This isn’t as much a mix so much as it’s… well no, it’s actually the Youtube channel’s five favorite hardvapour albums of 2016. It’s sort of like if you took the dreamy muzak dreamscapes of vaporwave and remixed it to hardcore techno and/or video game samples. It’s an entirely different energy and it’s still hopping across a vaporwave musak bed, it’s almost entirely its own. It’s weird. You can’t dance to it. You can’t really chill to it. It’s not background music, but it’s difficult to fully engage with it. Weird shit, indeed. And while it doesn’t fully engage me, are there people who hang on the edge of their seats when a new album comes out?. Are people downloading it and sitting utterly enrapt when the beat drops? There must be, right? Or have free and/or inexpensive downloads somehow changed the relationship to music and devalued it? That’s a shitty thing to suggest but I don’t know. I don’t like my suggestion that it’s only the capital value that can invest one in the music. Is it disposable in the absence of the labor required to pay for it? Or is it about the music?

It has to be about the music.

It has to be, or…

Speaking of music, here are the five albums in question:

• 01. Nmesh : Hard Classiks, Volume 1 (0:00)
• 02. NEW SHOPPE : DEATH OF THE TRAP (1:08:01)
• 03. Chungking Mansions : There is Truth in Fiction (1:35:13)
• 04. MOD-COMM 81 : #RAM-ceiling (2:09:43)
• 05. AUT2M : Улучшенный жизнь (2:27:27)

There’s enough in there for me to commit to engaging and connecting for three hours. It’s not, as I mentioned, background music. My level of direct connection may vary over three hours of listening, but it will be there. I guess what I’m asking above, by the way, is who are the people who are really into this stuff and are they into it the way I was, say… a Clash album back in the day. Will they go ape over it the way I did? It’s not really fair to imply that they wouldn’t.

I’m rambling again, but whatever…

How engaged am I really in my own day to day even? It’s hard enough to complete a coherent paragraph. It’s been months since I’ve been able to pin down a single, cohesive thesis in any one of these morning missives. It doesn’t seem time to question others when getting myself together has been so difficult.

Who is the audience for this stuff? I’ll do some research and get back to you.