Album Review : desert sand feels warm at night & MindSpring Memories - Desert Memories (2023)
It’s hard to explain the interest of vaporwave to someone who hasn’t lived through the pre-internet era, where boredom was a more accepted idea in popular culture. When nothing interesting happened for a long enough period of time, you could build a relationship to the strangest content, like infomercials or reruns of syndicated television shows cable networks featured at ungodly hours to fill dead air. You weren't connected to anyone then. Sometimes reality was just shared between you and whatever happened on TV.
desert sand feels warm at night & MindSpring Memories new collaborative record Desert Memories brought me back to these surreal late nights feelings where my inner self or outer self merged.
Desert Memories features seven songs and over 70 minutes of music, but it’s not really about composition or complexity. If you’re into the right frame of mind to listen to it, it might go by without you ever noticing the songs changed. It’s all about mood, layers and soaking in reverb and other electronic effets that dampen your perception of what's really happening. See, desert sand feels warm at night play a ambient and dreamlike subgenre of vaporwave referred to as slushwave, which is fucks with your perception by design.
I am less familiar with MindSpring Memories' catalogue, but it feels very much like a desert sand feels warm at night record.
The conveniently named opener Opening the Book is all piano and popping bass and reveals in that absence I love so much in vaporwave and slushwave. The same notes just swirl and swirl and dancing through their own reverberation, like the distant, overromanticized memory of an end of programming notice at 2 AM on a Thursday. Opening the Book is the memory of that familiar, comforting sound that filters through your subconscious. It’s subtle, but intoxicating, like any good slushwave should be.
Divine Manuscript features different textures by used a more contemporary bass sound and distant , swirling keyboard notes that hang in the air under a thick cloud of audio effects. Unlike for Opening the Book, it features slushwave traditional pitched-down vocals, which are so integral to the aesthetic. Divine Manuscript doesn’t feel like a distant, corrupted memory. It feels like something that never happened. A weird dream. A song that you’ve never heard, but inexplicably wake up humming in the morning.
Eighty Four, Zero One unapologetically abuses that lush, corny eighties since and the pitched-down vocals thing. It used obsessive repetition to foster this uncanny, but comforting feeling that’s so crucial to good slushwave. It has these out of the box synthwave elements too that builds up nostalgia. Sonically, it’s a very idealistic song that elicits incongruous, but pleasant feelings of walking in the air or flying over cities at night. It’s rich and textured like few other songs on Desert Memories.
Cognizance doubles down on the weird and the eerie. It’s an even slower, more distorted song that feels like you’re hearing being played through a wall, like it was your neighbour playing it. It almost feels voyeuristic, like you’re sharing solitude with someone you don’t know. Voices From The Oasis emerges from that otherwordliness Desert Memories swamped us in since Divine Manuscript. The instrumental is delivered more straightforwardly, which makes a cool clash with the slushwave vocals.
The Final Chapter is one of my favorite songs on Desert Memories. It’s one of the most straightforward vaporwave songs on the record, so maybe it played a part in my appreciation (I like slushwave, but I don’t LOVE it). It has these lucsious synths, distant echoes of saxophones doubling up the vocals. At least it’s what I heard. Slushwave mixes are pretty muddled by design. It gave me the distinct feeling of watching daytime television reruns in slow motion, inside a dream. A pretty unique mood.
The also conveniently named closer Closing the Book is a sixteen minutes-long atmospheric mammoth that takes us from a journey that starts with distant, swirling synths layered over one another that emerge into one clean, lingering retrofuturist melody. It’s one of these mood pieces that take their sense with time and several listens, so I haven’t really made up my mind about it yet, but the ambition of putting such journeylike long works out when most vaporwave songs like like 90 seconds long is laudable.
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I liked Desert Memories a lot. It’s smart and otherworldly exactly how I knew desert sand feels warm at night to be. It evokes a wide array of difficult-to-pinpoint feelings through a fog of nostalgia for sound that might’ve never existed. It’s a warm record, but I wouldn’t exactly call it sunny. It’s warm and sticky like a hot summer night in 1995 was. Not really sure how different MindSpring Memories sounds from desert sand feels warm at night on their own, but they have a new fan in me with this record.
