Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe

If you don't try too hard, you might just be able to enjoy the Macintosh Plus album Floral Shoppe (2011). There aren't reams (read: bytes) of commentary going around on this band - and that's good. It's better to listen to albums before reading/watching blogs/vlogs. They cloud your brainsex; you know, the stuff that makes tunes sound good.

I was sceptical of Floral Shoppe going into a one-sitting stream. I watched the internet's busiest music nerd wax lyrical (read: speak monotonously) about the band's lazy appropriation of found sounds and pop cuts. I think it's easy to criticise a new genre - which some incredibly smart people dubbed "vaporwave" - because it's unproven. There is no audience and it requires a new set of consumption values. More on that here.

For an impression of what this band does, listen to "リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー", which samples "It's Your Move" by Diana Ross. Sort of delicious.



It's tenuous to buy the hype of any new genre. Especially with conceptually ironic names that crop up beside vaporwave, such as "post-glo-fi" and "post-retro". But Macintosh Plus will feel familiar to internet users (read: more than 2 billion of you) for its mechanical warmth and 70s/80s pop-soul nostalgia. For music nerds, it's got samples, loops and pitch-bends for you to analyse disembodiedly (new word) for at least 15 minutes.

I would call the Floral Shoppe track "ライブラリ" a lazy edit of 1978's "You Need a Hero" by soft rock band Pages. But the original's charm does glow through:

  
The internet is a pastiche of little bits of us; digital images of our physical intentions. It's a meta-world, and copy/paste bands like Macintosh Plus are representative of the transition our lives are taking into post-humanity.

And according to Weblaw, you may download Floral Shoppe for free right here.