猫 シ Corp. & T e l e p a t — Building a Better World
Building a Better World finds the duo following the likes of w u s o 命, HKE and of course 2814 in mining a seam of post-vaporwave music that draws heavily from the soundworld of Bladerunner and the cyberpunk literature of William Gibson. That being said, the audioscape depicted here turns out to be a little less dystopian than we would expect; a fact hinted at by the record's bright colour art depicting 16bit style animated figures looking out onto clear skies above a futuristic cityscape at sundown. You could almost imagine such an image being used to sell timeshares on some off-world colony...in the 1980s. However, despite the lack of cloud cover the record opens with the sound of rain and an ominous drone, before the mood changes and we're beckoned by light toms and a vaguely jazzy synth lead.
Dawn over the Metropolis however leaves us in no doubt as to where we are meant to be, with its gloaming synth vistas, more rain effects and panoramic pads. And despite being generally free of dark synth cliché the record does contain its measure of shady scenes, as on Sector 31 which mixes wind chimes with distant drones and glitchy effects. For the most part the musicians tend towards the lyrical side of Vangelis' classic score, startlingly all too often passed over when it is referenced by other musicians; something most egregiously evident in Hans Zimmer's score for the Bladerunner sequal in 2017. Lost Promises and the surprisingly upbeat 世界の果て (End of the World) all work their ambient balm around a solid melodic structure.
These artists have each explored consumer culture using vaporwave techniques and it's noticeable that many passages on Building a Better World could work as a kind of internal soundtrack for the Tyrell Corporation, or perhaps a company selling the chance of a new life away from the environmentally decimated planet Earth. There are lots of environmental sounds throughout the record (mostly rain it must be said) and the overall dreamy atmosphere on the title track and Hiraeth V is reminiscent of the sort of worldless, vaguely new-age music that you sometimes hear across adverts for hotels in Singapore or Qatar. The very definition of post-modern simulacrum, suggestive of an pharmaceutically attenuated existence of sanitized, affect free living.
The final track A New Life Awaits You plays the record out to the sounds of distant children's voices, shakers and soothing synth pads. The darkness, overcrowding and pollution of Ridley Scott's vision has been left behind. The record is released in a number of formats including an elegant magenta coloured vinyl, several different colours of tape and a vintage mastering on CD. The amount of work and the total aesthetic the artists have achieved here signals this is a serious release and another sign that post-vaporwave has a lot to offer.