Liquid Advertisement & Gaseous Desire

A vaporwave supersession featuring the Inter-Dimensional Music debut of Smokey Robinson and Jacques Derrida

As an unemployed freelance artist and/or writer and/or yoga teacher with 25 years experience of being bad at making money by selling the results of my creative practices, I have a lot of time on my hands to feel shitty about dream up ways to assign value to the things that I release into the world. My recent dive into the world of vaporwave – as I wrote about last issue – has been unexpectedly helpful, a few hours spent listening to and reading about music that is deeply critical of capitalism’s fetishization of originality, authenticity, and the arbitrary valuation of art in theory and practice.

Vaporwave is endlessly recycled, sometimes with obscured artistic provenance, and other times with a note-by-note guide to the copyright-free source audio that it plunders. And it’s usually available to download for free. It sorta feels like vaporwave offers almost everything that Web3 stuff like NFTs was supposed to be, by doing the opposite of everything that Web3 actually does. You can read more about vaporwave in “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form,” the previous photo-based newsletter, or scroll down past this e x t e n d e d introduction to find a continuously mixed two-hour newsletter-exclusive VØID SUPERSESSION of hand-picked vaporwave and adjacent musics.

These ideas have been on my mind more than usual as I’ve been putting together this weekend’s Inter-Dimensional Music broadcast. It’s a show intended to correspond with a performance from water is the sun, an ambient duo playing at State Street Pub in Indianapolis on Wednesday, May 1. water is the sun is music from the other end of the ambient spectrum from vaporwave. It’s a seemingly improvised, acoustic, and deeply organic transmission from the wilderness, contrasted with vaporwave’s mushy hyper-silicate pre-fab electronica. Old-time deep forest devotionals versus “liquid advertisement and gaseous desire,” as the editors of the vaporwave subreddit describe it. But they share an implicit critique of commodity and capitalism in that most of these sounds are available for free. They’re both zones without people, regardless of whether the idea emerges from pre-or-post capitalist imagination. It’s worth noting that many of these artists create limited runs of physical media – with a shared fondness for dead tech: vinyl, cassettes, and VHS – reminding us that it’s possible to remain obscure and find compensation for your labor without manufacturing scarcity or erecting barriers to the work. The price of art is a good indication of who that art is for.

water is the sun is one of musician Adam Parker’s many extraordinary and often uncapitalized art projects, along with lightning white bison and timber rattle. The latter is a band that will be familiar to people who read this newsletter, listen to my weekly Inter-Dimensional Music FM radio broadcast, or who have attended one of my increasingly infrequent Basking in Gravity psychedelic death yoga art project sessions. I’ve been enamored with timber rattle’s eerie, mournful music since I found it late one night following Bandcamp tags down overgrown clickpaths. It’s a sort of acoustically screwed and chopped forest drone gospel, backcountry devotional music that is occult in the abstract, and deeply intimate in the moment. water is the sun is Parker’s collaboration with Mkl Anderson, who makes similarly cryptical ambient music as Drekka.

The water is the sun duo operates in familiar territory, but their feral goth ambience is less sprawling, with more keys and fewer discernible vocal sounds. It’s still crunchy, but to my ears closer to classic minimalist composition. Like most of of Parker’s work, it’s available as a Name Your Own Price (NYOP) download. Incidentally, I found out about water is the sun’s upcoming show after the den, a new, unusually succinct EP release from timber rattle hit my Bandcamp timeline.

I wrote about all of this in 2021 in an essay for the online magazine Aquarium Drunkard. I don’t look at AD frequently, as I have limited interest in the sort of Americana one would expect to find on a blog named after a Wilco song. But there’s a lot of good writing there, and they’ve long been a trusted resource when I’m in the mood for modern folk, vintage country, acoustic ambient music, and other granola psychedelia. It’s also a good website if you’re curious to hear what people who are obsessed with Lou Reed think about Neil Young. So I was surprised and deeply bummed when I dialed up the essay that I wrote for them three years ago and found it locked behind a $100 paywall. I poked around a little bit, and as far as I can tell everything on their website is locked behind the paywall. Other than a post announcing that everything is locked behind the paywall¹.

In addition to not knowing what to do for the newsletter I was trying to send, this bugged me for all the usual reasons: The ubiquitous condescension that yet another subscription is equivalent to buying yourself yet another “decent latte” when it’s starting to feel more like taking a bunch of coworkers who never reach for the check out for endless mimosas. Or the suggestion - familiar from NFT naifs and blockchain cretins – that restricted access, regressive subscription plans, and more libertarian-style commodification are novel ideas. An AD subscription is $100/year if you have $100 today, or $120/year if you’re broke and need to pay in monthly installments.

The thing that got under my skin most is that as far as I know, Aquarium Drunkard doesn’t pay writers. Or at least they didn’t pay me, an admittedly extremely minor character in the list of AD contributors, a guy who only published two things with them several years ago in 2020 and 2021. Essays about extreme metal and Zen, which are probably not super popular on a site for people who get Wilco references. But we all know it’s bad manners to talk openly about how much we’re getting paid².

I feel good paying³ artists for their work. Sincere gratitude to the handful of artists and labels that send me free promos, but I buy almost all of the music that I play on the radio show that I’ve produced for free on a weekly basis since 2010. I also subscribe to most of the podcasts that I listen to regularly, both to support their creators and for access to the bonus content they post in addition to weekly public shows. I know this is capitalism and I know that because of America’s class war things are always more expensive the less money you have, but it still sucks.

I used to parrot the line that the newsletter and podcast gig economy means “we’re all passing the same $20 bill back and forth,” but trickle-down will never be more than a trickle, and that $20 bill seems to take longer and longer to return as a $5 bill in my paypal account. And yes, it’s the same class-war price structure used for bulk toilet paper, rent, and Substack – though this newsletter is the same for annual, monthly, and free subscribers, as well as unregistered lurkers. I love all of you and if you don’t have the money to subscribe . . . what, you think I don’t want you to hang around? I like to be compensated for my labor too, but I don’t want you to skip my yoga session because you finally quit your shitty job. NOTAFLOF 4 LIFE.

I’m used to not getting paid to produce things that I care about, from thousands of words⁴ in Arthur Magazine, almost 15 years of radio production for Marfa Public Radio and WQRT, or for “Blood & Tears,” the brief essay that I contributed to Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears. But Arthur was free, FM radio is free, and at least a portion of the profits from the crying anthology were donated to “the Trevor Project, which focuses on suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth.”

To his credit, Aquarium Drunkard’s editor was immediately up front in telling me they wouldn’t be paying me anything for my contributions. He has also been very supportive and fun to work with, and sometimes he reads this newsletter: This isn’t a dig against you, bud! I’m just sad that I can’t look at your cool website anymore, and fewer people are gonna read the things that I wrote for your cool website.

To break it down into simple terms, I wrote for free about musicians who give their music away for free. I want to share that writing on my free newsletter in the hope that maybe two or three of you might come out to support one of those musicians who is playing a small show on a small tour at a small bar that may or may not have a cover charge for the show. If you would like to read what I wrote for free about the music that the artist gives away for free, you have to pay $100 to the company that hosts the web page where my essay is posted. If you squint and hold your head the right way, it sorta starts to sound like I’m talking about Spotify.

As I often mention in this newsletter, I am not good at figuring out how to make money by selling words, visuals, or mindfulness experiences. Most of the media companies I’ve worked with – in marketing, as an editor, or as a freelancer – don’t exist anymore. And my colleagues who feel differently than I do make a lot more money than I do. I’ve been involved in publishing since the days of print magazines, but I don’t expect to ever again have a job that provides a salary and health insurance in exchange for “having music opinions.” Maybe it was a bad idea to try and use all of our news, entertainment media, and cultural production to turn the biggest profit possible by forcing people to look at ads for things they don’t need.

In some ways, complaining about a nice website’s new paywall is like yelling at the call center worker when my health insurance occasionally denies coverage for the insulin that I require in order to stay alive as a Type-1 diabetic: We’re all oppressed by the same system, and the ones running that system aren’t working in customer service.

It’s also sort of like what I wrote about NFTs at the peak of the crypto hype cycle: Another paywall feels less like “a better way” or a blow against “enshittification” – a concept introduced by the writer Cory Doctorow to describe the corruption of social networks, online marketplaces, and everything else – and more of a “how nice for you.” I understand capitalism is real, and I know that I can’t know the particular circumstances of each individual paywall-builder. It may be a necessity for reasons that I’m unaware of, but please don’t tell me that erecting a barrier and denying entry to non-members is something better, or new. Things have always been nicer for people with more money, and public libraries would be illegal if someone tried to invent them today, yadda yadda yadda.

There are different ways to respond to enshittification, and like a lot of vaporwave artists I usually end up in the extremely naive and unrealistic “art isn’t a business” and “art should be free” camp, which feels more and more like a homeless encampment every day. The irony of anyone citing this phenomenon as an excuse to charge a $100 membership fee is that media paywalls are often a passive enabler of enshittification. Even reactionary publications like The Atlantic will admit that “democracy dies behind paywalls.” Doctorow often uses"enshittification" to criticize⁵ tech oligarchs and their attempts to extract more money from us through the forced obsolescence of their increasingly shitty tech, but with a little jiggling it could translate to this instance of a band and a writer who are offering their work for free, while the content host collects the access fee.

"Enshittification," Doctorow writes in Wired, "is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a 'two-sided market,' where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold[ing] each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them." 

It’s worth mentioning that you can also skip over the donation solicitations and access online services such as Wikipedia or . . . I dunno . . like the Wayback Machine? . . . for free too. But give your money to the musicians first, please, and if you’ve got some left over I’ll happily go spend anything I find in the tip jar on Bandcamp for you. And if your media subscription budget is bigger than mine and you want Bandcamp recommendations for trippy folk music instead of grotty death metal and New Age slush, the nice people at Aquarium Drunkard have interesting music opinions.

As for coming up with reasons to keep making things despite a pathological inability to generate profit, I would like to express sincere gratitude to friend of the show Beach Ball for writing to ask when I might be posting the vaporwave session. That sort of thing makes all of this worthwhile, and occasional DM reminders that anyone’s out there listening – with a free or paid sub, or just lurking anonymously – always make my day.

blessing up + blessing down,
DC

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Inter-Dimensional Music 20240322 + 29
VØID SUPERSESSION: Liquid Advertisement & Gaseous Desire

stream | download

If you’d like to read more about vaporwave, I wrote A LOT about vaporwave in the previous newsletter, despite the fact that the newsletter was supposed to focus on my photos of Muncie. (In turn, this vaporwave newsletter is mostly about paywalls and ambient music that is not vaporwave.) This two-hour continuously mixed session originally aired in separate installments on Marfa Public Radio and WQRT Indianapolis, where you can hear ID Music every weekend. It’s presented here as a newsletter-exclusive set, featuring language throughout as taken from the vaporwave subreddit, as well as from Jacques Derrida, the philosopher who coined the term “hauntological,” an adverb that is often applied to vaporwave and other melancholias for imaginary histories that arise from the recognition of dead futures.

Also before any vaporwave people yell at me – although they don’t seem terribly dogmatic! – there’s also some witch house at the beginning and some dream pop at the end which is not technically vaporwave but I think it works pretty good. Also, obviously DJ Screw is not vaporwave but the vaporwave kids know their history and he’s obviously the GOAT.

Global capitalism is nearly there. At the end of the world there will only be liquid advertisement and gaseous desire. Sublimated from our bodies, our untethered senses will endlessly ride escalators through pristine artificial environments, more and less than human, drugged-up and drugged down, catalyzed, consuming and consumed by a relentlessly rich economy of sensory information, valued by the pixel. The Virtual Plaza welcomes you, and you will welcome it too.

– from reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth.

– Jacques Derrida
Specters of Marx - The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International

HOUR I
artist – work
マグダラのショッピングモール – 食堂
James Ferraro - Dubai Dream Tone
Mathbonus - Tundra
Nmesh - 着物
Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza - Tropical Testmap
NEW MEXICAN STARGAZERS - FREEWAY ENLIGHTENMENT
desert sand feels warm at night - 𝓥𝑜𝒾𝒸𝑒𝓈 𝓕𝓇𝑜𝓂 𝓣𝒽𝑒 𝓞𝒶𝓈𝒾𝓈
modest by default - 你脚踝上的金子
Smokey Robinson x OG Ron C - Cruisin'
V/Vm - The Death of Rave 065
David Slowing - Hospitals
CRT麻痺 - BROADCAST 0.1
マグダラのショッピングモール - 駐車場
dharma: reddit.com/r/Vaporwave/

HOUR II
artist – work
CT57 - existential dread
天火見 - Every Secret of Your Heart Revealed as an Everlasting Tapestry of Love-Light (edit)
Chuck Person - B4
Dvevoted Love - Ancient Aquilaria Tree (edit)
A Name For Both of Us - Growth of the Night Plants I
Useless - First Sight
DJ Screw x 2Pac - So Many Tears
LLWCHほこり - Part XXVII
desert sand feels warm at night - 晴天
Games - Strawberry Skies
Aerial Jungle - A Monsoon in Waves
CT57 - Concrete Structure
Sleep ∞ Over - Outer Limits
Leyland Kirby - Departure
desert sand feels warm at night - 常夏
dharma: Jacques Derrida – Specters of Marx - The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International

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If you know anyone who might find value or otherwise enjoy Vøid Contemplation Tactics or Inter-Dimensional Music, please pass it along. It means a lot to me! Thank you.

Word of mouth is my primary form of promotion. My reach is limited on social media, which is a good thing as far as my own mental health goes. As Dōgen's teacher told him, “You don't have to collect many people like clouds. Having many fake practitioners is inferior to having a few genuine practitioners. Choose a small number of true persons of the way and become friends with them.”

If you’d like to support these projects with a one-time donation, you can also drop some ducats in the tip jar.

1. A quick non-definitive survey of other music websites the I look at:

• Pitchfork is still free but it'll be part of GQ for some reason (money? lol) soon and I’m guessing that means even fewer reviews of music that I’m curious about. Pitchfork pays writers, or at least that’s what my friends who write for Pitchfork tell me. It’s not really for me.

• The Quietus has multiple subscription tiers, and offers a lot of free content. The cheapest annual subscription was about $75 based on the GBP-USD exchange rate in April 2024. They also offered to pay me for an essay that I decided not to write for them last year. I find more new music through The Quietus than anywhere else.

• The Wire offers an annual digital subscription for $50.99, and it includes almost 500 issues of the magazine going back to 1982. They still print a magazine, and pay contributors I assume?

• Bandcamp and Boomkat are both stores, not magazines, but they have a lot of great writing about music. I’m guessing Bandcamp is paying people less and/or less often now that they’ve been bought and sold and fired all the pro-union people. Boomkat? Who knows what’s goin’ on over there. They’re both free, because the point is to get you to buy music from them, which is also why there aren’t many critical reviews.

2. As a musician friend of the show put it in a separate conversation, “Nobody – not just artists – should need to be paid to meet their basic needs.” Or as David Graeber writes, “to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working.”

3. Full disclosure: If an artist posts their music as NYOP, I will almost always stuff a couple of bucks in the tip jar. But since I buy a lot of music, it’s rarely more than that. I figure if someone needs $5 for their lo-fi dungeon synth demo they’ll ask for $5. This suggests a more complex consideration of how we value art, and what exactly are we paying for. At the very least, I like to think a couple dollars materializing in a venmo account suggests that I’m glad they took the time to make the thing.

4. Another annoying but worthwhile distinction: Journalism or “creative nonfiction” or whatever is different from criticism. Journalism usually means going into the world and writing something about the experience. Sometimes it requires travel budgets, original photography, interviews, etc. Criticism is having opinions, and as far as I can tell that’s most of what music writing has become: shopping advice written by people listening to music and typing about it on computers. Or maybe interviews with questions like “how awesome is your new album.” It’s often good and worthwhile and it can be challenging and insightful but – and I say this as a former critic who still reads plenty of criticism – it takes a lot of talent to write criticism that is something more than “I know a lot about music and have an opinion about this new CD,” or that means something more to the reader than “should I pay this artist to listen to their music pay a Swedish company or Jeff Bezos to rent a license to stream this music until the service no longer offers it for streaming.”

5. Doctorow also writes positively about user fees and paywalls for things like alternative, ad-free search engine alternatives to Google’s increasingly useless search engine. All of this is complicated and I’m just a guy yelling online, but it makes a big difference when it feels as if someone is making money by restricting access to things that people gave them to distribute for free. [shrug_emoji.jpg]