And so we've come to this: my absolute favorite vaporwave release ever, bar none, a masterpiece that transcends genre and achieves absolute beauty.
The first sounds you hear on Infinity Frequencies' Between two worlds is an old, static-riddled melody that sounds as if it came from an ancient out of tune piano backing a children's TV show or something. The fragmented melody changes key, then loops, then changes key again, and just as it begins to make sense, the song ends - and next is a shorter sample, a sadder one, repeating endlessly, looping a sad and obscure memory until it warps and becomes something else, something more abstract, something boundless.
All of the album continues in this hypnotic, disjointed style. Infinity Frequencies forgoes the hyper-capitalism and tongue-in-cheek humor of other vaporwave contemporaries, focusing instead on the broad feeling and atmosphere of melancholy, nostalgia, and times long lost but fondly remembered. This is accomplished and exacerbated with the static in the recordings, the distortion and the broken-record-esque looping, and of course the samples / melodies themselves. Lots of vaporwave excels by changing old music to make you nostalgic for it; Infinity Frequencies makes it feel like you're experiencing old music, reminiscing and yearning and aging at once.
They have a meaty discography following much of the same stylistic philosophy, from 2015's lauded Into the light to the stellar Computer trilogy (Death -> Decay -> Afterlife). The samples and the ambient sound of vaporwave is there, but IF's vocal samples are often chopped apart and twisted, made striking and even unsettling by the use of short loops, tempo modifications, and drastic key changes.
But there is something special about this album. Maybe it's the abstract, aesthetically pleasing album cover - we see an empty yet graceful palace-like atmosphere that is impossible to recognize, a much different vibe than others of IF's past (largely featuring unrecognizable human shadows, computers, or faded statues). Maybe it's the presence of the piano-based samples that were usually rare to find on other releases. There's also the chance that the relative dearth of vocals in the samples make them all the more haunting, as empty as the album cover implies; the absence of humanity is more stirring than the presence of it here. There's nothing really there to hold onto beyond the atmosphere.
I believe all of the factors play a part in making this release special. IF's previous albums are all incredible in their own rights, but none of them have struck such emotional chords with me or felt remotely like this, these windows to a forlorn and precious past. There's hypnotic or repetitive music, and then there's this, the definition of a beautiful hypnosis; songs with Victorian-era melodies and waltzes abstracted by the medium, made soundtrack to the wandering of the mind and the pain of memory.
Generally I find ambient music to be incredibly boring; the lack of immediate "melody" per se means it's easy to get distracted or lose interest in someone fucking around with samples or a synth pad or something. Even in albums of other genres, when I see short little synth interludes or when songs have boring ambient outros and shit, I'm usually turned off. That couldn't be further from the case here; not only is IF's technique and sample library incredibly consistent with its interesting nature and intriguing sound, but the songs are so short that they are memorable because they last for so little time. They stick to your head and they stay there long after they're gone.
Infinity Frequencies goes by @ComputerGaze on Twitter, where all they post are fragments of weird yet atmospheric sentences. Entire tweets like "The machine appears before you again", "Beyond you", and "A face overlooks the ocean. I trace fragments". This is one of the few living artists I truly consider to be genius, as they've managed to not only distill an incredible and unique style of music into short ambient tracks, but they've also managed to do the exact same thing, but with their tweets. Look no further for a description of IF's style and mood - anything and everything I could say is already there, has already been there for millennia, before any of us, and is only now being discovered in the earth where we will one day return.
I can't emphasize enough how unique this album is. It's truly one of a kind. You will be awed by this album's beauty, you will be haunted by its lonely shadows, and if you give it an honest listen I don't think you'll be able to forget it.
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