ESPRIT 空想
ESPRIT began in 2012 as the sample-based side project of George Clanton, working in what its own booking page calls classic vaporwave style. The first two EPs, Girls Only and Summer Night, are still treated as essential first listening for the genre.
virtua.zip (2014) is the turn: an album composed entirely of original material, arriving a year before 2814's Birth of a New Day made the same argument at length. Two of the genre's clearest moves away from sampling happen inside eighteen months of each other, independently.
200% Electronica followed roughly three years later, described as the successor to virtua.zip and the sister album to Clanton's own 100% Electronica — chopping samples from his own compositions, which is a neat closing of the loop for a project that started by chopping other people's.