Reality Matrix and the energy of contradiction
The final Reality Matrix album absorbs and feeds back dreampunk's chaotic nature, but is it to the album's benefit?
It hasn't taken long for dreampunk to coalesce around a set of overarching aesthetic guidelines. In the five years that have passed since the release of 2 8 1 4's Birth Of A New Day, the creative fluctuations emanating from key dreampunk labels constitute clear signs of tension and contradiction among their artists. On one side of the yin/yang divide is the label Pure Life, which has dedicated itself to the refining and crystallizing of metropolitan audio cinematics for emotional headroom in an ever shrinking urban space. Take the most recent offering in their trademark compilation series, Ambient Punk II. Sure, there is room for stylistic diversions, for instance in the form of UK Garage/2 step swing from Cryosauna, emo pop and trap fusion from w_baer and lo fi, washed out house stylings from Cult Member. However, all of these influences never drag the tunes that are offered far away from their foundational, humongous domes of atmosphere, all steeped in reverb and side-chain.
All of this seems to fit neatly with Pantha Rhei's vision of dreampunk and Pure Life's role in it, as he explained to Dreampunk Record Club in August 2020:
“The concept of purity to me is broadly about acceptance of yourself. Living on your own terms and not living to fulfill other people's expectations or standards. I guess it's a more optimistic version of 'based'. This translates into the way we run the label, we try to run it in a way that best services the artists and the fans and try to set an example by abiding to ethical practise. We're attracted to artists who share a similar mentality.”
“I kind of approach making music through a cinematic lens. I think of a scene and then try and soundtrack that moment or feeling or create an accompanying atmosphere. “
If we from these quotes can extrapolate that Pantha Rhei and his Ukraine based label partner CMD094 have the same mentality in the curation process for the label, it becomes easier to understand why Pure Life's back catalog by now has developed a highly recognizable, yet more strictly defined sound palette.
On the other side of the divide, at some point in 2015, Dream Catalogue's founder HKE and his friend and subsequent label manager Shima33 started to grow increasingly disinterested and dissatisfied with the music coming out of the greater vaporwave continuum. They eventually turned into straight up antagonists for vaporwave fandom, using the meme filled and messy yet insightful podcast CANVAS as a vent for their creative frustrations. The label's back catalog was similarly plunged into chaos. Record artwork became increasingly doused in neon, black and red. Artists got their albums pulled from the market without warning due to copyright concerns. HKE seemingly ran into a major period of creative restlessness, hurtling through layers of autotune, fuzz guitar, trap and acid to counteract dreampunk setting its foundations in stone. Dream Catalogue's excesses culminated in a hyperactive, Spinal Tap-esque version of modern rap music on steroids dubbed flap. Flap would go on to alienate almost an entire live audience at a 2019 show, but also yield the release #HYPERCHILL, a raw and honest detailing of HKE's emotions around recent pivotal events in his life.
Then, at the tail end of 2020, and right after Shima33 had delivered what basically amounted to a good guy pro wrestling promo on Dream Catalogue's future, the label's complete closure was announced to take place in early 2021. Now dreampunk is facing a giant void that needs to be filled by a new creative figurehead.
Yet others do not consider it at all necessary to break from their remaining vaporwave roots. A good example of this is Hiraeth Records, which with 沙漠鱿鱼 's 廟街 drags these roots out of the pastel colored 80s and into a completely washed out and blurred 2020 in urban East Asia. Label boss Jornt Elzinga, aka 猫 シ Corp., seems unconcerned with the potential of factions forming. 猫 シ Corp. is revered for its exploration of more concrete themes within vaporwave (such as mallsoft, the lament of and/or ode to capitalism's empty and abandoned market halls), and it seems like this kind of curiosity greatly influences Hiraeth's “odd one out” mentality. Thus, it becomes less fraught with danger to reach across the aisle and release dreampunk (such as the album 27th Floor by Passive Refraction) while at the same time staying hooked on classic a e s t h e t i c s (バーチャルボーイ A t s u – 月光 t e m p l e).
It's clear that the schism between the reverence of existing order and the desire for chaos and deconstruction provides an abundant energy source for dreampunk. It's less clear whether this is a sustainable divide, i.e. whether fans and artists will keep on populating the different sides of the divide equally enough to keep it around as a driving force. Your Soul, A Shadow, the final Reality Matrix release, manifests this dynamic quite clearly.
At first glance, the album provides the listener with another iteration of a familiar dreampunk pad sprawl: a crisp and clean synth canvas for further expressions of human tech city turmoil. Big, reverb drenched cityscapes span out in front of the listener, and drums and sub bass punch in loudly to underpin and twist the decorated neon surfaces conjured up in the mind of the listener. While the impact is immediate, fans of Visionist, PAN Records and HKE will not necessarily find anything particularly new here. However, the canvas Reality Matrix paints on is quickly riddled with dye bullets from across the spectrum of electronic music, causing it to bleed neon colored droplets all over propulsive 4/4 (“Interlaced With Neon”), trap (“Faces Like Yours”) and rapid, unrelenting portamento sequences that come crashing out of your speakers in waves (“Into Eternity”). The album seemingly frays at the edges, balancing on a razor's edge between the harnessing of adjacent genre energies for greater vitality and originality and the sacrifice of overall album cohesion. In the end, there's a lot of potential being displayed here, but it's also tough to fully argue that the rapid disintegration of an overarching stylistic framework necessarily is to the album's benefit.
Precious little information is available on the individual(s) behind Reality Matrix. Their Twitter account contains little more than a series of disjointed and vaguely evocative phrases. After the release of this album, they quickly moved on to a new moniker: Shunned Anubis, producing a few releases that are even more chaotic, menacing and sprawling stylistically than before, relying heavily on processed breakbeats and swallowing up even more space in the mix. No matter who hides behind either moniker, a turbulent deconstructive impulse remains at the center of the works they produce. As it stands, Your Soul, A Shadow is a vivid snapshot of an artist being yanked forcefully into a storm of competing creative forces. Will followers of dreampunk be happy here? Can dreampunk continue to subsist on the kind of schismatic energy that's displayed on this album, even at the risk of being pulled apart at the seams?