I'm partial to Redefining the Workplace by Internet Club myself.

Their album's really cool too. Not sure if it's spotifyable or not, but here it is on bandcamp.

http://beerontherug.bandcamp.com/album/floral-shoppe

If you like stuff like The Field or Tim Hecker, it's like that but more fun I guess? I dunno I listen to it a lot when I sleep, which is never. :)

It's kinda like Tim Hecker if he was a huge fucking hack:/
He could arrange an album exclusively out of fart samples (no 303, straight up fart noises) and it would put this to shame

Which brings me to the burning question, if you got to have an artist of your choice do exactly that, which one would it be?

Hmm.. Living? Zach Hill. Dead? Hildegard of Bingen.

Very important question: is the artist I choose MAKING the fart samples, or merely arranging them?

Booty you're right, I was thinking more of early Hecker/Field, which did more with stuff with Lionel Richie and Van Halen soundscapes respectively. But that was like 10 years ago! I just listened to the Cupid's Head and Virgins respectively.. very different.

As far as the farts go, I dunno. With Hill, it would definitely be the manipulation of fart noises into percussion, but that's kind of what Death Grips sounds like to me anyway. However I do love Hill's album Face Tat; it's actually one of my favorite albums ever! As for Von Bingen, she basically made it so beer has hops in it, as well as a million awesome songs, so it's your pick: Hildegard's beer farts put to the Ordo Virtutum, or a fart remix by Diplo and Skrillex featuring Justin Bieber, because that's a thing now.

That's the whole point of it, she has gone on the record at least once saying that it (and a lot of her other stuff from around that time) was made to specifically mock the sort of people who will listen to "the most lame music" (loose paraphrase) just because it's "not mainstream" or something to that effect. It succeeded at that way more than it was supposed to.

Last I heard about her was maybe a year and a half ago when she pissed of a bunch of self-serious vaporwave kids by doing an SPF420 stream where she smoked a bunch of weed, didn't play anything that sounded like this, and the mod(s) booted people from chat for talking about vaporwave.


All in all good work although it's far from my favorite thing like this. I actually think some of the self-serious stuff is pretty great although last time I checked (sometime last fall) the archive was up to something like 130 gigs of mp3s so it's safe to say that the good to crap ratio is completely fucked at this point. Floral Shoppe I've listened to maybe twice. Internet Club, Esprit, Telepath, Luxury Elite, 18 Karat Affair, Topaz Gang, Infinity Frequencies, Golden Living Room - all way more interesting to me, as far as the big names go.

Yeah, I'm not feeling it either. It sounds like Muzak to me. What's the deal here? I'm completely unfamiliar with the genre and the musicians you've listed, OZ; is this one of those things you need to listen to ironically?

Not the good stuff.

What ever you do don't believe anything you read in the Dummy Magazine article about it from a few years back, that broke it and spread massive amounts of horseshit about it. The author even wrote a long followup where he basically apologized for getting almost everything wrong but nobody paid attention and now everyone thinks it's some kind of ideological satire of capitalism (which it is sometimes but that's not even close to a defining feature).

Anyhow, it's a sort of merging between drone and muzak, and the best stuff is really compelling. Redefining the Workplace sounds like Neu! in 1974 and Oval in 1994 collaborated on an ambient muzak album.

Floral Shoppe IS a good album though, it's just overhyped. It's kind of like the Harvest of vaporwave. Harvest isn't a bad album but if it's your favorite Neil Young album you must not have heard enough Neil Young (or you're a FILTHY CASUAL).

I hadn't listened to this stuff in a while, I went on a tear in the fall of 2013 through in to the next spring and listened to a ton of it but then I kind of stopped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbQN0JnzWkA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_NwFGF3Eq0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqGPaJUG-do

This is a way more interesting album by the same woman who did the Mac Plus stuff, although this is also far from my favorite, since I kind of hate a lot of the beats. But it's still a lot more interesting.

I got in to it too late though, 2013 was the peak of the big hipster feeding frenzy when people started taking it too seriously, and also when tons of people started putting really shitty trap beats into it and most of the most creative people had moved on. There was still good stuff happening but there was definitely a pretty well established formula by then plus it was really trendy with music bloggers and Tumblr around then so even the good stuff that was coming out felt like it was being made under observation, rather than purely for the joy of making something new. People starting genre-specific blogs and netlabels to try to set themselves up in gatekeeper positions for "the scene" and generally just a lot of wank about how important and visible it was when in reality hardly anyone knew or cared about it, then or now.


I kind of unironically like this stuff, actually:
https://soundcloud.com/tags/sportswave

Except that it's frustrating because I was halfway through a PGA concept album last winter before I discovered that it was already A Thing. Even though the stuff I was doing has way more influence from Negativland than from the whole 90s muzak thing and sounds a lot different.

I remember maybe 8 years ago there was a web site that played a continuous mix of the current top 100 ambient tracks from Last.fm with a live stream of LAPD police radio playing over it.

It was really good.

Cool. Talk about living under a rock though: I didn't know what "vaporwave" or "health trap" was until either earlier this year or late last year, and never bothered to look up who Macintosh Plus was/is. I've actually known Ramona for some time since my old housemates were often booked on the same bill, me just helping move around heavy speakers and such for free beer.

Ironically I rarely stayed for the show itself, since it isn't really my thing (especially my friends whose stuff is better described as psytrance) but around the same time as Vaporwave was becoming a thing I was totally fucking around with a poor man's (literally a poor man's since it was ubuntu-based and free) Ableton, just fucking around chopping and screwing stuff like Toto's Africa mixed with Patty Hearst interviews.. you get the idea.. but I never thought about doing anything with it. Oh well..