Thought 10 - Milton Lim October 30th

My name is Milton Lim and this is my tenth thought residency going out to the consumers and to the future. I've been intrigued by a genre of electronic music called Vaporwave over the last year and a bit. It's a blend of synthesized 80s and 90s corporate mood music; it is often bright and cheery, modulated and slowed down, playing between the slightly familiar and the very familiar. It plays on retro culture aesthetics, so it's nostalgia-inducing and by muzak standards, I actually find it quite pleasing to the ear. Vaporwave potentially gets its name from Vaporware: technology that is introduced or announced by companies that never gets produced. The very idea is fleeting. I find the music so curious because it both suggests its anti-capitalist nature and yet it embraces its own hyper capitalism through its earnest use of material. It's ironic and sincere — pleasurable and numbing. It seems to both want to refuse and accept our very likely future. Sometimes I listen to this music and I think: this is where we're headed.