Vaporwave emerged online in the early 2010s, its name a pun on vaporware, software that is announced but never delivered. Producers took fragments of 1980s and 1990s smooth jazz, R&B, elevator music and Japanese city pop, slowed and pitched them down, chopped them into loops and soaked them in reverb, creating a woozy, dreamlike picture of a commercial past that never quite existed.
Key early releases include Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010) by Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual (2011) and Floral Shoppe (2011) by Macintosh Plus, often treated as the genre’s defining album. Its visual side, with early web graphics, classical busts, Japanese text and VHS blur, mattered as much as the sound, and many listeners read the whole thing as an ironic comment on consumer culture. Vaporwave shares lo-fi’s love of degraded texture and nostalgia, though it is usually stranger and more unsettling.