MYSTICDREAM_10

When considering the Vaporwave lineage that Dream Catalogue emerged from in the mid-2010's, before it went on to evolve into its own brand of Dreampunk and chaos, we first have to look at the Classical Vaporwave line that predated it.

Though often cited as originating in 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr or in the works of Oneohtrix Point Never or James Ferraro, who were just mere influences than participants, we find Vaporwave's true origins, in fact, in the realms of Tinychat and Turntable FM - the internet chat rooms where young, naive Millenials would sit in bong-smoke filled bedrooms around the world, chopping and slowing down audio, pairing it with found footage and internet art, streaming it in low bitrate to one another for their evening entertainment, eventually evolving out to become a broader art movement that would in part define the Roaring 10's as a decade.

Amongst these true Vaporwave originators was Chaz Allen, a dynamic firebrand who would go on to co-found SPF420, which was one of Internet Music culture's first hotspots, hosting a who's who of names and in turn defining the culture itself. He would also go on to create the Metallic Ghosts project, best known for its concept album 'Skytower 2032' in 2013, which parodied the blossoming genre in a way that recognised what it was long before most of its adherents and creators even had a chance to fully realise their own project themselves, demonstrating the artist's ability to see through the absurd and pretentious towards the divine.

If Vaporwave was a Web 2.0 inevitability, then 'My Journey' is the gates amidst the vaporous clouds here at the transition point into Web3; our sinking deeper into the internet hellscape. Vaporhell, if you will. Rather than the deranged pleasure of re-examining and fucking with our parent's artefacts from the 1980's and 90's, Chaz turns the microscope onto our generation's here, weaving and sewing together a tapestry of Millenial ambition as it once was before the disillusionment and shattering that the last two years of disease, war, economic meltdown have done to us. We hear Youtube buskers who never made a dime, failed soundcloud rappers who never took flight, kids who just turned their webcam and microphones on because they were simply there - 'My Journey' is a tapestry of dreams that have sank into the abyss of the digital ocean- a memory that is already slipping away. 'My Journey' is a return to Art with a capital A in a time of playlist bait and presaves, in that it sees a light in the distance, piercing through the darkness of this current time; an innocent dream that can be rescued and resuscitated if we want.

The album cover itself, of a glamorous looking doll sat blankfaced in a Star Wars t-shirt, recalls in some way the end scene of Stanley Kubrick's 1999 magnum opus, 'Eyes Wide Shut', in where the lead characters Bill and Alice, played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are walking through a toy store with their daughter, who shows them a series toys she wants Santa to bring her for Christmas, including a plastic doll, a direct metaphor of the hyperreal world that Bill has discovered a darker truth about in the film's narrative, and the child's explicit invitation into it -- this world of dreams and fantasia that we survive by, built on a foundation of unseen brutality and horror. "Maybe, I think, we should be grateful..." Alice says to her husband, out of earshot of the child. "...Grateful that we have managed to survive through all our adventures, whether they were real, or only a dream."