Spire and his Soda Island friends put on some of my favorite bumble gum funk, generally known as future bass, specifically called kawaii, but I call it vapor (who knows). He does however have much more breath than that.
He has some of the most intricate & introspective music, and a good handful of it, which I don’t see enough. The guy can take what sounds like a scene from a movie and make it music. Beautiful in a way that reminds me of jazz. You don’t know where it’s going next.
Couldn’t have kicked off 2017 any better than this inspiration (other than disco).
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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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.
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.