LOMO
by: maki
As much as I try, I can’t make a clean break from physical media. I’ve been collecting things since I was young, starting from probably Garbage Pail Kids cards and working my way up since then. I was really hitting my stride in the early 2000s, when I had a ton of disposable income and a computer that connected me to eBay. Things died down for a while, but once I found vaporwave, that collecting bug reared its head again. So many beautiful vinyl splatters, colorful cassette shells, and artwork waiting to complement my collection.
I generally take a careful approach with my purchases now – asking myself if this is something I’ll truly want to keep, or I’ll buy to support the artist. I can’t (and never really did) buy something just to buy it. I’m sure I’ll miss a ton of releases, but that’s completely okay. I’ve been able to purchase things I wanted and am continually impressed by the talent in the scene. There is absolutely no way anyone could keep up.
Our current state, this culture of immediacy and instant gratification, is both a blessing and a curse. Social media brought us the concept of FOMO (fear of missing out), but we can also search around the internet to find those samples we just can’t place. I wasn’t around for the “early days” of vaporwave, but I can still find a lot of the old stuff on Bandcamp.
Anyone can go and grab terabytes of space for relatively low cost, allowing a very low barrier to entry for someone to start building a formidable library of vaporwave releases. You could spend a day downloading the entire catalogs of Business Casual, DMT and Sunset Grid, and you’d still be barely scratching the surface of what the vaporwave scene has to offer. Some of the best music being made right now, maybe five people have heard it. You’re not missing out on it, though – the fact that it exists is beautiful enough.
Artists have pulled albums, labels have disappeared. It’s all part of the scene. There is absolutely no way to capture the entire world of vaporwave and what it has to offer. We’re talking a decade of content, with tons of music coming out daily (how many email notifications do you get about releases?), and that’s only what’s known. Does one “miss out” on all of this? It’s a safe bet that we’ve all missed dozens of albums that, if played for us right now, would make us say, “wow, this is amazing.”
One beauty of vaporwave is these artists, discovering these sounds, and using them in such a way that makes the listener “discover” those same sounds. The joy of the producer finding a great sample is passed on to the listener in the joy of finding their reinterpretation. The creators are crate-digging, and with that so are the listeners. Let the cycle be this. There is no way we will ever hear everything, even if we had all of it. Rather than the all-you-can-eat buffet of downloading everything from every source you can think of, curate your collection, keep it intimate, call it yours.
Can you truly miss out on something you never knew about? And even if you did miss it, doesn’t that add to the experience, the culture of vaporwave? Missed opportunities, missed lifestyles, missed generations, missed technologies, missed dreams. Vaporwave nearly embraces missing out. You should, too. It makes the things you do find and experience that much more special.
**This piece was originally featured in Visual Signals issue 1.
