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Music

This 90s-Style Cyberpunk World is Vaporwave's Wet Dream

Swick and Douster have created a portal into the old Internet for their first EP, 'Internet Dreams.'

Does the Internet dream? If it does, it probably dreams of Tumblr farts and dreary lifecasts, dusty memes and haul vlogging—all the bizarre excreta of the world wide web's most inane corners.

On their first collaborative EP, Internet Dreams, Swick and Douster—who hail from Melbourne and Lyon respectively, and have released solo work on labels like Mad Decent, Dim Mak, and Sound Pellegrino—have a different idea of what a fantasy borne from the virtual world looks like. And they've built an entire 90s hacker-style website straight out of Johnny Mnemonic to share that fantasy with your screen. (Don't worry. Keanu Reeve's face will not make a surprise appearance.)

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The website functions like a DOS-like terminal, where you can type in various commands to stream the EP in its entirety, download its files for later, or just watch an album trailer full of their visual inspirations.

The trailer for Swick and Douster's

Internet Dreams

EP

Tracks are given fitting titles like "OS War III" and "Hackers Convention Jam," and function like melodic collages of internet detritus, built from layers of disembodied voices, pad-like synths, dial-up tones and vaguely familiar jingles from propaganda masters like AOL. Samples taken from YouTube videos of moms using MS-DOS for the first time and 1998 TV ads encouraging users to "surf the web!" are all game. In essence, this multimedia project takes vaporwave's nostalgia for the internet's darker days, and its obsession with the hollowness of global capitalism, to their natural conclusion.

Both producers admit to being enthralled with Internet culture of yesteryear, when 56k modems and slow internet connections were a given—a culture perhaps best captured in 90s cyberpunk movies like Hackers, Total Recall, and Robocop. "I think that aesthetic is so appealing cause we're not living in the same period that those films depicted," said Douster during one of several email exchanges. "At some point in the night, [Swick and I] were watching videos of people doing weird things on DOS and it just seemed like the way to release our music. It kinda sets up a universe for the listener to visualize while listening."

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For example, "56K Desert Connection," the hypnotic third track of the EP, samples Arabic commentary of the goal that won the Premier League for the the Sheik Mansour-owned Manchester City three years ago. "The track is meant to be a dude streaming the match somewhere in the desert, but he has a really shitty internet connection, so it's lagging and buffering and stuff," explains Swick.

Swick and Douster are the latest in a series of programmer-producers who've opted for alternative methods to diseminate their music, constructing entire immersive worlds around their albums. Gatekeeper famously teamed up with Brooklyn artist Tabor Robak to create a video game for their LP Exo, where players roamed a high-def alien planet created in Robak's self-described "Desktop Wallpaper aesthetic."

Asked why they chose to go down this route, Swick explained that it would be too easy to just upload their music to SoundCloud with a free download button. "I would much prefer to have some fun, think a little bit more, and figure out how to download the tracks from this crazy website, than just getting a Dropbox link in my email or something," he said.

Finally, the money question: what the hell is an internet dream? "A fulfilling vision of enlightenment, except it's lagging, and "World domination from your bedroom," were the answers they lobbed over. Sounds like fun.

Stream and download the Internet Dreams EP right hurr.

@MichelleLhooq