Field guide · 66 terms
Glossary
Sound & subgenres
- Vaporwave Wikipedia →
- The microgenre itself: slowed, chopped-and-screwed samples of 1980s–90s smooth jazz, R&B and elevator music, wrapped in a visual aesthetic treated as inseparable from the sound.
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- Eccojams Wikipedia →
- The direct precursor style, named for Daniel Lopatin's 2010 tape: one short pop-song loop, slowed and drenched in reverb, repeated until hypnotic.
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- Future funk Wikipedia →
- The danciest offshoot — chopped 1980s Japanese city pop with French-house energy, usually paired with anime visuals. Pioneered by Macross 82-99's Sailorwave series in 2013.
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- Mallsoft Wikipedia →
- Also mallwave. Reverb-soaked lounge muzak built to sound like a vast, empty shopping mall — the most explicit meditation on consumerism and liminal space.
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- Vaportrap Aesthetics Wiki →
- Vaporwave atmosphere fused with trap drum programming. Blank Banshee's 0 (2012) is the founding text.
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- Slushwave Aesthetics Wiki →
- The most ambient extreme: single samples dissolved into ten-minute washes of delay and reverb. Coined by t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 around 2013.
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- Dreampunk Aesthetics Wiki →
- Ambient and largely sample-free, favouring original instrumentation and cinematic, cyberpunk-scored dystopian soundscapes. 2814's core sound.
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- Signalwave Aesthetics Wiki →
- Also broken transmission. Built from old TV commercials, station idents and weather-channel jingles, looped to feel like tuning into a half-remembered broadcast.
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- Hardvapour Wikipedia →
- A 2015 reaction against the calm: gabber- and speedcore-influenced aggression over the same source material.
- Simpsonwave Wikipedia →
- A 2015–16 YouTube phenomenon pairing decontextualised Simpsons clips with vaporwave tracks and VHS distortion. Kicked off by a fan edit set to HOME's “Resonance”.
- Utopian virtual Wikipedia →
- The Far Side Virtual register: plastic MIDI pianos and Windows-95-startup-chime optimism standing in for a sterile corporate future.
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- Fashwave Wikipedia →
- An unrelated and widely condemned appropriation of the synth-and-neon visuals for fascist and neo-Nazi messaging, emerging on YouTube around 2015. Listed here because the term circulates, not because it belongs.
- Chopped and screwed Wikipedia →
- The Houston technique, originated by DJ Screw, of radically slowing a track and rearranging its parts. Vaporwave borrowed it wholesale.
- Plunderphonics Wikipedia →
- Music built entirely from recognisable existing recordings. Coined by the composer John Oswald in 1985; one of the genre's core roots.
- Hypnagogic pop Wikipedia →
- A 2009-coined style of deliberately degraded, nostalgia-soaked pop that fed directly into vaporwave. The critic David Keenan described it as pop refracted through the memory of a memory.
- Seapunk Wikipedia →
- A short-lived 2011 Tumblr microgenre of aquamarine palettes, mermaids and GeoCities-style 3D net art. A direct stylistic forerunner.
- City pop Wikipedia →
- The 1970s–80s Japanese pop genre — funk, AOR, soft rock, leisure-class optimism — whose 2010s online revival supplied much of the raw material.
- Synthwave Wikipedia →
- Related but distinct: original rather than sampled, up-tempo, high-contrast neon music drawn from 1980s film and game scores. The sharper-edged cousin to the pastel haze.
- Late-night lo-fi Wikipedia →
- Slowed 1980s pop and jazz that emulates recorded programmes on old 4:3 televisions — public broadcasting, local news, after-hours scheduling. Pioneered by Luxury Elite.
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- VHS pop Wikipedia →
- A more upbeat variant of late-night lo-fi: richer, crisper, dancier treatment of the same 1980s jazz and pop sources.
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- Barber beats Wikipedia →
- Heavily sampled and slowed smooth jazz, lounge and R&B from the 1980s–2000s — suave, luxurious, melancholic, with trip-hop and instrumental hip-hop in its bones. The term was coined by the label Aloe City Wrld for Haircuts for Men's production style; Macroblank carried it on.
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- Ambient vaporwave Vaporwave Wiki →
- The broad ambient wing the genre keeps growing — long-form, beatless, atmospheric — of which slushwave and dreampunk are the named branches.
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- Broken transmission Wikipedia →
- The other name for signalwave, and the one people actually search: samples and distortions of radio broadcasts, television programmes and station idents. 猫 シ Corp. and CT57 are the representative artists.
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- Vapornoise Vaporwave Wiki →
- The harsh experimental branch — noise, distortion and heavily degraded sampling. One of several subgenre names that began in jest on 4chan and Reddit before people started using it seriously.
- French house Wikipedia →
- The filtered-disco Parisian dance style — Daft Punk, Stardust — whose grammar future funk runs on: loop a disco or city-pop bar, filter it, and let it repeat.
- Muzak Wikipedia →
- The brand that became the noun: background music engineered for commercial space, designed to be heard without being listened to. Mallsoft is an argument with it.
- Pitch shifting Wikipedia →
- Changing a recording's pitch. Distinct from slowing it: pitch can move without the tempo following.
- Time-stretching Wikipedia →
- Changing a recording's duration without changing its pitch — the counterpart to pitch shifting, and why some vaporwave sags without sounding transposed.
- Looping Wikipedia →
- Repeating a passage indefinitely. Banal as technique, central as method: eccojams is essentially one loop held past the point of comfort.
- Reverb Wikipedia →
- Simulated room sound. The genre's primary spatial device — what turns a four-bar sample into an atrium.
Look & motifs
- ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ Wikipedia →
- Fullwidth text. The signature typographic move — Roman letters stretched onto a Japanese fullwidth grid, now internet shorthand for the whole genre.
- Set it fullwidth →
- Greco-Roman statuary Wikipedia →
- Marble busts — the Helios head on Floral Shoppe, the Apollo Belvedere — repurposed as ironic emblems of high culture flattened into clip art.
- Add the bust →
- Memphis Design Wikipedia →
- Ettore Sottsass's 1980s Italian postmodern movement — bright plastic laminates, squiggles, asymmetry — absorbed wholesale into the colour and pattern language.
- Generate the pattern →
- Checkerboard floors Aesthetics Wiki →
- With palm trees and dolphins: the mall-lobby and tropical-leisure vocabulary, taken straight from 1980s advertising and city pop cover art.
- Lay the floor →
- Liminal space Aesthetics Wiki →
- Deserted transitional environments — empty malls, corridors, lobbies — at the centre of the vaporwave and mallsoft mood.
- Generate the emptiness →
- Old Web Aesthetics Wiki →
- Dial-up-era design — GIFs, table layouts, visitor counters, GeoCities pages — recycled as set dressing.
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- Y2K futurism Aesthetics Wiki →
- The chrome-and-translucency, dot-com vision of the future — blobby CGI, iMac G3 plastics — that both preceded and now runs parallel to the revival.
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- Glitch art Wikipedia →
- Deliberate digital or analogue corruption — databending, datamoshing, VHS artifacting — used as a core technique throughout.
- Break the frame →
- Pastel palette Aesthetics Wiki →
- Soft, degraded pink-and-cyan tones. The clearest visual separation from synthwave's harder neon-on-black contrast.
- See the palette →
- CRT and scanlines Wikipedia →
- The cathode-ray tube and its visible horizontal raster lines. The 4:3 curved screen is the genre's default frame; the scanline is how a still image announces it was photographed off one.
- Apply scanlines →
- VHS artifacting Wikipedia →
- Tape-specific damage as opposed to digital glitch: tracking bands, head-switching noise at the frame's foot, chroma bleed, dropouts, generation loss from copying a copy.
- Apply the damage →
- Chromatic aberration Wikipedia →
- RGB split. Colour channels pulled apart at the edges — a lens fault in origin, an intentional signal of analogue decay here.
- Split the channels →
- Early CGI / low-poly Wikipedia →
- 1990s computer graphics at their most unconvincing: visible polygons, chrome spheres over checkerboards, stretched textures. The look of a future rendered before the hardware could carry it.
- Render the wireframe →
- Palm trees Aesthetics Wiki →
- The single most repeated object in the canon. Imported from Japanese resort illustration and 1980s advertising, they signal leisure that is permanently out of season.
- Plant the palms →
- Japanese typography Wikipedia →
- Katakana and kanji used as texture, distinct from fullwidth Latin: the fullwidth trick stretches English onto a CJK grid, while Japanese type imports the visual authority of the 1980s Japanese consumer market wholesale.
- Set the type →
- Corporate futurism Wikipedia →
- Not the Memphis Group — the sterile visual language of 1990s corporate computing: globes, clip-art handshakes, office atriums, gradient business graphics. Utopian virtual mines it directly.
- Generate the brochure →
- Dead mall Wikipedia →
- A shopping centre with most units vacant and footfall gone. More specific than liminal space, and the literal subject of mallsoft rather than a mood borrowed by it.
- Empty the mall →
Concepts & criticism
- Hauntology Wikipedia →
- Derrida's term, taken up by the critic Mark Fisher for music haunted by futures that never arrived. The closest thing the genre has to a theory of itself.
- Anemoia Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows →
- Nostalgia for a time you never experienced. Coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and the most precise available word for what a 1997 mall recording does to someone born in 2001.
- Hyperreality Wikipedia →
- Baudrillard's condition in which the simulation is experienced as more real than what it copies. Explains why a rendered mall, beach or hotel lobby can feel more convincing than the original.
- Post-internet art Wikipedia →
- Art made in full awareness that the internet is the condition of its circulation, not merely a channel for it. The frame most useful for the genre's visual artists.
- Digital decay Wikipedia →
- The umbrella for deliberately ageing pristine digital media — compression artifacts, resampling, datamoshing, repeated re-encoding. Degradation as compositional material rather than fault.
- Degrade it →
- Remix culture Wikipedia →
- The broader culture of derivative works built from existing material, which vaporwave inherits and pushes to its legally awkward edge.
- Retrofuturism Wikipedia →
- Also lost futures. Nostalgia not for a real past but for a promised future that never arrived — what Bruce McCall called the nostalgia for a future that never happened.
Culture & history
- Vaporware Wikipedia →
- The namesake: 1980s tech jargon for an announced product that is delayed or cancelled forever. First used by Microsoft engineers in 1982.
- Floral Shoppe Wikipedia →
- Vektroid's 2011 album under the Macintosh Plus alias. The genre's breakthrough record and its most enduring visual and musical touchstone — not its first, since Eccojams Vol. 1, Far Side Virtual and early Vektroid and Internet Club releases all precede it.
- Beer on the Rug Perfect Circuit →
- The Lawrence, Kansas netlabel that released Floral Shoppe. It deleted its entire back catalogue from Bandcamp and SoundCloud in 2019; fans have been archiving it since.
- Bandcamp Wikipedia →
- The pay-what-you-want platform central to the genre's distribution, letting pseudonymous artists release without labels, tours or real names. Central, not exclusive: SoundCloud, YouTube, Tumblr, MediaFire, Last.fm, Turntable.fm and forums all carried the scene too.
- Consumer capitalism critique Wikipedia →
- The ambiguous, often satirical relationship to the advertising and technology being sampled — read by some as parody, taken by others at face value.
- Dream Catalogue vaporwave.wiki →
- The vaporwave and dreampunk label founded in January 2014 by HKE, initially with t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者. In its early years it was widely regarded as the pre-eminent label in the genre, releasing Telepath, Death's Dynamic Shroud and VAPERROR.
- Business Casual Bandcamp Daily →
- Founded in 2013 as Business Casual 87', the Pittsburgh label that has issued a release every Friday at noon Eastern for years, later broadening from vaporwave into “internet music”.
- New Dreams Ltd. Wikipedia →
- A Vektroid alias and, in the early conceptual vocabulary, a name that does the genre's whole trick at once: a limited company selling dreams.
- Palm Mall Wikipedia →
- 猫 シ Corp.'s sixth album, 2 October 2014. Nine tracks built from elevator-music samples, and the canonical mallsoft record.
- Birth of a New Day Wikipedia →
- 2814's 2015 album — 新しい日の誕生 — the record that proved the aesthetic could be produced as original music rather than assembled from samples, and the reference point for dreampunk.
- Cassette culture Wikipedia →
- The tape as object and as scene: Eccojams Vol. 1 was a hundred cassettes, and physical runs remain how an internet-only genre proves it existed.
- Internet-native genre Wikipedia →
- The defining structural trait: formed entirely online — Turntable.fm, 4chan, Tumblr, Reddit — with almost no live tradition, functioning as much as a meme as a musical style.