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I was listening to 空気系 today, and it struck me how strange it was that there's an entire (albeit microscopic) subculture of (generally young, internet-native) Western artists making releases like this.

The ads used as the main source material in these releases are originally produced in specific contexts and for specific purposes. Signalwave works through the elimination of this context while maintaining the content, devoid of its original media surroundings and now considered as an art object that exists on its own metrics and freed of its functionality. The kind of advertising used here are beautiful pieces of video and sound, created to sell a product. Signalwave is the action of removing of the product and thus revealing the beauty in means liberated of ends.

The original message of the media stolen for these releases is, "your life will be beautiful if you buy [x], do [x], etc." By collecting and presenting these recordings as music and not as functional media, the message is cut down to to, "your life will be beautiful." The aesthetic sugar needed to make the bitter pill of opinion and behavior manipulation go down is distilled and presented by itself.

The frequent usage of Japanese media could be reasonably attributed to the internet's general tendencies towards Japanophilia, especially pronounced in the nerdy music circles signalwave generally spawns from, but it could also very be considered as assisting in the process of context removal. The experience of listening to 空気系 as a Japanese speaker is doubtlessly quite different from my (American, monolingual) experience of it because the words would have decipherable meaning; there is actual context, slogans and messaging, separating you from the pure, alienated position of defamiliarized readymades that signalwave tries to create. The fact that the message is lost in translation is, to some degree, the point, in that it further allows the experience of aesthetically pleasing media, created for a business function, to be taken purely on its own grounds. The same way signalwave isolated snippets of media and allows them to be enjoyed devoid of their original context, the usage of Japanese media by and for non-Japanese speaking artists and audiences enables the sound of language to be similarly taken in without semantic content getting in the way of the sensory experience of the phonemes themselves; I can point to other examples of Russian, Hungarian, Italian, etc. signalwave projects, but few that seem to operate in the same way as 空気系, 天気予報, etc. that use English media sources.

When you look at advertisements, they paint lovely images that you know are not true; everyone involved knows this, but we continue to produce and receive these images because that's what advertisement is. Signalwave takes a bizarre approach to these media fragments by actually taking them at their word. No one, from the people making ads to the people involuntarily watching them, believes the images; people in an office are never all high-fives and happy cooperation, the grass is never that green, stock photo bliss is not real. Signalwave represents a strangely subversive appropriation of these inherently manipulative images and media fragments by removing that manipulation and then daring to believe what the image is conveying. Its sincerity stands in stark opposition to most of vaporwave; I very much dislike the word "irony" being thrown around in these circles, but there is usually a degree of tongue-in-cheek distance, a kind of wink wink nudge nudge, or at the very least a tension between the context and your experience of listening to it. Signalwave's rejection of this subversive, somewhat cynical appropriation of consumerist culture, in favor of the even more subversive act of daring to believe in a kind of experienced utopia, makes it stand out from almost all vaporwave as a separate artistic lineage, ideologically and aesthetically more in line with idyllic new age than the culture-jamming plunderphonics subculture that spawned it.