Canada’s Underground Vaporwave- Adjacent Scene Will Out-#StayAtHome Us All

By Dayna Mahannah

Trying to pindown what vaporwave is, exactly, is like trying to nail a jello cube to a wall. For an outsider looking in, as I was mere months ago, it was disorienting to learn that vaporwave music isn’t even all of it, “it” being the concept. The larger umbrella of this microgenre is better encapsulated in the term “aesthetic internet electronic bedroom music.”

Charlie Darragh founded the label 2010 Records to elevate this movement of electronic bedroom artists in a city drenched in indie alt-rock everything. “It’s an idea. It’s a concept. It’s a platform. It’s more than a label. It’s a collective. It's a space. It's a music video.” It’s like attempting to tell a friend about a crazy dream you had; it makes sense when you’re in it. But trying to articulate it is nearly impossible.

The first time I met with 24-year-old Darragh a couple months ago for coffee in The Before era of East Vancouver, he arrived in black denim cargo pants with a thick wallet chain and a choppy blonde bowl cut that jolted me into a vivid ‘90s flashback. Was that vaporwave? Nostalgia is fundamental. But the very essence of the underground genre—aesthetic internet music, more broadly—is nebulous and misty, crystallizing few vital components: electronic, DIY, lo-fi, and retro-futuristic visuals. It is “music made on a computer” and “produced in a bedroom.” The tagline on the 2010 Records website reads Low-Fidelity, High-Quality™.

After Darragh’s initial love of indie alt-rock classics at age eleven, then self-described “teenage drunk douchebag years” listening to trap, and a semi-pro skateboarding career that ended after he smashed his chin on a guardrail in Italy, a friend introduced him to the musical dreamworks of George Clanton, co-founder of American indie label 100% Electronica, who some fans refer to as “vapordaddy”—a jokey but loving testament to his role in pushing the movement far past its sub-sub-URL realm in the US. “He was a real awakening,” Darragh muses of Clanton. “His music was just so weird and fun and I was like, ‘oh. I wanna make that. That’s what I wanna do.”

During a Facebook call at the end of March, Darragh is self-isolated at his Vancouver home due to COVID-19. He grocery shopped for his grandparents the day before, and the day before that his 80s-synth single “We Don’t Have to Try Anymore” was released on 2010 Records under the translucent moniker Charlie D. Even before social distancing became the new normal, the high-accessibility of electronic bedroom music has allowed this subgenre to expand through the online sphere, creating a universe of DIY artists simmering just out of sight from the IRL. “Nothing is made in a studio… People are just doing it.” But unlike the visible tsunami of vaporwave in the US, Canada’s aesthetic music scene is still largely submerged.

Marc Junker, a Vancouver-based, award-winning composer and producer better known to his fans as R23X—“beatmaker from the mist continent” (as per his Twitter profile)—feels similarly. “I personally have felt a lot of disconnect locally,” Junker says over a video call from his home, as his orange cat Dijon crawls on his lap. “I played in LA and it was a massive multi-venue event to a packed stage. It was life changing. And I came back here and I did a show and it was 30 or 40 people, which is still fun, but it was a reality check I guess.” His VHS video game experimental music has been released on the popular UK label Dream Catalogue and he played Japan’s NEO GAIA PHANTASY tour twice. Last year he performed at 100% ElectroniCON in LA and NYC, a vaporwave festival produced by Clanton. “There's definitely space for someone to try to get traction here because people are hungry for it, but there isn't that much here.”

The sentiment is shared by Canadian artist Jeff Cancade, aka Devours. “Vancouver is amazing. The scene is humongous; it’s way bigger than people think it is,” he tells me from Nanaimo, where he was self-isolating at his parents house. “But it doesn't have a lot of media representation and so almost everyone is underground.” Have you heard of local chiptune savant bryface, or the eminent and faceless Blank Banshee? What about shitlord fuckerman, the broadly talented “reba mcentire of techno”? Their names seem to exist in a dimension tangential to Vancouver’s music scene. Before his big-browed electronic project, Devours, found success, Cancade struggled to find his voice and break into the scene in Montréal, where he lived for three years. Moving back to the west coast proved to be a rough start. “I just didn't fit in here because all I could see were indie rock bands and garage rock bands.”

In Montréal, Canada’s experimental music and arts capital, events like Slut Island prop up underrepresented artists and a plethora of DIY venues are active platforms bringing the fringe to the forefront. Producer lbardsley moved from Calgary to Montréal where she started the band Blue Odeur (now a solo electro-dance project) and helped run a small music venue called Poisson Noir. She believes the city is still in need of varied platforms for musicians, but it has advantages incomparable to the rest of Canada. “Montréal doesn’t give a flying fuck what you do,” she giggles over a Zoom call. “That harness set that you just got on the internet? You can wear it on Saint-Laurent… no ones going to bat an eye.” But she points to Montréal’s alleged underworld of organized crime syndicates that informally “run” the city as being a red herring, of sorts, for the burgeoning music scene. Though the DIY venue lbardsley helped run was “technically” legal, “We liked to joke at Poisson Noir that there are always bigger fish to fry.”

Of course, the Stay At Home mandate in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic has shuttered dance floors across the globe and shifted the music world largely online—exactly where aesthetic internet musicians have been thriving since the early aughts. “There’s been a lot of people posting things like, ‘self isolating since 94,’” lbardsley laughs. Her collaborative project, punctï, is still possible with social distancing.

Junker is hopeful. “I think it might be a bit of a reset button for these genres because a lot of them started with livestreams.” Indeed, the livestream platform Twitch saw spikes in traffic in mid March. Major festivals and megastars are going digital. Charli XCX played a DJ set at the unparalleled online queer pandemic party, Club Quarantine. “Everyone is basically being forced to be a bedroom musician now... of everyone in this situation who is struggling and who can't jam with their band, like, electronic musicians might be thriving right now,” Cancade says. The proverbial doors have been opened to swaths of people who don’t always have the opportunity to experience live music because of age, location, economic or accessibility issues.

Though still nascent, 2010 Records is dialled in to the endless possibilities of the internet and staying true to their tagline, “put the plan to your DIY.” The artist-friendly label will host its first livestream show, Reality Reflections, May 15 on its YouTube page. Darragh’s visions for 2010 Records are ambitious; he spitfires off a list of goals before stumbling over his words and saying he has so many ideas that he can’t think of any. He’s not all talk: since its founding in 2019, the label has brought on multiple artists, created nostalgia-heavy music videos, and produced the show Open Haus at Vancouver’s Red Gate Arts Society. Due to the pandemic, his plans for live shows and festivals are postponed, but Darragh’s eyes are set far into the retro-future, where there are no limits; 2010 Records is more accurately an arts collective that seeks to unite bedroom artists across the country, creating a collaborative network of criss-crossing talents that together can do, well, anything in the nostalgic audio-visual sphere.

Until the day we can come crawling out of our bedrooms, squinting and atrophied, into public gathering spaces, many will seek musical relief online. The Stay At Home mandate for many DIY internet artists is like telling the neighbourhood cat it is locked out of the house for the foreseeable future. “This weirdly enough could be, like, our moment,” Cancade considers, leaning toward his laptop’s camera. Nearing the end of our call, lbardsley gets “senty” after we discuss the loneliness that can accompany making music by oneself, compounded by the quarantine. “I feel like a lot of people are going to get into their feelings but also their old stuff—the stuff that they really liked when they were kids… I feel like there's going to be a retrospective reawakening of the things we used to hold really dear and actually true to ourselves comparative to the aesthetic masks or veils that we can wear. I feel like we’ll have less of those. Like the ‘cool’ or ‘not cool.’ That’s what I'm hoping.”

Creatives will create, no matter the restraints. But “nothing compares to live music,” as Cancade insists. Junker’s experience performing at 100% ElectroniCON last year was “heartwarming” and positive. “We felt like superstars but also the fans felt like superstars,” he recalls. “People were meeting each other for the first time who were internet friends for years.”

Whatever the end of this strange state of the world is, 2010 Records will be there, online and off. There is a phrase coined by electro-punk duo The Garden—Vada Vada—“that represents total freedom of expression without boundaries or guidelines of any sort.” It’s in this frame of mind that Darragh moves about day to day, and how he approaches work and music. It is, I’ve come to learn, a way of life. That’s one way to describe it.

Reality Reflections will livestream on 2010 Records Youtube channel on May 15 and feature performances from The Golden Age of Wrestling, Blue Odeur, Daffodil and Charlie D.