Soda Island is a collective of 8 or so producers, all of which are my favorite names in an emerging style of electronic. Kawaii is what I hear it called most, or more generally future bass, but I like vapor. Bubblegum funk works too.
Along with the rest of this future bass movement (let’s rename), the folks at Soda Island are doing to electronic what jazz did to classical music. Rewriting the rules.
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2015 was the year of live music for us. We covered eight festivals. I don’t think I’ve been to that many before in my life.
Hip hop seemed to make a return on here. That’s what we started on, but hit a major dip from 2010 to 2013. It started back up in 2014 with Kendrick Lamar, and predecessors have been poppin’ up all over the place since. Some with possibly more potential than Kendrick himself. One at the top of this list.
Other genres in electronic dominated the year even more. We got out a good amount of Kawaii in the first half, but future & trap took over the second. And of course house has been most dominate. Going from the deeper, heavier side and splitting into future & chill house near the end, as well as the funkier side of house music to jack to.
The amount of new singers seems to have dipped compared to past years, but the quality hasn’t. Anderson Paak, Madelyn Grant, Liz Vice & Joey Dosik to name out of the dozen others with clear personalities in their voices.
We’ve collected 29 tracks in total and a list of our 12 musicians with the most potential. Plus our biggest accomplishments of the year below that, the playlists. We put together 35 in total! That’s up from 25 last year.
You should also dance to last year’s list.
I’ve been to a handful of music festivals this year, but rarely did I dance. A lot of the house & techno at these festivals were more for raving than dancing and I prefer the midtempo soul anyway. Something you find in a lot of hip-hop and trap these days.
This playlist is all about what I love dancing to most right now and if you really love to dance you will too. I guess most of this would fall under trap music, but like every other style it seems ruined by mainstream.
It may sound funny at first, but this is what the future of dance music sounds like. It’ll at least be up there with house. I’m tellin ya!
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With our first VAPOR playlist, we wanted to figure out what this sound is called. We made up a few names of our own, but thought vapor fit best.
Turns out it’s called Kawaii, and Jersey Club. Kawaii actually means cute in Japanese, which makes most sense given its bubbly nature with anime and video game samples sprinkled in. Jersey Club seems to be more house-based, but still as bubbly.
We decided to still keep it called Vapor ’cause this is too funky to be that cutesy.
I’ve listened to way too much music this year, probably around 12,000 new tracks (I tried calculating it). Most of the music was.. unfinished, to say the least, but we found a lot more songs worth keeping than any year before it.
A lot of new music emerged or reemerged over the year. Deep house was the big thing, but many discredit it because of the hype. It had its bad with its good. Our favorite new style goes to what doesn’t seem to have an official name yet. I’ve heard many call it kawaii, but I prefer vapor – this naming shit is more important than you’d think.
We’ve got 30 songs to show off, 11 artists and 20 playlists for you, but if that’s not enough… wait ’til next year.
I’ve gone to a handful of EDM shows & festivals over the last year and I just don’t get how people can dance to most of the popular shit these days (says the hipster music blogger). At least not when you’ve got such better music to dance to (also hipster). So obviously we had to put a list together (very hipster).
Our Dance Party mix for 2014 is geared more towards the club or house party rather than the rave. I guess that’s where we differ from the higher BPM, bombastic music dominating EDM right now.
We get into various forms of house music on here, but there’s plenty of other influences as well — I’m being vague because I just spent way too much of my time putting together this list and I don’t have time to articulate it (like always).
Vapor is not really a style or genre. We got it from vaporwave, which most closely sounds like PUPANG’s Zane, but our list seems to be more electro influenced than vaporwave’s housey-synth sound.
The most common theme among all this vaporness is the cultural Japanese references, mainly inspired by anime & video games, and has an almost kiddish quality to it… which I warn you many won’t like. It’s not for everyone, as with most of our lists, but I dig the hell out of this sound.
We haven’t had a single on Silence since Embody’s Make A Stand, which was over two months ago. I guess we’re all about the playlists now and singles are even more selective. But Grynpret has something special with his Airplane Food.
I cannot tell you what this style of electro is going to do for dance, though it’ll take a few years to even have a chance mainstream. This vaporware style I can best refer to it as takes from anime & classic video games, I believe Yoshi is on here, and slaps some solid electro funk in. The sound is penetrating, for better or worse, but is exactly the right formula for the progression of dance music, at least for one style.