Fatal by Sheffner

NYS#157

FORMATTING NOTE:

Fatal has two constituent parts / "discs"

"Fatal"
Tracks 1-5

"Unburied"
Track 6

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If you've listened to my output before, I'm sure you're very confused. Or if you've been listening since before the current sound for "my output" was defined, I'm sure you're asking "why now?".

Who in their right mind would make a vaporwave album 9 years into their career?

Nobody. Never claimed to be of sound mind myself.

Let's cue the backstory.

Last month I heard Disembodiment by t e l e p a t h. A career suicide work. A fine slurred-speech-as-music work, kind of Reich-ian, maybe Joseph Hammer-y. Television delirium. It's inspiring. It has a recognizable pink cover. It sounds like nothing else by the artist. If I was gonna rip it off I wasn't going to do the blocks of machine translated Japanese. I may be a formalist, but I'm not entirely not a futurist. Let what is passé be passe.

But really what I was thinking as I was listening: "this is the modern Substrata by Biosphere!", or "it's a second Shader by Sacred Tapestry!", or "it's both!". No, I wasn't thinking of that. Sorry to lie to you twice. What I was thinking in that moment "this is way more involved than I remember this fucking guy being." I then proceeded to shill it to several of my friends. Somehow I grew obsessed. This brain-rotting, poorly EQ'd, profoundly melancholy beast took up way too much of my headspace. Imagine my disappointment when I had to remember this was the only work in the ouvre of one Luke Laurila, aka t e l e p a t h, that sounds that way. I knew I had to do something. This produced "FATAL", or this album I'm sure you have many questions about, at least I am presuming you do.

"FATAL" is rudimentary. I lied. There is still usually five things going on at once. The palette borrows from vaporwave (bargain big new age, 80s Japanese commercial compilations, library / production music, "city pop"), but I intended to push what I heard in Disembodiment into the directions of the minimalists, the tape musicians, the electroacousticians. I attempted to put far more emphasis on rhythmic speech. Eventually I dealt away with long samples and functioning melodies altogether. A single melody is actually 5 clips of different instances of itself. The record will grow more fragmentary throughout its runtime and the only sound sources will be 1-2 second microsampled clips of songs echoing out into eternity in the unoccupied hallways of my DAW's delay effects. There are phasers present. I confessed to borrowing from Laurila in the last paragraph, and that is a hallmark of his sound. The whole thing is caked in a shimmering reverb that can and will clip aggressively if the gain on a sample is slightly above a mouse's peep. Please adjust your volume accordingly, I hope I can make it up to you someday. The album was made in under 24 hours. I sit here at 3:46pm on the day after I started it. The first song was exported at about 10 in the morning yesterday. I think it's the most fun I've had making music in a while.

The first music to be called 'vaporwave', by and large, sucked. The music that came after it also mostly sucked. I think now that we're at an ouroboral stage where we are nostalgic for manifestations of borrowed nostalgia we can admit that the potential of 'vapor' remains to be seen. I see in Disembodiment the perfect work of 'hypermedia capitalist stasis, the abandoned mall of the mind and its ethereal food courts of neon junk food', or whatever you think vaporwave intends to achieve. I think you could do better than me, and you could make "FATAL" obsolete by tomorrow should you so desire. I challenge all of you, musicians and "non-musicians" (no such thing, just people who imagine in their heads that DAWs are too byzantine for them to navigate despite never having touched nor seen a DAW, get over yourselves), to prove me right and make this look like a fat, inauthentic, crock of shit. Make me proud, baby.

- Sheffner

Tracklist

1.	Fatal_	29:28

2.	F_atal	14:58

3.	Fata_l	16:54

4.	Fat_al	18:40

5.	_Fatal	0:16

6.	Errors Exist in Sacred Documents and The Uncorrupted Transmission of the Word of God Remains An Impossibility	30:00

Credits

released November 19, 2023

Solid Sheffner (soon to be liquefied) - music, cover art

License