Music Video: youtu.be/hRRRP3n1E0o

About the song and music video "When You Decide to Vaporwave". Popular YouTube channel Techmoan used our new album "Powers Activate" (released on the now retro compact disc format) to do a product review video on a compact disc recorder called the Superscope PSD300. In it, he used our CD to demonstrate the features of this magnificent machine. Interestingly enough, the unit was able to change the speed, pitch and key signature of our songs. Mat from Techmoan chose "When You Decide to Love Someone" to test out these features. In the comment section below the video, a lot of people remarked that the PSD300 would be perfect for the microgenre of electronic music called vaporwave. It wasn't until then that we first heard that term "vaporwave" and it excitedly peaked our interest. It was neat to hear Mat from Techmoan playback our song in an entirely different nontraditional way. We weren't put off by it but rather we were intrigued actually.

So we did some investigating about vaporwave and after our research, we are seemingly still left with more questions than answers. Here's what we found out. Vaporwave can be like taking a 45 record and playing it back at 33 1/3 speed on your turntable. If the artist in question is any good, they will do more than just slow down a song released by someone else. They will slice it, dice it, time-stretch it and remix it. They will add layers of new sounds, loops, and samples. The vaporwave community of artists and it's subculture also has a signature vaporwave aesthetic. This aesthetic is often stylized as “V A P O R W A V E A E S T H E T I C” which refers to retro-inspired visual art. Which typically includes Japanese lettering, nostalgic themes from the 1980s, 1990s computer operating systems and video game consoles. This sounded great to us!

Here is where it all gets a little tricky and seemingly complicated. We found ourselves wondering if the original artists of these sound recordings that are being "sampled" are getting paid? Is the whole genre anti-establishment and anti-corporation? Is it pretentious to spell V A P O R W A V E and A E S T H E T I C with an open space between each capital letter? Is vaporwave all just for fun and not profit? Is it more about creating audio art as opposed to making beautiful music? Is it growing in popularity or is it dying off? What are your thoughts?

We realize that people have been painting on top of paintings and recycling the old and making it new again for years. In our opinion, this microgenre is really not so different or so groundbreaking as some would like to think. It's a lot like traditional mosaic art but in the digital age. Take what is broken and glue it all back together with your own personal taste and design style. However, it sure looked like a whole lot of fun to us! So we just dove right in ourselves instead of sitting on the sidelines!

We decided to play it legally safe and just have fun with one of our own sound recordings. Being inspired by Techmoan's decision to change the pitch and key signature of our song "When You Decide to Love Someone" (Juno Dreams Remix), lead us to the idea to just vaporize the track ourselves. "When You Decide to Vaporwave" is our first attempt of the vaporwave genre. The aesthetics we used in the music video production where especially fun for us. The video is a social commentary on art, religion, luck, software and dying music formats. It would probably be best described as pop-art. We wanted to thank Techmoan, Macintosh Plus 'Floral Shoppe', Steve Kipner and Terry Shaddick (the songwriters behind Diana Ross's "It's Your Move".) for the inspiration.

Oh, and by the way, the Alison Moyet image at the end of the video was purposely placed as a nod to Alf herself. Often in our childhood, we would slow down our 45 records to hear what they would sound like at the wrong speed. We would laugh at how different sounding the song was and we'd always say before we played it, "Here's the Alison Moyet version".

Powers Activate! ~ Candy Apple Blue




Techmoan Superscope PSD300: youtu.be/AXL4r30VgSE