No products in the cart.
As a genre of electrical music, vaporwave became the fan favorite within a short period, and still is a very popular form of retro art and pop music genre. That’s right, vaporwave is a mash-up of both music and art. And the name James Ferraro is associated with it as one of the pioneers of vaporwave music.
In this article, we’ll explore the history of vaporwave and the man behind its emergence, James Ferraro.
Born on November 6th, 1986, James Ferraro is known as the pioneer of both vaporwave and hypnagogic pop genres. He came from a musical family. Having a musician father and a singer mother, Ferraro had the opportunity and knack to experiment with musical instruments. He fiddled with music since 2000 and became a leading experimental musician. Ariel Pink and James Ferraro are considered the pioneers of hypnagogic pop, a subgenre of vaporwave itself.
In the early 2000s, the musical career of James Ferraro started with a Californian noise duo named “The Skaters” alongside Spencer Clark. The groundbreaking part of his life started with the album named “Far Side Virtual”. It was released in late 2011. Written as FARSIDEVIRTUAL, this album achieved widespread recognition and was awarded as the Album of the Year by The Wire, a UK magazine.
Songs like Dubai Dream Tone, Linden Dollars, Global Lunch, etc. were experimental at that time but quickly formed the vaporwave subgenre. Ferraro also had a 2017 EP named Troll and an opera named Plague with the actor Nate Boyce in February 2018. His own subgenre, hypnagogic pop, contains sounds that create an aura of experiencing something while being half-asleep or just before falling asleep, hence the name.
FARSIDEVIRTUAL was released by the record label Hippos in Tanks, which also contains his other works like Condo Pets (2011), Sushi (2012), Cold (2013), and NYC, Hell 3:00 AM (2013). Being a vaporwave, it introduced the irrelevance of consumer culture, hyperreality and it was one of the original vaporwave releases that shaped the taste and the direction of the genre. It started with a mere set of ringtones and quickly came into a broader shape and taste. Before its release, Ferraro experimented on various other tastes like drone and lo-fi music. The 2011 album FRKWYS 7 saw the collaboration of Ferraro with another pioneer, Daniel Lopatin. His latest works include Neurogeist (2020) and Terminus (2021).
Vaporwave is a genre that takes 90s pop music or dialogue and loops it while adding a smooth, electronic sound. It’s a style of music that is meant to feel nostalgic and sometimes even melancholic. The style was originally used as a form of satire, but it has become very popular. In a way, it’s the soundtrack to the internet. For its unique approach, Vaporwave can be a great choice to get into the electrical pop realm. Its catching tone can be easily enjoyed by almost everyone.
The journey of vaporwave can be traced back to the early 2010s as an internet culture with The Eccojams volume 1 by Chuck Person and shaped by artists like Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro himself. It was considered a dead genre back then, but is one of the most popular choices now, with no possibilities of turning down.
The satire part of vaporwave comes from a criticizing of capitalism, that’s why vaporwave music uses chopped off conventional tracks with retro-fill, making the tracks slowed-down or fast-forwarded. The results are completely unique from the original songs or “samples” that it used. For example, his album NYC HELL 3:00 AM contains the startup soundtrack of the Windows 95 operating system.
As we’ve said, vaporwave isn’t only something you hear, it’s also something you see. The visual part of these music videos contains retro illustrations and elements of the past. Common elements like 90s computers and gaming memories, glitch effects, and fonts of the old machines are found in these videos. The visual counterpart is named A E S T H E T I C with spaces in between, and it creates a different taste of the music you hear.
What James Ferraro helped to create, has come a long way and is now among the top of its popularity. His works are known as a new world order of aesthetics, and since shaping the genre and guiding the newbies. James Ferraro has sealed his position in this realm with his groundbreaking albums.
