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Back to
my childhood fear of mannequins, how I couldn’t enter a department store without bursting into tears. My mortified parents would scoop me up and cover my eyes, encouraging me to be brave. Today I stand in museums and happily marvel at ancient statues, awed by fleshy marble. Why are mannequins scary but sculptures are sublime? Maybe because mannequins have wigs. There’s also the uncanny valley aspect, the sinister feeling of something pretending to be what it’s not, which seems to be the way of things in the 21st century.
Now we have chatbots that perform the illusion of consciousness. I’m amazed by the otherwise smart people who take the idea that chatbots might be sentient seriously, mostly because they admit it’s a possibility yet continue to use them. If there’s the tiniest chance a chatbot possesses consciousness, then forcing it to debug your javascript or create healthy recipes or whatever is morally fucked.
So I deny the possibility. Chatbots will never have upsetting dreams, regrets, or irrational fears about mannequins. Which isn’t to say they won’t make the world unrecognizable very soon. Five years from now, it might seem inevitable.
But memory is a weird animal. It’s an unpredictable, shapeshifting creature that collapses time. Sometimes an event that felt sudden actually wasn’t. Like the strange days in New York after a lawyer in Westchester contracted a virus that was circulating through China and Italy. We kept riding the subway and laughing and coughing on each other for weeks, waiting for somebody to tell us what to do.
In terms of artificial intelligence, this feels like the Days of the Westchester Lawyer.
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“What
is vaporwave, exactly?”
C. asked the other day.
“Slow-motion elevator music that thinks it’s Japanese,” I said.
Although this is correct, it might be a little dismissive. I’ve always thought of vaporwave as a genre that exists entirely in quotes because it looks—and sounds—like cyberpunk for children: chipper New Wave aesthetics, the chunky pixels of Windows 95, and Blade Runner fantasies all smooshed into reverberated telephone hold music. And like hold music, it’s meant to be reassuring but quickly curdles into the nightmarish because few things are as frightening as calculated innocence or manufactured happiness.
(The smile is the expression that can be seen from the farthest away, and as the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne observed, a smile that does not affect the muscles around the eyes will “unmask the false friend.”)
But as I pondered C’s question, I wondered if vaporwave was more than a distinct flavor of kitsch. After all, it’s a persistent reference point that appears alongside similarly elastic concepts such as ‘hauntology’ and ‘lost futures’. When it peaked in the 2010s, there was also mallsoft, signalwave, vapornoise, utopian virtual, vaportrap, seapunk, goblincore, witch house, and slushwave. All of which, I think, speak to the hardwired human craving for a scene.
So I spent September steeped in vaporwave, starting with the albums I remember enjoying ten or fifteen years ago. This time, the longing I heard in the echoes of dead mall music wasn’t for a fetishized 1980s of electric turquoise, popped collars, and Aquanet. It wasn’t even really yearning for a time when the world was tactile and technology felt liberating rather than like an asylum. Instead, it sounded like lonely music looking for a way out of an increasingly isolating future.
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Lately I’ve had it with the self-helpers and faith dealers, the ones telling us to sit in solitude on our cushions so we can become the best versions of ourselves and follow our bliss. They rarely mention community, and the conspiratorial zone of my brain wonders if making happiness an individual project is an orchestrated plot. Maybe they want to keep us apart. They. (Always a sign it’s time to switch gears.)
In my experience, the idea of getting spiritualized by myself is a dead end. The self is a cul-de-sac. Like I’m supposed to figure life out alone.
Jiddu Krishnamurti scolds those who think insight is achieved by rejecting the world, no matter how messy and fallen it might be. The sarcasm that drips through his critique of self-individuation delights me, e.g. “the traditional approach is from the periphery inwards, and through time, practice, and renunciation, gradually come upon that inner flower, that inner beauty and love—in fact to do everything to make oneself narrow, petty and shoddy.” Instead, he asks, “is it not possible to explode from the center?”
Explode from the center. I like this. Not sure what it looks like, but it seems like a worthy pursuit and reminds me of Bukowski’s apocryphal maxim to “find what you love and let it kill you.”
Unless it’s the past.
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For tonight’s broadcast, my plan was to deliver a solid vaporwave mix. But thankfully my mixtapes usually go awry and follow their own screwy logic. Too many vaporwave songs in a row began to blunt my senses, so I opened the tracklist to include fellow travelers. Some were obvious, such as John Maus and the landmark first albums of M83, but a few were unexpected, like the dead-eyed goth cover of “California Dreamin’”, which is all about yearning for a fictional place and time. This mix is rather unruly, which makes it one of my favorites.
- t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 - 深夜の愛 (Late-Night Love)
星間性交 • 2015 • archive.org - John Maus - Hey Moon
We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves • Ribbon Music, 2011 • Bandcamp - M83 - Gone
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts • Gooom, 2002 • Bandcamp - Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night - 新世界を上昇させて
New World Disciples • 2021 • Bandcamp - Lusine - These Walls
Melting Days • Ghostly International, 2026 • Bandcamp - Fohn - Hagstone Lullaby
Porcelain • Odda Recordings, 2026 • Bandcamp - Denial - California Dreamin’
M-Squared/Minimal Wave, 1982 • Bandcamp - M83 - In the Cold I’m Standing
Before the Dawn Heals Us • Gooom, 2004 • Bandcamp - Windows 96 - Hard
One Hundred Mornings • 2018 • Bandcamp - James Murray - Becalmed
Islands Alight • Quiet Details, 2026 • Bandcamp - 2814 - 恢复
Birth of a New Day • Dream Catalogue, 2015 • Bandcamp - Burial - Nightmarket
Hyperdub, 2016 • Bandcamp - Whitewoods - DMT Mother
Spaceship Earth • Business Casual, 2013 • Bandcamp - Oneohtrix Point Never - Nobody Here
Chuck Person’s Eccojams • The Curatorial Club, 2010 • Bandcamp
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Meanwhile, C. and I have been getting more analogue over the past few months. It wasn't intentional, but now our living room is covered with collage scraps, canvases, ink pots, stray doodles, and brushes. I love this development. Feels like a natural return to a zone of play—and through a more mystical lens, giving oneself over to impulses that are not fully understood. Which brings us to the godhead of mysterious connections and energies, the I Ching.