Spectreview: 猫 シ Corp. & t e l e p a t h – Building a Better World

-LIGHT CORAL-

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Vaporwave started as a logical extension of the short-lived “plunderphonics” movement of the late-90’s, a way to synthesize what was already dead in the grave and give it new life. The goal of vaporwave is in the name: “vapor,” a vanishing act that mirrors the current era of music consumption by releasing works anonymously and letting them dissolve into the ether. Ironically, this results in a disproportionate number for low-effort, tossed off works that have, almost humorously, nearly killed itself off in collective mediocrity. Jornt Elzinga (of 猫 シ Corp., which translates loosely to Cat System Corp) is a Dutch producer that’s been fiddling with sub-genres like dreamwave since 2013, and his newest collaboration with fellow producer t e l e p a t h (who to this day remains incognito) is a work that takes what’s already commonplace among vaporwave albums (overt appropriation of Japanese city pop, sample layering, dreamlike atmosphere) and lays the first few bricks towards something approximating an evolution. Many well-known artists in this field create whole landscapes out of consistent textures and sounds, but Elzinga and t e l e p a t h, both legends in their own right, are laser-focused on this project, which sees both of them stepping firmly out of pop pastiche and into something more elusive and introspective.

The tone is set in the album’s brilliant opening number, “目覚め”: as taiko drums thunder ominously in the distance, mellifluous synths shift the scene from a cold cityscape to a lush, verdant jungle caught in a rain shower. This sample of falling rain hovers over the entire runtime, a simple yet inspired trick that cements the listener in an environment that’s implicitly calming and downcast even as it morphs slowly from sublime, magical sunsets (“Hiraeth V”) to matrices of incandescent, crystalline digits (“Sector 131”). The samples here are woven so inextricably that they come off as original pieces, and this lack of distracting, displacing intrusion further contributes to a complete sonic world. It’s an album full of the kinds of remarkable base pleasures present in some of vaporwave’s best works, but there’s also a peculiar intellectual edge to this album in the way it strikes a nebulous area between utopia and dystopia. This is hinted at most explicitly in the melancholy title track, as soft saxophone hovers over samples of transit announcements and moody opaline synth twinkles like an update of David Bowie’s “Subterraneans.” Elzinga and t e l e p a t h want you to question whether the world they’re building is truly “better”, and this overarching theme, which calls to mind modern issues surrounding propaganda and techno-solutionism, lends an exciting depth and a powerful emotional resonance to the album’s gorgeously hazy glow. Dazzling on many levels, Building a Better World is a superb project from two of vaporwave’s long-standing titans that presents a possible direction for a quickly stagnating genre.

Recommended for lucid dreaming.