A year ago today I released PC LOVE LETTER, a six-song EP that went from concept to release in only seven days.
It started, as most things do, with a dumb joke. I was awake in bed one Saturday night when the phrase PC LOVE LETTER intruded into my thoughts, and I thought āthat should totally be someoneās vaporwave pseudonymā. I thought for sure the too-obvious pun on āPC load letterā would have been claimed by someone already, but a quick search around online surprised me: this dumb joke was mine for the taking. So I decided I would do a vaporwave project. I had never even considered making vaporwave before that moment, but there I was.
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At the time, I had been in the midst of a years-long struggle to complete Future Human, which was planned to be my third proper album and had been ānearly doneā for about two years. I badly needed a break, and this was a good excuse.
There had seemingly been two things slowing down my music work: obsessive focus on production detail, and overambitious songwriting. I had a tendency to either create lots of undeveloped 40-second song snippets, or spend years trying to perfect the drum sounds on a song that was already basically done. To avoid getting similarly bogged down here, I aimed for a rough lo-fi sound and allowed songs to be simple vignettes if they wanted to be. I love the cozy and mysterious atmospheres that lo-fi production can create, and on PC LOVE LETTER it helped give each song its own color and space, like different rooms in a house.
Vaporwave is best-known for slowing down and reprocessing samples of decades-old music, but I didnāt want to do that here. Rather than digging through archives for old pop songs to repurpose, I was going to do vaporwave my own stubborn way: from scratch, while still aiming for that same sound and feel.
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In some ways it feels less like I created PC LOVE LETTER and more like I summoned it into existence from another dimension. This EP came together more quickly than any other music project Iāve done before or since, and Iām still not entirely sure how its creation went so smoothly. (Yes, I am seriously saying this about a week in which my hard drive crashed and needed to be replaced.) However it happened, Iām glad these songs chose me to create them.
