005.5 - The Deep Dive - R∞ - IIɅ7 Album Notes and Interview

 

The deep dive is for readers who want to dig further into the album by reading the notes and pre-review interview that is done with each artist.  It is best read after the review.

Album Notes

IIɅO - The album starts off with a nice echoey tone and really sets the stage for what is going to be happening throughout the album.  Repeated melodies with tons of reverb over some very well constructed beats.  There are multiple levels going on here.  There is a low tone that drives the bass and a slightly obscured bass line.  After about a minute the fitler is lifted off the song and we have a much clearer picture of what is going on in the song, cleaner sounds.  The main melody is revisited a second time but with different synths driving it, the synth at the beginning of the song is now pushed to the background and a much deeper tone is taken with the new synth.  Its a great effect and really moves the song forward while still maintaining the same melody that was established at the very beginning.  For only having one melody this song really has some good flow to it and doesn't really overstay its welcome at all, pretty rare for something so simple.  About 3 minutes into the song there is a breakdown where a piano takes over the main melody and moves the song into a more ambient direction.  The same melody is maintained but it takes on a new character with this section, really well done.  The final minute of the song moves us back to the main melody as was established early on.  This is a really well constructed song and really surprised me with how it can maintain something that is a 10 second melody and give "variations on a theme" so well.

IIɅI - The track starts off with a distorted rain sound and a simple chime melody fades in.  It seems very much like a continuation of the first track for the 30 seconds until a voice interrupts the flow.  Immediately the song changes to a hard driving beat and distorted baseline accompanied by synth pads and a synth lead.  The main synth tone really reminds me of Stabbing Westward - How Can I Hold On, curious if that influenced the artist at all on this one.  Any indication that this was going to be like the first song should be shattered at this point.  A minute in a quick synth pad breakdown occurs and lulls the listener into a sense of security before the voice comes back in and violently rips the listener out of it with the beat and melody again.  I really love the flow of this song, the beat and 808 really add huge contrast to the ambient sections and at no point does this song feel disjointed.  The sections flow from one another so that after the initial shock at the beginning of the song it really grooves well until a piano and synths close out the song.  Really good contrast to the first song and excellent composition overall.

IɅIO - This song starts off with a low hum and a beat that really makes this sound like its in a factory.  The song keeps building up with the beat and a low pulse that gets stronger and stronger for the first minute or two.  As the sound crescendo continues there is what sounds like ghost tech glitch melodies building in the background.  At about 2 minutes in the song finally shifts a little bit and we start to get some chord progressions.  There is a ton of stuff going on in the background that makes this song deceptively simple.  Without headphones I would not have heard the glitch minor melodies in the background and would have thought about this song pretty much in drum and bass fashion.  By the end of the song the beat has smoothed out and has a nice flow to it with the simple chord progression driving it forward.  It's a more challenging listen than the other two songs to this point, but also if you pay attention is more rewarding.

OIOɅ - We start off with a low pulse that is phased in and out with some echoey metallic clanks over it for the first minute.  A drum kit breaks the silence about a minute in and gives the song a strong backbone with a nice breakbeat.  A guitar comes in that is reverbed to hell and back and this song is just taken to the next level.  You want to groove? This song is where you want to be.  It's hard not to bob your head to the set of instrumentals put together here.  The song has a similar structure to the first song where the same variations on a theme is on display but the instruments used and the structure are different enough that it gives the song an identity all its own.  The song identity is really found in the guitar but the center of the song we have a beautiful ambient breakdown that brings in a secondary melody with minimal beats.  At the end of the song all of these factors are merged together into a beautiful outro.  Possibly the best song on the album.

OɅII - A simple melody with a phased beat start the song on fade in.  This builds for the first minute and slowly more elements are added, first some synth pads and later what sounds like single note guitar leads.  The song is in no hurry to get anywhere and it takes its time building and layering itself.  Parts build and compliment each other and slowly morph.  By two minutes in the song is vastly different from where it started but the transition is done so smoothly that it is hardly noticeable.  The main progression is dropped shortly thereafter and replaced by a short melody loop that is now the main driver of the song.  It's those wonderful variations on a theme that we've seen so many times to this point really taken forward here, a stripped back section with a simple beat and then finally a purely ambient section with no beat and a synthesized choir for accompaniment.  I really like this recurring theme on the album and it's really used to maximum effect on this song.  At the end of the song the two opposing sections of the song begin to merge, the instrumentals from the opening merge with the instrumentals that became dominant later in the song and they combine to become what may be the musical climax of the album.  Usually a musical climax is loud and bombastic but this one is subtle and layered, and one I did not really fully get until I listened with headphones.  Great closing song that perfectly wraps up everything that has been showcased on this short album to this point.

Overall - The entirety of the album really takes the idea of variations on a theme and runs with it.  Each song has its own identity and a strong one at that.  I don't know if there is any overarching theme pulling the entire album together but it would be interesting to know if there is.  Great stuff and the album length is almost perfect for this style - everything is so well done it leaves me wanting more.

Interview

It's only been recently that you've started exploring "cyber vapor." What made you want to explore the style of music and would you consider this as part of the large dreampunk movement? If yes, why? If no, why?
 
I became interested in vaporwave because I saw an intersection of many different themes, and I felt an affinity for all of them. I began producing vaporwave because I felt an opportunity to explore a darker, more serious facet of those themes – and this darker, more serious approach to vaporwave felt like a natural extension of my own style. Not surprisingly, there were others taking this path as well – some well before I did – and dreampunk is an obvious example. I think my releases do fit quite well as part of the dreampunk narrative, but I’ve made a conscious effort to shift to a less ambient, more melodic and harmonic sound with a harder, defined synth edge that is still chill, dripping with reverb, and honors the trademark ‘slow’ quality of traditional vaporwave – a combination which was weird, unavailable, and just my own personal taste recently. I’m making stuff that I want to hear but I can’t find anywhere.
I found inspiration for that sound in the world of mid to late 90s and early 2000s electronic and alternative music, slowed down and drugged out further. I want a viscous residue of sound from that era, a vaporwave approach to the decade that comes after our current vaporwave focus. Cyberpunk was a core theme from this period for me – it was my introduction to things like Ghost In The Shell, Akira, and The Matrix – and eventually I had a decisive kind of moment where I was like, yeah – when you move vaporwave into this period, it’s not going to feel the same. It’s not executive lounges filled with shiny, jade covered pillars and endless optimism for the future. It’s high tech, but it’s grunge too -- neon signs for cybernetic body extensions, everyone fighting for themselves, and the former glory of cities covered in a layer of ash, dirt, and dystopia. It’s cyber flavored vapor. cybervapor (or, I’ve also used vaportech to some extent) became a single word that helped me drive to that goal and stay focused on exactly what I wanted to hear. It just felt right. And then I started creating new aesthetics to match.
 
What music has influenced you recently for making this and IIV9?
 
I have a rule: days that I’m in my studio, or even when I’m just thinking about my current releases while driving or in the shower or something, I don’t listen to any music. I fall in love easily, with a lot of different kinds of music, and also just sounds in general (like water running over boulders… that sort of thing. You’ll hear that a lot in the background of my tracks if you listen closely), and for me, it’s too tempting to constantly kick off new side projects based on what I was just listening to. However, even adhering to that, whatever is deep inside me is going to bubble up, so I feel like this helps me concentrate the theme, the sound, that I’m most in love with at the time, and then condense it.
I don’t know if this is true with other musicians, but when I try to reproduce something I heard, from memory, it hits different. I’m recalling my perception of it, rather than what it exactly was. And that’s how my tracks feel like me. No matter what I’m pulling from, it’s filtered and flavored by my memories and perception, which end up being rather consistent -- and I think you can hear that consistency in my tracks. I think I always sound like me, even when I’m trying to vary my styles wildly and not sound like me! I’ve started a few sub-labels as an experiment, with the purpose of not sounding like myself, and I just can’t shake the underlying thread of my sound. I always hear it. It’s always there. I think others hear it too.
With all that said, I actually didn’t have any specific music I was consciously drawing influence from – it was an overall feeling. I often pictured an imaginary cyberpunk city, like what I saw in the animes and movies I mentioned earlier, and I went from there. What does it feel like to walk down one of those streets? If I were out doing mercenary runs for mega corporations, ending the night at a cyberpunk bar, sipping on cheap, synthetic future alcohol – what kind of music are they playing in there? What do I notice about my surroundings? How does it make me feel? And would I feel nostalgic about it later? Can I transfer that ‘future’ nostalgia to the listener? Even though this is a time and place you’ve never experienced, I’m drawing from things you might have seen and heard already – can I make the album feel familiar? I want you to say something like ‘oh damn, this kinda feels like Shadowrun, or Ghost In The Shell’ or something like that when you hear it for the first time, even though I never directly mention it or sample anything from it. I want to be an extension of it, to carry the spirit of it forward to you, now, in 2020, and let you experience it again but with something new.
 
Is there a musical narrative that you are trying to communicate to the listener? What message are you trying to get across if any?
 
I actively avoid any kind of direct narrative in the album art, album titles, or tracks, even though I’m thinking about something concrete when I’m writing it. Most of my album titles and track titles look like random garbage, honestly. I do that on purpose. I don’t want to give you any kind of preconceived notion about what you’re going to listen to. It’s much more gratifying when I have fans come back and say, “this album gave me such a vision of this world, and it had this and this – is that what you were thinking when you wrote it???” and it’s completely different from anything that I had ever conceived myself. The music means different things to different people – it helps them pull together their own perceptions and memories to create a personal narrative for the music – and that’s what I think defines a truly amazing album. It’s not a story from me, for you, to consume -- it’s a tool I crafted, for you, to build your own world, and then share your experience with others, hopefully.
 
Melodically IɅIO is quite different from the rest of the album in feel having almost an EBM feel to it.  Is there any reason behind this?
 
My workflow is all over the place. The final tracks that ended up on this album were written years apart. The first track on album, I wrote in a single day – the day right before I released it. I finished the artwork and actually assembled all the tapes before I even started on the music (I almost always do this, actually, to help me focus on a particular sound). I would just sit and my desk and look at the blank cassette, and think – what are you going to sound like?
The rad thing is that I often find tracks, even written years apart, have a similar sound in some cases, and so I begin slowly grouping them together into albums, and as I do that my sense of the musical theme for the album becomes stronger. I almost never sit down and just write an album start to finish, I don’t work that way. It becomes difficult to even answer a question like this because, honestly, I can’t keep track of what I was doing or thinking or feeling when that particular track came into existence. I just know where it ends up, because that’s where it belonged.
 
What type of equipment was used to make this recording (if you prefer not to answer that is totally fine)?
 
This will always be a complete secret ;-)
 
A lot of the songs have a "variations on a theme" feel to them, the opening track in particular.  Was this a conscious decision or something that just evolved while making the songs?  If it was intentional what was the reasoning behind it?
 
It is fascinating to me, to no end, that you feel that way. Given my workflow that I just described, you would think this sort of thing wouldn’t happen, right? I don’t disagree with you, I do think there is a variation on a theme. But I wasn’t actively pursuing it, or completely aware of it. It was peeking through, here and there, as I went about writing random tracks the past few years, and I ended up discovering it myself, and then assembling it into an album, and then a series of albums. I find this haphazard creative process makes what I do better, and it’s also a relief from a world of organization imposed on me by everyday life, my day job, etc. I embrace the chaos when I’m trying to be creative, it feels really fucking good. I discover my own albums along with you, in a way.
 
On IIɅI there is a portion that sounds a lot like the intro to Stabbing Westward's song How Can I Hold On (link below). Was that an influence for this song at all?
 
Not directly, but like I outlined before – this album sits exactly in the time and space where I was directing my perception, so to speak. I listened to Stabbing Westward A LOT when I was living through this era, and they have a unique mix of both an electronic and rock/alternative aesthetic. Also, NIN and Garbage happen to be some of my other favorite bands from this era, and you can probably hear their influence as well.
 
How much of this album was sampled if any? If you used samples how were you able to manipulate them to get the "cyber" sound that you display on this album?
 
Zero samples, unless you count my frequent (legal and cleared) use of various nature and outdoor soundscape FX. Even in an album that’s about a dystopian cyberpunk city, I find a place for the sound of streaming water and rain. It’s absolutely necessary for the right feeling, even if you don’t notice it at first. It’s all over my albums, almost every single one!
I have nothing against people that use samples, but I make an effort to create everything of my own from scratch. I actually created an entire sub-label just to explore making traditional-feeling vaporwave without samples. It’s called ɅCCIDENT IN PɅRɅDISE (Rパラダイスでの事故) at https://accident-in-paradise.bandcamp.com/.