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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this genre called vaporwave, synthwave, and retrowave. Which meme is going to win?

Also for anyone interested, a pretty good resource for retrowave related music, art, and games: https://newretrowave.com/

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Vaporwave is a different genre from synthwave. Synthwave is based off synth-heavy 80s music, especially action and thriller/noir movie soundtracks. If you watched Stranger Things that has a very synthwave sound track.

Vaporwave is more sample based and is traditionally about looping distorted samples of 80s/90s songs, though it branched out a lot. Personally I'm a fan of naturewave, which is looped and edited "nature" or "new wave" sounds. But, key difference, it normally doesn't use a lot of classic synth sounds.

Retrowave I think refers to the over all aesthetic genre; so vaporwave and synthwave both fall under retrowave.

Correction: Vaporwave is more based.

If we are honest with the cultural aspect of it, vaporwave is the meme of taking old songs, slowing them down, making the time wonky, and occasionally overlaying software sounds or adjusting the phrasing.

Where synthwave describes a much broader range of music with a retro-futurist sound more often than not new original music, and not reliant on sampling phrases from songs outright.

Vapor-wave is definitely on the meme side. Synth-wave is probably the most "serious" and retro-wave is usually just synonym for the former.

Cool link. Thanks for posting!

Synthwave‘s cheery, Vaporwave‘s sad/depressed. I never liked the latter for that reason.

That's not true at all. There are plenty of cheery vaporwave songs mentioned in the article itself: saint pepsi [1], macross 82-99 [2] etc. all early vaporwave entries based on city-pop which is as cheery as you can get! In fact that's probably the most popular remaining evolutions of the genre, both of the mentioned artists are still huge! (multi-million listens on spotify)

1 - https://saintpepsi.bandcamp.com/album/hit-vibes

2 - https://soundcloud.com/macross-82-99/popular-tracks

Saint Pepsi and Macross are generally classified as Future Funk artists rather than "pure" vaporwave in the vein of Macintosh Plus. For anyone who is interested in Future Funk (i.e. "cheery" vaporwave) a now-archived and inactive youtube channel by the name of Artzie Music [1] collected classics of the FF genre and is, for now, still available to peruse. The best ones in my opinion were uploaded between 2017 and 2018.

[1]https://youtube.com/c/ArtzieMusic/videos

I can suggest this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHY1RpbKDDA

Yes. Saint Pepsi killed vaporwave.

Very good artists, additionally I can suggest

Jesse Cassetes.

https://soundcloud.com/jessecassettes

And Stinkbug.

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