ECCOJAMS: The Birth of Vaporwave

released on august 8 2010 daniel lopeten's chuck persons echo jams vol 1 is considered by many to be the first ever vaporwave album from its aesthetic direction to the style of sample slicing and looping the chopped and screwed playings of lopeten's one-time chuck person alias left a massive impact on the vaporwave direction and is rightly so considered to be one of the true grails of the genre and today i want to talk about it if you're always on the hunt for interesting music you've come to the right place for discovery my friend so make sure you hit that subscribe button and turn all notifications on so you can be here for our next deep dive and one last thing real quick before we begin today's video you can check out today's topic in written form over at vapor95's dark net blog as well as get 15 off your order over at their awesome shop the link that automatically applies the discount is in the description of this video down below and with that being said let's dive in to some good ol echo jams to properly discuss echo jams and how it all came to be i think it's best if we first take a look at the man who created the project in the first place daniel lopeten born in 1982 massachusetts very own daniel lopeten was introduced to the world of music at an early age both of his parents came from musical backgrounds his father was once in a garage rock band called the flying dutchman and his mother was a classically trained piano player and music teacher and because of this lopetin found a ton of musical influence right at home he was surrounded by many of the works found in his father's music collection mixes from local radio stations video game soundtracks as well as everything his mother taught him along the way heather fair does a wonderful biography on lopeten that i highly recommend giving a read if you're looking for a more intensive look on daniel's beginnings and early career which i will leave a link to in the description of this video as daniel got older he would go on to play synthesizer in bands and groups during his high school years he eventually moved to brooklyn new york for grad school and there he became involved in brooklyn's underground noise music scene lopetin would begin releasing music under a number of different names and aliases only to eventually take on the name oneotrix point never a play on the name of a boston radio station daniel's passion for keyboards samplers and sequencers has crafted a pretty impressive resume over the years many may recognize lopetin for 2011's replica an absolute 100 tricks point never classic with samples ripped mostly from 1980s commercials lopetin provided ears with a dynamic journey from start to end moments like submersible are heavy and bellowing while other tracks like child soldier are jittery and playful he's able to craft such genuine emotion with these broken and jumpy sounds while building the album ultimately presenting a beautiful palette of sensations for the listener eight years and much more music later lopetin would end up composing the original score to the 2019 anxiety ridden crime thriller film uncut gems and a year later even work with the weeknd producing and writing a couple of songs off of his album after hours lopetin would also play a huge role in the weekend's latest album dawn fm to think that someone who's working with the weeknd and composed music for one of my favorite movies of all time was once making vaporwave even if it was only one time with echo jams is still pretty mind-blowing to me lopetin's legacy and vaporwave would begin in the late 2000s on his sunset corp youtube channel angel nobody here and demerol are considered to be some of the first ever true vaporwave tracks all also eventually making their way onto chuck person's echo jams vol 1. these are all still viewable on the sunset corp youtube channel which i will put in the description below as well with nobody here even hitting over 2 million views as of the making of this video each piece features what l'hopiton calls echo jams chopped screwed up and slice selections that take a bite right out of a sample and pancakes that bite over and over to create this dizzying yet hypnotic sensation throughout a track's run time with varying amounts of delay reverb echoing all over the place anybody can make echo jams due to their simplistic nature and because of this each echo jam's unique personality depends on what snippet from a sample the producer finds to be the juiciest to flip lopetin understands that because each producer has their own taste there will always be an infinite amount of possibilities on how a sample can be used for an echo jam produced between 2009 and 2010 and released in the summer of 2010 chuck person's echo jams vol 1 consists of two sides tracks a1 through a8 and tracks b1 through b7 the album feels like a candy store of sounds with chewed up samples from toto to ian vandal and elo to janet jackson lopetin really used a little bit of everything on this album hearing that intro track a1 rev up into the africa sample by toto is just so magical every time i throw this album on lopetin throws the sample back and forth like he's having a baseball catch with it and just submerges everything in this aquatic thick shroud of effects and echoes and delays and all that stuff to quickly introduce us to this deep-sea artwork world that is in the album cover a2 or as we've come to know of it as angel from the sunset corp uploads features some of the more diverse sample chopping moments of the album nothing on the album is really revolutionary in regards to how lopetin decides to pick and place where each sample chop goes more of the focus on chuck person's echo jams volume one is spent with the textures and hypnotic experiences found within the final result of the sample reworks but a2's first couple of seconds does feature some of the more bouncier moments i guess of the sample chopping on the album [Music] fleetwood max only over you bombarded with reverb echoing and obnoxious yet super tasteful flangers and lopetin continues this style of nostalgia inducing trippy overlapping sample play throughout the rest of the track list and to talk about each track individually feels a bit pointless in a way since it's an album that kind of does the same thing throughout the entire run time and that's kind of the point of it anyway there's a really nice range of genres explored throughout the sample choices lopitan made in each track individually but the glitched almost broken concept that glazes over the entire project pretty much makes each track the same in a way and it really works for a project like this because loboton takes the sweetest most savory parts of the tracks he's working with and just loops them at nauseam you know he just loops that hook constantly and it puts you in this state you know what if you've heard the album you already know what i'm talking about and doing that pretty much throughout the entire album gives this thing its personality echo jams were done time and time again after this release but nothing ever truly captured the same like broken magic that lopetin did with this thing maybe he just knew how to hit our brains right with the perfect sample choices i don't know it's wonderful editing and text drive whatever it is nothing ever really hits like chuck person's echo jams vol 1. [Music] on the visual side of things we're given glitchy album artwork built up from bits and scraps of the sega mega drive and mega cd versions of the echo the dolphin video game this cover is like a historical vaporwave art composition at this point this in floral shop of course seem to be the most recognizable vaporwave classics from those who have at least heard of the genre once or twice and for good reason they both capture such a nostalgic tone yet they feel so liminal and unnatural and like empty in a way all themes that would be chiseled into the vaporwave aesthetic for years to come the concoction of fragments on chuck person's echo jams vol 1's artwork is just so jarring yet cool at the same time and just feels like a game shark chi code gone wrong the artwork really pairs well with the pancaking audio effect i mentioned earlier that low button uses as a staple throughout the project and just like the echo the dolphin video game itself there is a sense of dread throughout the entire album lopeten taking happy pop songs and corrupting them through various amounts of delay reverb tape manipulation while the video game gives you what should be a beautiful ocean world terrorized by an outside force i've always looked at the broken art and sound of chuck person's echo jams vol 1 as a message on the dangers of relying too much on nostalgia for happiness the idea that we can sometimes have such a broken view of a romanticized past and how that affects us in finding significance in new experiences there will always be discussion in virtually any community topic or subject on what people believe was the first to ever do it while many in the past have sampled music in similar fashion to lopetin's work here the aesthetic and tone present within the entirety of chuck person's echo jams vol 1 was so crushingly vaporwave in an almost sinister purposeful way that i feel it's so hard to choose anything else other than this as the first ever for the genre due to the project's self-awareness in a time where no other relatable vaporwave releases were there to compare itself to but today i actually have long time producer dj and a great friend skeleton lipstick here with me to give his take on who he believes actually did vaporwave first so for me vaporwave as an artistic movement really begins with 18 carat affair albums like 60 40 or gorgeous fantasy and while 10 tricks point never the echo jam's album and james ferraro and all of his work are extremely influential on the ideas and sounds and concepts that will appear in vaporwave a movement doesn't really begin until like-minded artists begin to group together and exchange ideas back and forth with each other and in my opinion dennis was the first person to really synthesize all these ideas that were bouncing back and forth amongst a lot of like-minded artists and you know when i saw his work come out and those records come out i was like well this is the person who's really nailed down what i think we have all been reaching for and all been trying to say you know he was really the um the first person to collect all of the ideas that we had been gathering from things like obviously what a tricks point never obviously um plunderphonics words of canada the chillwafe movie to gather all together these ideas and then just like produce a entire new mood for music and so 18 karat affair is where this all begins and he was a peer so it was somebody that you could speak to as well and exchange ideas with like i said and that's where a movement really begins and that guy uh our friend dennis is the pinnacle of it in my opinion as of today the only lopeten sanctioned physical release of chuck person's echo jams vol 1 came from the label the curatorial club on a limited edition cassette a cassette which has one sold according to discogs for 1 000 wild with the boom of vinyl and can set releases becoming more and more available in the vaporwave community in recent years echo jams never received a true lopeten sanctioned physical release beyond the original limited edition cassette back in 2010. and this is pretty understandable there's some heavy samples on here that are quite distinguishable and if lopitan ever wanted to officially get all of this cleared for a truly sanctioned physical release i'm sure it wouldn't even be worth it at this point a number of bootlegs were released throughout the years most notably the vapor tapes ink drop back in the day if some of you remember that which caused quite a stir when they were first revealed i actually grabbed one of these things when it was first announced i just saw it on twitter i think and i just immediately was like oh shoot it's echo jams on a physical how am i not going to pick this up so i did but only to see lopeten kind of shoot it down a little while later i don't really remember the whole story of vapor tapes inc back in the day but i do remember them dropping or at least announcing that they were going to be doing echo jams vinyl as well as like some blank banshee bootlegs or something i don't even know if any of those saw the light of day but yeah i have this weird and wacky cassette version of chuck person's echo jams vol 1. i do like the glittery cassette shell though it's it is kind of cool i also have an unofficial lathe cut record of the album released on groovy dude records these were released at a super limited amount as well a couple of years ago i don't remember the exact amount but i do remember seeing the post drop on reddit and it genuinely felt like the label was releasing this for the pure sake of fans and collectors just wanting to see chuck person's echo jams vol 1 on vinyl they were like really upfront and honest about it that it wasn't uh sanctioned from what i remember i love the transparent look of the lath cut lathe kind of to this day i still don't know how to pronounce i don't know if it's lay either lathe cut whatever we're gonna we're gonna stick with lathe cut let me know in the comments if i'm saying it right i don't know and the artwork it looks really rich and high-res here too which is a super nice touch bootlegs and unofficial releases are always weird and an interesting subject in general but this one just felt simply made as an homage to the classic vaporwave album and of course it's just cool being able to spin some echo jams on my record player in regards to visual material and this one's actually really cool i didn't know about this until i started doing the research for this video a handful of tracks from chuck person's echo jams vol 1 were also originally used on memory vague lopitin's 2009 audio visual project that was released as a limited edition dvd in june of 2009 by the label root strata with lopeten providing the music and maxwell august croy the design and layout of the project memory vague served up a concoction of found footage material like commercials animation and music videos all edited by lopatin in windows movie maker the project contains the sunset corp youtube music videos lopetin uploaded like angel and nobody here as well as several other tracks from the echo jam project all adding up to 11 tracks in total memory vague is considered to be another pioneering piece in the vaporwave genre due to its aesthetic tone and manipulation of 80 source material the dvd is also pretty hard to come by as well one selling for over a hundred bucks on discogs so with an album name like echo jams volume one it was only obvious that people were eventually going to ask well where's volume 2 with it now being over a decade since the release of echo jams a volume 2 never came to be unfortunately when asked about a possible volume 2 in a reddit ama post from october 2013 lopeten replied with i have multiple volumes of echo jams in the crypto tank set to defrost in the distant future and i absolutely love that i imagine daniel played with a ton of samples along the way while creating you know the echo jams and i'm sure there was a bunch that didn't hit rate for him or whatever it was who knows how many of them he has or had that are just half finished on like i like to think of like them just sitting on this frozen hard drive thousands of feet under the sea in some like metallic facility with a giant window overlooking the ocean yeah some like dr evil looking [ __ ] that's where i picture all of these echo jams that we never got to hear that's where they're sitting so looking back at the project and its legacy it's still really awesome to see how many people still to this day pay respects to the echo jam style in their own work one of the first things i can think of is echo 10 a tribute to chuck person's echo jams vol 1 which celebrated the 10 year anniversary of lopeten's work with a massive 51 track compilation project featuring over 30 artists and creators originally released in 2020 on the label virtual dream club the project would get re-released about a year later on tiger blood tapes as a complete version this time with a really sweet limited edition double cassette tape box set all profits given towards the cassette purchase went towards the water.org foundation a foundation aimed to help people get access to safe water and sanitation around the world i'll be sure to put a link to that in the description below as well for those who want to learn more even my favorite vaporwave release of 2021 which if you haven't watched that video yet go check it out ghost's incantation has a heavy influence from lopeten's echo jams even having a track on there titled echo to no one and the big question do i think lopeten will ever come out with a volume 2. honestly nah i don't think so i actually think it's kind of cool that there's only a volume one this concept that maybe people who stumble upon the release who don't know anything about it or its legacy just finding it for what it is possibly trying to search for a echo jams vol 2 after finishing the album only to completely fail at ever finding the follow-up or if they do they find like fan-made creations of what echo jams volume 2 could have been and that just adds to the whole concept of echo gems anyway which is just awesome that idea of lost nostalgia and the irony in those who try and recapture those same exact feelings in their present day living it just doesn't exist and it never can and chuck person's echo gems volume 1 is literally that the obnoxious behavior of daniel lopeten's one-time project and its dedication of flooding you with a nostalgia overdose serves as a great reminder at least for me personally to find inspiration in nostalgia but not necessarily try to recapture it exactly because it could be very broken echo jam's vol 1 is an album i really don't listen to frequently either i kind of get sick of it after a full listen honestly and i think that's just another ironic beauty of the album's disposability i get that nostalgia blast from it you know but after a while even i too just want to listen to something less intoxicating and more structured in a traditional sense you know chuck person's echo jams vol 1 is really unique in that way because it just genuinely feels disposable in all the good ways yeah like padded said before chuck person's echo jams is no doubt in my mind a staple within the vaporwave genre before we had you know this vaporwave didn't really have a home to reside in once the sunset and all the scary monsters came out looking for food sure we had songs from the great 18 carat affair and the songs he made spans all the way back to 2008 when six-year-old me was watching boomerang and catching freaking pokemon on my black ds unfortunately though those songs never really caught air like echo jams did two years later in 2010 echo jam served as a bold move into a genre that hadn't yet been fully cemented surprisingly a lot of that comes from its means of production or lack thereof music in that day and age was known for their high budget fleshy mixing and crystal clear quality this was due partly to the rise of video streaming services like youtube and the rise of easily accessible technology like iphones unlike this type of music echo jam stood out by having literally none of that the beauty from this album however comes from how jarring and downright crazy it presents itself as in 2022 when vaporwave is commonplace we've come to expect this type of practice whether it's the influential infinity frequencies in their computer trilogy with its notable looping or it's the sinister death's dynamic shroud with its chopped and scary sampling while both artists are obviously amazing they weren't the ogs of the genre if you will echo jam stands out because this had never been attempted before in such a far out trajectory while the music sounds human it doesn't feel human if you were walking on a beach one day back then only to find this cassette half buried in the sand when you got home cleaned it off and played it chances are you'd be confused as to what you're listening to when that amazing track a1 began playing three things would have most likely crossed your mind one is this cassette broken two if it isn't who would dare to make something like this that sounds broken and three despite this why does this actually sound really good that's because since the beginning of modern music we've trained ourselves to believe that music must sound proper and perfect everything must flow well everything must sound crystal clear and everything must be socially presentable or god help you when you suddenly have an album that's main focal point is being chopped up sampling artists and lowering the bitrate into the single digits while simultaneously going against every single cardinal sin in the modern day musical industry all the while it sounds surprisingly good then that's an album worthy of praise with an amazing selection of tracks beautiful album artwork and a legacy that allowed for an entire genre of music to follow it if you haven't checked out chuck person's echo jams as of yet you absolutely have to sooner rather than later thank you for having me pad i'll give it back to you so i wanna know what you gotta say let me know in the comments below your thoughts on the chuck person's echo jams vol 1 project as well as any other artists albums songs genres you name it that you'd want me to explore in a future video on this channel check out my video here that explores more beginnings of the vaporwave genre or here for a deep dive into japan's most dangerous band and i'll see you over there cheers and thank you so much for watching much love your boy and we'll talk soon pad channington

Channel: Pad Chennington

Views: 48,583

Keywords: vaporwave, vaporwave mix, vaporwave music, vaporwave macintosh plus, vaporwave aesthetic, evolution of vaporwave, vaporwave radio, late night lofi vaporwave, vaporwave subgenres, vaporwave shirt, vaporwave and their samples, vaporwaves, vaporwave pad, how to make vaporwave, first vaporwave song, vaporwave through the years, 2010 vaporwave, vaporwave edit, vaporwave text, vaporwave font, eccojams, daniel lopatin, opn, chuck persons eccojams vol. 1, ecco, ecco the dolphin

Id: F_jxPwQQcFk

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022