It is easy to dismiss vaporwave as just another bedsit genre that can only live within the confines of the headphones connected to your MacBook Pro with the genre’s obsession with antiquated physical formats like the cassette just adding to its minority appeal. So, it was with some degree of surprise that “H Y M N” by Winterquilt actually managed to bring pleasure to my ears.
Oddly, the press release for this album mentions both Liverpool and black metal but little else about Winterquilt yet perhaps it is this unusual combination of influences that adds the sense of scope and scale that separates this album from its cassette bound competition. There are, of course, looped to the limit excursions into electronica like “Infectious” but there are also rather more dramatic interludes – songs seems too trivial a term to use – that weave purposely through soundtrack cues in search of a neo classical conclusion. Try “Vail” on for size if you think you might like such a thing as, duly, I did.
“H Y M N”, therefore, isn’t your run of the mill vaporwave album and, the more you listen to it, the more you appreciate its underlying complexity and emotional motivations.
And, yes, it is, or was, available on cassette.
Available from Bandcamp.