These Nights Are Ours

  “I was shown so much kindness in Japan from my friends, the audiences, venues, the family I stayed with, strangers, and so on. I felt helpless due to the fact that it would be impossible to fully repay them for that. This album was written with two goals in mind: to thank and pay a tribute to those previously mentioned, and create something of a sound diary that would document my trip.” - No Death June 2021 The expression of joy can be difficult to communicate.  How do you even define it?  Is it expressing jubilation?  How do you translate the happiness felt when a life goal is achieved? The simple pleasures that bring a smile to your face?  The quiet contemplation of reliving the best moments of our lives?  Is it even possible to chronicle?   One possible answer is the arts.  Be it the written word, theater, or music,each approach provides a unique and expressive way to communicate wonderment and happiness.  Music in particular is capabl...

    I’ve made a repeated point of how much I dislike much of vaporwave.  So much so that people are probably tired of me talking about it.  But it bears mentioning here once again to drive home a point.  For an album to come out of that genre that and not only sounds good, but ultimately makes it on to my best albums of the year list, it has to be truly exceptional.  It is this very scenario that has happened with Macroblank and his vaporwave masterpiece, 絶望に負けた . Macroblank came screaming into the vaprowave scene out of nowhere in mid 2020, and quickly releasing two albums and EP’s. These albums specialize in groovy, chilled out acoustic music with just a hint of reverb on it.  To those familiar with vaporwave this should ring a bell.  “ It’s no surprise when I say that the main influence behind my music and style is Haircuts for Men’s work.  I have always been a fan of chillout music, and this style of vaporwave represents one of the best w...

  Disoriented.  The smell of mold and decay permeate.  Where am I? Why can’t I move?  Trapped, I’m trapped somewhere.  What is going on? Why is my head locked in this stockade? Why am I in a dungeon?  What’s that sound? Footsteps? Metal dragging on the ground?  What is going on? Panic sets in as the realization of what is transpiring slowly dawns on me.  I am in his dungeon, the dungeon of Dronn .  Dronn, the Executioner .  He is coming to take my life.  How did I get here? I have so much left to do in my life. I have to get out of here! I can’t move! Please someone save me!  Oh god, oh GOD it's HIM!  No please spare me plea… the sound of flesh severed, a thud, silence. Translating music into visual imagery is something that is not easily done.  It requires not only a strong vision of what the composer wishes the listener to experience, but also selecting the correct instrumentation and strong pacing.  All of the...

    Lost in Neon , is a perfect combination of w u s o 命 and Yoshimi’ s sounds.  The minimalist melodies and dark, brooding atmospheres that Yoshimi excels at - paired with the beautiful, cinematic melodies and percussion that w u s o 命 brings to the table.  The song ebbs and flows with subtle ambient passages, soaring leads that drip with a cyberpunk edge.  I cannot think of a better example of what a song co-written by w u s o 命 and Yoshimi would sound like… except, it's not.  It’s all Yoshimi , w u s o 命  had no part in the writing of Lost in Neon . I went into The Wushimi Complex album thinking that all songs were co-written by w u s o 命 and Yoshimi .  I noticed a slight shift in focus around track 5 compared to the first four tracks, but overall the sound is focused and offers a strong cinematic, beat driven, urban infused take on dreampunk. At no point did I realize that this was actually a split between the two artists.  The fir...

    Imagine walking down a city street at night.  Neon signs saturate the landscape as rain steadily falls.  A distant figure smokes a cigarette under an awning, their features obscured.  Sirens wail in the distance as we continue our journey through the rain.  This scene and many like it are what enter my mind as I listen to F0X3R's (Fox’s) latest album Neon Rain . Coming from the Future Garage scene, Fox has a significant change in style with Neon Rain .  He described this change as “ needing something new in my style of music, so I decided to change it by taking inspiration from my favorite album, Birth of a New Day (2 8 1 4 -  新しい日の誕生) .”   What Fox has accomplished on Neon Rain is taking the essence of dreampunk and distilling it down to one of the purest and finest representations of the genre.  This is the type of release that you point someone to when they say, "What does dreampunk sound like?" The musical arrangements are simpl...

  During our musical journeys there are some instances where we hear something and it sticks with us.  Be that a song, album, or musical style… something about it just resonates with you and it becomes interwoven into your musical fabric.  I had one such experience around the turn of the millennium while playing a video game.  Little did I know it at the time, but while playing Silent Hill 2 my taste in music would be forever shifted. The soundtrack to that particular game had such a strong sound and singular focus that it entranced me.  The semi lo-fi,hazy production gave the guitar oriented and ambient tracks a quality to them that became synonymous with that and all other games in the series.  I would eventually seek out every soundtrack to these games that I could.  Even if the game itself was not great, I knew that Akira Yamaoka ’s music would still be high quality. A few years later I discovered dream music, and I found myself thinking how good ...

  Magnum. Opus.  The highest level that an artist has achieved in their collective works. The best offering that they have put out.  Oxford puts it simply as “a large and important work of music, especially one regarded as the most important work of an artist or writer.” But this isn’t just anyone’s magnum opus, this is Remember .  The artist that released ルートバックホーム (Route Back Home) , largely considered one of the most important and best dreampunk releases across the entire genre.  The same Remember that released ハートエイクに歩い (Walking to Heartbreak) , an album that helped define the ‘classic’ dreampunk sound.  The author of The City is My Friend , an album that has significant personal importance to my introduction to the genre, and holds a special place in many people’s hearts.  A Deep Dive into the Conflicted and Scarred Psyche eclipses them all. As the title suggests, this album is a chaotic, emotional, and dark trip through someone's mind.  “ I...

  Grey overcast days, bright blue skies, neon red saturated streets at night.  Consciously or unconsciously, color plays a pivotal role in both the mood and tone of  our surroundings.  White, grey, black, brown, yellow, and green.  Six different colors, each of which has a critical role in the creation of Aural ’s album, アーバン空想 .   “ Color plays an extremely important role in production. Music is almost like a recipe, and color is the texture and flavor added in ,” they explained when describing the importance of color’s significance while taking the listener on this musical journey.  The details of how  color influenced them remains a trade secret, but it's the fact that it plays a pivotal role in music creation that  is most fascinating.   In utilizing these colors, Aural guides the listener from place to place within this city that we have never seen, showcasing different aspects of a life that we have never lived.  It's in these...

  I looked at my surroundings and found no one.  Not a single soul to share my pain with.  I cried out into the black night and found no response.  Why? Why must it be this way?  Why am I always alone?  Is there no one there to hear me? In a desperate, final attempt I wail out one last time… to someone, anyone that would hear me.  Just as the darkness closes in on me and I brace for the end, I hear it… your voice.   You answered my call. Gave me light where there was none.  Slowly the night fades to dawn and gives way to the sun on the horizon.  We have found each other and now finally we are ready to face the day.   “I wrote this song as a love song to my girlfriend at the time. I always find people really natural sources of inspiration, [they] have emotions just like myself, and sometimes those emotions intertwine,” Jude Frankum speaks of his song I Don’t Regret a Day of Our Life Together .  One of four musical short storie...

Have you ever watched someone play an instrument seemingly at random?  The notes don’t make any sense and are hardly musical.  Amateur musicians do this often to figure out what sounds good and what does not.  Master musicians do this with intent. I get this image of walking down an abandoned hallway with a lone guitar playing from one of the rooms.  The notes heard are hardly musical at first.  Then - seemingly without effort - the notes begin to coalesce into something familiar, something less alien to our ears.  Without even truly noticing what has happened, the musician has transformed these seemingly random notes into a vast musical buffet for our ears to feast on. This isn’t too far removed from my own experience with VVV ’s album When The Night Air Leaves .  Honestly the first few seconds of the album are a hot mess.  The guitar used is playing random notes and some other stringed instruments are just doing their own thing.  It’s here...

  The fusion of two musical genres is a risky business.  You wager that the two styles will mesh in such a way to create something greater than the two parts.  All too often the end result is lesser than the sum of its parts. On a rare occasion, a marriage of styles occurs where both styles are taken to another level.  Where the music is not only improved, but rocketed into a new stratosphere.   The mixture of 2-step with dreampunk flows as natural as a stream does to a lake.   The dreampunk ambience is deep, engaging, and mesmerizing.  The 2-step percussion is interesting, unpredictable, and driving. The fusion creates something entirely unique in dreampunk and its name is Cryosauna . The balance that he has struck demonstrates the mastery that he has over his craft.  Neither style dominates, rather they compliment each other.  It would be easy to just create some ambient dreampunk songs and put some garage beats underneath them and cal...

 If anyone, anywhere, can hear me: please, please don’t let it happen… don’t let him die… God if you can hear me, don’t let her die… I need her here! Cries of desperation that all human beings have or will face.  Crying out to a higher power to spare the life of a loved one;to give us just a few more minutes, days, years with the person we cherish so much.  Ultimately death must come to us all.  How each individual handles the grieving process is entirely unique.  Some lose themselves in work.  Others may alter their lives greatly or try to honor those lost.  Others still may create art. “I really consider Death my breaking away from vaporwave. I want to make music that screams what I’m feeling.  I want people to hear the stories I want to tell.”  As ll nøthing ll states, Death marks a huge departure from his previous vaporwave works.  It’s an album announcing an artist coming into their own style.  It shows ll nøthing ll ’s grow...

FLAP.  A word that strikes fear into the hearts of men, women, and children worldwide.  And for those whose hearts are full of cowardice and duplicity, it’s a genre observed with trepidation and fear.  But lo, should you gaze into the abyss, the abyss shall in turn gaze into you. Stare into the abyss I did on Basement ’s debut album Tartaria , and against all odds I found something that I enjoyed.  In my own musical journey I attempted to get into FLAP, knowing that it is mostly a joke genre.  Even then I couldn’t bring myself to like it outside of a few sections of songs here and there.  I was very disappointed after about a month of trying that there was nothing in the genre for me to gravitate towards.   It was a few weeks later that I stumbled upon this album.  I almost gave up on it immediately when I heard the vocals come in on From Mud .  However, there was something that stood out about it.  The vocals are the hyper-saturated vo...

  Opaque Lens World is the story about an individual who finds them self in the midst of conflict, longing, searching, finding, and ultimately defeated.  When listening to this album I was taken to a world where I was swept away with a myriad of emotions ranging form intrigue, hope, and discouragement.  As I went on my journey, I found myself hoping that the protagonist would find what they were so desperately searching for but in the end there was nothing.  At the end I was left questioning what the point of everything was and left with a feeling of hollowness in my core. Opaque Lens World (OLW) is the story of an individual who finds themselves in the midst of conflict, struggle, hope, defiance, assimilation, and ultimately triumph.  When listening to this epic I was swept away to a world where life and existence are a continual struggle.  The first half of the album is a consistent struggle against an unknown entity that persistently vies for dominance ...

  Dystopia is a word that is often used to describe albums that fall into the dreampunk genre.  Too often it’s used as a generic term to describe music that evokes a feeling of hopelessness and desperation.  There are times however where such a description is warranted, where the sense of a dystopia goes beyond a simple notion that life is difficult.  On Brave Warrior , Sangam and Kid Smpl take the notion of dystopia and embrace it, mold it, and hone it into a sound that is truly worthy of such a description.   Brave Warrior marks the second album in a trilogy, the first being Shadow Knight released on Dream Catalogue .  It falls in a line of many collaborations that the duo have explored over the past few years.  In doing these collaborations both Sangam and Kid Smpl have created a sound that incorporates their own unique styles while evolving into something all its own.   When asking about the collaboration process and how the songs take shap...

The music of dreams can take on many forms.  Be it reverb saturated synth pads taking us to beautiful landscapes with their ambience or maybe a soft beat leads us through gentle melodies as we are narrated down a rainy city street at night.  The sound that Goamae (Guild of Advanced Music and Exploration) has created on Planet Mansion falls well within the dreampunk genre, but calls to mind none of the former images. This record takes dream music and turns it on its head.  The rain saturated cityscapes are replaced with oriental mountainsides and neon lights with heavenly meteorite showers.    Just listen to Heartbeat, the second song on the album.  The track starts off very simply but quickly swells into this massively emotional collection of female vocals,  pan flute, and synth pads that create a sound that is rare inside of dreampunk.  In fact, this sounds more like an old Enigma track or something that Delirium would have written in the late 90...

I make it no secret that I am not a fan of classic vaporwave.  For myself, the style is inconsistent in its quality, is rarely engaging, and has few redeeming traits.  But, one of the standout characteristics it does possess is its hypnotic vibe.  Modern vaporwave sees artists capturing that mesmerizing essence of the early releases and transposing it into original compositions.  That is exactly what Tower of the Sun (TotS) has done on Reset . The sound that TotS is able to achieve on this album is a combination of the surreal and real, the ordinary and the extraordinary.  A majority of the album was created using a Fender Strat, vst synths, samples from Nintendo 64 games, and a metric ton of digital effects.  These effects transform the music through the use of phasers and reverb.   This is in stark contrast to the percussion, which has minimal processing and is clear as day throughout the album. The melodies take us to oceans of imagination while t...

    Hyperconsumerism.  The pressure to consume goods that ultimately serve no functional purpose.  Having those goods then define one’s identity.  One of the pillars of the American zeitgeist in the 80’s, it was ironically embraced by classic vaporwave years later.   What then would vaporwave look like if it was made from the zeitgeist of the 90’s? Would the rapid rise in technology lead to a utopian future? Or perhaps a more misanthropic vision of things yet to come?  For R∞ the answer is the latter.   Movies such as Akira , Ghost in the Shell , and The Matrix all help paint the picture for the sound that is present on IIɅ7 .  A darker, grittier future where technology is used to further the greed of mankind.  Self-dubbed cybervapor, R∞ has created his own vision of what beat driven, cyberpunk influenced vaporwave can be. The cybervapor genre is a conscious decision to not be classified as dreampunk.  R∞ explained that while th...