CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE Thesis Jorge Mercado

CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE: THE INTERNET AS SOCIAL AMPLIFICATION
A thesis submitted to the College of the

Arts of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
By
Jorge L. Mercado Méndez
July 2022
ii
Thesis written by
Jorge Luis Mercado Méndez
B.A., University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, 2019
M.A., Kent State University, 2022
Approved by
__________________________________________
Janine Tiffe, Ph.D., Advisor
___________________________________________
Tim Culver, M.M., Interim Director, School of Music
___________________________________________
Diane Helfers Petrella, D.M.A., Dean, College of the Arts
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………iii
LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………….iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………….…v
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION
Opening Statement and Background…………...…………………………………1
Survey of Literature……………………………...………………………………..5
Purpose of Study…………………………………………………………………10
Methodology……………………………………………………………………..12
Projected Results…………………………………………………………………13
II. A BRIEF HISTORY OF VAPORWAVE, LATIN AMERICAN VAPORWAVE,

AND THE LATINWAVE RECORDS INCIDENT
Vaporwave Historical Context…………………………………………………...14
North American Experience in Vaporwave………………………………………18
Latin American Experience in Vaporwave………………………………………21
Latinwave Records Incident……………………………………………………..26
III. CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE AND THE INTERNET AS SOCIAL

AMPLIFICATION
Eternal Vibes Record Label………………………………………………………33
Interviews………………………………………………………………………...39
Characteristics of Caribbean Vaporwave………………………………………...46
Caribbean Vaporwave and the internet as a Social Lived Space…………………56
Conclusion……………………………………………………… ……………….61
IV. CHAYANNEWAVE: ANOTHER SUBGENRE FOR VAPORWAVE AS AN

EXTENSION OF CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE
Introduction………………………………………………………………………62
Luismiwave………………………………………………………………………62
Chayanne…………………………………………………………………………64
Methods of composition for Chayannewave……………………………………..67
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….68
V. CONCLUSION
Background………………………………………………………………………69
Summary…………………………………………………………………………71
iv
Expanding the Research………………………………………………………….75
APPENDIXES
A. Caribbean Ventures LLC. Discography from 2018-2020…………………………….78
B. Eternal Vibes Discography from 2017-2020…….…………………………………...79
C. ANANA SUPREME Discography…………………………………………………...82
D. S.A.X Discography…………………………………………………………………..84
E. Cubalibre.exe Discography………………………………………….……………….86
F. 悲惨な forever Discography……………………………………...………………….87
G. Visual Depiction of Vaporwave Subgenres …………………………….……………88
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
v
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Album cover from Floral Shoppe (2016) by Macintosh Plus…………………………...19
2. Album cover from Palm Mall (2014) by 猫シ Corp……………………………………21
3. Album cover from L U I S M I W A V E (2016) by Jesse Cassettes……………………..23
4. Latin All-Stars Vaporwave Festival poster……………………………………………....26
5. Screenshot of various Bandcamp accounts posted by Elconejitocallado11 on Reddit…..31
6. Album cover from The Sacred Pathways Tales by Ezlo Montblanc…………………….35
7. Album cover from Will You Be My Gameboy Always? by BloomSTRAD……………...36
8. Album cover from Kint by Jai Cletz……………………………………………………..37
9. Album cover from Eternal Sunset by 27 UHF…………………………………………..38
10. Album cover from ♥♫♥Teleltón: Matiné de Comerciales Solo para Tí♥♫♥ by
BloomSTRAD…………………………………………………………………………...42
11. Album cover from Hija mía, vamos de compras by BloomSTRAD…………………….53
12. Album cover from Aereo by S.a.x……………………………………………………….53
13. Boeing 727-100, Dominicana de Aviación………………………………………………53
14. Album cover from Olazàbal by BloomSTRAD…………………………………………54
15. Entrance from Puerto Rican textile company Olazábal………………………………….55
16. Living a Dream cassette tape…………………………………………………………….60
17. Chayanne/SpongeBob meme posted by Facebook page Mitú…………………………..66
18. Meme posted by Chayanne Toreroposting on October 17, 2020………………………..66

vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My time at Kent State University was full of experiences that made me aware of what I
wanted for my future. Due to the pandemic Covid-19, my first research interest was limited but
for the better. Thanks to Dr. Andrew Shahriari’s Intro to Ethnomusicology class, I started a
vaporwave research project that by that time I did not know was going to be my thesis. Having
that strong start, I came across professors such as Dr. Johnstone, Dr. Hamrick, and Dr. Heinlein
who from the beginning gave me tools and feedback to strengthen my research interests. Dr.
Kazadi wa Mukuna provided me with the knowledge that led me to understand my past and “To
always look at the big picture.” I also need to give a special mention to Dr. Priwan Nanongkham
aka Dr. Khio. Your lessons in Thai music, friendship, and life would always be with me. Finally,
thanks to my advisor Dr. Janine Tiffe. Since when we started to work together in African
Ensemble, I instantly learned to handle everything with care and love but at the same time be
responsible for my actions. I am grateful for the patience and guidance that it took to make this
type of work.
To the extended family that I met at Kent State, you will forever be in my heart. Thanks
to Alexis Hill and Jeng Anuthep for the countless love and laughs that we shared while eating
Jojo’s. Also, a special mention to Ricardo Ramos and Jose Ramírez. I met you guys a little late,
but it was worth it. The nights that we spend only hearing music from our countries of origin are
examples of how we have more similarities than differences. You guys are musicians with
substantial quality.
My interest in doing a master’s degree started thanks to unique professors from the
University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras. Thanks to Dr. Ernesto Alonso that prepared me to have
all the tools that are required to endure graduate school. Special thanks to my tuba professor
vii
Nelson Corchado who supported my academic interests and gave me all the help to achieve my
goals since the beginning of my bachelor's. Also, to the people from Puerto Rico that directly or
indirectly contributed to this project through music gatherings and hallway conversations at the
University.
I could have not done this without the immense support of my family. Juan Mercado,
Wilfredo Mercado, Sylvia de Los Santos thank you. To my mother, Griselle Méndez, you are an
inspiration. Since I was young, I learned from the commitment that you gave to your work as a
teacher and especially to your family. I know that every person who you've come across admires
something from you.
To my partner, Andrea S. Pimentel Rivera, thanks for your patience and for
accompanying this journey with me. You have seen every process of my master’s degree, helped
me countless times, and heard a substantial amount of vaporwave-related details. All the ideas I
had for this research; you were the first person to hear them. Your valuable thoughts and the
tremendous work that you do gave me powerful insights to complete this thesis. I am so thankful
for you in my life.
This thesis was not possible without the unique views from the vaporwave producers.
Anana Supreme, S.a.x, 悲惨な forever, and cubalibe.exe thank you for saying yes to my
interviews so I can see your valuable perspectives. The Caribbean is full of necessary and
creative musicians like you. Long live vaporwave!

1
Chapter I
INTRODUCTION
Opening Statement and Background

In its basic form, vaporwave is primarily internet-born music that emerged in the early
2010s. The music uses looped audio samples to create new musical pieces by applying audio
manipulation techniques to the samples. While the above is my interpretation of vaporwave,
other scholars have attempted to define vaporwave in a variety of ways.
Sharon Schembri defines vaporwave as a “. . . digital music subculture. . .” 1 Laura Glitsos
mentions, “As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of
largely background musics such as muzak®, 1980s elevator music, and new-age ambiance.”2
Ken Mcleod defines it as, “Embracing a decidedly “do-it-yourself” (DIY) ethic that incorporates
a mix of traditional composition, DJ-ing, and/or production, vaporwave heavily relies on the
creative manipulation of samples of mellow adult-contemporary pop music and Muzak that date
from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.”3 With these examples from various scholars, vaporwave has a
general foundation in digital music from the 1980s and 1990s music, sample-based music, and
audio manipulation. However, these definitions define vaporwave as how it is done but not what
it is for.
In one of my interviews with Dominican vaporwave producer by the name of S.a.x, told
me the following definition of vaporwave,
Vaporwave is a style of music that one tries to expose by giving images and
presentations of a past time usually where one grew up or that only heard about it.
This is with the intention of presenting previous calm times with nostalgia but a
1
Sharon Schembri, “Digital Consumers as Cultural Curators: The Irony of Vaporwave,” Arts and the
Market 7 no. 2 (2017): 191.
2
Laura Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music Optimized for Abandon Malls,” Popular Music 37 no. 1 (2018):
100.
3
Ken McLeod, “Politics, Protest, and Identity,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 30, no. 4 (2018): 123.
2
certain reserved aesthetic. Not necessarily Greek or Roman statues aesthetics but a
personal aesthetic of any nostalgic construction that it is possible to do. 4
S.a.x’s definition is important because in vaporwave the listener will experience in form
of nostalgia via sound and/or visuals the producer’s view of a concept. The idea of the past will
be brought from the producer’s point of view. In the upcoming chapters, I will bring back this
definition to comprehend certain aspects and approaches of Caribbean vaporwave that are the
focus of this research.
To understand the general auditory aesthetic of Vaporwave we can listen to one of its
most famous songs - the song “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing,” from the album Floral
Shoppe composed by Macintosh Plus, who is also known as Vektroid or Ramona Xavier. In this
song, the base sample that is used is a covered song by Diana Ross called “It’s Your
Move” released in 1984. It repurposes Ross’s rendition by shifting down the tempo and pitch,
giving another feel or another auditory aesthetic. It is a constant loop of the introduction of “It’s
your move” delivering another direction with a lot of manipulated audio effects like echoes and
reverb. Furthermore, the audio sample is manipulated to a point that it limits the recognition of
the sample.
As mentioned before, vaporwave emerged in the early years of the 2010s. However,
tracing back the history of vaporwave is challenging because there was not a Billboard chart
curating and counting the number of plays year by year. This allowed scholars and vaporwave
fans to bring interpretations of how vaporwave began. Nevertheless, some scholars see the
beginning of vaporwave with the album Far Side Virtual by James Ferraro released in October
2011.
4
S.a.x, interview by author, November 17, 2021.
3
Far Side Virtual is an album that uses audio samples such as elevator music, corporate
mood music, easy listening, and early computer sound design. The album has been interpreted as
engaging concepts like hyperreality, disposable consumer culture, 1990s retrofuturism5, and
advertising practices. With the release of this album, there is a misconception that entitles James
Ferraro as the grandfather of vaporwave. For instance, Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth
mentioned, “James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual album is often credited with crystallizing the
vaporwave sound . . .”6 In response, I can acknowledge that James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual
influenced some vaporwave musicians, but it should not be considered as the canon discourse to
understand vaporwave. In a 2016 interview by SPIN magazine, Ferraro himself stated he was not
involved in the movement in any sort of way. Ferraro mentioned the following:
The vaporwave thing to me has always been pretty weird but exciting. Since day
one, it’s been someone else’s interpretation of my work. A record I’d made created
some new micro-trend in music, a journalist hopped on to it and labeled it, and then
I’m like the grandfather of this new thing and I don’t even know what they’re
talking about. For me, it’s always been this thing that’s cool, but I don’t really know
what it is. I never really paid that much attention to it. I think vaporwave in a
nutshell was that they took this conceptual framework of Far Side Virtual, a record
I did, and took the musical framework of my friend Dan Lopatin’s [a.k.a. Oneothrix
Point Never] weird DJ screw and chop tape. They took both of those things and
blended them together and that was vaporwave. A few aesthetic things I had going
on at the time were sucked into that. It’s hard for me to even gauge the extent to
which vaporwave is actually a real thing. 7
A key moment that led vaporwave to successful fame and popularity was the release of
the album Floral Shoppe in 2011 by American electronic musician Ramona Andra Xavier, also
known as Vektroid. Ramona Andra Xavier has released multiple musical projects under different
5
Hyperreality: the inability to distinguish between reality and a simulation of reality, Disposable Consumer
Culture: the consumption of items that only have a single use before being discarded, Retrofuturism: depictions of
the future from the past.
6
Georgina Born, and Cristopher Haworth, “From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics,
Online Methods, and Genre,” Music and Letters 98, no. 4 (2018): 634.
7
Anna Gaca, “A Conversation with James Ferraro, Critical Futurist,” SPIN, August 18, 2016, accessed
November 2, 2020, https://www.spin.com/2016/08/james-ferraro-human-story-3-interview/.
4
aliases like dstnt, Laserdisc Visions, New Dreams Ltd., Virtual Information Desk, and
PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises. However, this album was released under the alias of Macintosh
Plus. The popularity of the album was widespread on various internet sites. Until this day it still
receives more than two million views on YouTube channels not owned by the artist. Also, Floral
Shoppe received important reviews from acclaimed music review internet sites such as The
Needle Drop, Pitchfork, and Sputnikmusic.
The album cover of Floral Shoppe has a distinguished appeal that it can be even
recognized by non-vaporwave fans. It presents in a dark pink background a marble bust of
Helios, an ancient Greek sun god, placed on the checkerboard, and on the middle right side a
picture of a pre-September 11 World Trade Center. It also includes the title of the album in kanji.
McLeod mentions:
The aesthetic distinctly recalls the gaudy neon fascination of the 1980s while the
juxtaposition of the decaying Greek bust (and its association with historical fine
art) with the pre-911 skyline seems to comment on the merging of East and West
and portend the evolutionary decline of commercial empire. 8
The release of this album created a legitimate music scene that was known to various
music reviewers from 2011 to 2015. Musicians such as Blank Banshee, Saint Pepsi, Luxury
Elite, 2814, Eco Virtual, and 18 Carat Affair were releasing music on internet sites like YouTube
and Bandcamp. Internet social forums, such as vaporwave on Reddit, were created to talk about
various topics on vaporwave. Moreover, record labels dedicated explicitly to vaporwave music
started to emerge on the internet. These record labels included Dream Catalogue, Business
Casual, DMT Tapes FL, Commercial Dreams Ltd., Illuminated Paths, and Ailanthus Recording.
All of these labels had their own artists that created vaporwave in their authentic ways. However,
8
Ken McLeod, “Vaporwave: Politics, Protest, and Identity,” Popular Music 30, no. 4 (December 2018):
127-128.
5
the popularity of vaporwave began to decrease by the year 2015. Internet magazines like Esquire
declared its death in 2016 with their collaborative article called, “How Vaporwave was Created
and Destroyed by the Internet.”
Nevertheless, vaporwave still has musicians that are making new music with the same
energy as in 2011. In the late 2010s, musicians like George Clanton, Windows 96, Fujii, Sea of
Dogs, Origami, Girl, and Artfluids arose as some of the new artists that are frequently seen and
heard in the contemporary vaporwave scene.
Survey of Literature
Vaporwave academic literature is not more than ten years old. One of the earliest articles
on vaporwave is Alican Koc’s “Do You Want Vaporwave or Do You Want the Truth?”
published in 2017. Koc claims that “Vaporwave aesthetics can thus be understood as creating a
cognitive map of the bleak affective space of late capitalism, inviting viewers or listeners to step
inside and critique it from within.”9 Therefore, Koc’s understanding of vaporwave is that
vaporwave musicians are disillusioned with the late capitalist society in the Western world.
However, by exploring his bibliography, there is a particular article that stands out.
On December 07, 2012, Harper published an article called “Vaporwave and the Pop-Art
of the Virtual Plaza” for Dummy Mag, an internet magazine site dedicated to music news. Adam
Harper, currently, is a visiting lecturer in the Music Department at the University of London.
This is a non-peer-reviewed article that transformed into a canon to understand vaporwave. The
article was used on numerous occasions by other scholars such as Sharon Schembri (2017),
Laura Glitsos (2017), Ken McLeod (2018), and Teogran Kim (2020). Harper's take on
vaporwave is that the genre is explicitly political. Harper mentions the following:
9
Alican Koc, “Do You Want Vaporwave or Do You Want the Truth?,” Capacious 1 (2017): 60.
6
Is it a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it? Both and neither. These

musicians can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages
of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, . . . 10
Because of this analysis of vaporwave, Harper’s vaporwave is seen as a critique of
capitalism. In addition, the article was not intended for an academic audience. However, the
influence of Harper’s article arrived in the academic field with epistemological consequences by
connecting vaporwave with capitalism. As consequence, the narrative of “vaporwave as a
critique of capitalism” is a phrase that was repeated occasionally by the same scholars that I
mentioned earlier.
Laura Glitsos examines vaporwave by analyzing artist 18 Carat Affair and using it as a
case study. Glitsos examination of vaporwave is that it is a music that produces “memory play”
by using audio-visual aesthetics that creates nostalgia. However, the nostalgia that Glitsos found
in vaporwave revolved around the American shopping mall and 1980s popular culture. Glitsos
mentions, “Vaporwave exploits the lingering representations of this period, challenging
contemporary neoliberalism with the resonating cultural cringe of the 1980s aesthetic.” 11
Furthermore, characteristics or ideas that revolve around the shopping mall are capitalist
behaviors that are alive due to consumption activities that maintain the status quo. As result,
Glitsos’ vaporwave exists due to the capitalist activities that can only be found in American
shopping malls.
Ken McLeod, by examining the 2011 album Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus,
understands that vaporwave reimagines the past by using pre-existing audio and visual materials
to create left-leaning consumer critique. The audio and visual materials that vaporwave uses are
10
Adam Harper, “Comment: Vaporwave and the pop-art of the virtual plaza,” Dummy Mag, December 07,
2010, accessed October 21, 2020, https://www.dummymag.com/news/adam-harper-vaporwave/ .
11
Laura Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music Optimized for Abandoned Malls,” Popular Music 37, No. 1
(December 2017): 103.
7
pre-existing graphics from old pre-millennial techno culture that are often used as corporate
logos or products intended for commercial purposes. This type of activity of using materials of
the past that predicts the future is often associated with retrofuturism. As a result, same as Laura
Glitsos, vaporwave can be understood as a critique or parody of capitalism and the culture of
consumerism that is experienced in the twentieth-first century. McLeod mentions, “Although
there is much ambiguity in the overall attitude and message of vaporwave, its main unifying
ideology appears to be a simultaneous critique and parody of consumerism and corporate
culture.”12
An important work that brought new perspectives to vaporwave is Andrew Whelan and
Raphael Nowäk’s research article “Vaporwave is (not) a Critique of Capitalism: Genre Work in
an Online Music Scene.” Both authors state that the academic, vernacular, and press writing
about vaporwave positions the musical genre as an ironic or ambivalent critique of modern
capitalism. Whelan and Nowäk mentioned, “In arguing that the range of interpretative discussion
of vaporwave is constitutive of its meaning, we are arguing that vaporwave has become a genre
with a dominant narrative, which is only loosely laminated to the music itself.” 13 As it seems, it
is evident that the scholarship towards vaporwave is still tightly attached to “vaporwave as a
critique of capitalism.” However, I also attribute this narrative to the use of analyzing the same
early vaporwave musicians which leads to the same results and conclusions.
An imperative tendency when researching vaporwave is the use of the same three early
vaporwave musicians to claim that vaporwave is a critique of capitalism. These musicians are
Ramona Alexandra Xavier (Vektroid, Macintosh Plus), James Ferraro, and Daniel Lopatin
12
Ken McLeod, “Vaporwave: Politics, Protest, and Identity,” Popular Music 30, no. 4 (December 2018):
124.
13
Andrew Whelan and Raphael Nowäk, “‘Vaporwave is (not) a Critique of Capitalism’: Genre Work in an
Online Music Scene,” Open Cultural Studies 2 (2018): 460.
8
(Oneothrix, Point Never, Chuck Pearson). These musicians are studied extensively by scholars
such as Laura Glitsos (2017), Ken McLeod (2018), Teagam Kim (2020), Paul Ballam-Cross
(2021), and Alican Koc (2017). Consequently, the vaporwave scholarship has brought limited
opportunities for diverse research perspectives. It is evident that using the same early vaporwave
musicians leads to similar results in the academic narrative. To depart from this narrative, new
theoretical orientations are needed for this research.
For this reason, the theoretical orientation of this work is going to be the phenomenology
of the internet. Specifically, Tetsurō Watsuji’s phenomenology of aidagara (betweenness) with a
contemporary view and deepening analysis by Lucy Osler and Joel Krueger that focuses on the
internet or the virtual space. Osler and Kruegger explain that,
. . . such as letters and telephone calls, and as such may be considered an expression
of human interconnectedness—a form of subjective extendedness. However, we go
on to make a stronger claim: Rather than just being a means of communication, the
interactive nature of our interpersonal encounters online can be conceived of in
terms of subjective spatiality proper. 14
The authors argue that a subjective spatiality is a new form of space that can be found on
the internet. As different from encounters in physical world, encounters in virtual environments
have their own ontological characteristics that defines it. However, limiting the internet as a
vehicle for social interaction is not useful. Thereby, the internet enables “. . . new forms of
emotional expression, shared experiences, and modes of betweenness that would be otherwise
inaccessible.”15 When talking about online space, it is assumed that the internet is not a physical
space. Experiences that revolve around the real world are interconnected on the internet. This
means that the internet is a socially lived space.
14
Lucy Osler and Joel Kruegger, “Taking Watsuji Online: Betweenness and Expression in Online Spaces,”
Continental Philosophy Review 55 (2022): 11.
15
Ibid., 1.
9
Another consideration when discussing about the internet is how objects are perceived
inside virtual environments. In “The Physical and Social Reality of Virtual Worlds”, Phillip
Brey gives great discussion points on what are objects inside the internet. Addressing that the
objects in virtual environments are commonly assumed that are not real but a mere simulation of
the physical reality, Phillip Brey mentions the following, “Aren’t virtual insults real insults, if
they are intended and taken personally by users of a virtual world?”16 To discuss these questions,
Brey uses an ontological approach to virtual objects to answer them.
As a fact, virtual objects are real objects that are generated by computer systems. Brey
mentions,
A virtual object is a digital object that is represented by a computer, usually

graphically as an object or region in a two- or three-dimensional space, and that can
be interacted with or used through a computer interface. Virtual objects are digital
objects that appear to us as physical objects and that we interact within a manner
similar to physical objects. 17
Like many artifacts, virtual objects rely on authorship. Every virtual object that resembles
something from the physical reality must imply that it was created by somebody with a computer
that generates the virtual objects. Brey analyzes that, “. . . virtual objects depend on authorship,
and this sometimes implies that facts concerning a virtual object are made true by fiat of their
creator, in the interest of a narrative of which these objects are a part.” However, ontologically it
is impossible to reproduce the same qualities of a physical object in virtual environments.
Nevertheless, it can be clear that virtual objects are not real in the manner that I could apply the
same principles to physical objects, but how about the physical phenomenon?
16
Philip Brey, “The Physical and Social Reality of Virtual Worlds,” in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality,
ed. Mark Grimshaw, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 43.
17
Ibid., 44.
10
According to Brey, there are two types of objects, first, objects that resembles the
physical world and second, objects that resembles phenomena. Furthermore, the author sees that
objects that resemble phenomena can be ontologically reproduced in virtual environments. Brey
mentions, “A phenomenon is an observable event or pattern, like a thunder flash or a repeating
high-pitched sound.” This means that activities like hearing music, watching a movie, reading an
email, and looking at a picture are phenomenon that can be reproduced equally as in reality. In
addition, virtual phenomenon can have institutional powers inside the internet that can affect the
physical reality.
Some virtual spaces and objects can convey institutional power. For example, a currency
used for transactions online or government sites that can convey services to the public. These are
called virtual institutional entities. Brey mentions,
Institutional entities in virtual environments come into existence in ways similar to

institutional entities in the real world. They are assigned a status function either by
some recognized authority who is held to assign this status, or because this status
has been proposed in a nonauthoritative way and members of the community of
users have come to accept it as useful. 18
Phillip Brey discusses greatly the ideas revolving around virtual objects using an ontological
approach. In order to understand virtual environments and vaporwave music it is necessary to
apply these theoretical approaches to obtain alternative understandings of the music.
Purpose of Study
To create new and continuous vaporwave knowledge there needs to be new musical data
and alternative theoretical approaches. I propose to study and interview vaporwave from the
perspective of Caribbean Hispanic vaporwave musicians. This approach conducts the research to
understand vaporwave by geographic location and see the internet as a social amplification of
18
11
reality. The gathering of data from Caribbean Hispanic vaporwave artists can bring new
perspectives that challenge the previous definitions of vaporwave. Furthermore, these musicians
bring their cultural experiences to their compositions that are posted on the internet. I argue that
their music is a primordial example of acknowledging their social-cultural context and questions
the anonymity aspect of vaporwave. With these forthcoming analyses, there is an expectation to
answer the following: What constitutes Caribbean vaporwave? How does it compare with
vaporwave made in the United States?
Answering these previously mentioned questions can lead to visualizing the social lived
space of vaporwave music. At the same time generating new questions such as, how are shared
experiences lived in Caribbean vaporwave music? What are the important characteristics of
Caribbean vaporwave music? How is Bandcamp, an internet music company that sells and
streams music, a social lived space? Also, to put into practice my findings and understanding of
Caribbean vaporwave, I will compose music based on Caribbean vaporwave.
Source Materials
Vaporwave being a musical genre where the primary activities such as listening, viewing,
and music uploading revolve around the internet, the research will rely on sources that are mostly
found on the internet. As a primary source, music from Caribbean vaporwave producers would
be used. These musical compositions can be found on streaming platforms such as Bandcamp,
Spotify, Apple Music, and occasionally YouTube. For the moment, the primary music comes
from these artists like Puerto Rican Anana Supreme, also known as π_ROL, BloomSTRAD, Too
Young to Ror and Rol, and Flamingo Music Club, from the Dominican Republic, 悲惨な
forever, also known as señales tropicales, and S.a.x, also known as Punto Historia, Waves-RD,
and Vape-A-Kreyol, and from Cuba, cubalibre.exe, also known as GOD'S WR4TH and H Y P E
12
R. The music from the mentioned vaporwave artists can be found in Bandcamp. From the
previous data, interviews will be conducted with the vaporwave musicians. After the interviews,
data is going to be extrapolated from the interviews of every musician that was mentioned. Also,
social internet sites like Twitter and Discord are intended to be used for the purpose of this
project. Active conversations of vaporwave and the vaporwave musicians’ social sites are found
on both of those platforms that are accessible to use as data for further analysis.
At this time, there is no available or published vaporwave bibliographic reference book
with peer-reviewed articles on the subject. The journal articles that are intended to be used as
secondary sources were found in JSTOR, Google Scholar, and WorldCat. Also, extra-musical
scholarship such as Digital Anthropology, Digital Ethnography, Digital Geography, and
Phenomenology of the Internet is intended to be read and used for cultural critical analysis of
internet music and vaporwave.
Methodology
The first activity for this project is to be familiar with the music of the vaporwave
producers that I intend to study. As mentioned in the source materials, the music can be found on
streaming platforms such as Bandcamp and Spotify. The data that is going to be collected from
the mentioned vaporwave producers are from interviews conducted with them by myself. These
interviews will be conducted through the internet with a telecommunication peer-to-peer
software platform called Zoom. For this research, this platform is preferred due to its
accessibility in the current academic year 2021-2022 and the ability to record the conversation
with no external software or applications.
For the interviews, the sessions would be guided by a series of questions that
encompasses their encounter with vaporwave, experience in digital production music, extra-
13
musical references in their compositions, and their definition of vaporwave. These interviews
would be used to analyze to find commonalities and differences between the Caribbean
vaporwave musicians. As a result, the analysis is intended to answer the following questions:
What characteristics are in Caribbean vaporwave music? How do they differ from early
vaporwave and vaporwave made in the United States?
Projected Results
One of the major outcomes that are projected in this research is to understand vaporwave
by geographic location. I understand that Caribbean Hispanic vaporwave artists are great
examples to do a case study because they can be reflections of their cultural context and
challenge the strict narrative that is used in academic writing. As such, using Caribbean
vaporwave as a case study will demonstrate the uniqueness of the music inside the Caribbean
and be able to compare it to early United States’ vaporwave. From my own cultural experiences
in Puerto Rico, I can be aware of these cultural insights and explain the significance that appears
in the Caribbean vaporwave. As result, I am uniquely positioned because I have the linguistic
abilities and similar cultural background to do this research.
I believe that doing this type of research can create new scholarship about vaporwave
music, for example, researching other geographic or cultural contexts that produce vaporwave
music. The research that is going to be done in this project will demonstrate methods and
theories to investigate other locations where vaporwave is produced. From this research project,
a new vaporwave scholarship will be created as a support to diverse research, new knowledge,
and involving other vaporwave musicians.

14
Chapter II
A BRIEF HISTORY OF VAPORWAVE, LATIN AMERICAN VAPORWAVE AND THE
LATINWAVE RECORDS INCIDENT
Vaporwave Historical Context
The historical context of vaporwave is important to understand the subgenres that emerge
within vaporwave, in this case, to understand the research topic, Caribbean vaporwave. For this
chapter, I am going to discuss the historical context of vaporwave, the North American
experience in vaporwave, the Latin American experience in vaporwave, and an incident tied to a
Latin internet record label called Latinwave Records. All of these topics demonstrate a broad
picture of vaporwave music that leads to the comprehension of Caribbean vaporwave across the
whole spectrum within the world of vaporwave.
Vaporwave, as stated in the previous chapter, is essentially a virtual music scene. In other
words, the same activities done in a physical life music scene are done on the internet or in a
virtual format. As mentioned by Shara Rambarran, “. . . virtual is potentially representing
something that is real, almost real, or realness in actuality, or real life.” 19 Most vaporwave music
is uploaded on internet sites like Bandcamp, which is a streaming platform that lets artists sell
their music according to the value that the same artists assigned to their music. Accordingly, in
this streaming platform such as Bandcamp, vaporwave music has its own market on the internet
that can provide payments to the artists or producers. Moreover, various internet platforms like
Reddit, Twitter, Discord are used for communication practices and eventful promotions within
vaporwave.
19
Shara Rambarran, “‘Technology Gives You Everything Immediately . . .’ A Brief Discussion on the
Digital Virtual,” in Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic,
2021): 39.
15
The word producer, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, is used with different
meanings inside the music industry. A producer can be somebody who is responsible for
business decisions that go along with the production of a musical product, for example, a music
album or a single song. These responsibilities can be coordinating meetings, organizing the
recording session with musicians, hiring session musicians, and managing the finances for the
musical project. However, in the music industry, this role is usually distinguished as an executive
producer.
Also, a producer can be somebody that is a creative and technical leader in the production
of a musical product. This role is usually the person that is behind the audio console controlling
the recording sessions of a musical project. These descriptors are used to distinguish a record
producer. A good example is the album Californication (1999) by the acclaimed band Red Hot
Chili Peppers. In this album, Rick Rubin was the producer that helped the band establish a
particular sound according to the band’s taste and his understanding. Next, I will discuss the term
record producer.
Andre Romelle Young, professionally known as Dr. Dre, is a rapper and record producer
who, since the 1980s has had numerous and significant contributions to North American hip-hop
and rap music. In the song “California Love” by 2Pac, released in 1995, Dr. Dre as the producer
of the song created a beat using sample audio from the first ten seconds of Joe Cocker’s song
called “Woman to Woman,” released in 1972. Dr. Dre manipulated the “Woman to Woman”
sample and added drums. While 2Pac is rapping, the beat created by Dr. Dre is the base of
“California Love.” This practice of using previously composed sonorous materials, such as
sampling, is still used and can now be done on a computer. However, musicians who sample for
the creation of new music are still considered producers. In the context of this paper, and in
16
vaporwave music production, the word producer refers to people who make music through the
use of MIDI Production Center or Digital Audio Workstation on the computer with the use of
previously composed sonorous materials.
On the internet, virtual music scenes like vaporwave generate forms of mediation that
produce organized environments of music production. For example, files of audio digital format
are uploaded on an internet site that is visible to a person visiting the site for hearing and
downloading the music. This can be similar to record stores; however, this activity creates new
spaces in the virtual world that produces a new type of exchanging music. Born and Haworth
mention that “. . . the net multiplies music’s discursive and social mediation, engendering new
online entities, practices, and relations, which may themselves augment, publicize, and globalize
offline forms thereby generating the hybrid online-offline forms referred to above.”20
Impressively, most vaporwave authors do not discuss or investigate frequently concerning the
cultural and historical context where it came from. Although, it is understood by most of the
authors that the music was developed by two previous musical genres: chillwave and synthwave.
Chillwave was developed in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The music took inspiration
from 1980s independent music scenes in California and London. In musical aesthetics, “. . .
chillwave can be characterized by an emphasis on cheesy-sounding old synths, vintage drum
machines, and an expressively degraded, echo-and-reverb-laden production aesthetic, . . .”21
Prominent performers from this era still stand out in popular media such as Toro y Moi, Washed
20
Georgina Born and Haworth, “From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online
Methods, and Genre,” Music and Letters 98 no. 4 (2018): 603.
21
Paul Ballame Cross, “Reconstructed Nostalgia: Aesthetic Commonalities and Self-Soothing in
Chillwave, Synthwave, and Vaporwave,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 1. (March 2021): 74.
17
Out, and Neon Indian. As for chillwave, the visual medium of chillwave is often associated with
“. . . the vacation, summer, and vintage-related themes. . .”22
Synthwave, sometimes referred to as retrowave or futuresynth, is distinguished by its
attention to specific popular media of North America in the 1980s, such as sci-fi films and
electronic music heavily based on synthesizers. “Some of the stylistic aspects of synthwave have
also been taken into the popular culture more broadly, such as the music for the popular Netflix
TV program Stranger Things.”23 While both of the musical genres gained commercial success in
the early 2010s, other internet activities on YouTube were gaining prominence.
In August 2010, Florida-based musician and producer Nick Pittsinger, as a joke,
dramatically slowed the tempo of a Justin Bieber song called “U Smile.” It resulted in an
ambient musical piece that lasted nine minutes. The effect of dramatically slowing the tempo of
the song made it difficult for the listeners to distinguish the original song. Regardless of the
difficulty to distinguish the song, the video uploaded on YouTube generated millions of views
creating a new trend called 800% slower music. With a quick YouTube search of 800% slower
music, you can find various dramatically slowed-down pop songs from artists like Lady Gaga,
Radiohead, Black Sabbath, and Nirvana. In the same month of the release of the slowed-down
version of “U Smile,”, vaporwave producer Chuck Person released Eccojams Vol. 1. This was
one of the first important vaporwave albums that arose from the mentioned previous music
genres and historical internet events like 800% slower. However, in this first era of vaporwave
during the first part of the 2010s, the sonorous and visual materials used in the music were
mostly related to the North American experience that I am going to discuss in the next section.
22
Ibid., 74.
23
Ibid., 75.
18
North American Experience in Vaporwave
Vaporwave music is often credited with the use of nostalgia as a powerful inspiration in
the creative process. Nostalgia, although an ambiguous term, in music tends to include
familiarity and a personal idea of the past. As mentioned by Paul Ballam Cross, “. . . a person’s
relationship to a given song may be expressed as to how familiar they are with it, as well as the
degree to which the song is associated with a personal memory.” 24 This means that nostalgia is a
personal experience with a broad variety of perspectives. Because the creation of vaporwave
music relies on the use of nostalgia, the listener hears the producers’ understandings or
perspectives of his or her past that can go on through childhood memories. Furthermore, talking
about nostalgia in a general sense in vaporwave leads us to understand the context or specific
time and place of the music. This is why there are shared experiences between the listeners and
the producers in vaporwave depending on the time period and geographic location of the
producer.
One of the failures in most vaporwave academic articles is the limitation of emphasizing
where the nostalgia comes from. According to Simon Chandler, vaporwave draws imagery from
the following “. . . shopping malls, retro video games, Eastern text or imagery (Japanese), neo-
classicism, hazy skylines, living spaces, obsolete tech and design, the 1980s and 1990s
television, summer, and sea.”25 If we look closely at these images and use the examples that
Chandler gives in his article, it is easy to conclude that the images respond to a specific time and
place that is not experienced globally.
24
Ibid., 71.
25
Simon Chandler, “Escaping Reality: The Iconography of Vaporwave,” Bandcamp (2016), accessed
January 8, 2022, https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/vaporwave-iconography-column .
19
For example, let us consider the hazy skylines on the album Floral Shoppe by Macintosh
Plus (Figure 1). Besides the neoclassical statues that are presented on the left side of the album,
what is noticeable is the pre-9/11 New York City skyline on the right. Although, it is often
assumed that the historical event of 9/11 is known globally, in fact, the experience of the event
can be personal and shared by most citizens of the United States. Depending on the familiarity of
the event and the music of the album, listeners have different experiences because of their
cultural backgrounds. For instance, a person from Mexico listening to Floral Shoppe may feel or
have different meanings towards the music as for a person from New York, United States.
Figure 1. Album cover from Floral Shoppe (2016) by Macintosh Plus
Another example is the 2016 album News at 11 by 猫シ Corp that shares experiences
that are understood by most of the population in the United States. The album uses audio
material that is from the last moments before the 9/11 disaster in New York City. For example,
in the first ten seconds of the track “Downtown,” a weather forecaster explains how beautiful the
morning was on September 11, 2001. With that announcement, another person starts to explain
20
how the morning is so beautiful in front of a crowd, and the crowd starts to cheer because of the
announcement. The concept of the album is to present the final moments of the pre 9/11 disaster
through audio samples from various news stations usually with positive connotations like people
cheering, before playing the music samples that vary from 1980s North American pop and 1980s
jazz music.
Another element of imagery mentioned by Simon Chandler and researched by Laura
Glitsos is the North American shopping mall. By the 1980s in the United States, the shopping
mall became a central plaza for suburban, middle-class families. George Lewis mentions, “More
than just central locations for shopping, these covered, and climate-controlled monoliths have
become meeting places. . .”26 In vaporwave, the shopping mall is evident in certain producers to
the point of using it as a theme for the concept of the album in early North American vaporwave
productions from 2010 to 2015.
When vaporwave is seen only as a critique of capitalism, the shopping mall is used as an
important example of how vaporwave uses elements from inside of the mall to rebel against the
corporate industries that are involved in these spaces. Laura Glitsos mentions, “Vaporwave
exploits the lingering representations of this period, challenging contemporary neoliberalism
with the resonating cultural cringe of 1980s aesthetic.”27 (Figure 2) Within these images, it is
ideal to understand that the shopping mall mentioned in the scholarship and North American
vaporwave is culture specific.
Inside North American vaporwave there were moments that the music went outside of
the internet to create vaporwave festivals in the United States. In the year 2019, George Clanton,
26
George Lewis, “Rats and Bunnies: Core Kids in an American Mall,” Adolescence 24 (1989): 881.
27
Laura Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music Optimized for Abandoned Malls,” Popular Music 37, no. 1 (2018):
103.
21
a vaporwave producer, and owner of the record label 100% Electronica, organized the first
vaporwave music festival that was held on two different dates and venues, one in New York, on
August 31, and another in Los Angeles, October 29. It was called 100% Electronicon. The
festival was held in live venues by vaporwave musicians from the previously mentioned label
and other guest artists outside the label that gave musical performances from 30 to 50 minutes.
This festival was a successful attempt to organize a community in real life for a music scene that
mostly exists on the internet.
Figure 2. Album cover from Palm Mall (2014) by 猫シ Corp.
Currently, new vaporwave musical projects are being completed every year. Record
labels in the United States like 100% Electronica and DMT Tapes FL are curating vaporwave
albums with their own organization and thousands of followers. Although this experience caters
to the North American experience, there are other vaporwave scenes like in Latin America that
cater to their own sociocultural background, in this case, Latin American experiences.
22
Latin American Experience in Vaporwave
In the early years of vaporwave between 2010 and 2015, other countries besides the
United States developed an interest in vaporwave music. Not only were they amazed by the
sound of vaporwave but recognized the nostalgia factor in North American vaporwave did not
completely relate to their experiences. Chilean and Mexican vaporwave producers emerged to
create different soundscapes and productions that gave their own distinct sound. As result,
vaporwave music that was produced by Latin American producers paved a new way for
vaporwave production going to similar routes as with the emergence of rock music in Latin
America in the sixties and seventies. Despite the significant number of vaporwave producers
from Latin America, there are three vaporwave producers that stand out beyond their
geographical borders.
Jesse Cassettes from Chihuahua, Mexico started his vaporwave career with his first
album titled L U I S M I W A V E. An album dedicated solely to Luis Miguel music samples.
Luis Miguel is a Mexican singer, known as “el sol de México” (the sun of Mexico), and
experienced a well-known famous hiatus from the 1980s to the 2000s. Until this day, Luis
Miguel still gives stadium range level concerts all over the world. Naming the album L U I S M I
W A V E gives a connotation of creating another subgenre in vaporwave that is dedicated to
sampling - Luis Miguel’s songs in a vaporwave remix style. However, this album is a great
example of Latin American vaporwave having cultural indicators from their own socio-cultural
background.
In the first track of L U I S M A W A V E, Jesse Cassettes used the song “Suave”, a song
performed by Luis Miguel released in his ninth studio album called Aries in 1993. As for the first
track from L U I S M A W A V E, Jesses Cassettes only takes the audio material to slow down the
23
tempo and lower the pitch. This extends the duration of the song and makes Luis Miguel’s voice
sound distorted and deep.
Camila Domínguez aka Lila Tirando a Violeta is a producer from Montevideo, Uruguay.
Her vaporwave productions are heavily influenced by gothic and electronic imagery. Lila
Tirando a Violeta started to compose electronic music in 2010 experimenting heavily with synth
sounds incorporating the harmony from Uruguayan folk songs.
Figure 3. Album cover from L U I S M I W A V E (2016) by Jesse Cassettes
From Mexico, one of the most famous vaporwave producers internationally is Macross
82-99. His music is heavily influenced by eighties anime as it can be seen in the name Macross
which is the name of a famous mecha anime28 from Japan. In an interview that Macross 82-99
gave in Monterrey after a live performance, he mentions that he started as a vaporwave artist
28
The term mecha anime is refer as a genre of Japanese animation that centers on giant robots that are
usually controlled by people.
24
through his explorations of 1980s sampling, but now it is more so considered as future funk
although this genre is a sub-genre from vaporwave.29 The above mentioned artists are a fraction
of famous Latin American vaporwave producers. They have their own fan bases that surpass
thousands of followers on social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter.
While Latin American vaporwave producers started to emerge from 2013 to 2018,
internet record labels led by Latin American producers saw an opportunity to create virtual
spaces for Latin American vaporwave producers. These Latin producers were separating
themselves from the vaporwave music scenes by North American artists, producers, and record
labels, and Latin American-based record labels brought new directions for vaporwave. The most
famous record labels were No Problema Tapes based in Chile, Virtual Soundsystem based in
Mexico, and Latinwave based in Ecuador. All of them had their own organization, methods of
distribution, and their loyal fans.
No Problema Tapes was founded by Chilean Pablo Salas alongside Gonzalo Silva and
Felipe Mercado in Santiago, Chile. They started in 2013 with their first album released called
Never Played by Altiplano. Under their record label, they distributed important vaporwave
albums such as Palm Mall by 猫シ Corp in 2013, Selva by Niños Indigo in 2014, and Total by
Corona Andrade in 2014. Besides releasing vaporwave albums from Latin American and
worldwide producers in digital format as in .WAV files or streaming services, the same albums
were released in physical formats such as a cassette tape. They did this by sourcing materials
from different countries, enlisting the help of local designers, and reproducing each tape in-
house. In an interview by Discobres to Pablo Salas, the founder of No Problema Tapes stated he
29
El teorema, “マクロスm a c r o s s 82-99 habla sobre el Vaporwave (English Subtitles / Macross
Interview),” Youtube video, accessed January 6, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZg1TIK0P1A .
25
was “. . . interested in physical format editions that allowed us to bring together music, design,
and collectibles. The cassette presented an ideal option for a label that would be novel and that
could rescue the ancient ritual of ‘listening to a disc.’”30 No Problema Tapes is still releasing
albums as of 2022.
Another important vaporwave record label based in Latin America is Virtual
Soundsystem. The record label is fairly new compared to the other labels starting in 2017 with its
base in Mexico City, Mexico. Currently, they have more than 100 albums published.
Nevertheless, according to their Bandcamp, their catalog is not limited to Latin American
vaporwave producers because there are producers from different parts of the world. For example,
IDDQD 神モード from Germany, and ABeNrmaL from Florida. In addition, the amount of
Mexican vaporwave producers that contribute to the label is impressive to consider additional
research for topics like Mexican vaporwave.
Both of these record labels saw an opportunity in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic to
organize a virtual vaporwave festival to focus on Latin American vaporwave producers.
Vaporwave record labels such as No Problema Tapes, Virtual Soundsystem, Vaporwave Tapes
Brasil, ATMO, and VILL4IN, started to approach artists for the festival that occurred towards
the end of January 2021. The result was a three-day festival with the participation of more than
100 producers streamed on the Latin All-Stars YouTube page.
The producers invited to this festival were allowed to pre-record their sets and visuals,
but also to perform live sets through streaming. Most of the function of this festival was to give
proof of a noteworthy experimental music scene that is occurring virtually by Latin American
30
Pablo Salas, “Plastic Dreams: An Interview with Pablo Salas of No Problema Tapes,” Discobres,
accessed January 9 2022, https://www.discobr.es/archive/plastic-dreams-an-interview-with-pablo-salas-of-no-
problema-tapes.
26
producers. Vaporwave producer Andr0ider mentioned in an interview, “Music from here has
always been fantastic, from Bossa Nova of Brasil to the more recent and very popular Latin trap
and hip-hop movements. I believe that our experimental electronic scene should be held in the
same regard, and Latin All Stars is proof of that.” 31 (Figure 4)
Figure 4. Latin All-Stars Vaporwave Festival poster
Latinwave Records Incident
In 2015, the record label Latinwave Records was created. Like other record labels by
Latin American producers, Latinwave Records was created for the purpose to promote music
31
Iz Morris and Laura Murphy, “A Virtual Weekend Like No Other,” Listencorp Magazine 001 (December
2021): 6.
27
produced by the Hispanic vaporwave community. Similar to No Problema Tapes and Virtual
Soundsystem, they also have producers outside the Latin American community. This gave a
great opportunity for Hispanic and Latin American vaporwave producers to have a space
specialized in Hispanic vaporwave in the early period of the music.
Within the first year of its creation in 2015, Latinwave Records released albums by
vaporwave producers from different parts of America. There were producers such as Paz from
Colombia, m o d e r n dream from Argentina, Sega Dreamcastle コンピュータ天国 from
Mexico, Virtualboyatsu 8 from Chile, CLNS from Honduras, Toxic Twister from Costa Rica,
and Lila Tirando a Violeta from Uruguay. Every producer that released a musical project on this
label had their own distinct sound. Also, most of the producers used Latin American cultural
elements for their music such as pop songs, commercials, television shows, movies, and cultural
insights that were mostly known by the people from the country from which they came.
In Latinwave Records, listeners could find and identify cultural elements from Latin
America that were used in most of the vaporwave albums released under the label. For example,
the album Paz by Paz released in 2015 included the track “Cristal,” which means crystal in
English, and used audio samples that mention “Bogotá la ciudad capital de Colombia,” (Bogota
the capital city of Colombia) from old government advertisements videos. Another example can
be found in the 2015 album Dreamweaver by Costa Rican producer Toxic Twister. According to
the description of the album on the Latinwave Records website, the album was “. . . strongly
inspired by the style productions ecojams from the first and second generation of vaporwave.”32
In the track “0012 DESIGUALDAD,” Toxic Twister slowed down an audio sample from the
song “Gimme the Power” by the Mexican rock band called Molotov. “Gimme the Power,” is
32
Toxic Twister, Dreamweaver, Latinwave Records LWV-019 October 27, 2015. Bandcamp streaming
audio. https://latinwave.bandcamp.com/album/dreamweaver.
28
considered one of Molotov's most emblematic and well-known songs, despite the fact that it was
not played on the radio, but also one of the most controversial, since the lyrics harshly criticize
the politicians of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which at that time was in power in
Mexico in 1997. However, in this track, the Molotov sample gets slowed down; besides being
the upbeat song in the original context, it leads the vaporwave song to a slowed-down rebellion
track sung by a powerful deep voice. While it is possible to find Latin American cultural
elements that resemble the producers’ experiences, not all musical productions done under
Latinwave records have been explicit with Latin American cultural elements or experiences.
Besides the cultural indicators that resemble the Latin American experience, there were
other themes or concepts used by other Hispanic vaporwave artists that did not necessarily use
their cultural background in their music. A good example of this is the 2016 album Flying Home
Experience by Argentinian producer m o d e r n dream. The producer used as a concept in the
album the experience of traveling through an airport. By looking carefully at the track list that is
composed of eight different songs with names such as, “TAKEOFF,” “COMPANY
INFORMERCIAL,” “SOMETHING TO DRINK,” and “LANDING,” all of the tracks inside the
album takes the listener to an auditory experience of traveling through an airport. In the first
track called “TAKEOFF,” the music is produced by using long tone ambient synths with samples
of Japanese phrases that give the impression of being inside a Japanese airport. The use of
reverbs and echoes in the song makes the experience of being in a dream-like state in an
uncrowded airport.
Another good example of different themes from the albums in Latinwave Records is
Mexican producer MIKUINTHEOCEANGRUNGE’s concept of vaporwave using metal music
sonorous materials. In the album Vapormetal released in 2016, MIKUINTHEOCEANGRUNGE

29
used various metal samples, dragged down the tempo, and added reverb to create another
subgenre from vaporwave called vapormetal. Besides her experience in doing vapormetal,
MIKUINTHEOCEANGRUNGE also experiments in her music by producing vaporwave mixes
to popular songs. On September 9, 2017, MIKUINTHEOCEANGRUNGE released “tａｙｌｏ
ｒｗａｖｅ(Look What You Made Me Do (VAPORWAVE MIX).” In this track, the producer
slows down and speeds up the tempo on various sections of Taylor Swift’s song “Look What
You Made Me Do” which was released that same year.
From the years 2015 to 2018, Latinwave Records had an impressive start releasing
albums monthly with new vaporwave producers from the Hispanic community starting to get
acknowledged through this platform. Also, women were at the forefront of this community
releasing most of the albums under the record label. Despite the progress that Latinwave Records
generated for the Hispanic vaporwave community, in January 2018 a Reddit post took Latinwave
Records in another direction.
On January 9, 2018, a now-deleted Reddit user wrote a post titled “The Truth about
LATINWAVE and the Hispanic vaporwave scam artist.” 33 The Reddit user mentions that in
2015, she was contacted by Pentium 2, who is believed to be the creator and owner of Latinwave
Records, to be part of the Hispanic vaporwave label and community. In this community, she met
other women vaporwave producers such as Akane in Tokyo, HYPERNOVA, and Aroma Virtual.
According to the user, these producers had their own different lives with no alias, being friends
with most of these vaporwave producers. Nevertheless, the user knew between the years from
33
U/[deleted], “The Truth about LATINWAVE and the Hispanic vaporwave scam artist,” Reddit post
January 8, 2018, accessed January 8 2021,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/comments/7p8l61/the_truth_about_latinwave_and_the_hispanic/?sort=confide
nce.
30
2017 to 2018 through other vaporwave artists and her experience that Pentium 2 was posing as
other vaporwave producers such as the ones mentioned above. The user mentions:
Between many horrible stories and fights that these people (characters or whatever)
created in the scene, some girls came forward telling us yesterday (we have
screenshots of him saying this) that this [sic] were all his projects and he offered
them to be the new face of them. Because being a girl for him sold records in the
vaporwave community. He stole identities, photos, and many more during the
process.34
As for the user, she felt a lot of distrust toward the Hispanic vaporwave community. A lot
of vaporwave producers, who she thought were her friends with a unique life in the community,
resulted in the alias of one specific person. The Reddit user also mentions, “As a female and
someone who once thought of this person as a friend, I and many others feel completely outraged
with what he is doing since a long time ago.”35 This post generated a lot of attention by
numerous users reaching out and explaining their experiences with Latinwave Records and
Pentium 2, in addition, posting screenshots of conversations they had with Pentium 2.
Some users commented on the Reddit post about how it made sense to them that all of
these vaporwave profiles were false. In the post, Reddit user Waves-RD posted a photo of a
screenshot that demonstrated some of the accounts that were used by the same person. (Figure 5)
Following that photo post, Reddit user Elconejitocallado11 mentioned, “Now I understand why
about all [sic] these aliases he spoke very well of and the rest of us were garbage artists.” 36 The
user demonstrates a discrepancy between Hispanic vaporwave artists and Pentium 2’s aliases that
34
Ibid., accessed January 8 2021,
nce .
35
Ibid., accessed January 8 2021,
nce .
36
Elconejitocallado11, “The Truth about LATINWAVE and the Hispanic vaporwave scam artist,” Reddit
comment January 8, 2018, accessed January 8 2021,
nce .
31
always favors the owner of the record label without giving the necessary access for other
Hispanic vaporwave artists.
Figure 5. Screenshot of various Bandcamp accounts posted by Elconejitocallado11 on Reddit.
The use of aliases or pseudonyms is fairly common in vaporwave music. It is normal that
one producer has three to six different projects running at the same time. This is done because
they understand that every project has its own concept and aesthetic. Furthermore, if the concept
and/or aesthetic of the music does not correlate to a specific project it is preferred to make
another project to release the musical material. However, the use of the aliases by Pentium 2 was
negatively impacting the Hispanic vaporwave community because, according to the users in the
Reddit post, he would steal personal information and photos to make other projects and
masquerade as another person from the same community. Reddit user Pi-rol mentioned, “To me,
it is not an issue for someone to have so many names, the internet allows everyone to be
32
anonymous; I, however, can't tolerate that he used these "people" to hurt others.” 37 These
comments are just a fraction of the comments posted in the above-mentioned Reddit post.
Clearly, there was a general dissatisfaction towards the actions of Pentium 2. Ultimately, this
incident explains other movements that started to appear in the vaporwave music scene in
response to these problems in 2018.
The knowledge of these virtual music scenes can give us the bigger picture to understand
how the Hispanic Caribbean vaporwave artists started to emerge. In this chapter, I demonstrated
the historical context of vaporwave inside and outside of the internet that occurred at the
beginning of 2010. Within the early beginnings of vaporwave, I exemplified the characteristics
and history of the North American experience in vaporwave by North American vaporwave
producers. Also, by researching internet sites such as Bandcamp, I set in context the history and
characteristics of the Latin American experience in vaporwave. I used as examples certain
internet record labels such as No Problema Tapes, Virtual SoundSystem, and Latinwave Records
and Latin vaporwave producers such as Jesse Cassettes, Lila Tirando a Violeta, and Macross 82-
99. Finally, I narrated the story of the Latinwave Records incident utilizing comments and posts
as data done on the internet site Reddit. In the upcoming chapter, I will discuss what are the
important characteristics of Caribbean vaporwave music? How is Bandcamp, an internet music
company that sells and streams music, a lived social space in the vaporwave music scene?
37
Pi-rol, “The Truth about LATINWAVE and the Hispanic vaporwave scam artist,” Reddit comment
nce .
33
Chapter III
CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE AND THE INTERNET AS SOCIAL AMPLIFICATION
Eternal Vibes Record Label
The fall of Latinwave records led to the creation of other internet record labels to
promote Hispanic vaporwave producers. Within these internet music spaces, other vaporwave
producers from the Caribbean organized internet music spaces that were dedicated to vaporwave
producers from the Caribbean. In this chapter, I will talk about the history of the Latin
vaporwave record label Eternal Vibes, and the Caribbean vaporwave record label Caribbean
Ventures LLC. Also, I will be discussing my interviews with Hispanic Caribbean vaporwave
producers such as Anana Supreme, S.a.x, 悲惨な forever, and cubalibre.exe, the characteristics
of Caribbean Vaporwave like the use of culture-specific material such as sound and visuals from
the Caribbean, and the relation between Caribbean vaporwave and the internet as a social lived
space.
To get out of the dishonest situation that was occurring in the Latin vaporwave
community, vaporwave producers started to create musical projects and record labels by
themselves with other communities having the same principles of promoting Latin vaporwave
producers. One of the first and most successful internet record labels was Eternal Vibes created
in 201738 founded by vaporwave producers MALO 420 from Chile and S.a.x from the
Dominican Republic. 39 This record label was, “Created to promote music made mostly by the
Hispanic vaporwave community.”40 It had the same objective as the previous label called
Latinwave Records. Besides Eternal Vibes, the creators had another similar project named
38
Eternal Vibes, “Bandcamp site”, accessed February 27, 2022, https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/ .
39
40
Eternal Vibes, “Bandcamp site”, accessed February 27, 2022, https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/ .
34
Unnatural Vibes with more experimental vaporwave music by Latin producers. In these two
record labels, vaporwave producers MALO 420 and S.a.x divided the workload between
themselves.41 As for Eternal Vibes, the record label published 74 vaporwave albums by diverse
vaporwave producers of different nationalities (Appendix A). However, most of the releases
were by producers from Mexico and Chile.
The first album in their catalog was a compilation album of various vaporwave producers
with 25 tracks embarking on a new journey through the sounds that were going to be part of the
Eternal Vibes project. In the album, there are vaporwave producers that participated previously
in Latinwave Records. There were only three, MIKUINTHEOCEANGRUNGE (Mexico),
Lisergishnu (Chile), and バーチャルボーイＡｔｓ u (Chile). Consequently, it seems that the
purpose of Eternal Vibes was to not be involved in any sort of way with Latinwave Records.
According to Dominican vaporwave producer S.a.x:
For reasons related to the change of jobs inside the label and my private life, others
joined the administration and in turn, others went away, processes that took place
in an environment where most of the work in the label was done by me. Unnatural
vibes closed due to inactivity and Eternal Vibes by my decision. 42
In examining the number of downloads from the albums published by Eternal Vibes between
2017 and 2020 on their Bandcamp page, the label had a gradual decrease of downloads starting
with the first 13 albums having a minimum of 88 and 110 downloads with an average of 91
downloads. Unfortunately, it ended its last 10 albums with a minimum of 6 and a maximum of
28 downloads having an average of 17 downloads per album. As such, the gradual decrease in
downloads was an important factor in shutting down the record label. Nevertheless, within the
41
42
35
three years of existence of Eternal Vibes, there were important albums from the label that stand
out defining the sound of the label.
Although the majority of the producers that published music for Eternal Vibes were
Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, some Brazilian producers contributed to the extensive music
catalog on the record label. One example is Brazilian vaporwave producer Ezlo Montblanc with
the release of The Sacred Pathways Tales 43 in 2020. The album has a lot of Native American
imagery from the United States starting with the name of the songs such as “Shaman’s Death,
“Prayers For The Rain,” “Kokopelli,” and “Santa Rosa.” The samples used in the album are
mostly country music guitar style samples from the United States with certain loops of chords
adding reverb and echo effects. To add a visual aspect to the album, the album cover is a blend
of three different native indigenous faces faded in a way that is not recognizable in plain sight.
Figure 6. Album cover from The Sacred Pathways Tales by Ezlo Montblanc.
43
Ezlo Montblanc, The Sacred Pathways Tales, Eternal Vibes EV-0053, January 10, 2020, Bandcamp
streaming audio, https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/the-sacred-pathways-tales.
36
The presence of Caribbean vaporwave producers is not as prominent as the Chilean and
Mexican producers, but it is noticeable that one of the founders and active workers of Eternal
Vibes was Dominican producer S.a.x. This contribution does not end here, thus the first album
released by a Caribbean vaporwave producer on the label was by Puerto Rican producer
BloomSTRAD, currently known as Anana Supreme. The Puerto Rican producer’s first album for
the record label was Will You Be My Gameboy Always?44 released on February 14, 2018. This
album, released under the pseudonym of BloomSTRAD, uses a lot of video games and 32-bit
audio samples (Figure 7). What makes it distinctive is the mixing of the music that makes the
bass and drums sound aggressive and abrasive. This sound can be heard in the tracks “I Need
Your Love,, “Out of Reach,” and “Sexy”. Furthermore, there are other instances that other
Caribbean vaporwave producers contributed to the internet record label.
Figure 7. Album cover from Will You Be My Gameboy Always? by BloomSTRAD
44
BloomSTRAD, Will You Be My Gameboy Always?, Eternal Vibes EV-0006, February 14, 2018,
Bandcamp streaming audio, https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/will-you-be-my-gameboy-always .
37
On April 30, 2018, Eternal Vibes published a re-release of the album Kint45 by Puerto
Rican producer Jai Cletz (Figure 8). The release of this album was to announce the comeback of
Jai Cletz due to not being present in the vaporwave scene from 2016 to 2018. The record label
mentions the following in support of this comeback, “Since then this project remained paralyzed
for 2 years but have returned to try to put Puerto Rico on the map! He expects a lot of things for
this year so keep supporting this project . . .”46 This activity of re-releasing previously published
albums was done multiple times throughout the active period of the record label.
Figure 8. Album cover from Kint by Jai Cletz.
Re-releasing albums was done with the motive of publishing albums that were difficult to
find. The label understood that these previously published albums were important due to offering
a particular expertise in vaporwave, for example, using audio samples from famous cumbia
songs such as the album Caribbean Ghost by Pangea Sonido. Referring to the re-release of
Caribbean Ghost, the label mentions that,
45
Jai Cletz, Kint (Re-Release), Eternal Vibes EV-0012, April 30, 2018, Bandcamp streaming audio,
https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/kint-re-release .
46
Ibid.
38
Pangea Sonido is one of the few producers who are dedicated to sample cumbias
and derivatives, overcoming the barrier of Vapormeme in the Latin community.
This EP, which was published and subsequently eliminated from the label
Latinwave, is one of the few and first pieces of production that still exist of this old
project which has a second chance in the community after 4 years of it original
release.47
Some other examples of re-releasing were Eternal Sunset by 27 UHF, de esas ノミ no
brincan a mi ベッド by Holocaust Cowboys, and Dream Machine Travel by Mediterráneo Mall.
Besides the title that announces that the album is a re-release, another indicator of this practice
was the cover used for the album. Like in the following image that is from the album Eternal
Sunset by 27 UHF (Figure 9), it is noticeable that the original album cover is on the upper right
side accompanied by two symbols of Eternal Vibes one in the upper left and another on the
bottom right side.
Figure 9. Album cover from Eternal Sunset by 27 UHF.
As I previously mentioned, Eternal Vibes had a life span of three years releasing 74
albums in their catalog. Unfortunately, due to the lack of activity between the producers and
47
Pangea Sonido, Caribbean Ghost, Eternal Vibes EV-0043, August 20, 2019, Bandcamp streaming audio,
https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/caribbean-ghost-re-release.
39
fans, the record label shut down. Besides this unfortunate event for the Latin vaporwave scene,
the participation of Caribbean producers was crucial because it gave them opportunity to be
exposed and have policy-making positions on the decisions of the label. Nevertheless, thanks to
this record label, Caribbean vaporwave producers such as Anana Supreme, S.a.x, and 悲惨な
forever started to be in contact with each other. This was the beginning of an attempt to create a
Caribbean vaporwave scene that did not last long enough. In the next section, I will discuss my
interviews that were done for this research with the previously mentioned Caribbean vaporwave
producers.
Interviews
Between November 2021 and January 2022, I did a series of interviews with vaporwave
producers from Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean. The interviews were a series of
questions that involved their encounters with vaporwave, their attention to vaporwave,
experiences in digital music production, extra-musical references in vaporwave, interactions
between vaporwave producers from the Caribbean, platforms to publish their music, and their
definition of vaporwave. With these questions, I hoped to understand the characteristics of
Caribbean vaporwave in terms of sound, cultural material, and visuals. With that information, I
am going to discuss how the internet is a socially lived space through the lens of Caribbean
vaporwave.
For this discussion, I interviewed the following vaporwave producers: from Puerto Rico
Anana Supreme, (also known as π_ROL, BloomSTRAD, Too Young to Ror and Rol, and
Flamingo Music Club); from the Dominican Republic 悲惨な forever, (also known as señales
tropicales), and S.a.x, (also known as Punto Historia, Waves-RD, and Vape-A-Kreyol); and from
Cuba cubalibre.exe, (also known as GOD'S WR4TH and H Y P E R.) Four formal interviews
40
were held over Zoom and lasted from thirty to forty minutes. One interview took place over
Twitter Messages.
The first interest in interviewing vaporwave producers was regarding where exactly they
first encountered vaporwave music. As expected, they encountered vaporwave for the first time
on the internet. Anana Supreme found vaporwave through Facebook. As for S.a.x, he
encountered the music for the first time in an app called Vine 48. According to 悲惨な forever, he
found vaporwave through antecedent musical genres like seapunk and hypnogic pop. Finally,
cubalibre.exe was searching on YouTube for weird music that made him stumble upon
vaporwave.
Although they were different from each other in particular, the interest in vaporwave
from the producers grew significantly to the fact that they wanted to make vaporwave music.
Anana Supreme was drawn by the samples used in vaporwave because most of them were from
the eighties and nineties pop music. Similarly, 悲惨な forever and S.a.x were captivated by a
certain aesthetic of classic vaporwave such as the Greek statues and 1980s imageries. However,
for these producers, their previous experience in digital music production ranged from basic to
none.
Their method for learning to produce vaporwave music was through do-it-yourself
methods, Youtube instructional videos, and a lot of trial and error. Thanks to these individualized
experiences, every producer had their way of producing vaporwave. For example, when using
digital audio workstation (DAW), S.a.x, Anana Supreme, and Cubalibre.exe use FL Studio. Yet,
due to the user-friendly and costless factor, 悲惨な forever uses Audacity which is an open-
48
Vine is an app that users share six-second-long, looping video clips. The app released in 2013 and it was
similar as the contemporary app Tiktok.
41
source digital audio workstation software. Within this involvement, according to my interviews,
these producers were interested in searching for a Latin community in vaporwave since their
beginnings of producing vaporwave.495051 For example, Anana Supreme mentioned,
“I entered the vaporwave rabbit hole and started to do visual art related to the early
visual aesthetics of vaporwave like the Greek statues. By that time, I realized that
there was no representation for us. My first album was a response to the poor
representation of Boricuas or Caribbeans in vaporwave.” 52
The album that she mentions is ♥♫♥Teleltón: Matiné de Comerciales Solo para Tí♥♫♥
released on February 5, 2016.
This album is fueled with Puerto Rican-related audio and visual materials. As for the
cover of the album, at the bottom, there is a symbol that is from an old Puerto Rican channel
called Tele-Once. (Figure 10) This channel aired in Puerto Rico from 1986 to 2002 producing
famous Puerto Rican TV shows like the late-night show El Super Show hosted by comedian
Hector Marcano and the famous sitcom Entrando por la cocina airing regularly on Thursdays
from 1996 to 200053. The sonorous materials of the album are commercials that aired in the
1990s in Puerto Rico. For example, in the track “タイトル手慮,” translated as “Title
Consideration,” the sample is a commercial from a news program called Noticentro. Inside the
track, the names of famous news reporters from Puerto Rico are mentioned, such as Guillermo
José Torres who was influential on the channel with a career experience of 44 years from 1969 to
2013, and Luz Nereida Vélez who is still working as a news reporter in the same program.
49
Anana Supreme, interview by author, December 16, 2021.
50
51
悲惨な forever, interview by author, December 27, 2021.
52
53
Primera Hora, “Vuelve ‘Entrando por la cocina,’” Primera Hora, September 23, 2021,
https://www.primerahora.com/entretenimiento/cultura-teatro/notas/vuelve-entrando-por-la-cocina/ .
42
Another great example of Puerto Rican cultural material used in the album is the track
“La vergüenza de los niños pobres” (The shame of the poor children). In this track, Anana
Supreme uses a commercial sample from a famous Puerto Rican shoe company called La Gloria.
This shoe company is widely known in Puerto Rico due to having 40 stores across the island
with its oldest one in the municipality of Mayagüez since 1940. 54 An important aspect of this
company is their slogan, “Tus pies en la tierra, tus zapatos en La gloria.” (Your feet on the
ground, your shoes in La gloria) which is heard very clearly in Anana Supreme’s track.
Something that strikes me as an intention is the name of the track “The shame of the poor
children”. This is intentional because in this shoe company the shoes were cheap and accessible
to middle and lower-class communities in Puerto Rico. Anana Supreme wanted to emphasize
how people who wore shoes from this company were stigmatized as being from the lower class
and not being able to afford shoes from other big companies with more expensive shoes.
However, Anana Supreme was not the only producer to notice the poor representation of the
Caribbean in vaporwave and their search for a Latin community inside the music.
Figure 10. Album cover from ♥♫♥Teleltón: Matiné de Comerciales Solo para Tí♥♫♥ by BloomSTRAD.
54
La Gloria “Nuestras Tiendas,” accessed April 10, 2022, http://www.lagloriapr.net/lagloria/Tiendas.html .
43
S.a.x was also interested in searching for a Latin community within vaporwave music. In
our conversation, we discussed how he noticed a difference between vaporwave producers from
the United States and Latin America. S.a.x mentioned that “The production of vaporwave within
the Latin community, more than having audio samples in Spanish, the music selection to do
vaporwave had its own sound. It was normal to use songs like ‘Vamos a la Playa’ or ‘No tengo
dinero’.”55 However, these interests in Latin vaporwave were at the same period when the record
label Latinwave Records started to publish albums at the beginning of 2016.
As with many other vaporwave producers from the Latin community, Anana Supreme
was involved with the internet record label Latinwave Records. On the Latinwave Records
Bandcamp internet page, it is not possible to find the albums published by Anana Supreme, but
on her personal Bandcamp internet page, it is possible to find those records published in
Latinwave Records because the catalog number from the record label is still available (Appendix
C). These albums were #ECBAC1スキーム from her previous pseudonym π_ROL, 1͞͞9͞9͞6͞ ＵＭＢ
ＲＡ 1͟͟9͟9͟6͟ and B r y c e published under the name of Flamingo Music Club. Those three
albums were published in 2016. In addition, her involvement in Latinwave Records was not only
to publish albums but also contributed to the decisions and marketing strategies for the record
label. She mentioned the following:
I started to do vaporwave music in the active period of Latinwave Records.

Although, they were starting the label with very few albums. However, they had a
problem. They didn’t know how to manage the entrance of new productions and
have a certain type of quality for the record label. With what I studied before, I gave
them regulations that they could follow and after that, the productions were starting
to have more success. Basically, the instructions that I gave pushed forward the
whole Latin vaporwave community. Eventually, when Latinwave Records died and
Eternal Vibes started, every other vaporwave producer could go ahead with their
55
44
lives. Practically, I am the person responsible for giving them certain rules of what
they had to do.56
As it can be seen, the involvement of Caribbean producers in the Latin vaporwave community
was happening since the beginning of the music scene. Thanks to her involvement, Eternal Vibes
was able to be led by a Dominican producer, in this case, S.a.x.
Before describing the characteristics of Caribbean vaporwave, I need to mention that
these producers from the Caribbean understand that there is a notion of a Caribbean sound in this
type of vaporwave. However, all producers agree that there are not a lot of vaporwave producers
from the Caribbean to make a group or a movement that is big compared to Latin vaporwave.
Concerning my question that if there is a notion of Caribbean vaporwave, 悲惨な forever
mentions that “You don’t see Caribbean vaporwave a lot, and it is difficult to find vaporwave
producers from the Caribbean. At least that’s what I think.” 57 Furthermore, it was Anana
Supreme who pushed forward the idea of creating a Caribbean vaporwave scene and a record
label dedicated to producers from the Caribbean called Caribbean Ventures LLC. Anana
Supreme mentioned, “I was the one who pushed that idea after the fall of Latinwave Records
because I knew of people who were doing the music. I tried to create the scene, but it failed due
to not having enough people.”58
Caribbean Ventures LLC was founded in June 2018 by the Puerto Rican producer Anana
Supreme. The internet record label published albums made by three different producers with
their different pseudonyms, Anana Supreme, S.a.x, and 悲惨な forever. Unfortunately, the
record label only lasted for two years from 2018 to 2020. Inside the record label, the producers
56
57
58
45
were very active and supported each other on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Moreover, this
record label is primordial evidence of a notion or existence of Caribbean vaporwave. To further
the notion of a Caribbean vaporwave, I discussed with Anana Supreme how certain subgenres in
vaporwave cannot be used in other environments. In this conversation, we talked about Mallsoft,
a vaporwave subgenre, and how the Caribbean, specifically, Puerto Rico cannot be a part of
Mallsoft.
Mallsoft is a vaporwave subgenre that usually conjures up audio and visual depictions of
a shopping mall, often empty retro shopping malls from the 1980s to 1990s in the United States.
According to Laura Glitsos referring to the idea of the mall in vaporwave,
The satirization of the emptiness of ‘mall culture’ as a shadow of neoliberalist

fantasy connects partly with the notion that vaporwave music is cobbled together
through a patchwork of found sounds, not its own thing but echoes of other things,
and ultimately, empty. In a sense, vaporwave’s ‘mall aesthetics’ mimic sedative
tones of the shopping center soundtrack that accompanies the consumer in that
soundscape (Trainer 2016, p. 421). It is for this reason that vaporwave is described,
on its ‘official’ Reddit thread dedicated to the community, as ‘music optimized for
abandoned malls’ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/), suggesting a kind of
‘consumption lubricant’ that ‘coats’ spaces of consumption. 59
However, Anana Supreme has a certain opinion on how it is difficult for the Caribbean to do
Mallsoft due to the experience of the Caribbean revolving towards the mall is different from the
United States. She mentions the following:
Mallsoft does not fit here because the mall here (Puerto Rico) are not like in the
United States. People here love to go out, see their faces, eat, hang, go to the
theaters. For that reason, we don’t have dead malls besides the poor economy.
Having this cultural difference, the experience in the mall is different from the
United States.
In the United States, they have to handle abandoned buildings. But here,
there is a certain affection towards these places because people go every day. These
buildings are contemporary public plazas because the heat is unbearable. The towns
59
Laura Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music Optimized for Abandoned Malls,” Popular Music 37, No. 1
(December 2017):103.
46
are dead. Having that in mind, mallsoft can’t exist in Puerto Rico because that
chemistry of a nostalgic or empty mall does not exist here. 60
Characteristics of Caribbean Vaporwave
Before describing the characteristics of Caribbean vaporwave, I will explain how and
where I gathered the data for this research. Most of the music from Caribbean vaporwave is
found on a streaming site called Bandcamp. Furthermore, in Bandcamp there is no stream count
for any of the songs like on Spotify or Youtube; what is useful in this streaming site, is that every
album has a “supported by” section. The “supported by” section tells the viewer of the site how
many accounts downloaded an album or single. Bandcamp mentions, “. . . ‘supported by’
section, which displays thumbnails of the fans who bought that record. By default, we show a
single row of the latest purchasers, but you can expand that to see all the supporters and read
what they had to say about the record (the artist also has the option to remove any of these they
wish).”61 With this information I made a list with all the albums by the previously mentioned
Caribbean vaporwave producers to gather information on which albums were downloaded the
most, according to the “supported by section” in Bandcamp (Appendix C,D,E,F). This was
useful because I could isolate the albums that were downloaded the most to get useful data from
the successful albums. Additionally, these data are corroborated by the interviews that I did with
the previously mentioned producers to discuss the sound, visual, and cultural characteristics of
Caribbean vaporwave.
Before proceeding with how Caribbean vaporwave sounds, I need to present again a
definition of vaporwave mentioned in the first chapter. According to S.a.x,
60
61
Bandcamp updates, “Bandcamp for fans,” Bandcamp, accessed April, 29, 2022,
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2013/01/10/bandcamp-for-
fans/#:~:text=Supported%2Dby&text=Back%20on%20Bandcamp%20artist%20pages,fans%20who%20bought%20t
hat%20record .
47
Vaporwave is a style of music that one tries to expose by giving images and
presentations of a past time usually where one grew up or that only heard about it.
This is with the intention of presenting previous calm times with nostalgia but a
Alluding to this definition, depending on the album or project, the producer will expose a certain
theme for the album. This means that not all albums by these producers are going to have
Caribbean sounds or elements. For example, in the album A Lonely Night by Dominican
producer 悲惨な forever, a user that downloaded the album mentions that “this album is
SMOOTH JAZZ VAPOR, with minor lo-fi static...just the right amount (i HATE when possibly
good vaporwave is obscured by WAY TOO LOUD AM RADIO STATIC, TAPE HISS, etc..you
all know what I mean.”63 As for the experience of this listener, this album does not give any
reference to a Caribbean sound. In my interview with 悲惨な forever, he explains, “besides
Transmisiones de Medianoche that I use Dominican TV commercials, my music tends to use
audio samples of music from the United States.” 64 However, in 悲惨な forever’s album
Transmisiones de Medianoche, there are explicit audio samples that allude to a Caribbean
element.
In Transmisiones de Medianoche, 悲惨な forever uses TV commercials that are from the
Dominican Republic. Inside vaporwave, the use of commercials as audio material is a subgenre
that is called signalwave. 65 Besides the use of the commercials, it is common to use static audio
samples to make the experience be similar to an old television set with static interference.
62
63
Shane Dangers, supported by section comment, Bandcamp, accessed May 9, 2022,
https://latenightjams.bandcamp.com/album/a-lonely-night.
64
65
In appendix G, the reader can see a visual depiction of the vaporwave subgenres that are mentioned in
this chapter, and which are related according to the information presented here.
48
Referring to Transmisiones de Medianoche, 悲惨な forever mentions, “I wanted to do something
like signalwave as in implementing Dominican TV commercials that had a VHS vibe. Like a
transmission.”66 This description can be seen in the fifth track of the album called “La
tranquilidad que usted se merece” (The calm that you deserve). For this track, 悲惨な forever
takes the audio sample of a TV commercial from Hotel Villa de las Américas, which is a
currently open hotel in Santo Domingo. As common with other vaporwave tracks, 悲惨な
forever slows down the audio sample by adding static audio samples that will make the listener
experience the TV commercial to make it seem that is a distant memory. Having this first
example, I will be discussing albums in Caribbean vaporwave that convey contrasting
soundscapes.
In the album, Ser culto es el único modo de ser libre by Cuban producer Cubalibre.exe,
the listener gets transmitted to an aural experience as if a person is changing channels in an old
analog television set. This can be perceived in the first track “Un canal internacional” due to the
static noise in the music. Also, within all the songs, the listener can hear heavily based synth
piano samples and Studio Ghibli style piano music. Within this soundscape, what strikes me the
most in this album is the José Martí’s poem recitations in “Niño (soñar despierto)” and “En solo
un beso.”
José Martí was a Cuban activist who founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano
(Revolution Cuban Party) and was one of the head organizers of the Cuban War of Independence
against Spain in the late nineteenth century. Besides his commitment to the independence of
Cuba, Martí also was a famous poet that wrote famous poems like Sueño despierto which
appears in “niño (soñar despierto)” and Mi caballero, which can be heard in “en solo un beso.”
66
49
In both tracks of the album, the listener can hear, while a heavy synth-based sample is played, a
deep and slow voice reciting Marti’s poem. Furthermore, José Martí’s references do not end in
both of those tracks.
The title of the album, “Ser culto es el único modo de ser libre” (To be cultivated is the
only way of being free), is a quote by José Martí part of an essay called “Maestros ambulantes”
(Wandering Teachers) that Martí wrote in 1884 for the newspaper La América in New York.
According to Laura Lomas,
Wandering teachers involve the most marginal peasants and workers in the exercise
of judgment and self-study. Thus, if colonial pedagogy historically devalues in the
mind of the colonized “his own nature” (Obras, 8:289), this model calls for self-
study of peripheral modernities and redirects the European legacy that privileges
the urban over the rural and the head over the heart and body: “The cities are the
minds of nations. But the city’s heart, where it beats and where it distributes the
blood, is in the countryside. Men are still eating machines, and they are sacred
chests, full of preoccupations. It is necessary to make of each man a torch 67
However, Cubalibre.exe’s music does not always allude to Caribbean intellectuals and sound
materials in Cuba. In his last vaporwave project and album Hyper, under his other pseudonym
Hyper, cubalibre.exe creates a soundscape with very fast-tempo samples that relates to the idea
of being hyper or fast. Most of the audio samples used in the album are based on jungle music68
samples.
Dominican producer S.a.x also alludes to Caribbean elements in his album Boriwave,
under the pseudonym Punto Historia. The name of the title alludes to Puerto Rican vaporwave
written by combining the words of “Boricua” and vaporwave. In all of the tracks of the album,
67
Laura Lomas, “La América with an Accent: North Americans, Spanish-Language Print Culture, and
American Modernities,” in Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernists,
London: Duke University Press, 2008, 129.
68
Jungle music is a musical genre that was developed inside the rave and sound system scene in the United
Kingdom. The music was characterized by its heavy influenced towards reggae dancehall and fast breakbeat loops
with bass synthesizers.
50
S.a.x slowed down salsa music samples by looping certain sections of the songs. For example, in
the track “Social”, S.a.x used the introduction of the El Gran Combo’s song “Ojitos chinos”
(Chinese Eyes). According to the Bandcamp page, the album was created for Facebook pages
such as Boriwave and Lloripari. 69 Both Facebook pages are vaporwave-related sites that use
most of their content from vaporwave or use local content to transform them into a vaporwave
aesthetic. Although the Lloripari Facebook page is not available, Boriwave is still actively
posting vaporwave-related posts with more than 25,000 followers. In contrast to the album
Boriwave, Smooth Melodies an album published by S.a.x replicates another approach besides the
Caribbean elements.
Smooth Melodies, released on December 7, 2019, and published by the internet record
label Gorgeous Lights, is an album which soundscapes revolve around the nightlife according to
the title of the tracks such as “Sky Lobby,” “Top Floor,” “Nocturnal Breeze,” and “Night View.”
However, the location is not disclosed in the album. As for the audio material, the samples that
appear in this album are mostly R&B, funk, and smooth jazz music samples from the United
States. A good example is the third track of the album called “Sky Lobby.” In this track, S.a.x
slowed down and added audio effects to the song “I’m For Real” by Howard Hewett. Besides
creating loops from specific sections of the song, S.a.x used the whole song in its original format.
Another album that does not allude to Caribbean elements is Dead Fantasies Vol. 1 by
Anana Supreme, under the pseudonym BloomSTRAD and published by the internet record label
Power Lunch Prime. In this album, Anana Supreme tries to narrate a love story inside an office
or workplace. Although the samples used in the album do not carry lyrics to understand the
specific plots or context, the titles of the tracks will lead the listener to hear the atmosphere of the
69
Punto Historia, Boriwave, June 18, 2018, Bandcamp audio streaming,
https://puntohistoria.bandcamp.com/album/boriwave.
51
plot of the story. For example, the album starts with the track “Depressed at the office” that
includes bossa nova samples with ringing telephone audio samples which it is contradictory
because the aesthetic of the song does not seem as sad or depressed. The next track is “The
awkward merger meeting, and he keeps staring at you” which relates to a person in the office
looking at the principal character of the story. Next is “Hallway encounter... it's a date then?”
gives the idea to the listener that the character of the story is going on a date. Two tracks after is
“Instant gossip network on Monday” that gives the idea of other coworkers talking about the date
between the principal character and the coworker. Finally it finishes with “S h e s a i d Y E S”
that gives the idea that both characters that went on a date in the story ended marrying each
other. According to the record label this album is “The world's first offficesoft romance. . .” 70
When it comes to sound, these Caribbean producers do not necessarily evoke Caribbean
sounds every time. Although, when they do convey sounds related to the Caribbean, they do it
with meaningful intention. Of all the Caribbean producers mentioned in this research, Anana
Supreme is the producer who does the most music related to the Caribbean. In her album Hija
mía, vamonos de compra, Anana Supreme explicitly uses Caribbean sonic and cultural materials
from commercials, movies, and old music.
In this album, Anana Supreme creates a sonic atmosphere that alludes to a mall in
Bayamón, Puerto Rico called Plaza del Sol. The titles of all the tracks of the album are the names
of the stores that were, or are still, in the mall. For example, the track “Flor de Mayo,” alludes to
a Chinese restaurant, “TIME OUT!” which was a famous arcade also found in other malls in
Puerto Rico; “Suncoast Cinemas” was a movie theater. Anana Supreme recalls “La tienda sin
nombre” as a convenience store for which she could not remember the name because it did not
70
BloomSTRAD, Dead Fantasies Vol.1, Power Lunch Prime, April 17, 2017, Bandcamp audio streaming,
https://powerlunch.bandcamp.com/album/dead-fantasy-vol-1 .
52
have a sign in the entrance. Her intention in this album is to give the listener a point of view of
how she remembers this mall in Bayamón. Anana Supreme mentions,
As I said before, my mom did not let me be exposed to new stuff like music, art,
and television shows. But Plaza del Sol was my exposure to the world. The music,
games, fashion, and what the people are saying. I was aware of everything that was
happening inside the mall. That atmosphere influenced me to give more care to
places that the people give in vain. That is what I carry with me when I do my music
productions in vaporwave.
Visually, all of the Caribbean producers mentioned in this research project have their own
aesthetic. By looking at their Bandcamp pages, all of them have different orientations in the use
of colors, figures, and organization. As for S.a.x and 悲惨な forever, their Bandcamp page has
darker colors with a lot of use purple elements. Cubalibre.exe has a more fundamental approach
with a white background leaving the album covers to carry most of the color palette. And Anana
Supreme uses more pastel colors with Japanese and chrome animation. Besides the aesthetic in
their Bandcamp pages, certain album covers allude to Caribbean visuals that can be easily
recognizable to people from the Caribbean or the local area where they are from.
The album cover of Hija mía, vamos de compras presents a mother with her daughter
posing for a picture in an electric escalator. Because the album carries a lot of references from
the mall Plaza del Sol in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, the escalator is from the mall to which the
producer is referring (Figure 11).
In the album Aereo by S.a.x, the producer uses samples from Dominican airlines
commercials that gives an aural experience of being inside an airport. Furthermore, on the album
cover, there is an airplane that is taking off from the runway on a sunny day. The red and blue
stripes from the airplane indicate that the airplane is from a Dominican airline called Dominicana
de Aviación. Also, in the first track of the album “Dominicana de Aviación,” S.a.x uses samples
from the previously mentioned airline.

53
Figure 11. Album cover from Hija mía, vamos de compras by BloomSTRAD
Figure 12. Album cover from Aereo by S.a.x.
Figure 13. Boeing 727-100, Dominicana de Aviación.

54
Another great example of Caribbean elements in the visuals of Caribbean vaporwave is
the album cover from Olazábal by Anana Supreme. The album cover presents the title of the
album in front of what appears to be a red flower on a pink background. The title with its font
alludes to a textile company in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Also, the album is an homage to the
Puerto Rican textile company. Anana Supreme mentions:
Olazábal's fabrics do not need an introduction. Due to the wide assortment and
unsurpassed quality of its fabrics, Olazábal is the place where the most prestigious
designers and dressmakers on the island go looking for the perfect fabric for their
most exotic creations. Its fabrics have made history by dressing our beauty queens:
from glamorous evening dresses, comfortable and functional casual outfits, and
even some typical costumes, all of them have worn dresses made with Olazábal
fabrics.71
Figure 14. Album cover from Olazábal by BloomSTRAD.
71
BloomSTRAD, Olázabal, June 9, 2017, Bandcamp streaming audio,
https://bloomstrad.bandcamp.com/album/olaz-bal .
55
Figure 15. Entrance from Puerto Rican textile company Olazábal.
It is not common to make music videos for vaporwave tracks, but a collaboration
between S.a.x and 悲惨な forever resulted in a music video for the song “Unlimited” 72 from
their joint album Living a Dream. The music video is a collage of commercials and sites from the
Dominican Republic. It is possible to see samples of commercials from hotels and the airline
Dominicana de Aviación. Also, there are video samples of the beach, mountains, palm trees, and
people enjoying the pool. The whole album is an aural experience of luxury living in the
Caribbean that is only enjoyed by tourists. In the description of the album, the producers mention
the following,
Come and enjoy paradise on earth! Do not miss the opportunity to invest in a place
like this... It is a dream come true! Take a seat, see beyond sight and listen. Listen,
feel... Don't stop looking! Do not let the adversities of life manage to lose focus on
the promised land of the working man! Give yourself the well-deserved luxury of
paying attention to your whims, as this was prepared solely and exclusively for you.
Sweet dreams.73
I argue that this collage style music video is a satire to this type of social life that is not enjoyed
by the majority of the population in the Dominican Republic if not by tourist and wealthy
investors not from the country.
72
S.a.x & 悲惨な forever, Living a Dream, Aquablanca, July 10, 2021, Bandcamp audio streaming,
https://aquablanca.bandcamp.com/album/living-a-dream .
73
Ibid.
56
Caribbean Vaporwave and the internet as a Social Lived Space
As I mentioned in the first chapter, new theoretical approaches are needed for this type of
research. Vaporwave is a music that the majority of the content and experience is experienced
through the internet. This means that a critical view of the internet is needed for this work to
understand the context and how it behaves differently from the physical world. In this section, I
will discuss the notion of locality on the internet, objects in the virtual environment, and virtual
institutional entities by using examples from vaporwave to understand the internet as an
amplification of reality and a social lived space.
Limiting the internet solely to social interactions is not useful. There are alternative
experiences that go beyond communicating with somebody else. Lucy Osler and Joel Kruegger
mention that the internet enables, “. . .new forms of emotional expression, shared experiences,
and modes of betweenness that would be otherwise inaccessible.”74 This implies that activities
done in virtual environments can be perceived differently than those done in the physical
environment. This brings the question of what does it mean to say that we are on the internet?
When we say we “go online,” it is implied that we do not enter the internet in the same
way that we enter into a physical structure. There are no geographical boundaries or physical
directions that prevent us from entering a social media site. It is absurd to say that WhatsApp is
on the left of a building in a city. Consequently, for this research, I do not have to go to a
physical venue or community to study this music. For example, all of the music used for this
research was found on internet sites, primarily from Bandcamp. Also, for the interviews for this
research, I relied on video-telephone software that could make the interview possible while
74
Lucy Osler and Joel Kruegger, “Taking Watsuji Online: Betweenness and Expression in Online Spaces,”
Continental Philosophy Review 55 (2022): 11.
57
simultaneously being more than 100 miles away from each other. For this type of issue, Osler
and Kruegger, asked themselves “. . . when we talk about online spaces, are we simply being
metaphorical? Or do our online experiences have spatial dimensions? If so, how should we
understand these dimensions and how they shape our experience of sharing online spaces with
others?”75
To understand this, we use subjective spatiality to navigate the internet as a new form of
space. Osler and Kruegger argue, “We use them to construct distinctive relationships of
betweenness with one another—each with a unique intensity and character—and to animate
forms of shared feeling that sustain these relationships across distances large and small.” 76 On
sites such as Bandcamp, besides being an audio streaming service like Spotify and Apple Music,
the site offers commenting privileges to fans who downloads the music. It also allows fans
greater access to the artists because it is possible to message them directly through the site. As a
result, there is a community that is built and sustained because listeners are able to share interests
in music across large distances, which would be impeded in a physical environment.
Consequently, the conversations that move through vaporwave are faster than the conversations
in physical music scenes.
To further expand upon this notion, the experience of publishing music is different
online from the physical. In the twentieth century, there were a series of procedures to publish
the music in audio format like going to the recording studio, giving the music to a distributor,
recording the music on physical formats, releasing them in stores, and playing the recorded audio
on a device that could play them. However, virtual environments and technology cut out the
majority of the processes of music publishing. For example, a producer would record music on
75
Ibid., 8.
76
Ibid., 8.
58
their computer, release it by uploading the music to a streaming platform, and hear the music on
the computer by navigating the platform of their choice. Consequently, this helps the Caribbean
vaporwave producers enjoy their music although their physical space is hundreds of miles away.
As a result, these producers experience the internet as a “. . . resource for creating space; online
spaces that we experientially share with others.” 77 However, this only explains the experiences of
space. What are the objects in virtual space for Caribbean producers?
According to Philip Brey in his chapter, “The Physical and Social Reality of Virtual
Worlds,” objects in virtual environments are perceived in two different ways. First there are
objects that resemble physical objects and objects perceived as phenomena. Consequently, this
brings the question of to what extent the music found on these streaming sites, like Bandcamp,
resembles physical or phenomena objects. Brey mentions:
A virtual object is a digital object that is represented by a computer, usually

graphically as an object or region in a two- or three-dimensional space, and that can
be interacted with or used through a computer interface. Virtual objects are digital
objects that appear to us as physical objects and that we interact in a manner similar
to physical objects.78
When I want to hear a track from a Caribbean vaporwave producer on Bandcamp, I do
not take the song in physical format, put it inside a device that could play the recording, and hear
the music. Otherwise, I just click the track and the computer has the capabilities to read the file
that is on the site and play the track for me. In some sense, the track in digital audio file format
as a digital object is resembling the physical recording. However, Brey mentions that it is
ontologically impossible to reproduce the same qualities of a physical object in the virtual world.
Furthermore, if physical objects cannot be reproduced ontologically in the virtual realm, are
77
Ibid., 12.
78
59
personal or social experiences can be reproduced ontologically in virtual environments? Brey
understands that phenomenon can be experienced and reproduced in physical and virtual
environments.
The author mentions that “A phenomenon is an observable event or pattern, like a
thunder flash or a repeating high-pitched sound.”79 For example, receiving an insult through the
internet via an email can carry the same ontological effects as receiving them via a physical letter
sent through the mail. This can demonstrate that experiences such as hearing music can be the
same in both virtual and physical environments. However, this experience is amplified due to
having access to a computer. Different people in different geographical areas can hear the music
at the same time and collectively experience the same phenomenon. That is why the experience
of an online vaporwave scene can be similar or the same as a music scene in the physical world.
However, this experience is amplified because it is experienced by people that are not
necessarily near each other, if not, more than hundreds of miles away from each other.
Nevertheless, the scene that is in the virtual environment needs to collectively assign its status to
function as a music scene.
In agreement with Philip Brey’s analysis of the internet, some virtual spaces and objects
are assigned with institutional power that reflects directly on the physical space. Brey calls them
virtual institutional entities:
Institutional entities in virtual environments come into existence in ways similar to

institutional entities in the real world. They are assigned a status function either by
some recognized authority who is held to assign this status, or because this status
has been proposed in a nonauthoritative way and members of the community of
users have come to accept it as useful. 80
79
Ibid., 47.
80
Ibid., 48.
60
In vaporwave, there are examples of virtual institutional entities that are assigned the
same status as in the physical world. The internet record labels such as Latinwave, Eternal Vibes,
No Problema Tapes, and Caribbean Ventures LLC. are virtual institutional entities that come into
existence in similar ways as the physical record labels. Furthermore, a record label in the
physical world sometimes functions as a publishing company that manages the music in their
favor and the musician’s. Record label activities in the physical environment can also be on an
internet record label as a virtual institutional entity. For example, record labels coordinate the
production of the music. In virtual environments, the internet record label also coordinates the
release date and location of the music release. As we have seen in this research the music is
published mostly on Bandcamp. The record label manufactures the music being released. In the
virtual environment, this can be seen when there are special music productions that are released
in a physical format as collectible items. A good example is Living a Dream by S.a.x and 悲惨な
forever; the vaporwave record label Aquablanca released a limited-edition cassette consisting of
100 copies. (Figure 16). Finally, the record label markets the music to be released. Most of the
time, internet record labels like Eternal Vibes and Caribbean Ventures LLC. would promote their
music or announce the release through social media sites like Twitter.
Figure 16. Living a Dream cassette tape.

61
Conclusion
In this chapter, I contextualized the history of the internet record label Eternal Vibes to
recognize the involvement of Caribbean vaporwave producers in important projects that elevated
the recognition of Latin vaporwave producers. Then, I discussed the interviews with Caribbean
vaporwave producers about their encounters with vaporwave, involvement with the Latin
vaporwave scene, methodological practices, the meaning of vaporwave, and the notion of
Caribbean vaporwave. With the notion of Caribbean vaporwave, the Puerto Rican producer
Anana Supreme gave intriguing thoughts on how subgenres like mallsoft are difficult to
reproduce in Puerto Rico due to having different cultural and economic practices from the United
States where most of the mallsoft is made. After this discussion, I demonstrated the
characteristics of Caribbean vaporwave emphasizing the sound, visuals, and the cultural material
that are used in the music. However, I also raised the notion that being from the Caribbean does
not necessarily mean that the producer is going to use Caribbean materials for their music.
Finally, I ended the chapter with a critical view of the internet, how it applies to vaporwave, and
how the internet is an amplification of reality and a social lived space by comprehending Osler
and Krugger’s idea of subjective spatiality and Brey’s understandings of virtual objects on the
internet.
62
Chapter IV
CHAYANNEWAVE:
ANOTHER SUBGENRE FOR VAPORWAVE AS AN EXTENSION OF CARIBBEAN
VAPORWAVE
Introduction
For this chapter, I will make use of my findings on Caribbean vaporwave and apply them
to a composition I completed for my World Music Analysis class taught by Dr. Jennifer
Johnstone. Before presenting my vaporwave composition, I will discuss a Latin American
vaporwave subgenre called Luismiwave, and the relationship between the Caribbean and a
famous Puerto Rican singer called Chayanne. Both of these above-mentioned subjects discussed
in this chapter will be used as influences for my composition titled “Y tú te vas (V a p o r w a v e
M i x)” and will be part of a new subgenre that I will call Chayannewave. Finally, I will attempt
to converse and analyze “Y tú te vas (V a p o r w a v e M i x)” based on the findings of this
research.
Luismiwave
Luismiwave, as mentioned in the second chapter, is a subgenre of vaporwave that uses
audio samples by a singer called Luis Miguel. As stated before in chapter II, Luis Miguel is a
Mexican singer often considered El sol de México (The Sun of Mexico.) Luis Miguel has sung in
multiple arenas over the world since the 1980s. Also, the singer has interpreted many musical
genres like pop, bolero, and mariachi with 21 studio albums. Besides utilizing Luis Miguel’s
audio samples, these samples are used with the same methods as in classic vaporwave such as
adding audio effects, detuning, and making it slower or faster. The first formal album created for
63
this subgenre was by Mexican vaporwave producer Jesse Cassettes. The album is called L U I S
M I W A V E81 released July 27, 2016.
In this album, Jesse Cassettes uses various samples from famous songs by Luis Miguel.
As part of the project, the songs inside the album are not titled but named with numbers. The
album has five tracks that are titled in numerical order such as “L U I S M I W A V E #1” to L U
I S M I W A V E #5.” Jesse Cassettes started this type of vaporwave, subgenre trend, and since
that time other attempts have been made from this practice.
Internet record label Eternal Vibes released an album that involved various producers
from the same label called Luismiwave: Tributo a Luis Miguel (Luismiwave: Tribute to Luis
Miguel) released July 14, 2018. One of the accomplishments of this album was Luis Miguel’s
songs in a vaporwave mix through the vision of the producers - to construct a certain soundscape
related to Luis Miguel. The record label mentions, “The Latin vaporwave community comes
back to reunite their necessary forces to arm a production of grandiose caliber. This time, a
tribute to the musical icon of the 80s, Luis Miguel.”82
This album included fourteen different producers who each chose one song as a base
sample to develop a vaporwave track. For example, in the track “Metal de Amor” produced by
Skule Toyama, the base sample of the track was “Oro de ley” by Luis Miguel released in the
album 20 años (20 Years). The producer tuned the pitch of the song higher and set the tempo
faster than the original song. The album had immediate success with ninety-five users
downloading the album according to the supported by section in Bandcamp. As well, releasing a
81
Jesse Cassettes, L U I S M I W A V E, Bandcamp audio streaming, July 27, 2016,
https://jessecassettes.bandcamp.com/album/- .
82
Eternal Vibes, Luismiwave: Tributo a Luis Miguel, Eternal Vibes [EV-0018], accessed April 19, 2022,
https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/luismiwave-tributo-a-luis-miguel .
64
physical format as a CD for the fans, which is currently sold out. 83 As mentioned in the previous
chapter, the release of physical format audio, like a CD, cassette tape, or even a floppy disk that
BloomSTRAD released for her album END OF THE CENTURY: The Viral Transfer,84 is used
for special projects from the label to sell as collectible items.
Chayanne
For this musical project, I needed to find a Puerto Rican musician equivalent to Luis
Miguel. To my understanding, an important singer famous in the 1980s, with a boost of fame at
the beginning of the 2000s, is Chayanne. In this section, I will discuss a brief biography of
Chayanne. Also, because I am including a Chayanne sample for mi composition, I will discuss
how he is appropriate for Caribbean vaporwave.
Chayanne was born in Puerto Rico with the name of Elmer Figueroa Arce. At the age of
10, Chayanne auditioned as a singer for a boy band named Los Chicos (The Boys) in 1978. In
this boy band, Chayanne and the other members of the group had exposure to fame by creating
hit songs and touring successfully in other countries of South and Central America. Also, this
exposure thanks to being part of Los Chicos led them to create a film by the name of Conexión
Caribe released in the theaters in 1984. However, by 1983 before the release of the film,
Chayanne left the group to start his solo career.
His first album, Chayanne es mi nombre, was released in 1984 and, this was the first time
that Elmer Figueroa Arce presented himself as his stage name, Chayanne. After being successful
with the first album, Chayanne kept on recording studio albums with famous singles like “Fiesta
en América” and “Este ritmo se baila así,” which was used for Pepsi commercials that were
83
Eternal Vibes, Luismiwave: Tributo a Luis Miguel, Eternal Vibes EV-0018, accessed April 19, 2022,
https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/luismiwave-tributo-a-luis-miguel .
84
BloomSTRAD, END OF THE CENTURY: The Viral Transfer, Power Lunch Prime, August 6, 2018,
Bandcamp audio streaming, https://bloomstrad.bandcamp.com/album/end-of-the-century-the-viral-transfer-2 .
65
transmitted in many countries of Latin America. 85 By the late nineties and the beginning of the
2000s, Chayanne released a number of famous singles like “Provócame,” “Y tú te vas,”
“Torero,” and “Tiempo de vals,” which is song commonly used in festivities like quinceañeras.
Thus far, Chayanne has released 14 studio albums. In addition, his career was not only as a
singer as he had multiple voice acting roles in Spanish dubbed versions of movies like Tangled
(2010) and Sing 2 (2021).
To understand how Chayanne is perceived in the Caribbean and Latin America, I believe
meme culture is a great way to provide an overall comprehension. Facebook pages like “Mitú”
with more than four million followers, and “Chayanne Toreroposting” with more than one
million followers have posted Chayanne memes that demonstrate the nostalgia towards
Chayanne in Latin America. A good example is a meme from the Facebook page Mitú, which
makes Chayanne an important element of every Latin American household (figure 17). This
meme shows SpongeBob86 inside a kitchen with the mop adoring Chayanne. The assumption is
that Chayanne is mostly listened to when somebody is cleaning the house.
Another example is a meme from the Facebook page Chayanne Toreroposting that shows
a quirky kid sitting at a computer, complaining about how Chayanne is only for women (Figure
18). This is immediately followed by three photos of three physically strong men acknowledging
how they love Chayanne. With this post, the Facebook page is trying to say that anybody can
listen to Chayanne, because according to the three muscular men, he is one of the best Latin
American artists of all time. With this perception, I deemed it appropriate to create vaporwave by
85
Thinkalcubo, “TVAd Pepsi Chayanne” YouTube video, accessed April 15, 2022,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMfvYtr9xyo
86
SpongeBob is a character from a kid’s television show called SpongeBob SquarePants. The show is
about the adventures of a square yellow sponge named SpongeBob who works as a fry cook with his aquatic friends
in a town called Bikini Bottom.
66
using audio samples of Chayanne in the same method as Luismiwave. For this project, I call this
vaporwave subgenre Chayannewave.
Figure 17. Chayanne/SpongeBob meme posted by Facebook page Mitú
Chayanne? That is for women hahaha
My favorite song definitely is “Torero,

I will always put my soul in the ring”
I can’t pass on a single day without

listening to “One Century without you” so
much romance and what a beautiful voice from
my father Chayanne
Chayanne Toreroposting? Excellent. It

was about time to have a page dedicated to the
best Latin American artist of all time
Figure 18. Meme posted by Chayanne Toreroposting on October 17, 2020

67
Methods of composition for Chayannewave
To come back to S.a.x’s definition of vaporwave, I want to “expose by giving image and
representation of a past time.”87 This means that the presentation that I am exposing is a
nostalgic listening of Chayanne according to my perception of him. In this section, I will
demonstrate what methods I use to produce Chayannewave, a vaporwave tribute project of
Chayanne, and discuss my process of creation. Finally, if you would like to hear my
composition, I added the hyperlink to “Y tú te vas (V a p o r w a v e M i x)” for easy access to
the site where the track is available.
A primordial reference for this composition is Jesse Cassette’s track called “Estrenando
Amor,” released on July 15, 2018, for the Eternal Vibes compilation Luismiwave: Tributo a Luis
Miguel. In this track, Jesse Cassettes uses various samples from different sections of Luis
Miguel’s song “Estrenando Amor.” As different from other vaporwave tracks where producers
will use the whole song and put various reverb effects to do the vaporwave mix, Jesse Cassette
meticulously uses samples of Luis Miguel’s song to create another version close to that of Luis
Miguel, but at the same time far from it. For my track, I want to use one song by Chayanne as a
base sample and use audio samples from various sections of the same song.
To complete this type of project, I recommend a digital audio workstation (DAW) to
manipulate the audio samples - cutting them, employing the audio effects, making them slower,
or making them faster. For this project, I decided to use Ableton as the default DAW because it
is the software program that I use the most. The song that I use as the base audio sample is “Y tú
te vas,” originally released by Chayanne on the 2002 album, Grandes éxitos. To add more
Caribbean elements, I used audio from a television commercial aired in Puerto Rico by the bank
87
68
Doral Mortgage Corporation. The commercial shows a child convincing the viewer to get a
house similar to the one he is showing, while saying phrases in a witty manner such as “¿Tú
quieres una terraza como esta que es para mí y para mi novia?” (Do you want a terrace like this
that is for me and my girlfriend?).
For my Caribbean vaporwave composition, I began by cutting the first part of the
commercial audio sample and placing it as an introduction. After the commercial, which is
interrupted with an audio sample of a crash cymbal in reverse, I placed an audio sample of the
chorus from the song “Y tú te vas.” When the chorus ends, there is a brief moment of silence
that proceeds to a loop of the first two chords of the introduction from the same song. At this
moment, I add audio kicks and a snare to emphasize the beat more while it loops four times
before the song ends. These are the Caribbean elements to make the track Caribbean vaporwave.
Besides using audio samples from the Caribbean, I added audio effects to make the track
sound like vaporwave. First, for all the audio samples, I pitched them down five semitones below
the original sample. This makes the commercial sample sound like a very slow and low-
aggressive voice. Plus, the samples from “Y tú te vas” make Chayanne sound like he is singing
in a bass tenor register. After this, I slowed down the samples to my desired bpm of100 bpm.
With all of these audio effects and manipulations added, I concluded the song by adjusting the
mixing to my desired sound with an eight-band equalizer. Finally, I named the track “Y tú te vas
(V a p o r w a v e M i x)” and published it on Bandcamp under my artist name Jorge Hatake.
Conclusion
For this chapter, I briefly discussed the vaporwave subgenre Luismiwave and provided a
short biography of Puerto Rican singer Chayanne. With this previous information, I was able to
use the necessary techniques of Luismiwave and the cultural material from the Caribbean in
69
Chayanne’s music to make a vaporwave composition called for the new subgenre that I named
Chayannewave. By applying S.a.x’s definition of vaporwave with Chayannewave, I have
discussed my compositional process through my interpretation of the past with Chayanne, by
adding cultural elements like a Puerto Rican TV commercial, and a distant memory of how I see
Chayanne. Furthermore, I have supplied an explanation of particular digital production
techniques I employed for making “Y tú te vas (V a p o r w a v e M i x).”

70
Chapter V
CONCLUSION
Background
In Fall 2020, I started the master’s program in Ethnomusicology at Kent State University
with research goals that involved Puerto Rican plena music. However, I encountered a virtual
educational experience as a consequence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the Introduction
to Ethnomusicology class. Social distancing guidelines limited the prospect of conducting
fieldwork external to the university setting for the required research topic of the class.
Nevertheless, vaporwave sparked an interest to use data gathered from the internet to learn and
apply digital ethnography methods and research within the parameters of the limited physical
fieldwork.
I explored the academic narrative of vaporwave because there was a dearth of research
limited to studying the same three early musicians such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin, and
Macintosh Plus to define and explain it as solely a critique of capitalism with sonorous materials
that are assumed to be understood in the world. I responded to this discontinuity by analyzing
and conducting Zoom interviews with Australian vaporwave musician Andrew Lucas Healy, also
known as Doktorb. He rebels against the idea that vaporwave to be meaningful; it is supposed to
have sonorous materials that are culturally understood in the world. Among my findings include
that vaporwave can be understood as a genre that is still in development with varying
perspectives that defy the static interpretations within the academic discourse. This hard work led
to the result of presenting the paper for the past Society for Ethnomusicology Annual
Meeting on October 31, 2021.

71
In January 2021, I stumbled upon a Facebook post promoting the Latin All Stars
Vaporwave Festival. By that time, the only vaporwave festival that I knew was 100%
Electronicon hosted and coordinated by vaporwave producer George Clanton. Nevertheless, I
knew that there were Latin American producers producing vaporwave, but it seemed impossible
to me that there were sufficient enough to do a virtual three day festival. I was wrong to think
that way. Even when I was discussing that vaporwave was still developing new sounds in the
Intro to Ethnomusicology class a month before. When I started to investigate this festival, I came
across a massive amount of Latin American vaporwave producers and record labels that were
producing music with sonorous materials from Latin America that I could understand and
appreciate more than North American vaporwave. Little that I knew that this was the beginning
of this thesis.
By the beginning of the Spring semester in 2021, I still wanted to explore a thesis topic
related to the Caribbean. Even so, I still was doubtful of myself researching something related to
vaporwave. This changed when I found out that there was a Dominican vaporwave producer
with an extensive vaporwave catalog under the name of S.a.x. This sparked my interest again
towards vaporwave because I knew that there was proof of Caribbean producers making
vaporwave. Finally, I discovered that I could research a topic related to the Caribbean and my
new passion thanks to vaporwave, the internet. Under the guidance of Dr. Janine Tiffe, by
Summer 2021 I started to research a vaporwave subgenre that exposes imageries and audio
samples from the Caribbean called Caribbean vaporwave.
Summary
To make sure that Caribbean vaporwave is understood in its broad spectrum inside
vaporwave music, I needed to include a general comprehension of vaporwave from its historical
72
framework and that which has been created recently. Furthermore, one of the intentions of this
research was to navigate the reader through a series of events inside that led to the creation of
Caribbean vaporwave. As such, in the first chapter I demonstrated definitions of vaporwave
according to other scholars that defined it as a “. . . digital music subculture. . . ,”88 “a style of
music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak®,
1980s elevator music, and new-age ambiance. . . ,”89 or a “decidedly “do-it-yourself” (DIY) ethic
that incorporates a mix of traditional composition, DJ-ing, and/or production. . .”90 However,
these definitions are only partially correct because they explain how vaporwave is made but do
not include the meaning or its purpose. For this reason, I added a definition provided from my
interviews with Dominican producer S.a.x. As stated by S.a.x:
Vaporwave is a style of music where one tries to expose by giving image and
presentation of a past time usually where one grew up into or that only heard about
it. This is with the intention of presenting previous calm times with nostalgia but a
I presented a survey of literature to explain the commonalities in the narrative of
vaporwave scholarship. One of the clearest similarities is the narrow focus on the most
successful artists from the early period of vaporwave, thus characterizing the genre’s aesthetic
features as globalized music with nostalgia towards North American popular media from the
1980s to the early 2000s. Finally for the first chapter, in addition to generating alternative
discussions of vaporwave, I saw it appropriate to provide alternative theoretical frameworks to
analyze the Caribbean vaporwave music scene by applying Lucy Osler and Kruegger’s idea of
88
Sharon Schembri, “Digital Consumers as Cultural Curators: The Irony of Vaporwave,” Arts and the
Market 7 no. 2 (2017): 191.
89
Laura Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music Optimized for Abandon Malls,” Popular Music 37 no. 1 (2018):
100.
90
Ken McLeod, “Politics, Protest, and Identity,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 30, no. 4 (2018): 123.
91
73
subjective spatiality and Phillip Brey's critical analysis of virtual objects on the internet. With the
theoretical frameworks, I discussed in chapter three the notion of locality on the internet, objects
in the virtual environment, and virtual institutional entities by using examples from Caribbean
vaporwave to understand the internet as an amplification of reality and a social lived space.
In contrast to chapter one, in which I focused mostly on the scholarship of vaporwave,
the second chapter focused mostly on the historical context of vaporwave, Latin American
vaporwave, and an incident tied to vaporwave record label Latinwave Records. I exemplified the
characteristics of North American vaporwave and Latin American vaporwave through their own
social experiences and how it is applied to the music. For example, the 2016 album News at 11
by 猫シ Corp references experiences that are understood by most of the population in the United
States. The concept of the album is to present the final moments of the pre-9/11 disaster through
audio samples from various news stations, before playing the music samples that vary from
1980s North American pop and 1980s jazz music. As for Latin American vaporwave, in the track
“Cristal” from the album, Paz by Paz released in 2015, the producer used audio samples that
mention “Bogotá la ciudad capital de Colombia,” (Bogota the capital city of Colombia) from old
government advertisements videos. Unfortunately, inside the Latin American scene, there was an
incident in the internet record label called Latinwave Records that was uncovered on a Reddit
post titled “The Truth about LATINWAVE and the Hispanic vaporwave scam artist.”92 The post
stated that the creator and owner of the label was posing as other vaporwave producers, which
led to a lot of confusion about identities inside the label. Once I provided an extensive
92
U/[deleted], “The Truth about LATINWAVE and the Hispanic vaporwave scam artist,” Reddit post
nce .
74
background of vaporwave knowledge in the first and second chapters, it was appropriate to start
discussing Caribbean vaporwave.
In my third chapter, “Caribbean Vaporwave and the Internet as Social Amplification,” I
discussed the history of a record label that emerged after the fall of Latinwave Records called
Eternal Vibes. On this record label, which was founded by vaporwave producers MALO 420
from Chile and S.a.x from the Dominican Republic, 93 Caribbean vaporwave producers such as
Anana Supreme, S.a.x, and 悲惨な forever started connecting with each other. This contact
resulted in the creation of a record label called Caribbean Ventures LLC. With the notion that
there is Caribbean vaporwave thanks to this label, I discussed and analyzed the characteristics of
Caribbean vaporwave such as sound, visual, and cultural materials that are from the Hispanic
Caribbean. Nevertheless, I emphasized that being a Caribbean producer does not necessarily
mean that the musical production is going to be related to the Caribbean. Having discussed the
characteristics of Caribbean vaporwave for the last section of the third chapter, I analyzed the
vaporwave virtual music scene applying theoretical frameworks including Lucy Osler and
Kruegger’s idea of subjective spatiality and Phillip Brey's critical analysis of virtual objects on
the internet. I applied this framework by using examples from Caribbean vaporwave to
comprehend the internet as an amplification of reality and a social lived space by discussing the
notion of locality on the internet, objects in the virtual environment, and virtual institutional
entities.
The fourth chapter titled “Chayannewave: Another Subgenre for Vaporwave as an
Extension of Caribbean Vaporwave,” I utilized my findings on Caribbean vaporwave to produce
93
75
my own musical composition. In doing so, I discussed a subgenre of vaporwave called
Luismiwave that uses audio samples by a famous Mexican singer called Luis Miguel and gave a
brief biography of a famous Puerto Rican ballad pop singer named Chayanne. Both of these
discussions were examples used as influences for my composition. I used Luismiwave’s
techniques and Chayanne’s audio samples to make a subgenre I named Chayannewave. As for
this subgenre, I produced a Caribbean vaporwave track called “Y tú te vas (V a p o r w a v e M i
x)” released under my artist name Jorge Hatake.
Expanding the Research
Currently, vaporwave scholarship is not more than ten years old. However, like many
scholars, I do not want this research project left behind with no expansion to other fields. I
believe that there are numerous subjects in this thesis that can be expanded to different types of
scholarship. For example, Latin American vaporwave can be its own thesis or dissertation topic
due to its vast number of Latin American vaporwave producers. Latin vaporwave record labels
are great examples of how the virtual music scenes are organized and how they communicate
with each other. Thanks to this communication, festivals like the Latin All-Stars Festival, a
festival dedicated to and performed by Latin vaporwave producers, reveal the amount of
organization that is achieved inside this virtual music scene. Additionally, these producers
illustrate how Latin vaporwave reflects its own cultural and social background likewise to the
topic of this research Caribbean vaporwave.
Moreover, besides doing vaporwave scholarship through musicological or
ethnomusicological disciplines, vaporwave scholarship can be expanded to fields such as
Psychology, Geography, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). For example, in
psychology, the production of vaporwave music is usually undertaken in isolated environments

76
where the producer is in the comfort of his or her home using his or her computer with little
physical interaction with other people. Although different from other musical genres like
mainstream pop in this manner, there are still physical interactions between the artist, producer,
sound engineer, recording musicians, and marketing strategists. This can be studied on how
producing music alone affects their physical relationships in their social life by comparing their
social life in virtual environments.
Through geography, vaporwave can be used as a case study to understand other forms of
social spaces. In the same way as to how physical and political spaces affect the social
interactions between human beings, spaces in virtual environments, like in vaporwave music
scenes, can be studied extensively to understand how it affects the social interactions between
human beings or how it differentiates from the physical spaces. Finally, and not limited, Science
and Technology Studies can be employed to understand how the technological achievements in
the current and past century led to the complex orientations of electronic music and how the
internet has been an important factor for vaporwave to be created.
I do not expect these types of research to be produced from one day to another.
Therefore, we need more conferences or symposiums dedicated to vaporwave that are extra-
musicological. These meetings are important to exchange ideas, learn about new music inside
vaporwave or other internet musics, create alternative methods to analyze internet music, and
support diverse knowledge through other vaporwave producers from different regions. As
obvious as it seems, it is necessary because virtual music scenes move faster than physical music
scenes. Likewise, it is extremely difficult to keep up with the broad spectrum of producers that
vaporwave has and will have in the future. Vaporwave music from the early 2010s is
significantly different from the vaporwave that is being produced right now.
77
To conclude, this research was not possible without the Caribbean vaporwave producers
that participated in the interviews such as Anana Supreme from Puerto Rico, S.a.x and 悲惨な
forever from the Dominican Republic, and Cubalibre.exe from Cuba. From them, I learned
instantly that it is important and necessary to include their voices in vaporwave scholarship. It is
easy to over-analyze and over-theorize vaporwave to the point of arguing a claim that is not the
intention of the music or the producer. In my first vaporwave research at the beginning of my
master’s degree at Kent State University, Doktorb, a vaporwave producer from Australia,
brought a perspective on how vaporwave producers are aware of the vaporwave scholarship. He
argued:
Academics talks like whatever they write will only be read by other academics.
So, they can say what they want but is not true. We will have discussions on the
Discord platform about how all the academic research is bullshit. This was part of
my motivation for doing my Ph.D. The reading of academic papers is like
research in semiotic aesthetics. They only talk about one thing: “it’s a critique of
capitalism.” How can be a critique of capitalism? Nobody that I spoke to thinks
they are critiquing capitalism. I think it’s valuable as one perspective. But that’s
the only thing that academics say.94
These conversations led me to realize that when we talk about vaporwave, we are still talking
about human beings that have one passion in common, to produce vaporwave music. As
scholars, we need to acknowledge them as a community that is greatly organized and treat them
with respect. If we do not include their voices, it will be difficult to have a healthy relationship
between scholars and vaporwave producers. To finalize this thesis, my main goal has been to
demonstrate methods and theories to investigate other locations where vaporwave is produced.
From this research project, a new vaporwave scholarship will be created as a support to diverse
research, new knowledge, and involving other vaporwave musicians. Long live vaporwave!
94
Doktorb, interview by author, November 23, 2020.
78
Appendix A: Caribbean Ventures LLC. discography from 2018-2020
Album Artist Release date Country Supported by
Doble 00 Punto Historia 13-Jun-18 RD 0
Modern Hentai Dick BloomSTRAD 13-Jun-18 PR 2
You S.a.x 25-Aug-18 RD 3
Night Shift 悲惨な forever 30-Jun-19 RD 2
21/4445 BloomSTRAD 3-Aug-19 PR 0
Emisión Diurna Punto Historia 2-Oct-19 RD 0
Emisión Nocturna Punto Historia 2-Nov-19 RD 0
Portals Vapè-A-Kreyòl 15-May-20 RD 0
Septermber S.a.x 30-Sep-20 RD 1

79
Appendix B: Eternal Vibes discography from 2017-2020
Release Supported Physical

Album Artist date Country by Format
Eternal Vibes Vol 1 Comp 4-Nov-17 N/A 92

Technological Hallucinations 22-Nov-
IV Exhak 17 Argentina 93
Happy New Year: A Future
Funk Party Comp 1-Jan-18 N/A 92
Oniric Landscapes RadIoN 15-Jan-18 unknown 91
DREAMS M a g n a v o x 2 3 汉字 2-Feb-18 Mexico 89
Will you Be My Gameboy
Always? BloomSTRAD 14-Feb-18 Puerto Rico 89
World Wide Web PZA 23-Feb-18 Arkansas 89
Forever in My Heart AfternoonWalk 1-Mar-18 Chile 88
11-Mar-
v a p o r m e x '95 Comp 18 N/A 90
31-Mar-
On da Wave PLASMA 18 Argentina 90
Ｖｉｒｔｕａｌ仮想中空（Ｖ 15-Apr-
AloneAtNight ＨＳ） 18 unknown 110
30-Apr-
Kint (Re-Release) Jai Cletz 18 Puerto Rico 87
15-May-
LOOP NO. 3 Mikuintheoceangrunge 18 Mexico 87
30-May-
[L u I s m I w 4 v e] Jesse Cassettes 18 Mexico 89
Chilean Dreams Eternal Vibes 15-Jun-18 Chile 91
Eternal Sunset 27 U H F 30-Jun-18 Peru 89
De esas ノミ no brincan a mi
ベッド (Re-Release) HOLOCAUST, cowboys 10-Jul-18 Mexico 86
Luismiwave: Tributo a Luis
Miguel Comp 14-Jul-18 N/A 93 Yes
Not Elevator Music Camarena No Signal 20-Jul-18 Mexico 83
Neo Retro Perreo SIMON OPTIX 30-Jul-18 Chile 80
10-Aug-
C∃ΓΕΖΤΕ Punto Historia/ π_ROL 18 PR/RD 84
20-Aug-
walkIngnIghts ジェティX TV 18 Chile 85
30-Aug-
Vamos al Super Liquor Department 18 unknown 79
parovaya volna (edicion
especial) Mikuintheoceangrunge 10-Sep-18 Mexico 78
Imagine Logic Mikuintheoceangrunge/Malo420 20-Sep-18 Mexico/Chile 77
all i wanna say is thank you, 爱
(Eternal Vibes Edition) VAAV Social Club 30-Sep-18 Mexico 78
明菜の瑙 BloomSTRAD 15-Oct-18 PR 78
TERRENAL BABEFAKE 24-Oct-18 Peru 78
Eternal Vibes Vol 2 Eternal Vibes 4-Noc-18 N/A 99
ミス・ユニバース1987 M A L O 420 11-Jan-19 Chile 71
80
Ryuku Village Jazzy Ryuuji 24-Jan-19 Mexico 73

Alba Heights Virtual Offices Alba 64 27-Feb-19 Chile 75
LOOP NO. 4 女の子 / 私たち 27-Mar-
の女神マリヤタケウチ Mikuintheoceangrunge 19 Mexico 70
Interracial (Eternal Vibes 10-May-
Editions) PLASMA 19 Argentina 66
20-May-
Voyager Steve Joy 19 Argentina 66
30-May-
Ｃｏｎｔａｃｔコンタック A L I. A S 4 0 4 19 Spain 64
fragments default.cfg 14-Jun-19
Vanidades GALAFUTURA 20-Jun-19 Texas 64
+ Punto Historia/K a n a l V I e r 30-Jun-19 RD/ 61
La torre de Eternal M A L O 420/ S.a.x 7-Jul-19 RD/Chile 62
Funk Summer: A Future Funk
Party 2 Eternal Vibes 14-Jul-19 N/A 66
10-Aug-
Midnight Café n0x 19 Texas 57
23-Nov-
Caribbean Ghost (Re-Release) Pangea Sonido 19 Peru 53
30-Aug-
Entre las nubes videograbadora 19 53
Cruis'n Exotica (Eternal-
Arabian Edition) Lunais & Ezlo Montblanc 15-Sep-19 53
Oursource International Comp 30-Sep-19 N/A 54
The island Malo 420 10-Oct-19 Chile 51
Sdesireé Danzante PLASMA 20-Oct-19 Argentina 50
Eternal Vibes Vol 3 Eternal Vibes
13-Dec-
Salsa para Follar HENTAI中毒 19 Colombia 45
2020 Mikuintheoceangrunge 1-Jan-20 Mexico 47
The Sacred Pathways Tales Ezlo Montblanc 10-Jan-20 Brazil 46
Endless Summer (Eternal Vibes
Edition) Macintosh 128キー 20-Jan-20 Mexico 48
VISUAL Enseada Espacial 30-Jan-20 Brazil 43
4th & Anderson TVVIN_PINEZ_M4LL 15-Feb-20
Ocean Breeze trushinitas 25-Feb-20 Mexico 36
10-Mar-
El Congreso CASANDRA 20 New York 37
20-Mar-
Macina Pensant Macina Pensant 20 Brazil 36
Os sucessos de ontem, hoje e 30-Mar-
para sempre Enseada Espacial 20 Brazil 35
Punto Historia & 10-Apr-
Entidad videograbadora 20 RD 35
30-Apr-
the End of the Beginning π_ROL / BloomSTRAD 20 PR 29
10-May-
Light Emission MentalTV 20 29
30-May-
Rooftop Views Modernist 76 20 Chile 29
81
Dream Machine Travel (Re-

Release) Mediterráneo Mall 10-Jun-20 Spain 28
PRIDE Sr. Noseybonk 30-Jun-20 Peru 28
MALIBU MUSK 悲惨な forever 10-Jul-20 RD 28
PEACHY! (Delux Edition) Enjoy!! 30-Jul-20 Iowa 27
10-Aug-
Computer_Graphics Pay de Menta 20 Mexico 27
30-Aug-
limerencia dinovo 20 Chile 22
ＡＴＥＮＴＡ２－２００１
(Eternal Vibes Edition) Conexión Directa 11-Sep-20 Spain 21
Last Forever ETHEREALUST 20-Sep-20 16
Winter/Pure Romance... Ezlo Montblanc 10-Oct-20 Brazil 14
Narcisismo Online (Re-
Release) Mediterráneo Mall 30-Oct-20 Spain 8
The Best of Eternal Vibes Various Artists 4-Nov-20 8
UNWIRING THE WIRED Cleni Limones Mexico 6
82
Appendix C: Anana Supreme Discography

Record Label Album Pseudonym date by Format
Too Young to Ror

♫Anticristo♥ＨｏｔＶａｐｏｕｒ♫ and Rol 9-Oct-16 9
Latin Wave 24-May-
Records #ECBAC1スキーム π_ROL 16 43
22-Jun-
与纪尧姆一个日期在游艇 BloomSTRAD 16 4
Latin Wave Flamingo Music
Records 1͞͞9͞9͞6͞ ＵＭＢＲＡ 1͟͟9͟9͟6͟ Club 1-Aug-16 23
Latin Wave Flamingo Music
Records Bryce Club 7-Aug-16 23
18-Nov-
Lenguaje Audiovisual BloomSTRAD 16 0
Hija Mia, Vamos de Compras! BloomSTRAD 2-Dec-16 22
BarbieWAVE BloomSTRAD 7-Feb-17 5
14-Feb-
Commercial Love BloomSTRAD 17 2
Power Lunch 14-Mar-
Corporation Dead Fantasy Vol. I π_ROL 17 77 Yes
TELELTÓN: ∆××√Solo Para Personas 15-Sep-
Con Criterio Formado¥√××∆ π_ROL 16 7
€∉♡TELELTÓN: Matiné Sabatino
Sólo Para Tí♯♯♥ π_ROL 3-Jun-16 4
♥♫♥Teleltón: Matiné de Comerciales
Solo para Tí♥♫♥ π_ROL 5-Feb-16 5
Olazábal BloomSTRAD 9-Jun-17 3
10-May-
-------Fun 2k------- BloomSTRAD 18 0
19-Oct-
PHANTOM POWER BloomSTRAD 19 0
END OF THE CENTURY: The Viral
Transfer BloomSTRAD 6-Aug-18 48 Yes
Power Lunch
Corporation REQUIEM BloomSTRAD 7-Feb-19 42
Power Lunch 26-Nov-
Corporation Solara BloomSTRAD 17 31 Yes
12-Feb-
root@lyoko:/home/MAGENTA BloomSTRAD 19 0
14-Mar- Spotify
ⒷⓄⓇⓃ ⓉⓄ ⒹⒾⒺ BloomSTRAD 19 2 Release
SINGLES OF Y2K18 BloomSTRAD 1-Jan-19 0
27-Jan-
SINGLES OF Y2K19 BloomSTRAD 21 0
14-Apr-
ᴷⁱʷⁱ.ᴮᴬᵀ Annana Supreme 21 0
apathy 44 Annana Supreme 3-Jun-21 0
83
84
Appendix D: S.a.x discography

Record Label Album Pseudonym date by Format
Night S.a.x. 27-Jul-18 25

Randomize S.a.x 17-Sep-18 25
You S.a.x 25-Aug-18 26
Morning S.a.x 11-Oct-18 96
Far Away S.a.x 17-Nov-18 25
S.a.x., Nouveau Dossier,
Bogus Collective Slow Conglomerate & CALI四TYPE 7-Oct-19 288
Wonderland S.a.x & BABEFAKE 25-Jun-19 27
Aero 4 17-Aug-19 26
Randomize 2 S.a.x 30-May-19 25
Smooth Melodies S.a.x 7-Dec-19 160
Power Lunch
Corporation Is Gone S.a.x 17-Dec-19 66 Yes
Randomize 3 S.a.x 3-Jan-20 25
Living a Dream S.a.x & 悲惨な forever 10-Jul-21 97 Yes
melancholic serenades S.a.x 27-May-20 96 Yes
Virtual Beach
Club On the Road 27 U H F and S.a.x 18-Jul-20 128 Yes
Drunk parade echoflange & S.a.x 7-May-20 4
Promises for a better life S.a.x 7-Oct-20 35
Somewhere Around S.a.x 27-Apr-21 13
Stereotyped Frames S.a.x 27-May-21 13
venue S.a.x 27-Jul-21 11
S.a.x & Too Young To
Seacrest Crush ROR and ROL 25-Jul-21 26
Outlook S.a.x 7-Oct-21 11
Expressions in Time PanPan & S.a.x 7-Jan-22 7
BORIWAVE Punto Historia 18-Jun-18 0
Emisión Punto Historia 2-Dec-19 1
In De Mornin Television Nightime Television 17-Jun-19 39
愚かで大げさな音楽。(
第1巻)。超特製ハム. 9-Mar-21 11
85
愚かで大げさな音楽。(
第2巻) ウルトラディー
プ!!。超特製ハム. 4-Jun-21 6
agency forecast wheater
le broken hmm... table or something idk 15-Dec-21 0
Conception Punto Historia 17-Dec-21 0
86
Appendix E: Cubalibre.exe discography
Supported
Record Label Album Pseudonym Release date by
ser culto es el único

modo de ser libre cubalibre.exe 14-Dec-20 0
ｖｏｌｖｉｅｎｄｏ cubalibre.exe 23-Jan-21 0
distante cubalibre.exe 26-Feb-21 0
Ɑ cubalibre.exe 24-Mar-21 0
saturation cubalibre.exe 18-May-21 0
RLPW'97 cubalibre.exe 26-May-21 0
GOD'S WR4TH GOD'S WR4TH 26-May-21 0
DE4TH.ZIP GOD'S WR4TH 5-Jun-21 0
life simulations cubalibre.exe 10-Jul-21 0
hyper HYPER 10-Jul-21 0
87
Appendix F: 悲惨な forever discography
Record Label Album Pseudonym Release date Supported by
a lonely night 悲惨な forever 8-Jan-19 16

luxurious lifestyle 悲惨な forever 1-Feb-19 17
days of summer 悲惨な forever 1-Jun-19 13
Night Shift 悲惨な forever 30-Jun-19 2
seduction 悲惨な forever 25-Jul-19 13
fragrance I&II 悲惨な forever 24-Sep-19 16
darkweb recordings deluxe suites 悲惨な forever 30-Aug-19 98
Thank You for Flying with Us 悲惨な forever 12-Dec-19 84
Increasing Cloudiness 悲惨な forever 4-Feb-20 5
insatiable lust 悲惨な forever 5-May-20 13
MALIBU MUSK 悲惨な forever 10-Jul-20 28
transmisiones de medianoche 悲惨な forever 22-Feb-21 67
recuerdos vacacionales señales tropicales 6-Apr-21 1
Encuentros Nocturnos 悲惨な forever 20-Jan-22 4
88
Appendix G: Visual depiction of Vaporwave subgenres

89
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SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
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https://bloomstrad.bandcamp.com/album/olaz-bal.
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Cubalibre.exe. Ser culto es el único modo de ser libre. December 14, 2020. Bandcamp streaming
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Eternal Vibes. Luismiwave: Tributo a Luis Miguel. Eternal Vibes EV-0018, July 14, 2018.
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tributo-a-luis-miguel.
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Jesse Cassettes, L U I S M I W A V E. July 27, 2016. Bandcamp audio streaming.

https://jessecassettes.bandcamp.com/album/-.
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Punto Historia. Boriwave. June 18, 2018. Bandcamp streaming audio.

https://puntohistoria.bandcamp.com/album/boriwave.
95
S.a.x. Aereo. August 17, 2019. Bandcamp streaming audio.

https://vaporsax123.bandcamp.com/album/aereo.
S.a.x. Smooth Melodies. Gorgeous Lights LIGHT-034, December 7, 2019. Bandcamp streaming
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Bancamp streaming audio. https://occasionallytapes.bandcamp.com/album/transmisiones-
de-medianoche.

CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE Thesis Jorge Mercado

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CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE Thesis Jorge Mercado

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CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE: THE INTERNET AS SOCIAL AMPLIFICATION

A thesis submitted to the College of the

Jorge L. Mercado Méndez

Jorge Luis Mercado Méndez

B.A., University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, 2019

M.A., Kent State University, 2022

II. A BRIEF HISTORY OF VAPORWAVE, LATIN AMERICAN VAPORWAVE,

III. CARIBBEAN VAPORWAVE AND THE INTERNET AS SOCIAL

IV. CHAYANNEWAVE: ANOTHER SUBGENRE FOR VAPORWAVE AS AN

Expanding the Research………………………………………………………….75

1. Album cover from Floral Shoppe (2016) by Macintosh Plus…………………………...19

2. Album cover from Palm Mall (2014) by 猫 シ Corp……………………………………21

3. Album cover from L U I S M I W A V E (2016) by Jesse Cassettes……………………..23

4. Latin All-Stars Vaporwave Festival poster……………………………………………....26

5. Screenshot of various Bandcamp accounts posted by Elconejitocallado11 on Reddit…..31

6. Album cover from The Sacred Pathways Tales by Ezlo Montblanc…………………….35

7. Album cover from Will You Be My Gameboy Always? by BloomSTRAD……………...36

8. Album cover from Kint by Jai Cletz……………………………………………………..37

9. Album cover from Eternal Sunset by 27 UHF…………………………………………..38

11. Album cover from Hija mía, vamos de compras by BloomSTRAD…………………….53

12. Album cover from Aereo by S.a.x……………………………………………………….53

13. Boeing 727-100, Dominicana de Aviación………………………………………………53

14. Album cover from Olazàbal by BloomSTRAD…………………………………………54

15. Entrance from Puerto Rican textile company Olazábal………………………………….55

16. Living a Dream cassette tape…………………………………………………………….60

17. Chayanne/SpongeBob meme posted by Facebook page Mitú…………………………..66

18. Meme posted by Chayanne Toreroposting on October 17, 2020………………………..66

something from you.

for you in my life.

creative musicians like you. Long live vaporwave!

Opening Statement and Background

manipulation techniques to the samples. While the above is my interpretation of vaporwave,

other scholars have attempted to define vaporwave in a variety of ways.

Sharon Schembri defines vaporwave as a “. . . digital music subculture. . .” 1 Laura Glitsos

me the following definition of vaporwave,

focus of this research.

Needle Drop, Pitchfork, and Sputnikmusic.

recognized by non-vaporwave fans. It presents in a dark pink background a marble bust of

and Destroyed by the Internet.”

heard in the contemporary vaporwave scene.

Is it a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it? Both and neither. These

Because of this analysis of vaporwave, Harper’s vaporwave is seen as a critique of

connecting vaporwave with capitalism. As consequence, the narrative of “vaporwave as a

mentions, “Vaporwave exploits the lingering representations of this period, challenging

consumerism that is experienced in the twentieth-first century. McLeod mentions, “Although

ideology appears to be a simultaneous critique and parody of consumerism and corporate

theoretical orientations are needed for this research.

of the internet. Specifically, Tetsurō Watsuji’s phenomenology of aidagara (betweenness) with a

internet or the virtual space. Osler and Kruegger explain that,

means that the internet is a socially lived space.

Brey uses an ontological approach to virtual objects to answer them.

A virtual object is a digital object that is represented by a computer, usually

is impossible to reproduce the same qualities of a physical object in virtual environments.

mentions, “A phenomenon is an observable event or pattern, like a thunder flash or a repeating

called virtual institutional entities. Brey mentions,

Institutional entities in virtual environments come into existence in ways similar to

approach. In order to understand virtual environments and vaporwave music it is necessary to

apply these theoretical approaches to obtain alternative understandings of the music.

vaporwave made in the United States?

Caribbean vaporwave, I will compose music based on Caribbean vaporwave.

At this time, there is no available or published vaporwave bibliographic reference book

scholarship such as Digital Anthropology, Digital Ethnography, Digital Geography, and

internet music and vaporwave.

interviews will be conducted through the internet with a telecommunication peer-to-peer

2. Album cover from Palm Mall (2014) by 猫シ Corp……………………………………21

Figure 2. Album cover from Palm Mall (2014) by 猫シ Corp.

Lisergishnu (Chile), and バーチャルボーイＡｔｓ u (Chile). Consequently, it seems that the