8
votes
~music Listening Club 10 - ▣世界から解放され▣
Hello all you good people, we made it to week 10! Here we've got this week's user-voted record: ▣世界から解放され▣ by ░▒▓新しいデラックスライフ▓▒░ !
From @Cleb:
Internet Club takes a bizarre set of samples consisting of things from Dragon Ball to some random Japanese radio show and turns them into a glitchy, repetitive vaporwave project that sounds just a little bit unhinged.
Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the artist, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with ▣世界から解放され▣. Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!
If you'd like to stream or buy the album, it can be found on YouTube or bought on Bandcamp.
I picked this album because while I don't really enjoy it that much, I think it's an interesting thing that Internet Club put together. It got kind of a cult following attached to it and it's just kind of an oddball thing that crosses my mind from time to time.
There's not really anything super unique or extremely technical or anything going on in this album. It's composed of a lot of old samples from mostly Japanese media, molded into this atmosphere that sounds kind of.... off. Most of the tracks are really light kind of ambient-based stuff with maybe a glitched or small vocal samples that comes in and out and it just kind of works to make you feel a little bit uncomfortable. Is it the greatest vaporwave thing ever? Not in my opinion, but it's something that I think is a pretty cool thing to hear if you've got ~20 minutes to spare and the repetition doesn't bother you.
I have what I would like to consider a well refined taste when it comes to music. I don't particularly care for "genre music" and prefer music to have interesting evolving soundscapes.
This is the complete antithesis to my tastes.
Albums like this are difficult to critique properly. It's all too easy to dismiss them entirely. But that would be pointless to do in the context of this post.
There is a point in Georgio by Moroder where Moroder mentions letting go of concepts like melody and rhythm. Albums like this take that concept to the very extreme, giving up on everything western music has built. In spite of frequently being made up of sampled music, this album abandons all aspects of western music. The looping creates a natural beat, but the artist always seems to create intentional breaks to jarr you out of any pattern you may have been enjoying. All that remains is an aesthetic. And since aesthetic is even more subjective than any other aspects of music, these recordings can be neither good nor bad.
Personally, I like the Japanese aesthetic. I have really been enjoying ミカヅキBIGWAVE lately, and it has aesthetic simelarity in spite of not being vaporwave.
But let's be frank here; how many aspects of music can you take away from a recording before you can no longer call it a song? If you make a boat that doesn't have a hull and doesn't float, is it still a boat?
I generally really like chill/vaporwave and glitch music, and even purely experimental music is growing on me the more I listen to it. This album had elements of all three, so you would think I would have enjoyed it... and yet the only thing I felt while listening to it was disappointment and incredible levels of annoyance. Disappointment because some of these tracks had really interesting elements in them and could have been really good if mixed in to full songs (rather than just weird little snippets like they are)... and annoyance because every time a track piqued my curiosity, instead of building up to something more they just repeated a couple of times until they abruptly ended. :(
Interesting and strange, but not particularly enjoyable, IMO.
Uninteresting source material, very basic edits and composition, sonically dull, I feel like a 1 to a strong 1.5 over 5 on that one.