Our Spilt Milk: Proto-Vaporwave and the Romanticized "Exile"

Vaporwave before it was a wave?

Our favorite things this week include “Exile on Main Street,” Circulatory System’s “Signal Morning” and the records that gave vaporwave its musical language.

The promo copy for Numero 95 referred to it as “eight droplets of proto-vaporwave,” and this collection of tracks from the early ’90s can certainly be heard in the vaporwave vein minus the critique of capitalism. That’s a pretty big minus though because without vaporwave’s cheeky, mocking, fetishization of consumer culture, what are we left with? The soundtrack to the Miami Vice spinoff, Sonny at Sunset? Or Stranger Things: November Beach? 

Every song on Numero 95 sounds like an act auditioning for Trevor Horn’s ZTT Records by imagining the follow-up to The Art of Noise’s “Moments of Love,” complete with bright, airy synths that emulate a host of instruments including tuned wooden drums and marimbas with crisp, autumnal presence. You can fairly quibble that the emphasis on atmosphere and texture leaves these tracks faceless and bordering on muzak or new age, but I consider that a feature not a bug. I’ll take less antiseptic ambient music and more worldly spiritual music. If they gave a musical vocabulary to an aptly named -wave that could evaporate when a light’s shone on it, all the better. (Alex Rawls)

Living through our screens has left me—and many young adults, I suspect—wishing for more mythical times. The pandemic has led to considerable free time which I spend in mundane ways. I listen to my favorite songs, and one album that you’ll never catch me skipping a song on is Exile on Main Street. While in the seemingly unescapable land of Zoom and Netflix, I catch myself dreaming of the 1971 summer in the South of France that The Rolling Stones spent recording the celebrated album. The Exile legend of partying all day and recording all night is one that I and many other wild life-deprived college students feel we’re missing out on right now. 

The nostalgic appeal of the glory days of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll has left my generation yearning for a simpler time when everyone wasn’t so attached to their devices and just lived. Of course, “just living” took a heavy toll on The Rolling Stones and their circle, and it really was a different time back then. Still, after a year of my life being defined by the four walls around me and my devices, I keep wondering what I missed out on by being born too late. Every generation goes through this, but being part of one of the first generations to have grown up with our face in a screen, an album with such tangible lives attached to it is a natural to romanticize. (Jillian Fontana)

Apart from spare moments of relative quiet, Circulatory System's 2009 album Signal Morning constantly operates at twice the usual number of sonic layers for indie rock. The album's resting mode is out-of-control like a Jackson Pollock painting, with squelches, guitar fuzz, horn blasts, and electricity noises always slithering up your legs. Sounds often come in layers of threes and fives, especially vocals, which every once in a while resemble a crowd, and cellos, spanning from low swells to shrieking upper-range tremolos.

With its manic, messy performances and stacks of distortion, Signal Morning can be overwhelming at first. But once you're accustomed to the album's thrill-ride energy, the sonic palette Circulatory System employ on Signal Morning starts to become irresistible. The textures crawl under your skin, and the orchestral instruments give the album a unique flavor kick. No other psych-pop album quite shares Signal Morning's dense, crisp, and explosive sound.

Songwriting-wise, Signal Morning employs a jagged mashing of vintage psych outfits like The Zombies, Pink Floyd, and John Lennon. Thankfully the group stops short of feeling like a direct copycat of any one of those artists. There's an aggression to many of the album's tunes that matches the energy of the noises they're translated through, like the song "Particle Parades" which climaxes with singer Will Cullen Hart yelling "REALIZE! REALIZE! We still make up this world as we go along!" over a deranged splattering of drums, horns, and bass. For as chaotic as it is, there's an underlying positivity to Signal Morning. Circulatory System seek to explore the chaos of the world and make something beautiful out of it. It pushes your happy buttons all while releasing the aggression from your system like a throat-ripping scream. (Andreas Jahn)

Thinking of acquiring any of these music talked about this week? Do so through the links on this page and you’ll be supporting My Spilt Milk. Thanks in advance!