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Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

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Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#121
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CybernΔzi is an original artist. Another original artist is Xurious, who does sometimes include spoken word in the tracks (I recall at least one with Woes in it). I also wouldn't conflate Trumpwave with fashwave. Trumpwave imagery is of course popular with the TD crowd, fashwave not so much when they realize the associations. None the less, if you like the music, no need to self flagellate.

The video in question though has its backing track by iamMANOLIS

I really didn't even notice the vice article had an embedded video (the wonders of video blocker extensions). I had assumed that the OP had gone down a youtube rabbithole much in the same way I discovered fashwave from looking into synthwave and retrowave.

Edit: wait the Trumpwave video isn't fashwave, and isn't CybernΔzi. I assumed you were referring to the vice article.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#122
post #106
post #73

Vaporwave is a huge genre which covers a wide range of styles. Here are two favourites which show different styles. From down tempo electro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GW6sLrK40k to new reworking of 80s pop songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jynPLTeBaFc The main thing that ties in the different styles is the slight feeling of nostalgia and the internet subculture central to it. The playfulness with the subc…

One of the things that, to me, makes it such a vibrant genre is the huge emergent tree of sub-genres that seemingly sprout out of it on a weekly basis. This means that if you're able to accept the basic premise of the genre, there's probably some sub-genre that you can get into. It reminds me of what we now call the EDM scene, but back in the 90s when it was "Techno" or just "electronic music". There was an attempt t…

>Another important part of the scene is that it's not just a music scene, but a more general cultural movement with visuals, palettes, clothes, food, tv and so on.

I’m trying to imagine “vaporwave food” now, and the closest I can get is those weird little Kid Cuisine TV dinners with the frozen blue stuff for desert.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#123
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that, to me, makes it such a vibrant genre is the huge emergent tree of sub-genres that seemingly sprout out of it on a weekly basis. This means that if you're able to accept the basic premise of the genre, there's probably some sub-genre that you can get into. It reminds me of what we now call the EDM scene, but back in the 90s when it was "Techno" or just "electronic music". There was an attempt t…

>Another important part of the scene is that it's not just a music scene, but a more general cultural movement with visuals, palettes, clothes, food, tv and so on. I’m trying to imagine “vaporwave food” now, and the closest I can get is those weird little Kid Cuisine TV dinners with the frozen blue stuff for desert.

I went to this food... thing... in Palm Springs a few weeks ago. We watched Sitcoms and ate food inspired by them. They went way back to 1960s shows, but it would have been 1000x more fun (for me) had it been full on vaporwave. We were all dressed up, the servers sang and did trivia. It was awesome and now makes me want to throw a Vaporwave food event.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#124
post #31

> Cassette players, they’re not really manufactured anymore, and the prices are going up on used ones Tascam just released a new deck cassette player, with USB: https://ask.audio/articles/tascam-announces-202mkvii-dual-ca...

They probably mean quality cassette players. Even that Tascam is made using standard cheap mechanisms, it only has the most basic noise reduction (Dolby B) and no tape type selection. To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C and S, as well as HX-Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for music.…

All I want is speed control on a cassette player. It'd be great for sampling for lo-fi music.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound seriously good We had one of those 3 head tape decks growing up. The one we had a yamaha with dolby hx-pro,b,c and dbx. We used to tape cds and try to a/b compare them. The 3 heads were erase, record and play, which meant you could monitor the recording as it was happening and adjust levels and such. (and results in the weird behavior of the "ta…

DBX was really cool, there were also DBX-encoded LPs available for a while. Unfortunately it also made the recordings sound absolutely horrible if your player didn't support DBX (as you noticed), so it was a massive failure. The days of physical media for music are generally over, but I just feel cassette tapes could have been so much better than they ended up being.

Vinyl's alive and growing every day. Lots of artists release on vinyl at the demand of their fans and there are plenty of thriving record stores with recent releases.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks fancy enough and you can show your friends how retro you are. Sure a CD player would be better in every way, but everyone has those. Sound is really secondary here.

Why not just get an actual 70s/80s vintage tape deck instead?

Because they're i) mechanical and often need to be repaired and ii) shit. Seriously, tape is fucking awful for all use cases except "no other formats exist at this point in time", and that was true in 1982, but not today.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#127

Wasn't Mini-discs music on a floppy? IN the US as s format mini-discs weren't very successful, but I used one in grad school. Put my CDs onto discs. Energy efficient, didn't skip, remote on the headphone extender cord and sounded great. The blank disks were fun colors. I have a mini home stereo with a minidisc changer, I tried a few recently and they still work. Mageneto Optical technology. MP3s killed them. People w…

I've started a small collection of obsolete media. So far it's just cassette tapes, floppy disks, minidiscs, the stuff I grew up with. But I'm slowly adding stuff, just because I think it's neat to keep them as reminders of what we used to use.

You may find this interesting: https://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/lostformats

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#128
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just get an actual 70s/80s vintage tape deck instead?

Because they're i) mechanical and often need to be repaired and ii) shit. Seriously, tape is fucking awful for all use cases except "no other formats exist at this point in time", and that was true in 1982, but not today.

Tapes were pretty durable. Degraded tapes at least played, unlike scratched CDs which could be be effectively ruined pretty easily. Plus portable tape players could be jostled around during playback with effecting anything, while cheap portable CD players would cut out.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably mean quality cassette players. Even that Tascam is made using standard cheap mechanisms, it only has the most basic noise reduction (Dolby B) and no tape type selection. To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C and S, as well as HX-Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for music.…

The tape deck manufacturers today know what's up. Nobody is trying to get serious hi-fi out of tapes anymore. There are cheaper and more effective ways of doing that today. People using tapes are looking specifically for the imperfections of the medium. Trying to get perfect reproduction out of one would be like selling a synthesizer that only produces the most perfect, clean sine wave. Nobody wants that. The distort…

Not out of cassette tapes maybe, but... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHSz9Gi-II

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#130
post #106
post #73

Vaporwave is a huge genre which covers a wide range of styles. Here are two favourites which show different styles. From down tempo electro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GW6sLrK40k to new reworking of 80s pop songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jynPLTeBaFc The main thing that ties in the different styles is the slight feeling of nostalgia and the internet subculture central to it. The playfulness with the subc…

One of the things that, to me, makes it such a vibrant genre is the huge emergent tree of sub-genres that seemingly sprout out of it on a weekly basis. This means that if you're able to accept the basic premise of the genre, there's probably some sub-genre that you can get into. It reminds me of what we now call the EDM scene, but back in the 90s when it was "Techno" or just "electronic music". There was an attempt t…

This is a little older, but I think it is still accurate.

https://m.imgur.com/K78sYq3

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