Mix: Hardvapour Essentials

Just what in the Hell is hardvapour? Well, although we’ve mentioned it before, we’re still not entirely sure. Dystopian, often frightening, and indebted to the harsher, Eastern European sides of club music, hardvapour is amorphous and divisive, splitting the already polemical vaporwave community. The only thing we can say for certain is that it’s an exciting new frontier for electronic music, and while hard to pin down, unofficial genre godfather HKE compares it to its parent genre as such: “If vaporwave is painting alternate utopian realities through sound, vision and concept, then hardvapour is the antithesis to that, the hard parallel.” Considering our curiosity, you can imagine our excitement when Jesus Selin, who recently released an album on Ukrainian label H.V.R.F., contacted us with a mix that aims to construct a bridge between all representations of the subgenre, portraying once and for all what the reality of the scene is like.

In his own words:

Zomby once wrote on his Twitter, “The future is vapour……. and that vapour is hard.” It was quite difficult to take his words serious at first, since he speaks of one of the most contradictory genres that have ever appeared on the Internet. Hardvapour, having no static core of sound or ideology around it, breaks all ties with the past. It shows that only by leaving behind all the baggage collected with experience, it is possible to truly feel the future. Aggressive shapes, satirical references to numerous genres, and the visual style of cover arts serve as a means to pull listeners out from their customary habitat and open their eyes on both the really existing problems and on the infinite color-palette, whose beams breath with the great beauty of our world. You shouldn’t try to analyze or wait until someone says, “this is cool,” thus, losing the ability to look at the world with your own eyes. Hardvapour is freedom. Be who you want to be. Do what you want to do. Create what you feel. Just be your true self. It is time to break away from all lifebuoys thrown by others and learn how to swim in the most dangerous waters, because “The future is vapour…….and that vapour is hard.”

Tracklist:

Thomas Seraydarian

Crossfader is the brainchild of Thomas Seraydarian, and he acts as Editor-in-Chief.