Vaporwaves: live radio from San Francisco

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Vaporwaves

Elevator music from a dream.

Future funk and vaporwave, half-remembered and pink.

Vaporwaves joined SomaFM in 2020, alongside Heavyweight Reggae and n5MD Radio, two decades after Rusty Hodge turned a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man into a full-time internet station in February 2000. It is among the network's most specific channels, which is only possible because SomaFM has taken no advertising across its entire run and answers to the listeners who fund it. By then the aesthetic had been circulating online for the better part of a decade.

The music is vaporwave and future funk with chillwave and mallsoft around the edges — INTERNET CLUB, Solo Jazz Cup, American Online, Sunset Network 91 — built from slowed samples, drum machines and saxophones. Their own description is empty malls and empty streets with the music still echoing through them, which is the aesthetic in one line.

bySomaFM

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San Francisco, United States

Vaporwaves

Elevator music from a dream.

Future funk and vaporwave, half-remembered and pink.

Vaporwaves joined SomaFM in 2020, alongside Heavyweight Reggae and n5MD Radio, two decades after Rusty Hodge turned a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man into a full-time internet station in February 2000. It is among the network's most specific channels, which is only possible because SomaFM has taken no advertising across its entire run and answers to the listeners who fund it. By then the aesthetic had been circulating online for the better part of a decade.

The music is vaporwave and future funk with chillwave and mallsoft around the edges — INTERNET CLUB, Solo Jazz Cup, American Online, Sunset Network 91 — built from slowed samples, drum machines and saxophones. Their own description is empty malls and empty streets with the music still echoing through them, which is the aesthetic in one line.

bySomaFM