Vektroid

Vaporwave began with an album by Oregon's graphic artist and producer Ramona "Vektroid" Xavier, Floral Shoppe (2011), credited to Macintosh Plus, and with her single Lisa Frank 420/ Modern Computing. For this album she employed a technique of scrambling sections of old obnoxious songs (elevator "muzak") and slowing down these grotesquely edited ghosts of music. The victims came from AOR, lounge soul music and smooth jazz. Boot cuts up and remixes of Sade's Tar Baby, turning the singer into a zombie male. Lisa Frank 420/ Modern Computing aka Risa Furanku 420/ Gendai no Konpyu is a seven-minute dilapidation of Diana Ross' It's Your Move. Floral Shoppe/ Hana no Senmon-ten and Library/ Raiburari spoil the Pages' pop-jazz. Geography/ Chiri (perhaps the standout) builds an industrial sonata out of a videogame soundtrack. Chill Divin' with ECCO/ ECCO to Okan Daibingu is a solemn requiem for Dancing Fantasy's sleepy dance-jazz. The seven-minute Mathematics/ Sugaku (another high point) abstracts pop-jazz into celestial new-age music. The brief saxophone-driven instrumental Piko I Am Pico is the ultimate grating tribute to elevator muzak. At best, her praxis evoked Brian Eno's parodies of pop music, and the digital manipulations of Autechre, Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin. At worst, these were just trivial remixes of old songs, the kind of things that fans armed with a computer would do privately in a bedroom but refrain from exposing to the Internet world.

Her early recordings were actually under the moniker Vectorfray, all of them digital files, all of them released on the Web in 2005: Pentbut, From The Comfort Of Your Deathbed Omegalpha Disc One, Ides, Bloodsample, etc. This then morphed into Vektordrum that released a ton of music between 2008 and 2010: Shitaihokansho (2008), Capitose Windowpane (2009), I Banished (2009), Deciphered (And Re-Encrypted) (2009), Hello Skypedals EP1 and EP2 (2009), Fraktalseq - Blossom (2009), Discret Night Signals (2010), Trinity (2010), etc.

The main project Vektroid debuted with the EP Telnet Erotika (2010), aka Telnet Complete (2017), that sampled vintage dance songs in the vein of Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams, and was therefore vaporwave even before Floral Shoppe. Vektroid then released a deluge of albums: Starflight Iguana (2010), Hot Neon Love (2010), Planet Dudett (2010), Polytravellers (2011), an album of gentle ambient music, Starcalc (2011), an album of proper songs, Neo Cali (2011), an album of dance-pop, and Color Ocean Road (2012), by far the most musical of the batch, more focused on ambient music and less on sampling tricks, littered with vintage synth sounds in the vein of Oneohtrix Point Never.

A quantum leap forward took place with the ten-minute single Enemy (2013), a smooth and elegant electronic composition that blends manipulated vocals with house music.

Midnight Run (2016) was a collaboration with Houston's rapper Siddiq (and not coincidentally Vektroid's least awful album yet). Vektroid Texture Maps (2016) compiles recordings from 2009-13 including Enemy and a lot of unreleased garbage, Big Danger (2016) recycles old demos and some music from Starlight Iguana and Planet Dudett,

Re-Set (2016) was a more serious attempt at composing original music. Seed & Synthetic Earth (2017) followed suit, a Vektroid album that could be considered made of her own (digital) compositions, largely dispensing with the samples of other people's material. Unfortunately, these two albums also showed her limitations as a composer compared with the tons of great electronic music produced since the 1960s.

In between she released several digital "albums" as Dstnt in 2010, starting with the five-song EP Iss2 (2010) that was also made available as Vektroid's Iss2+2 (2010) with the addition of the ten-minute Ntdrvvvr Arc and the 14-minute Rmx Cncn2. She released the EP Prism Genesis (2011) as Fuji Grid TV, a collage of samples from Japanese television; Black Horse (2011) and MIDI Dungeon (2011), two albums of muzak as bland as it gets, bordering on the new-age music of the 1980s, as Esc; the droning ambient album Dream Castles (2011) as Tanning Salon; and Sacred Tapestry's EP Shader (2012), which contains "Japanese" songs similar to the Fuji Grid TV music plus a 14-minute Spirited Child that sounds like an extended ambient remix of Floral Shoppe. Her project Virtual Information Desk (with "information desk" spelled in Japanese) is documented on the 74-minute album Sapporo Contemporary (2012), which is as faithful as vaporwave can get to the original awful muzak that it intends to appropriate/satirize/decontextualize. This album can also be considered the originator of the "mallsoft" subgenre.

Under the moniker Laserdisc Visions she released the cassette New Dreams Ltd (Beer On The Rug, 2011), later reissued in different formats with different songs, but basically a 30-minute mini-album of 27 songs, mostly culled from smooth instrumental jazz, hip-hop and dance-pop, and peppered with snippets of spoken Japanese television. It can be viewed as a splendid documentary about musical repression and audio brainwashing or as an incredibly boring experience. This album became the project New Dreams Ltd which released Initiation Tape - Part One (2011), later revised and reissued as Initiation Tape - Isle of Avalon Edition (2014), Sleepline (2016), which collects unreleased 2013 material, and Eden (2016). New Dreams Ltd was mostly a "cut-and-paste-and-slow-down" project in the vein of Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams, with just a bit more of videogame overtones.

PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises released Home (2013) and ClearSkies (2013) in the silly vein of James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual. Fuji Grid TV EX (2016) and Shader Complete (2016) are revisions of previous albums.

Peace Forever Eternal released Nextcentury (PrismCorp, 2017).