks pulled over skis clacked together
making the space for a new love affair on a dartboard 
your body begging the sun to burn its way through the curtains
like the popcorn smell of a lonely gal in an armchair 
on a string of weird birthdays
watching a fake fall compilation 

blur a disco clutz through napster
during the marathon of swiss vaults
that keep you hostage
like a record collector at one of andy warhol’s parties
kaleidoscoped
then bundled down all the stairs
past the choppers smoking
next to a blue tarpaulin
left by the photographer
reading 'i am legend'
like a yodel that outstayed its welcome
the southern-fried sounds of muntjacs
moved on by the shock end
would beat you into who you are
letting go by the photocopier, in the carpark
or dressed as a photocopier for halloween
lurching out of nowhere
to explain what is humanism
to the percussive lockstep of the lock-in
saying it, say it
to the freckles on my
memory of a meadow
i’m sorry too
for doing that to you
for a summer doing nothing 
so i could write a book about it 
then selling out a festival
the page still refreshing on a clarinet
he points at the right-angle triangles where the moon hung
then at a wedge-toothed tree
drawn on a stranger’s degree certificate
that fell on the street from a skywriter
on a patch of hair on a bathroom tile
and yes, a rubber
between my teeth
a lamppost in my driveway
as the dew rests on
two ketchup bottles dropped in his sleeping bag
the day turns into night without a love letter in hand
with someone you’ll never get
out of your winchester
hoping the man with the key will not really eat the butterfly
just because i frosted
the buckles of a thousand dungarees dragged behind a buffalo
via dead usb cables
hoverboarded
slush puppy bit-crushed from its cassette case
huddled round a bong with the entire cast of hollyoaks
by a lego display case
finally feeling alive on a starbucks dongle 
wrapped up in mosquito netting
locating the sound on a kindle
its final rays bending like a sprinkler
on a greasy mark on the late night menu 
at a japanese office block 
where they let you make out with the lift buttons 
wet as his fevered odes to lobster in the sweat lodge
right through the lowriders in a valley 
and straight into your mouth
nope, your toaster waits for a jaguar e-type
using a bassist with a shelf for a neck
tapped out and pulsed at
chatting to some implants
wearing a player piano underneath a canadian tuxedo
whittling a guitar out a cigar box with a steak knife
while my phone gets cold
like it's late night 
dancing to the bee gees and dragged through the tupperware 
with a ripoff  cover and a cheesy, deadbeat title
like you are indiana jones struggling to use the google 
and saying all that in pig latin
would give new york an aneurism
like the end of goodbye lenin deleting itself off a dell laptop
a very small train model wrapped up in a tear away trousers 
clutch bag buzzing wework
like the light up wework coasters thrown at an ever longer wework conga
the wayward notes you wrote in coffee foam
as someone with a nice desk, 
some seitan on a chopping board
like a fake set of lungs when the bullfight started