Far Out There Character Soundtrack: Lynne-3

Lynne is a character perpetually covered in neon pink and pastel blues, often with squiggly 90s patterns. What kind of music do YOU think this kid listens to? Clearly, the answer is ANGRY GROWLING ATONAL DEATH METAL. Get ready for lots of umlauts and blasphemous band names! No, but seriously, Lynne likes Vaporwave. Of COURSE he likes Vaporwave. Even aside from the omnipresent color scheme, he’s the one “cool kid” in a crew of noisy children, the one standing calmly in the back while everyone else wigs out. It only makes sense that Lynne’s music of choice is going to be infamously chilled out AND of the stereotypically ”background” variety. On the flipside of that, though, he’s also unbearably image-conscious and DESPERATE to maintain that “cool” image, which also makes Vaporwave a good choice for the kid. I mean, WOW, people like to go on and on about how to properly interpret the philosophy behind slowed-down loops of Weather Channel music or what’s on the exact checklist of what kind of GIFs are an acceptable aesthetic choice. Vaporwave would ABSOLUTELY be a good fit for any kid who thinks too hard about what other people think about him.

And I don’t just mention that because I’m a bitter, cynical old man who needs to tear down things I don’t understand (also GET OFF MY LAWN) but also to segue into something important about this particular soundtrack. I’m going to indiscriminately use the term “Vaporwave” here to describe songs that are almost CERTAINLY not all considered to be a part of that genre. I also don’t really care. Maybe that one song really IS officially categorized as Mallsoft or Chillwave or Future Funk and I really am being extremely lazy by throwing the catchall “Vaporwave” term around to refer to everything. Whatever. Some of these character soundtracks are born out of my deep personal interest in the music in question and heartfelt desire to share that music with the world. Lynne’s is NOT one of those soundtracks, this is another one that was purely dictated by the character. That’s not to say I HATE Vaporwave or any of its various spinoffs. I unironically enjoy Smooth Jazz and City Pop and the other, older stuff these songs were reverse engineered out of, so of course I can enjoy the self-important younger version. But this is definitely another genre where my knowledge is pretty surface level. I mean, it IS pretty much designed to be played in the background while doing something else, after all. I can rarely be bothered to seek out other tracks by that one artist who did that that one song I liked, or to discover better, lesser-known artists lurking behind the more prominent ones. I’m sure there’s objectively better stuff out there than what I pulled out of my personal collection here, but I just don’t care enough to seek it out. Honestly, I don’t think Lynne cares all that much either. He probably just downloaded this mix wholesale from somebody else he thought was cool enough to copy, I bet he knows even less about the actual artists than I do. As long as he thinks it makes him look cooler while he broods in the corner of the room, that’s all that matters.

So now that I’ve openly expressed my ambivalence to what I’m about to write, aren’t you just TOTALLY MOTIVATED to spend time reading it? Yeah, sorry about that. I guess I spoiled myself with all those Cowboy Bebop blogs and their music that I actually have an emotional connection to. It’s also a lot more fun to write these blogs if the soundtracks have more songs nobody really talks about. Lynne’s soundtrack, on the other hand, is bookended by "リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー" and “ECCOと悪寒ダイビング” off of Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus and has “A6” from Chuck Person’s ECCOJAMS Vol. 1 in the middle. What the HECK is there left to say about baby’s first Vaporwave albums? They’ve kind of been analyzed before.  I mean, it’s fitting for a little kid who hasn’t had a chance to dig too deep into anything yet, but it doesn’t give me much to work with. Then again, relatively less blogged-about tracks like “Summer Night” by ESPRIT 空想, “YEA” by RITCHRD, “Space Cowboy” by Herr Doktor, “MANNEQUIN” by Diskette Park, “Just Begun” by Saint Pepsi, or “あなたの目で失わ” by t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 don’t exactly inspire me to say much about the rich history of plunderphonics either. Again, I just listen to this stuff as background noise, and I’m pretty sure the same goes for Lynne.

Things get nominally more interesting when we get to the stuff I know isn’t “technically” Vaporwave because it’s actually written and recorded from the ground up rather than just pre-existing material re-contextualized. Probably the most well known song of that sort here is “Resonance” by HOME (a.k.a. That Song From That One YouTube Clip You Saw That One Time), though I think “Caligula” and “Mind Mirage” by Windows96 are a lot more interesting to my ears. I think the whole One Hundred Mornings album does a really great job at evoking the feel of those 80’s-era Contemporary Instrumental albums in a more modern context (go check out Sophia’s soundtrack to see what I’m talking about there). Props also go to “Taipuki All Inclusive” by Bubble Keiki バブル景気 for apparently being another all-original composition but doing such a good job at evoking the sound and feel of a slowed-down 80’s snippet that I REEEAALLY had to double check myself on Google to make sure that’s not actually what it was. Which is to say, I’ll feel especially stupid if it turns out I was still wrong about that even after checking. “New Memories” by Capo Blanco is a bit more obvious as a modern TRYING to sound retro rather than an actual retro recording, but has a nice electronic groove going for it none the less.  I can easily picture Lynne standing at the back of the room bobbing his head to this, trying desperately hard to look like he’s not trying as hard as he is.

But, of course, my favorite stuff is the oldest stuff; the primordial, Proto-Vaporwave. There’s a handful of tracks here that actually date back to the very days that modern plunderphonics mine for samples, yet somehow ALREADY have the exact sound these new kids have been trying to manufacture. Easily the most famous of these tracks is “Moments In Love” by Art of Noise, a pioneering experiment with sampling in Pop music. Sure, that’s “sampling” in the early, digitally-reproducing-sound-clips-on-a-keyboard sense rather than looping whole sections of pre-existing songs, but it’s still where we got the term. Within the narrow halls of Aestheticopolis, though, the best-known track is almost certainly “Island Sunrise” by Software. Seriously, it’s astounding how hard this song hits all the key notes that Vaporwave tries to be DECADES before it was even a thing. Slow repetitive groove, looping drum beat and synth keyboards, general “spa at a fancy hotel” vibe; the only thing “Island Sunrise” is missing is the lo-fi, muffled cassette tape warble. A number of modern Vaporwave songs have tried to “sample” the song, which just consists of playing “Island Sunshine” back at different speeds because there’s really nothing else you can do to it to make I fit the aesthetic any more than it already does.

But while that’s my favorite song here from a purely musical standpoint, it’s not my favorite find from a curiosity standpoint. THAT would be “Tomorrow’s Fashion” by Geoff Bastow, a track off his Tomorrow’s World album. It’s one of those library/stock music albums that wasn’t really made to be sold in stores or anything, but rather so tracks could be licensed for use in TV shows or commercials or, I dunno, industrial training films or something. The point is, “Tomorrow’s Fashion” is EXACTLY the sort of obscure song that aspiring producers love to slow down, dub an extra drum track over, and release as their own Vaporwave classic. It’s got a cool relaxing groove, a catchy synth hook, and a general early-80s atmosphere that just DEMANDS to be posted on YouTube with some looping anime GIF… but nobody seems to have heard of it. I checked those “who sampled what” websites, and as far as I can tell NOBODY has ever used a piece of “Tomorrow’s Fashion” in another song. I cannot fathom how this happened, but it makes me feel kinda cool to know about this random little gem nobody else seems to have noticed. If that’s how jaded old grown-up ME feels, then Lynne-3 would absolutely CHERISH a chance to dismissively tell other people “It’s really obscure, you probably haven’t even heard of it.”

Oh, and in closing, despite how much Future Funk and the like loves to mine City Pop for samples, this soundtrack somehow managed to come together without a single Japanese song on it. I’d normally bemoan this lapse on my part… but since around a third of these songs or artists have completely gratuitous Japanese text in their names, there’s actually something strangely appropriate in the track list being entirely Western in nature.

(This was another fairly easy YouTube playlist to put together, what with it focusing on one of the most Internet-based genres we as a species have yet to cough up. Some of these things BEGAN as YouTube posts, remember? That said, I did have to do a bit of hunting to find posts that were accessible in all regions. It’s kind of funny, but one of the fundamental problems of using fan posts instead of official videos is that the audio quality is often lower… which is kind of a non-issue in a genre where “warbly boom box cassette player hiss” is considered a valid artistic flourish. The weird thing, though, is I again found several videos that were blocked in Denmark and ONLY Denmark. Are the Danes secretly setting up with own, private, fully-enclosed Internet or something? It’s just weird that this specifically has been popping up multiple times is all. I actually had a bit of a scare over “Tomorrow’s Fashion,” though. That was one of the original focal points of the whole soundtrack, as befitting it’s climactic place in the blog post, but the original YouTube post where I discovered it wound up getting deleted sometime between my putting together the original draft of the playlist and this final version you’re all seeing now. In fact, for a while, the only version of “Tomorrow’s Fashion” I could find on YouTube was a rip of the entire Tomorrow’s World album, which… would have slightly disrupted the flow of the soundtrack. Thankfully, a newer if slightly lower quality posting turned up by the time I finally got around to writing this up. I’m sure you’re all as relieved as I was.)

Lynne-3's YouTube Playlist