I kept reading that this was the vapourwave album you need to hear before you die, and all of the usual shit, but every time I tried it was gone - removed from whatever platform it had turned up on due to uncleared samples. At least that was the thrust of the apology as I remember it, unlikely though it now seems given that the entire thing is nothing but samples and yet here it is again; and this time I managed to nab a copy before they all vanished.
Vapourwave seems to have been an internet phenomenon, popular amongst young people who spend way too much time playing computer games and talking about Chinese cartoons in chatrooms. I don't think it ever occupied any space formerly inhabited by the music biz as it existed in the days of physical media, so it's probably a bit odd that this vapourwave Never Mind the Bollocks should have been pressed onto vinyl. I'm not complaining because it means I can listen to it, although it seems equivalent to some ageing fifties guy rejoicing that they've taken the trouble to issue the songs of this Elvis Presley person on wax cylinder. Should anyone be grumbling about such parallels, citing the distinct absence of gangs of vapourwavers slashing cinema seats at their local picture house as evidence of it having failed to be a thing in any meaningful sense, then it's probably worth remembering that not everything is a repeat of some earlier form.
Perhaps ironically, vapourwave sort of is - or possibly was, given that I have no idea what the kids on the streets are up to these days so it may all be ancient history - constituting a repetition in so much as that it's mostly sampled eighties muzak, emphasising the slick, bland, overproduced and even corporate to the point of surrealism - swollen synth and MOR sax slowed down, cut up, processed, stripped of context and pulled back together without concessions to familiar structure or purpose; and Floral Shoppe seems to exemplify this like few other albums, so the legend would have it.
I haven't heard a lot of this stuff, although for my money, Blank Banshee do it better, further abstracting the source material before building it up into something new, weird, and shiny. Nevertheless, Floral Shoppe really is one hell of a record. The sampled material sounds almost familiar, something on the tip of one's recall which never quite gets there, heard through a codeine haze and repeating bars in rhythms which ignore the existing tempo and feel like fractal thoughts going through the mind of a console game with a hangover. The effect is weirdly hyperreal and is perfectly illustrated by the cover art. It's something bland polished up and put on a pedestal, presenting a juxtaposition of past and present so weirdly angular and shocking as to invoke J.G. Ballard - or what J.G. Ballard seems to represent to people who actually enjoy his writing, which I mostly don't.
Of course, it's supposed to be ephemeral - or that's the impression I get - but then maybe its having been immortalised on vinyl can be taken as simply another contradiction, just one of the many. Vapourwave, and particularly this album, demonstrate the impossibility of predicting the future - being absolutely alien while sounding familiar to the point of mundanity, and that's a good thing.
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