A masterpiece of traditional vaporwave that deserves just as much praise and recognition as its predecessor, Floral Shoppe. No, that's not an exaggeration, considering both that classic and Initiation Tape: Isle of Avalon Edition are spun by the same artist.
That's right. Anonymous artists New Dreams Ltd. (pronounced "limited") and Macintosh Plus are just two of many pseudonyms electronic artist Vektroid has released music under. In my opinion, it's very obvious on a first listen that Initiation Tape and Floral Shoppe share a number of similarities in their styles. (I'm dubbing this album 'traditional vaporwave' because of this, considering FS basically codified the vaporwave genre.)
(I'd give a description of what vaporwave is right here, but I think it's a little more popular in my age group than funeral doom or whatever, so I'm not actually going to do that. Old songs and nostalgic samples are chopped and screwed and reverbed as all hell until they resemble melancholy new sounds. That's all you need to know.)
Where Floral Shoppe experimented, Initiation Tape achieves with clinical precision.
From haunting opening "Forever" to glitchy ballads like "Slave" or "Sky Nouveau" to plain well-composed sample-based soundscapes like in the criminally short hit "Gone", in this tape New Dreams Ltd. (I'm actually going to just say "Vektroid" from here on out, sorry) cuts up and sews sounds back together, twisting moods, adding incredibly original new context to melodies, repeating tiny sections of otherwise mundane parts of samples in order to make a new, moody package. Sounds you otherwise wouldn't ever even get stuck in your head can become shockingly weird (as Infinity Frequencies does so well, and Vektroid emulates with "Forever"), so saccharine and subtly made inhuman by pitch switching that they become inhuman and almost threatening ("Cast") - and that's not even getting to what sort of things you can do with instrumental samples!
If I go too deep into describing exactly how these songs sound, I'd just be giving a vaporwave tutorial - so just trust that Vektroid is a damned good vaporwave artist.
What differentiates this from a bad vaporwave album? What makes it such a masterpiece? The long and short of it is that this album is consistent (there's that word again). Initiation Tape knows what it wants to be and it fills that niche very well. From the breathtakingly a e s t h e t i c cover art to the incomprehensible late 90's futurism-inspired title and even to the musical composition itself - very reverb heavy, very repetitive, very abstract - this album doesn't try to be anything other than some good ol' fashioned vaporwave.
That alone is enough to turn some people away, but I truly don't understand why. I've heard some say the genre as a whole is boring and lazy. I'm not going to waste anyone's time trying to change minds on the Internet, but I would like to challenge those kinds of people to make some vaporwave of this quality if it's really that easy. There's a lot that goes into this; finding random samples, making music out of them, and especially curating it all to sound as cohesive and interesting as Initiation Tape... honestly, if you can produce this kind of shit in your sleep, please do, because it'd be music that's right down my alley!
That alone is enough to turn some people away, but I truly don't understand why. I've heard some say the genre as a whole is boring and lazy. I'm not going to waste anyone's time trying to change minds on the Internet, but I would like to challenge those kinds of people to make some vaporwave of this quality if it's really that easy. There's a lot that goes into this; finding random samples, making music out of them, and especially curating it all to sound as cohesive and interesting as Initiation Tape... honestly, if you can produce this kind of shit in your sleep, please do, because it'd be music that's right down my alley!
Anyway. This is one of those albums I think benefit greatly from being listened to all the way through. Usually I resent those pretentious people that claim to never listen to their music on shuffle, but I really mean it here - the context of this album really enhances the moodiness and structure of each song, to the extent where songs are more striking because of where they are in the runtime. The album slowly morphs from vocal-based twisting to vaguely vaporwave-inspired ambient at the end of itself, a product I believe of the repackage format (and the funky title), and to be honest... as I said, some of these songs are improved because of their context. "Pine Forest Surf", a fairly straightforward midtempo ambient song, comes as a refreshing shock after getting through the loop-heavy middle third of the album. "Forever" is so striking and memorably partly because it's the very first thing you hear when you push play.
So much of this album's memorability and greatness comes from its little touches and whistles along with the pure (subjective) musical sensibility of it. I think it's necessary for such things to exist in order for an album to truly be considered "art", as something made out of passion and great effort by someone who is very skilled (if not very talented). Initiation Tape may not be your perfect idea of how to spend an hour, but there's a lot here that could entice you. Give it a try.
DREAM...
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