#sample based music

When I say that, the first example that comes to people's minds when it comes to sample-based concept albums, it's most likely Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker. If you don't already know, Leyland Kirby produced a monolithic 6-part saga of albums that ran from 2016 to 2019, each part representing a different stage of Alzheimer's disease & dementia and each part taking from super old traditional pop & jazz records and warping them to some degree until the very end where they're no longer intelligible. It's an absolutely staggering work of art and it blew up in the years since its conclusion to stunned reactions.

But to me, there's a lot more do delve into than creating haunting ambient pieces like this. Not to knock The Caretaker at all, I think it's amazing that this even happened, but it's nothing that I would personally want to listen to regularly, unless I wanna feel spooked by putting on Stage 3, but even then, look me in the eye and tell me you would listen to that kind of thing in the background on a casual setting.

Another artist that kind of fails in this regard is also one of the most important & genre-defining plunderphonics acts. Negativland are an infamous band in one of the best ways possible, using sample-based music to create some of the most biting pieces of satire in the late 80s and even 90s. I love it. They still don't have that replayability to me personally, but I still can't think of songs like Christianity is Stupid and Yellow Black & Rectangular from their Escape From Noise album without chucking a laughing fit.

Nowadays, plunderphonics music is so much easier to make than with the technology they had back then, so those albums are still miracles to me. Today, they're almost too easy to make. There are more plunderphonics albums in this past decade and a half than at any other point in history. To mention that, I need to talk about vaporwave again. They didn't start off as super detailed conceptual albums, but the way they have presented themselves over the years, you'd think they were conceptual by default.

Vektroid's pioneering albums in this genre are very potently indicative of the sounds, atmospheres and even worlds that they were not only capturing, but deeply exuding in their mere presence. You listen to Floral Shoppe under her Macintosh Plus alias and you are immediately taken somewhere else. It's completely atmospheric in that there's an ambience to the music that's playing and how they're twisted to warp you into its reality.

I know I've knocked The Caretaker's music for being too ambient, but there's a musicality in the way that Vektroid distorts her samples that still keeps them wildly enjoyable to me. I've especially been tuning into her New Dreams Ltd. project's Initiation Tape: Isle of Avalon Edition a lot recently for this exact reason. I almost so desperately want a visual accompanyment, I want to be in that lonely hotel room in the middle of the night with only this music & my feeling.

I could talk all day & every day about vaporwave albums that capture me and lift me away with their potent atmospheres. Tuning into Vacant Places by Hantasi, which makes me float like a ghost across the halls of its incredibly haunted & dense yet empty shopping centre; or The Path to Lost Eden (ロストエデンへのパス) by Nmesh & telepath テレパシー能力者 whose individual sides take me to two different ends of a journey to a mystical rainforest paradise; or Into the Light by Infinity Frequencies if I ever want to see The Backrooms again.

I also want to add probably vaporwave's biggest leading act right now into the conversation, who were responsible for some of the genre's most enriching & creative concept albums. death's dynamic shroud.wmv is a supergroup who at a point in time were creating conceptual mixtapes non-stop in 2014, my personal favourite being SEAWRLDハートブレーク from their member Tech, but there are a ton of fan favourites across their discography to choose from.

They didn't stop there either. James & Keith put together the group's magnum opus in their essential I'll Try Living Like This the following year and after a while of slowing down, they've since kicked off the NUWRLD Mixtape Club with new albums almost every month, many of which are concept albums of multiple stripes! It's so impressive how much they've been able to put together as a group.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, because over the course of its existence, vaporwave as a genre has also grown to have albums sometimes simply be albums without the need for heavy concepts or even samples to speak of to deliver an atmosphere. But I want to talk about a certain artist who bridges between plunderphonics & vaporwave in ways that I think have loads of potential in unprecedented ways.

If you know me, you know I'm talking about christtt. He's one of the most experimental figures in the vaporwave genre and often the most polarising because of it. His 2016 album no lives matter* takes the simplest components of vaporwave and completely flips them on their head by delivering themes & concepts of death and the afterlife in hell. It's the minimal sample editing and yet potent atmospheres that are common in most vaporwave albums taken to some of their logical extremes.

Along with that, you have his 2018 album deep dark trench, another concept album that delivers in a completely unique way, taking from sound collage to deliver emotions about worldwide tragedies. Not to mention his side-project 아버지 (father2006) and its album reflection, another album about death that is far more ambient, simultaneously dissonant and yet emotionally devastating. These three are among my favourite albums of all time. They are so incredibly captivating, both sonically & conceptually that they make up my most replayed listens ever.

There is so much potential in the music that he's creating that so few people are taking from to create their own concept albums with these approaches to vaporwave & plunderphonics. Especially since the ones that I currently have in mind the most recently are also among the most flawed examples. To bring up christtt again, as much as his best material has some amount of contentious decisions put into them, his lower received material is even more debatable.

His most recent album last year A.D. is probably his most underrated? It combines many of the styles that he's experimented with in a concept album about the rapture. It mostly centers around the lone survivor, but there's also a suite of tracks titled hell that surround those in the afterlife, which caught many people off guard. Even worse is social justice whatever from 2017, what I see as a love letter to the early ages of the internet paired with subtle sombre & bittersweet moments, most other people see as a compilation of chopped together memes & shitposts, understandably so.

But the biggest example to me of the unforeseen potential in music such as this is made not by him but one of his protégés. This year, a friend of mine RAWINTHEVOID put out their most recent concept album NOTINTHEMOOD, which tells the story of love at first sight turned into a sexual yet eventually bitter & spiteful relationship. There are some amazing tracks on this album that I highly recommend you sit through to find for yourself, but in my opinion, it also has some rough patches. I'm proud to say he's certainly found his edge ten albums in, but it needs some sharpening & polishing to say the least.

Conclusion? No. Concussion. 💥🔨