Style: vaporwave, experimental pop, glitch
Primary Emotions/Themes: a wonderful mess of genres forced together in ways that are unconventional to say the least
Thoughts: There are many things I do not like about vaporwave. It's derivative by definition, often it's lazy, and for the longest time I did not find myself enjoying the genre. Recently though... something has started to shift in me.
I've started listening to stranger entries into the genre... one's where the music isn't just slowed down and a beat put on it. Music where the plundering is done a bit more selectively, and the reconstruction is done with a bit more tact... I've been listening to more albums like Perfect Fake.
アバドン is an artist that I know nothing about, and I want to keep in that way. One of the constant allures of the vaporwave genre is the anonymity of the music. By the artist hiding behind some sort of online moniker it allows the music to speak for itself without the influence of the artist tainting it (for better or worse).
That's a very wordy introduction for music that is fundamentally hard to describe. At it's heart Perfect Fake is vaporwave. This is music that has been stitched together from different sources. I don't know if this is from original works or from other artists - honestly though this doesn't matter. This music has been transformed into something completely different from the source material.
On the twelve songs that are present in Perfect Fake, my ears have explored themes of depression, distorted and fragmented thoughts, unhinged mania, and a myriad of other emotions. The music itself is glitchy, distorted, disjointed, deranged, and desperate. It claws out for my attention at every turn, like some touch starved animal desperately trying to find anything that will give it some contact... some validation.
The thing is though... it all succeeds. The glitches make the music disjointed, but they also bring me into the distorted mindset that the album is portraying. Switching from genre to genre every few seconds can be jarring, but it also lets me feel the desperation present in the creators mind as they write this music.
Feeling lost and alone is nothing new, however the way that アバドン has managed to put this feeling into musical form in Perfect Fake is unlike anything I have heard before. Sure I've heard glitchy music, sure I've heard desperate music, and sure I've heard vaporwave before... but not like this. This is the musical equivalent of someone who is screaming for help, but has no voice. They are desperately seeking someone, anyone who will give them attention... any kind, and losing themselves in doing so.
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