Here it is, the beginning of vaporwave, the true white hip-hop. Lopatin hacks up Toto and Heart and Kate Bush, and most centrally, “The Lady In Red” by Chris de Burgh, which he has cited as the first real eccojam. Instead of chopping beats, we are decelerating synth pads and making the saxophone stutter, creating a new world from old vibes rather than new songs from old melodies. This was the real shot in the war against what Lopatin famously described in 2009 as “timbral fascism,” in The Wire, a year before dropping this bombmaking blueprint. That interview with David Keenan contains much of the rationale behind vaporwave, which Lopatin called “ecco jamming” (here rendered as “echo jamming”). “I find that the repurposed work reveals all sorts of insane secret messages. For instance, the lyrical context can totally take on new meaning, or the act of repeat listening to a particular musical loop will invoke unexpected time and space relationships. Pop music is horizontal by nature, it wants to tell you a story from start to finish. Echo jams make pop vertical and cyclical. It’s all about reveling in the sublime. And anyone can do it. Echo jamming is like DIY personalized psychedelic appropriated music. It’s also a DJ Screw/John Oswald Duo cover band.”

When compared to later, more sophisticated works such as 2814’s Birth Of A New Day, Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol 1. might sound a little rough around the edges, but on his extremely limited cassette release, Daniel Lopatin (better known when trading as Oneohtrix Point Never) essentially pulled what would be termed Vaporwave and its myriads of offshoots out of the ether of shared cultural memory. 

Created out of boredom while he was working for a Boston publisher, the concept was fairly simple: Lopatin ripped well-known tracks from the 1980s off YouTube — Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Womack & Womack, Tears For Fears, Toto — slowed them down into a narcoleptic fugue state, chopped them up and ran them through some reverby Logic FX.

Yet the liminal space he created would reset the dial for sample culture, electronic production and the wider culture’s relationship with its own past. The deeply melancholic murk here doesn’t trigger nostalgia for its source material, but instead conjures up half-remembered ghosts, flickering and stuttering to break through from their own nightmarish netherworld. Not only would Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol 1. inspire a generation of bedroom producers and set a sonic tone for mainstream superstars such as The Weeknd and Drake, but also — one could argue — helped lay the foundations for Netflix’s all-conquering 80s reanimation, Stranger Things.