NEWS AT 11 Lopes !

Pedro Maia Lopes

Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Lisbon, Portugal
25 December 2018

NEWS AT 11
Post-9/11 experimental electronic music for a post-9/11 society
Abstract

This paper explores the main concepts and ideologies of the artistic movement known as
vaporwave, as well as its relation to nostalgia and the subconscious memory, all through the lens
of a structural, ideological and conceptual analysis of a music album identified to be part of the
musical genre connected to the movement, NEWS AT 11, by 猫シ Corp. (pronounced CatSys-
temCorp), looking to prove it and herald it as a musical byproduct of a post-modern, post-9/11
society, fixated on its own past, and as a prime example of music and art produced by people rel-
ishing in the real and/or idealised and faux-memories of an era by which they were moulded and
deeply influenced, directly or indirectly a posteriori. It will also present excerpts taken from a
personal interview conducted with the album’s creator that further support and confirm the ideas,
concepts, theories and hypotheses presented and developed in the text.
Keywords: vaporwave, nostalgia, experience, capitalism, post-modernism, September 11

Introduction

Nostalgia is one of the most powerful feelings a person can experience in their lifetime.
Unlike screen memory, nostalgia does not relate to one specific memory, but rather to an emo-
tional state. Nostalgia may be viewed, in psychiatric terms, as a driving force for actual behaviour
-- the attempt to recreate an idealised past in the present. (Hirsch, 1992). We embrace this feeling
not simply because we miss a cherished period of our life, but maybe because we would want to
relive it. It could be just out of pure emotional comfort, or maybe even because we may present a
dissatisfaction with the current state of our own life, be it socially, emotionally or even financial-
ly; it is only natural that, as human beings, we would want to, in some way, try to simulate the
experience of reliving the memories that we so deeply long for. It has been done through music,
retro-styled motion pictures and television series, clothings and fashion trends, and many more.
However, a problem arises: because of the very broadness and vagueness of the feelings
associated with nostalgia, there is actually a big chance that we may be longing for a time, place,
event or feeling that we may actually have not experienced at all - at least directly, first-hand.
This is what can be defined as faux-nostalgia (Chapman, 2013). This pseudo-experience of sen-
timentality for a past that may not even be our own is not at all hard to relate to. Television series
that were popular in the last two decades of the previous century are becoming popular among
younger audiences who were born after this period of time, for example.1 Clothing and hairstyles

1See Jolly (2018) for a general analysis into why younger generations remain interested in, for example,
old TV shows, using the sitcom Friends as the main example.
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !2

alluding to 1980’s and 1990’s trends are experiencing a renewed surge in popularity. Everyday,
there are constantly new throwbacks to older genres in today’s commercial music (which I be-
lieve to be one of the strongest carriers of nostalgic power). Overall, there’s a genuine growing
interest in popular culture from a time which is long gone, and that for some was not even their
own (Erol & Öz, 2016) - and for those who did indeed experience these supposedly cherished
times, it’s more than probable that there are at least a couple of actual memories which are always
worth remembering.
Nonetheless, there are also memories, individual and collective, which may not always be
the most positive ones to remember. One so is relatively recent, and is probably one of the most
impactful events in human history’s recent past - the September 11 attacks. Now, why would I
bring up this topic, seemingly out of the blue? For one thing, it is, I believe, the turning point in
collective nostalgia: most nostalgic references and expressions - be them from either older or
younger generations (the latter strongly connected to the already mentioned faux-nostalgia) -
point to a time before this event and not after (may it simply be because of it’s recent happening,
for example - or may it be, specifically for newer generations, for the relatively short period of
time that these have lived through, possibly inhibiting the creation of a strong nostalgic feeling
for posterior times). It is, in a way, the end of an era, of a certain lifestyle. It is also a threshold
moment in world history - living the very hour preceding it was like, figuratively speaking, living
in a different world from the one we inhabit now. Objectively, this “old world” was probably far
from pure or naïve, but by comparison to the mentioned events, maybe it was in fact slightly pur-
er. We idealise a world before these events that probably did not even realistically exist, because
we want to find emotional comfort and a narrative that better suits our view of that same world,
effectively creating a rhetoric rewrite of history (Horning, 2004). On the other hand, precisely
because of it’s marked significance in human history, it could only certainly change everything
that succeeded it in humanity’s cultural panorama. It inspired books, films, articles, texts, paint-
ings, plays, sculptures and, obviously, music - and here I argue that these events, in all their fate-
fulness, have inadvertently contributed to the final form of an entire artistic, ideological and mu-
sical movement called vaporwave.
In this paper, I will present a brief introduction about this movement and what it repre-
sents, and I will specifically address one musical album in this artistic vein - NEWS AT 11, by 猫
シ Corp. I will present, in my view, how it relates to vaporwave’s thought and ideologies, how its
concept is mainly fuelled by allegories to the September 11 attacks, and why I believe it to be va-
porwave’s musical culmination and realisation, as well as an example of post-modern, post-9/11
experimental and conceptual music. These views will be supported by presenting an interview I
prepared and staged with the album’s creator, where his own experiences and thoughts on the al-
bum are shared, and by referencing works and texts that further support these beliefs.

Vaporwave: origins and concepts

The word “vaporwave” is a portmanteau of the words “new wave” - the popular 1970’s
and 1980’s music genre - and “vaporware” - a business term used to refer to products which are
announced to the public but are actually never released or even manufactured. It is mainly a vis-
ual and musical manifestation that grew out of the early 2010s internet culture. It’s influenced by
the hypnagogic (a fixation with past trends) pop and chillwave genres of the previous decade
(Coleman, 2015), and it is deeply rooted in post-modernist ideologies and symbolist characteris-
tics. Visually, it alludes to obsolete 1990s technology and computer-generated imagery, neon and
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !3

bright colours, paradisiac tropical landscapes, Japanese characters and anime, VHS-styled grainy
and blurry images, and many other varied retro trends, mainly taken from 1980’s and 1990’s pop-
ular mainly Western cultural paradigms - heavily influenced by Asian technological elements,
however, as seen in multiple albums and works from different artists (see “情報デスクVIRTU-
AL, 2013). This particular style is dubbed within the community as “aesthetic” (often stylised in
fullwidth and double spaced letters - A E S T H E T I C - as way to emphasise the di-
chotomous split between the pretences of aesthetic studies in general, and the uncanniness of la-
belling pastiche, almost kitsch visual art as being an “aesthetic”). Ideologically, it presents an
ironic, sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek view of modern society - more specifically capitalism, si-
multaneously and ambiguously criticising it and embracing it, mocking it and using it as its mask
(Harper, 2012). Musically, it is heavily sample-based (although, as of the writing of this paper,
there has been a rising shift towards original compositions, mainly due to reasons related to copy-
right, and, also, artistic expansion), basing itself in 1980s smooth jazz, synthpop and funk,
muzak-type, corporate “on hold” music, and commercial radio and TV jingles - all in the vein of
glorifying and/or vilifying capitalist, consumerist societies and their practices. It is an exposition
of the “false promises of capitalism” (Pereira, 2017), a subtle “critique of the salient characteris-
tic of late capitalism, such as pastiche and depthlessness” (Koc, 2017), and a “glorification of
stealing other people’s art and marketing it under something else with foreign
languages” (Wolfenstein, 2015). Mind you: vaporwave has a deep concentration towards western
culture and paradigms, which might eventually alienate cultures and societies not so familiarised
and accustomed to it, which is itself a potential topic worthy of study.
While it has a decidedly political quality to it, not all vaporwave has political or even re-
motely ideological undertones. Actually, the oldest point to which we can trace the beginning of
this movement’s musical journey has nothing to do with politics or philosophy - in fact, it started
as a joke. American electronic experimental music producer Daniel Lopatin, perhaps best know
by his alias Oneohtrix Point Never, released in 2010 an album entitled Chuck Person’s Eccojams
Vol. 1. The album ultimately consists of a rehash of popular songs from the last three to four
decades, slowed down to a drawl and remixed in a chopped-n’-screwed style, with heavy
amounts of echo and reverb effects overlaid on top of the tracks. The album cover is a sloppy,
glitchy and confusing rework of the 1992 Sega Mega Drive video-game Ecco The Dolphin.
Lopatin has confirmed that this work of his was nothing more than a simple, playful experiment,
with no actual serious qualities to it (Lopatin, 2013). However, that did not stop listeners from
finding an actual artistic quality to it. The nonstop, slowed down looping samples, drowned in a
sea of hazy reverb and echo, with no other variations to them besides occasional pitch shifting,
reminded listeners of works from avant-garde, electronic, musique concréte and even minimalis-
tic composers, comparing Lopatin’s style and multiple works to figures such as Karlheinz Stock-
hausen, Steve Roach and even Steve Reich (Pereira, 2017). The result was a hypnotic, discom-
forting cloud of sound, lost in itself and never seeming to reach anywhere.
Copycat albums and tracks started surfacing around the internet, trying to recreate this
result of discomfort from hearing familiar voices that, all of a sudden, were distorted and haunt-
ingly eerie, almost like a ghost - a ghost that haunts the machine and communicates with us
through its faultiness and glitches, possibly reminding us of a time that went by and we forgot
about (Tanner, 2016). The genre’s popular breakthrough, however, came in 2011, with the release
of Ramona Xavier’s (better known as Vektroid, a.k.a Macintosh Plus) milestone album, Floral
Shoppe. It quickly gained traction on the web, and is today considered the album to solidify the
genre’s characteristic elements (Beauchamp, 2016). The music definitely follows the style previ-
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !4

ously established on Eccojams, using sampling, the copious amounts of delay and reverb and the
same choppy style found in Lopatin’s album - however, the flow of its tracks is much more con-
cise and structured, with an increased compositional variation to them, and an overall more cohe-
sive presentation. What distinctively set Floral Shoppe apart from other similar albums, though,
was its full incorporation of globalist, corporate and capitalist themes and references into its
tracks and album cover, as well as a retro-inspired style - its cover consists of a bust of Greek god
Helios, next to a blurry, VHS-style, almost sunset-like image of New York City’s skyline (with
the infamous Twin Towers in the foreground), and both of these images on top of a neon-pink
background with bright green lettering and chessboard-like patterns, with the album’s and artist’s
name written in Japanese. All of these elements, both visual and conceptual, had been previously
explored, in a slightly different manner, in James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual. While
its musical style does not have many of vaporwave’s trademark techniques (choppy editing, use
of reverb and delay), it does sample cues from electronic sources, or as Colton (2017) puts it, “the
grainy and bombastic beeps” of 2000’s media, such as Windows XP sound bites, or the Nintendo
Wii’s startup sound, creating a very marked electronic and robotic-like presence on the album
(most of the work, however, consists of original compositions). More striking than its musical
style is its use of technological and futuristic themes in its tracks (such as “Sim”, “Google Poeis-
es” or “Solar Panel Smile”), and the now-standard consumerist and corporate approach - its cover
consists, again, of a blurry and pixelated image of one of New York City’s busy avenues, with
floating Apple iPads overlaid on top of this background, showing face-likes figures over a dream-
like blue and cloudy sky, crystallising a mixed sense of artificiality and pre-fabricated calmness,
safety, or even happiness with the mundane, conformist reality of an imagined (or not) modern
society. Vaporwave has since evolved, and it has developed different focuses other than the objec-
tive of creating a nostalgic simulation through its self-referential nods to capitalism and post-
modernity, as you can see and hear in more recent releases - a change spearheaded by albums like
Birth of a New Day, by 2814 - but never losing its retro appeal and nostalgia-centred attitude.
However, for the purpose of fulfilling the objectives of this research, I am focusing on vapor-
wave’s first form, alluding to capitalist themes and corporate-type soundscapes.
In my view, these mentioned things contribute to a very specific, particular feeling.
Through the distorted use of songs and sound clips from our both distant and recent past, vapor-
wave poses a sort of ambiguous and ambivalent stance. Listening to works like Far Side Virtual,
we can almost idealise an utopian cityscape, where technology prevails and presides over our dai-
ly lives, sucking out all possible traits of a human quality from itself - a world where nothing can
go wrong, and that’s probably not a good thing either. Contrastingly, Floral Shoppe is a dystopian
“mess”, where capitalist ideologies also prevail, but where we find an uncertain and indecisive
feeling of comfort or discomfort in the ghostly voices from the past that echo throughout its
tracks, surprising us and confusing us in all their disorienting and unsettling glory. It attacks us
with a distortion and violation of beloved and calming sounds from our past - sounds that we may
not even remember hearing, such as that muzak that you listened to in 1993 on the elevator up to
the 47th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Did you experience that first-hand?
Were you even in New York City, to begin with? Other albums emulate the experience of a late
night drive through a cosmopolitan, well-lit city, such as Luxury Elite’s World Class. Do you
even remember taking that car trip, in the first place? Can you, at least, relate to it? Whatever the
answers may be, works like these confront us with the subconscious mind that underlies moments
like those - mundane, vapid, even boring - and make us notice what we did not even recognise at
first. Vaporwave is an artistic and musical background to mental holograms of past events we es-
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !5

cape to in our minds (Chennington, 2017), and is, indeed, a rewrite of history, but not in a mis-
leading way. Possibly more in an idealised way, in a very ambiguous way, where we can’t decide
if we fear these corporate approaches to memories and emotions that we maybe didn’t even know
that existed, if they existed at all, or long for these mundane times when things seemed simpler.
And the questions is: were they actually simpler? Or is this an actual result of the emotional ma-
nipulation that vaporwave offers to the listener?

Post-September 11 music: NEWS AT 11 as vaporwave’s prime example

Ever since Floral Shoppe’s release in 2011, numerous albums and tracks have tried to
replicate this uneasy feeling that results from the mixture of nostalgia and a longing for a time we
partially forgot about with the falsity and plastic comfort that capitalism and all its consumerist
pleasures offer us (Foster, 2018). Music has been created using commercial jingles as hooks, and
even retro commercials themselves have been re-edited and recycled as music videos, in the
hopes of maximising its own effect on the listener. However, I believe that no other album has
captured this feeling better than 猫シ Corp.’s NEWS AT 11. All because it uses the most powerful
symbol it could use to recreate this bittersweet feeling of desolation and numb pleasure: the Sep-
tember 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, USA. To better explain and
understand the reasons for the setting of this album, I’m going to make a brief analysis of the
piece and its structure.
The very first thing the listener is confronted with upon the album’s listening is a short
sound clip of news anchors Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, hosts of CBS’s Good Morning
America:

CG: “Good morning, America. I’m Charles Gibson.

DS: “I’m Diane Sawyer, and it’s Tuesday, Septemb-.”
(sound cuts off, segues into a jazzy, chill-out instrumental)

Given the subtlety of the album’s name, including a picture of the American flag encapsu-
lated in a grainy 4:3 TV screen, I believe that the foreshadowing present in the very first seconds
of the first track, “Good Morning America!”, is pretty obvious. Musically, there’s not a whole lot
to say about the album: it consists mainly of slowed-down loops and samples taken from relative-
ly obscure smooth-jazz and 1980’s funk songs, fully tinged with saxophone hooks and synth pads
and melodies. This description is valid for pretty much the entirety of the album. In my view, this
is not an album to listen to for its technical value, but for its sonic experience. It is, in a way, a
painting of a symbolic day, but instead of paint, it uses sound. Like an ambient album, it does not
rely on complex segments or intricate harmonies and virtuosic passages, but on mood and the
evocation of a feeling, of an emotion, a common trait of vaporwave works (Trainer, 2016). The
most notable productional aspect throughout the album is the subtle static-lke distortion in the
background, along with the mid-heavy, boxy quality that shines on its tracks, emulating the expe-
rience of listening to a radio station or TV broadcast using a 1990’s car stereo, or on a small tele-
vision setup, giving the listener the ultimate experience of simulation, of watching the morning
news on that fateful day, interlaced with jazzy commercial jingles and soothing, ambient elevator
music. This simulation is amplified, again, not so much by the technicality of its tunes, but by the
mood it sets. This is helped by the injection of news anchors’ sound clips and announcements,
like in the track “Morning Commute”, where the time for different cities in the US and abroad is
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !6

announced. This is further accentuated by even more subtle, but heavily eerie foreshadowing, as
we can hear in the album’s third track:

Announcer: “It’s kind of quiet around the country. We like quiet. It’s quiet… it’s good
quiet.”
(funky, jazzy instrumental plays)

This track is called “8:46 AM”, the exact time the Twin Towers were hit by the first plane.
Slowly, it starts to dawn on the listener that the anchors’ and reporters’ sound clips are taken from
TV broadcasts of that precise day. The next track, “Downtown”, starts with the anchors describ-
ing a “perfect Fall morning”. The fifth track “Channel 4” begins with a small clip of an interview
where the interviewer describes “the music that we listen to today [as echoing] music from a
hundred years ago or more”, which is an interesting and coincidental tie-in with vaporwave’s en-
tire philosophy of replication and imitation. After the first half’s interlude containing no inter-
views or news anchors’ voices, “Heli Tours”, an interesting piece begins, called “Financial
News”. While all tracks up until this point began with short samples of interviews and news
broadcasts, this track has virtually no music for over two minutes, after which another typically
1990’s smooth jazz tune plays. Instead, for these two minutes of audio, we listen to Carmax (a car
dealer) commercials, a Ross (a fashion outlet franchise) advertisement, and publicity for McDon-
ald’s breakfast, all before a brief weather forecast. This is where the album’s intention as an ex-
perimental, almost-ambient like, mood piece starts to come together. It does not want us to dis-
sect the music, but instead to make us let the music pass by and enhance the experience of living
a calm, serene Tuesday morning in 2001 - arguably a cultural, economical and historical barrier
year between both two centuries and two millennia (Cvek, 2011) - as the track’s ending, a finan-
cial report about Nokia’s, Motorola’s and Boeing’s stock rates and a commercial for financial ad-
vising, abruptly cut short by the beginning of the next track, “Tuesday Television”, again prove
us.
Notice I used the terms “calm” and “serene” to describe the morning this album is based
on. I utilised these specific words because, up until now, if we did not know beforehand about the
events which the piece is inspired by, there is nothing throughout the work that points us to any-
thing out of the ordinary: that is, no direct reference to the attacks is to be found anywhere in the
tracks mentioned up until now. Finally, the album’s first side comes to a conclusion with
“Evening Traffic”. This is the turning point on the album. It is preceded by the audio of an inter-
view on NBC’s Today between Matt Lauer and the author Richard Hack, where the latter is pre-
senting his new book about the business magnate, pilot and airline pioneer Howard Hughes. Hack
is talking about a detailed part of his book, about Hughes’ obsessive fear of germs, which is
bookended by this exchange:

RH: “…but on the other hand, he was absolutely the most amazing man that America has
ever created, ever.”
ML: “Ok… I’ve got to interrupt you right now, Richard Hack… thank you, we appreciate
it. The book is called Hughes. We’re gonna go liv-.”
(sound cuts off, and emotional, slow, contemplative synth piano track plays)

All of a sudden, the entire mood of the album takes a steep turn into something darker.
The music is no longer groovy, jazzy or even remotely danceable. The track that plays, again
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !7

(and, at this point, obviously) sampled and heavily edited from an 1980’s song, is slow, almost
ethereal, and carries an obvious emotional charge on its weight. The interview preceding the track
actually started at 8:47 AM, one minute after the attacks occurred, and it was cut short at 8:49
AM, just two minutes into the interview. CNN was the first network to carry news of the event
(Stelter, 2013), but, nonetheless, Lauer’s break of the news on NBC is a defining moment of the
multiple reports that followed that day. While, in fact, the Towers were not shown on TV until
after a couple of minutes later - during which the commercials included in “Financial News”
played - and while Lauer did not exactly mention what happened, it was clear that something was
going on. “Evening Traffic” games with the listener: as soon as the anchor is about to announce
that something is happening at the World Trade Center, it cuts to the powerful, sentimental track,
barely giving us a chance to hear and understand what is happening - even though we know be-
forehand what the subject matter is.
With the first side of the album finished, the second suite of the work plays, appropriately
titled “The Weather Channel”. It consists of eleven tracks, all bearing the same name as the suite,
and numbered after their exact order on this side of the album. It consists, nothing more and noth-
ing less, of musical samples taken from a lost-and-found VHS tape containing actual weather
forecasts from the The Weather Channel (Corp., personal communication, November 3, 2018).
Sonically and structurally, there is not a lot to say about this side of the album. The music is, one
more time, smooth jazz-inspired and moody, which is actually typical of The Weather Channel
forecasts. The flow is sometimes interrupted by pitched-down voices reading out instructions to
interpret the weather information that would be shown on a TV screen, including brief cues sim-
ply announcing the name of the channel. This second side might be interpreted as somewhat of a
“retreat into safety”. Unlike the start-stop nature of the first side, where unexpectedness and fear
of an encounter with the somber reality of that day reign, the second half of the album serves as a
low-key media environment, where there are few things to surprise the listener, as they don’t
need to worry about any nefarious, outsider action. It represents a sort of cocoon, a mind shield
that comforts us and distracts of the horrors of the tragic events that happened that day, as if we
were pretending that nothing had happened, which only adds to the spectral, uneasy quality of the
album itself.

Interview with 猫シ Corp.: understanding vaporwave, NEWS AT 11 and modern society

猫シ Corp., whose real name I will not identify by personal request, is a Netherlands
based electronic, noise, dark-ambient and vaporwave music artist. Initially composing and releas-
ing music under the name Mesektet, Corp. eventually had his encounter with the vaporwave
scene through an unusual way: “I was looking for a way to promote my noise [music] in a more
unique way; release [it] on floppy disks. Then I just ‘googled’ “music released on floppy” and I
found [the artist] Miami Vice’s Culture Island. What I heard there was extremely life changing”,
he says. When asked about vaporwave’s meaning, the artist reinforced the notion that the move-
ment is based on nostalgic characteristics, and underlined a similar attitude between vaporwave
followers and the punk movement: “It has been invented by people from my generation, born and
raised in the late 80’s, early 90’s. The genre relies heavily on nostalgia. There is an underlying
message within the genre, a message possibly from our generation. The same with punk music;
we are the new internet punks from the 2000’s”. This comparison to the punk movement is inter-
esting: both vaporwave and punk music and aesthetics began in the underground - one in the
clubs and venues of major urban centres like New York City and London, the other on forums
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !8

and music sharing communities of the internet. Punk has a cynical attitude towards society and
conformism (“Punk ideologies”, n.d.), and vaporwave follows along, incorporating the already
mentioned ambiguity towards capitalism and neo-liberalism: “We both mock and love capitalism
and use art in a communistic way”, Corp. says.
The inspiration for the album came in a peculiar way, as the artist describes: “I found a
YouTube vaporwave mix called “ＲＥＰＴＩＬＩＡＮ ＴＶ (Vaporwave Mix)” which used
feel-good, Weather Channel and easy jazz tracks by various vaporwave artists over a picture of
the burning towers to create a very disturbing mix. I don’t know why, but this immediately grabbed
my attention. The tracks were made as if you were commuting to work on a perfect September
morning through the United States or New York on your way to the office.” This further rein-
forces the album as a listening experience, rather than an object of formal musical analysis. Corp.
explains - and confirms the feelings that the listener may experience throughout the listening of
the album - the theory behind the usage of such powerful imagery and symbolism in his work:
“9/11 has made a huge impact on me back then. I was 12 years old, fresh into high school, and I
was making French homework when my mom suddenly called me to come over to the TV on her
bedroom (…) and she told me there had been a ‘hit’ on the Twin Towers, a possible ‘terrorist at-
tack’. I had never heard these words in my life before. What I then saw was absolutely surreal
(…), that day was the day the old world died and the new world began.” On the 14th anniversary
of the attacks, in 2015, the artist had an epiphany: “I personally only know America from movies,
games and TV, so my image of the country is very popularised. Therefore, to me, the USA is a
mythical/mysterious country, almost like a dreamworld. (…) I wanted to experience [that day]
again. So I put on a livestream (recorded from TV back then) of 9/11 and watched it evolve. (…)
I told you that America is very special to me (…) so the ReptilianTV mix came to mind again,
and watching New York just before the attacks made me feel like I was there: driving or walking
in New York City listening to The Weather Channel. So then I muted the TV and put on Weather
Channel tunes on my PC. That gave me the thought ‘God, I wish this had never happened!’, and
the music, combined with the images, was so striking and gave me such an odd feeling, I just felt
like I had to use this idea. To make it as if it never happened!” This explains why the album plays
like nothing occurred that morning, at least until the first side’s last track: “At the beginning of
the album, it sounds all very fresh and cheerful, but that last track is meant to be emotional. As if
you drive away from the scene back home, stuck in a traffic jam and thinking about what just
happened.” There’s a certain symbolism in Richard Hack’s last words in the brief interview be-
fore the report of the attacks: “You hear [the writer] talking about his new book; now this was an
interview that happened minutes before and even during the attack on the first tower, so this mo-
ment is very surreal and haunting. He’s talking about his book, about Howard Hughes, and he
does it in a way that’s really showing how proud Americans are - ‘…the greatest man America
has ever created…’. And at that precise moment he says that, that ego and pride just got a huge
punch.”
An interesting hypothesis is put forward: given the information you currently know about
the current present time, then the future, would you, given the chance to go back in time and be
powerful enough to control its outcome and evolution, change everything that happened on that
fateful day? As Corp. implies, he probably would have changed the occurrences of that day, and
this wish is reflected in the abrupt cuts and stop-start edits that are abundant on the album, ex-
plaining how it is also a way to create a subtle thematic mask for his work: “As I mentioned ear-
lier; I wanted to make it as if it never happened. That’s why the reports are being cut off. Plus, I
neither wanted to make it too obvious. If somebody is just listening (consuming) the album as it
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !9

is, would they find out at first listen? The album was also released on September 11, 2016, when
it was 15 years ago. So yes, the samples are meant to be cut off. On one hand, to make it as if it
never happened, and on the other hand, as if somebody was recording TV to VHS and he just
pressed record and stop a couple seconds too soon or too late”. Meanwhile, the significance of
the second half of the work is explained in a brief and summarised manner: “[It] was meant as if
you would put in a VHS tape in the recorder, put The Weather Channel on and press ‘record’. In a
way, it’s ‘the day after’, another clear sunny September day and nothing bad happened. Some
tracks were constructed to be a bit longer, to make this easy listening, chill out vibe.”
As I mentioned earlier in the course of this paper, vaporwave may be seen as a manifesta-
tion of the ghosts of the past, speaking to us through the glitches and distorted perspectives of-
fered to us by the machines that we co-habit with in modern times. A term often associated with
vaporwave is hauntology. Hauntology is a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in
his book Specters of Marx, and can be described as the situation of temporal, historical, and onto-
logical disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin,
represented by the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor
alive (Derrida, 1993). The concept is derived from Derrida's deconstructive method, in which any
attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an al-
ways-already existing set of linguistic conditions, thus making “haunting” the state proper to be-
ing as such. In the 2000’s, the term was used by critics in reference to paradoxes found in late
modernity and post-modernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro
aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms, and critics such as Mark Fisher and Simon
Reynolds used the term to describe art preoccupied with this temporal disjunction (Reynolds,
2011) and defined by a "nostalgia for lost futures” (Gallix, 2011). If this does ring a bell to you, it
might be because vaporwave can be considered an offshoot of hauntological applications to mu-
sic. While the relationship between vaporwave and hauntology and its assertion that society is too
fixated on its own past is a topic too complex and deep to expose here, it is now easier to corre-
late to vaporwave’s motives. We grab on to the past because its ghosts haunt us in the present day
and, in a way, conduct us and drive us to the point of finding comfort not in the present, but in the
nostalgia that we feel towards long gone memories. And at the time, many of these now memo-
ries didn’t seem to make any impact on us because it was our routine, our daily lives. There was
nothing special about watching The Weather Channel in the 1990’s, when all of us were younger,
unaffected by a new world and new mentality that would follow that month of September in
2001, given how much it changed culturally not only in the USA, but in the entire planet. As
Corp. says: “If you knew the future, would you still want to experience it? We long back to the
good old days, when everything was comfortable and known to us - protected by the innocence of
a child”. 2001 truly marked the death of a previous, culturally different society, and with the fall
of the Towers, vaporwave has risen up in their place, as a symbol and result of a society that does
not seem able to go completely and uninterruptedly forward without looking back at what it left
behind, both in age and in culture. Perhaps there was, indeed, an innocence to our westernised
culture that is lacking in modern times; vaporwave helps us find comfort in that sad reality, and a
work like NEWS AT 11 stands as a reminder of how global tragic events shape our history, culture
and behaviour, and yet we never seem able to free ourselves from the shackles of the innocence
we want to go back to and that we lost along the way to this very moment. The only real barrier
between vaporwave and a potential listener is how culturally specific it is, and how it probably
relates better to some generations than others, because its ideals of nostalgic comfort are most
certainly universal and applicable to any different era and group.
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !10

Conclusions

Vaporwave has, as a genre and art movement, a lot of room to grow. What started as a
tongue-in-cheek joke on the internet has developed into a remarkably sized community, with
hundreds of new threads and posts being published in forums and web groups around the globe,
discussing the traits, ideologies and artsy contours that define the movement as it is. Initially
shared exclusively through the internet, the musical counterpart has now evolved to even include
vinyl records printed by actual record companies, as well as cassettes, CDs, MiniDiscs, floppy
disks, and even 8-track cartridges2 - and as you can notice, some of these are ageing, even obso -
lete, listening mediums. However, that’s all part of vaporwave’s ideology and charm: if we are
going to develop a movement recreating a distorted perspective of our own collective memories
as a dual eulogy and welcome sign to an era that went by and remained buried deep within our
subconscious mind, we might as well distribute it through old mediums, as well. The relationship
between vaporwave and the listener, and how they compare it other types of music, modern or
older, commercial or erudite, as well as the means of listening, is very well a topic of its own
merit, and a difficult one to properly study. For all that matters, it stands on its own, being ar-
guably the first music genre to be completely bred through the internet, and to amount to signifi-
cant popularity and traction. “There are no borders on the internet, we’re all neighbours”, Corp.
says; it is a movement born from “nowhere” and “everywhere”.
As I mentioned earlier, there has been a rising trend in the community towards original
compositions - for example, Corp., as of the writing of this paper, has recently moved on from
sample-based music, and has founded his own record label - most probably due to a desire to ex-
pand the possibilities of self-composition and truly original input inside the genre, to expand its
own horizons, as well as, most definitely, concerns regarding the copyright status of the thou-
sands of tracks that are used daily in vaporwave compositions. To avoid such troubling affairs,
the community has preferred to both keep an underground, low-key attitude, as well as careful
managing of its works. For Corp., the possibility of NEWS AT 11 - a true testament to the emo-
tional, nostalgic, psychological, cultural, philosophical and ideological power that vaporwave can
drop upon a potential listener, and, in my view, sample-based vaporwave’s ultimate milestone -
reaching the wider audience is narrow: “In a way, we are writing history here, and maybe indeed
somewhere in the future, people will analyse us internet punks and vaporwavers, just like we do with
other subcultures from days gone by. But I don’t see NEWS AT 11 reach the mainstream public;
the topic is too sensitive and the music too niche. (…) Also, [original vaporwave] has possibly a
future to reach out to the main public, [sample-based vaporwave] has not. But who knows,
right?”
Reaching mainstream popularity or not, it is my belief that NEWS AT 11 is an important
piece of experimental music: it serves as a mirror of a society that struggles with too many con-
cerns for their own time and future, that tries to finds comfort in the mundane routines of the past,
and when confronted with the horrors of the very past it cherishes, that same society struggles
with the indecision of turning the other cheek, preferring to adopt nostalgia as its main shield, or
confronting reality as it is. NEWS AT 11 is the portrait of a society that has forgotten about itself;

2 The popular subreddits, on the popular forum website Reddit, r/Vaporwave, r/VaporVinyl, r/Vaporwave-
Aesthetics and r/VaporwaveCassettes are examples of the popularity and artistic prosperity the movement
has been gaining for the bigger part of this decade. New music releases and artworks can be found here
regularly.
NEWS AT 11 Lopes !11

its listening is a rediscovering of feelings and real or idealised memories that we probably never
knew they even existed.

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NEWS AT 11 Lopes !12

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temporary-sapporo
Appendix

NEWS AT 11 album cover Floral Shoppe album cover Far Side Virtual album cover

A typical vaporwave visual artwork (artist unknown)