Here’s some neat Vaporwave music from the artist Glass Mesa. The above song–titled “3 Megabytes of Hot RAM”–is exactly three minutes long and blends together several samples to create a mysterious atmosphere of audio.
The song opens with droning electronic notes which are reminiscent of Philip Glass’s landmark opera Einstein on the Beach. In the video, an image of a Sony Walkman emerges from the darkness and moves toward the viewer. All the while, the song starts to develop a melodic rhythm, which eventually forms the foundation for the rest of the piece.
Now, Glass Mesa holds our attention by layering on an auto-tuned sample that sounds like a woman’s voice. This is cut, spliced, and merged with additional drum beats. The result is a trap-like feel wrapped in the Vaporwave aesthetic.
By the middle of the song, angelic ambient electronic melodies are mixing with the auto-tuned voice while the video shows VHS tape recorders being stacked one upon another. A Betamax video recorder and a 3D animation of a CD player are even edited in for good measure! As the song ends, the layers of carefully constructed audio are stripped away until only the ambient electronic droning remains. Eventually, even it fades away to nothingness.
“3 Megabytes of Hot RAM” was posted on June 13, 2015. Little is known about the artist Glass Mesa. Although, the YouTube account for this person features a few other Vaporwave songs, such as “AGRIPPA//SÉANCE.”
“AGRIPPA//SÉANCE” keeps with Glass Mesa’s use of the Vaporwave aesthetic, pairing ambient samples with VHS imagery. What makes this song particularly fascinating is the 3D computer generated face in the video whose eyebrows rise and fall with the beat. The resulting video is at the same time both intriguing and unsettling.
This is only further reinforced by the title which seems to indicate a communion with the dead (perhaps someone named Agrippa?) through a séance. Another interpretation of “Agrippa” is that this is referencing writer William Gibson’s artwork titled Agrippa (A Book of the Dead).
Glass Mesa, like the face in the video for “AGRIPPA//SÉANCE,” is a mystery. The artist does not appear to have a Bandcamp account and has not posted anything new since 2015. However, it is hoped that this artist is on only a temporary and will return to produce new and innovative Vaporwave music.
