Water Music I: Enjoy Yourself
I.
The above track is a – maybe the– example of that music genre named Vaporwave. And let me be fast here and immediately give you established vapor doxa: Emerging in the early 2010s, Vaporwave was a music genre that harkened back to iconic interfaces of 1980s and 1990s Western capitalism (after Japan’s 1980s-boom, but before 9/11): malls, offices, skyscrapers, hotel lounges, VHS tape, the internet, and the like. Chopping and bending samples from R&B, smooth jazz, guitar pop, videogame soundtracks, or synth ambient, decorating the album covers with impossibly cheap 3D objects, and indiscriminately sprinkling track titles and artist names with East Asian characters, Vaporwave delivered something like a surrealist take on late 20th century consumer culture; a profoundly weird, dreamy semiosynthesis.
Damaged muzak manifestos, critique kind of glitching in and out of existence.
I have written about Vaporwave elsewhere, and I keep being fascinated by its fanged nostalgia. I will also tirelessly defend my notion that luxury elite’s world class (2015) is one of the best albums of the last decade. Yet the past tense of the paragraph above is crucial: All non-delusional vapor doxa admits that the genre is a thing of the past (and as with any good avant-garde, everyone hurried to be the first to pronounce its death), having had a nice shot a meme-ishness from 2010 to ca. 2017 before its punchlines ran dry: There was only so much mileage to get out of the 1980s-1990s-rehash, especially as the fundamentally synthetic approach of vaporwave tended to let everything in its catalogue sound very much alike, and its anti-innovation stance always made it ripe for outdatedness. In the great parliament of music, Vaporwave had always been of the party of the afterparty, and by the late 2010s, even that seemed over. The world post-2016 demanded a different edge than Vaporwave’s one-trick-phony.
Now I do not necessarily disagree with vapor doxa, I think this is all fair and correct, and obviously quite reductive, and justly so (non-reductive historiography is lame). But I still feel like adding something, an aspect that I think has been somewhat unjustly overlooked by the doxa, and that is the idea of placing Vaporwave not just on the wave-continuum, or the continuum of 4chan-friendly online micro-genres, or of 2010s artsiness, but within a larger and longer continuum, which I will tentatively call water music.
II.
The first kind of water music is the one of Water Music, Händel’s Baroque masterpiece of royal entertainment, composed on occasion of King George I’s boat trip on the Thames in July 1717. This is what Wikipedia says:
The first performance of the Water Music is recorded in The Daily Courant, the first British daily newspaper. At about 8 p.m. on Wednesday, 17 July 1717, King George I and several aristocrats boarded a royal barge at Whitehall Palace, for an excursion up the Thames toward Chelsea. The rising tide propelled the barge upstream without rowing. Another barge, provided by the City of London, contained about 50 musicians who performed Handel’s music. Many other Londoners also took to the river to hear the concert. According to The Courant, ‘the whole River in a manner was covered’ with boats and barges. On arriving at Chelsea, the king left his barge, then returned to it at about 11 p.m. for the return trip. The king was so pleased with Water Musicthat he ordered it to be repeated at least three times, both on the trip upstream to Chelsea and on the return, until he landed again at Whitehall.
The music is typically Händelian: luminous, clear, and calm, with dashes of dramatic glitter, triumphant enough to suit the King, and composed for an orchestra large enough to be suited to outdoor, water-surface performance. It is also fairly repetitive (although maybe not especially repetitive compared to contemporary works), and if we believe The Courant, it was not only repetitive, but also repeated “at least three times”, maybe even at least three times upstream and then at least three times more downstream (I’m not sure if Wikipedia’s wording is really clear here). Taking Händel’s boat trip soundtrack as the archetypical water music of one kind, we could define this kind as music that is (1) bright and luminous, (2) functional (it was made to suit a specific occasion), and (3) can stand (or even profit from) repetition.
But now imagine you’re a fish, a Baroque fish even, and you’re swimming about in the Thames on July 17th, 1717, and what you hear are these strings and these oboes and these reeds and such, all those fairly high-pitched, sparkling layers of Händel’s score. But of course you’re underwater, so you hear them not as King George I and his entourage hear it, but in the subdued, greenish tones transmitted through the water, the brilliance of the strings muffled, their edge taken away; Händel’s George On A Boat OST softened and darkened, dimmed, like a summer day seen through almost-shut blinds. And unlike the King and his entourage and the audience distributed on the multitude of boats on the Thames, you do not see the orchestra, none of the frills and frocks, none of all that human sherbet floating on the River surface on this July evening; instead, these sounds come to you as disembodied and without origin, curiously suspended in the dark water, drifting in and out of audibility as the waves of the music and the waves of the river sometimes drown out whole notes. And you’d have a hard time even naming the instruments, because you’re a fish.
What you would hear, then, as that hypothetical fish, is water music of the second kind. It is simply water music of the first kind, but heard from beneath the water surface. It is the submarine approach to water music; not concerned with ‘sounds that can be heard underwater’ (whale sounds and the like), but with what happens to water music when it sinks, inevitably, below the water line into a space where light and luminosity reaches you only in ways, where sound is warped, and tends towards something like pure reverb. Water music of Type 2 tends to hollow out Type 1’s brightness, to darken its luminosity, and to lessen its edge. Further, the functionality of Type 1 – the ways in which it is, essentially, occasional music, with a location, a time, and a purpose – is rewildened and relativized. Doing so, Type 2 plays with the tension existing between the occasionality of Type 1 and its repeatability; for the very idea of repetition obviously allows for a repetition beyond the situational limits: King George I can request that Water Music is played ten times on July 1717, but then for it to be played again in December 1718, or, really, whenever (and T.C. Boyle’s 1981 novel Water Music toys with this idea to great comic effect); thus stretching the music’s specific occasionality. I know this is trivial, but I do think that the tension of occasionality and repetition is crucial to how water music of Type 2 works, because the repetition will bear a trace of the occasion (the occasion reverberates), and there would be a lot more to say about that.
But instead, let me first widen the lens a little bit. From now on, I will speak of Water Music when I mean Type 1 and Underwater Music when I mean Type 2, because I hope that by now it is clear that what I call Underwater Music has nothing to do with the wailing of whales and is not restricted to music actually played underwater. Underwater Music is a specific way of dealing with Water Music, which, in turn, does not actually need to be played on water. Händel’s Water Music is Water Music, but then so is his Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749), because, again, it is occasional music, with a specific setting and function, establishing a certain mood (in this case, celebratory), sounding clearly and brightly, and is repetitive. Its specific setting is not a water surface, but that doesn’t matter. Underwater Music, for a long time, exists only in that accidental way mentioned above; it might have existed to some animals and plants, but it was, to my knowledge, not intentionally composed in that way.
For a quite simple reason, I’d argue: music had not yet developed the sort of repetition that allowed for decay and disintegration, for hollowing and darkening; that is, it had not yet developed the technological instruments to actually record music; and without recording, there was none of the forgetting so crucial to Underwater Music, none of the notes drowned out in the waves, disappearing, never even reaching the fish (or the algae, or whatever listens, down there). There had to be a medium, and air, famously, had already been declared not a medium, but music itself (an aria, an air, is the same thing as a melody). Somewhere, there had to be a fissure and a darkening. An Inbetween. So it is probably no accident that a genuine musical interest in submarine phenomenology only appears with the advent of recording techniques around 1900.
So, yes, Debussy’s Cathédrale Engloutie (1910) is a true progenitor of Underwater Music. First of all simply because of its explicit fascination with submerged structure(s) – the title translates to Sunken Cathedral. This is really very telling, because of course, the thing submerged, in Underwater Music, is Water Music, that is, a (kind of) human-made structure. Again, Underwater Music is not about submarine nature sounds and the like, but about a cultural product in a state of submersion. But second of all, it is a true progenitor because Debussy included it almost first thing on his first piano rolls, that ancient technique of phonography. The submerged cathedral as the recorded cathedral: it is for the sheer semiotic and theoretical density of this image that one could justly name this piece an early document of Underwater Music.
When Jean Cocteau polemicized against Debussy by saying that everyone has had assez d’aquariums and that the times called for clarity, he pitched, among other things, a new kind of Water Music (clear, lucid, brilliant, suited for that great occasion that is Modernity) against the budding and bubbling strand of its submarine underbelly, a new musical undercurrent that, Cocteau notwithstanding, persisted; persisted precisely because the great occasion named Modernity would obviously produce its River Thames, with its boat parties on top, a water line, and an immense reverberation underneath.
III.
So what I try to say is that we could place Vaporwave on that undercurrent continuum, consider it a part of Underwater Music. And that it would be worthwhile to do so because it makes everything a tiny little bit more complicated and interesting, and Vaporwave a tiny little bit less over (and simultaneously absolutely over, infinitely over).
This would mean considering Vaporwave as related to what those Baroque fishes hear down in the River Thames waters while the King’s orchestra blasts Händel’s Water Music at full tilt and on repeat going upstream and then downstream again.
In terms of description, very little would change, I guess. Core characteristics of Vaporwave would stay the same, as would the vapor canon. It might even seem banal to say that Vaporwave is an Underwater Music to a Water Music, or an Underwater Culture to a Water Culture; that those 1980 lounge jazz tracks appear to us, in Vaporwave, as degraded echoes of a party ‘below surface’, of history passing above you in large boats (or airplanes), that everything seems disembodied and physically rich at the same time, just like if you heard sounds through and within a large body of water, but without ever seeing the source of those sounds. It might seem banal, and it probably is, to say that the sounds of TV static and damaged cassette tape fetishized by Vaporwave are ways of filtering sound similar to the way a hilariously dirty river in the middle of 18th-century London would filter it; to say that on a river floor, everything is a sample. 1980s lounge jazz, mall muzak, or elevator music, are obvious examples of Water Music (bright, luminous; occasional [made for a setting, setting a scene]; and surviving or even profiting from a lot [a shitload of, even] repetition). (It doesn’t even matter whether it existed or not; if you can’t Händel music at its worst, you don’t deserve it at its best.) And a lot of vapor doxa has focused on how Vaporwave is about occasionality in indirect ways, how it evokes settings and surroundings: huge, quintessentially air-conditioned mall complexes; Wall Street money fuelled cocktail parties on Long Island; terminally liminal transit hotel lobbies. Also, everything depicted in this video to luxury elite’s “Self Discovery”: a kind of brilliant, luminous, glittering, good life. How long did Water Music reverberate beneath the Thames surface, celebrating a King’s pleasure trip long after the fact, to beings indifferent to the concept of monarchy?
Placing Vaporwave on the Underwater Music continuum entails just a slight shifting of accents; yes, mallsoft is interested in the acoustics of huge malls, but it is not at all accidental how the largest and most interesting of malls all too often feature those faux fountains, maybe even that bit of lush flora around an artificial little waterfall surrounded by escalators; or how malls and their onslaught of glass and light, and their always-far-away music, and, exactly, those little bits of pseudo-tropical vegetation, all but evoke aquariums.
When it comes to the historiography of the genre, taking Vaporwave as a type of Underwater Music means that two albums to consider would be William Basinski’s Watermusic and Watermusic II. Released in 2000 and 2003 respectively, their publication dates frame the final threshold of what classic Vaporwave considers ‘its’ era, namely 9/11. Strenuous, you will say. Yes, of course, I will answer; but then I would point you to perhaps his most famous work, The Disintegration Loops and its sequels The Disintegration Loops II, III, and IV, which, released in 2002 and 2003 respectively, sit squarely between the two Watermusic-albums. All of these are Ambient albums, and the way The Disintegration Loops works is that in the 1980s, Basinski searched for and recorded sounds on shortwave radio and synthesizers and delay systems and the like, and put them on tape. Then, in the late 1990s, he let those tape loop for a very, very long time, tracking and, again, recording them (this time digitally). The extreme amounts of looping wore the tapes down and the damage produced all sorts of acoustic effects: that’s the disintegration in the title. He also put a lot of reverb on it afterwards, but what matters is not the ‘factual’ accuracy of sound degradation, but the idea of disintegration through repetition, this kind of falling apart of music, and the gradual inaudibility of some of it, as parts of the appeal. This is already somewhat fish-type listening, algae reception. Note, also, how history comes back to play a little role in all of this, with the original sounds being recorded in the 1980s, and then the album being made in the early 2000s. This matters, too, I guess; and also how Basinski then turned it into occasional music, dedicating it to the victims of 9/11 and adorning the album cover with a self-taken photograph of the 9/11-smoke over NYC. On the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, The Disintegration Loopswere performed in their entirety and with live(I cannot stress the importance of this adjective enough, here) orchestra at the MOMA. Exactly (to the day) two months later, Macintosh Plus releases Floral Shoppe (the album that the track hat starts this article is on). Its album cover prominently features the World Trade Center, intact.
Certainly, it would mean taking seriously that Daniel Lopatin’s seminal Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010) is not only a take on videogame sound aesthetics (and on a boatload of 80s stadium pop anthems), but is explicitly concerned with a videogame taking place underwater (In the title-providing Ecco the Dolphin, you play a dolphin).
Then, there was this thing called Seapunk, a movement quickly declared a micro-micro-genre offshoot by vapor doxa, which turned the submarine-elements all the way up to eleven, establishing an absolutely thrilling mix of mid-1990s dotcom aesthetics and aquatic vibes, a sub-style considered minor and obscure even for Vaporwave standards – but championed by one of the best arbiters of taste of the past decade, Rihanna, in her 2012 SNL "Diamonds" performance. And I think Seapunk leads us directly to one heart of the matter, because it identified submarine and Internet aesthetics in a way that shows how one can really be the flipside of the other; that is to say, that speaking of the Internet, in Vaporwave, meant speaking of an underwater world, and that speaking of an underwater world, in turn, meant speaking of the Internet. It is crucial to remember, here, that over 95% of all international Internet traffic passes through an immense web of underwater fiber optic cables (constructed by an equally immense and labyrinthine web of international consortia). For Vaporwave, it is as if the information passing through those ocean floor cables would imbue itself with some of this ocean floor quality, turning both 1980s Wall Street and 1990s Dotcom culture into a bombastic form of organized submechanophilia. Seen in this light, Seapunk was the subgenre that pushed this notion to maximum explicitness, but it only accentuated and celebrated something all Vaporwave would agree with: that all hardware is, to a large degree, wetware.