The album briefly created a small army of Eccojammers, most notably Laserdisc Visions and New Dreams Ltd., both pseudonyms of Portland-based producer Vektroid. However, this would quickly metastasize into “vaporwave,” a slowpoke collage-art music that plundered the ’80s and ’90s for R&B, smooth jazz, Japanese pop, muzak, video games, and Microsoft sound effects. Though many will cite chillwave or hypnogogic pop as the birth of too-online music, vaporwave was truly the first internet microgenre, a self-sufficient community ignored by any critical establishment larger than e-zines and vloggers. The vaporwave community instead blossomed in subreddits and Last.fm scrobbles, serving as the test kitchen for the next 15 years of weird little microscenes, from the fleeting (“seapunk,” “mallsoft,” “dariacore”) to the tectonic (the Haunted Mound/Bladee/TeamSESH axis of white trap that’s breaking containment after nearly a decade in the internet’s margins).
After Eccojams, the dustiest, most overlooked corners of Goodwill were rethought and re-appreciated. Drafthouse Films exhumed kitschy ’80s genre films like the 1981 3D Western Comin’ at Ya! and the 1987 karate musical Miami Connection. Reissue label Light in the Attic moved from Betty Davis and Rodríguez to successfully recontextualizing soft rock, adult contemporary, new age cassettes, and Japanese AOR. The “uncanny ’80s” was explored in films like weirdo comedy Brigsby Bear, psychedelic horror Mandy, and nü-slasher MaXXXine. The “uncanny ’90s” is next at bat with films like Skinamarink and I Saw the TV Glow. The folk tradition of the Eccojam lives on nearly unrecognizably in YouTube videos called “slowed + reverb,” where slowpoke versions of Hindi love songs get views in the tens of millions.
Critics and theorists mostly paint Eccojams and vaporwave as a critique of the market, with Simon Reynolds saying it reveals “the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities” in his essential 2011 nostalgia screed Retromania. That reading, while popular, fails to see the forest for the pixelated palm trees. “I think a lot of those Eccojams are just cathartic for me,” said Lopatin. “I make them when I hear something in pop music, and I’m just like, ‘Fuck, I just wanna hear that over and over.’” An Eccojam is a celebration of the ineffable. Like ASMR, horror movies, cat videos, rage bait, or pornography, it’s a functional medium painstakingly calibrated to evoke a specific sensation. An Eccojam or a vaporwave song gives a listener a sense of placelessness, with the knowledge that “placelessness” is still an interesting place you want to visit.
“The sublime is located in all times and across all brows at once,” Lopatin told The Wire, railing against the “timbral fascism” that won’t let synth musicians use chorus effects without seeming cheesy. With Eccojams, Lopatin uses the bit-compressed technology of the present to extract the sublime from the trash heap of the past, and provides instructions on how to access it in the future. Hurry, boy, it’s waiting there for you.
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