News at 11

I never heard of this Dutch musician, but I'm afraid I did not miss very much. He has produced a lot of albums during the last 13 years (more than an album a year). I now know how to achieve this: sample complete songs by other artists, slow the songs down and drop some radio conversation samples in between. I compared these versions to some originals (Torcuato Mariano and Rippingtons) and was struck by the lack of difference apart from speed. I like the usages of samples in general and do not know vaporwave as a genre, but just using complete songs with hardly any changes seems copying to me, not sampling. I really not impressed by this album.

Incredible. Nostalgic, haunting. Smooth.

Having to listen on YouTube put me in a bad mood so this album was already doomed.

At first glance you’d be excused for thinking this was a thrown together bit of clips from old television - but after listening and reading a bit more I realized the effort and artistry behind this is easy to miss. Even given that, this was a choice that seems almost made for someone like me. I have always had a fascination with instrumental music from stores, elevators, and as background for things like The Weather Channel. Indeed I would listen to the music on The Weather Channel and wonder who created it, what was their inspiration, and the subtle differences in the smooth jazz that made each song evoke a slightly different kind of vanilla emotion. Weird I know. It wasn’t until after my first listen to this that I was able to read the background material and better understand what it was about. My emotions were swayed by this knowledge and I cant stop thinking about this album. While not something that would even be my favorite to listen to, it is something that I think is well-qualified as listen-to-before-you-die-worthy.

Broke my rule of auto-one starring anything I can’t stream on Apple Music because the concept was cool and it was available on Bandcamp. I think I’m going to be a mallsoft guy now

Rang: 7/10 Best songs: 8:46 am, Heli tours, The weather channel 1

Very interesting

Interesting album, worth a listen at least once,

What am I? The weatherman?!

This album wasn't available on Spotify but I listened to another one from 2016 instead. Pretty cool, nothing bad to say about it. 3/5.

The concept behind this certainly hits... the 9/11 terrorist attacks came weeks after my 30th birthday, a few months after my getting married. My spouse was supposed to be flying out of Oklahoma on business that morning: disruption of cell communications kept me out of touch with her for hours. It was a genuinely gorgeous fall morning in the Midwest U.S. Now that the always sinister invocation of the "homeland" that arose in its aftermath seems to be flowering into its full form at last in America (with disturbing echoes around the world) - mainly in the service (to my reckoning) of propping up the last gasps of petroleum wealth dynamics long enough to lock in global warming as a 5 century civilizational disaster - the melancholy dream of a world where it never happened is more enticing than ever. But does the product truly convey the message? I certainly don't think I'd ever have arrived at that interpretation if I had gone into this listen with no background information. Probably would have intuited a much vaguer meditation on 80s/90s era capitalism. Listening to it was amenable enough, though the microgenres around vaporwave are not really my thing and I assume, perhaps unfairly, a certain intellectual smugness in its devotees. Odd enough to keep it out of negative ratings, plus the nostalgia hit, whether earned or not.

I missed out on the whole Vaporwave/Mallsoft etc. thing when it first happened, but I've been dabbling a bit in it recently. There are probably much better examples of this sort of music, but I found this enjoyable enough.

Mallsoft, smooth jazz, vaporwave. Canciones instrumentales como de hilo musical interrumpidas por noticias. No le veo sentido a esta propuesta. Un 2.

Very weird album, with the ads and weather reports. Did not enjoy it that much

It's different, it's got that. However not in a particularly interesting way when it gets to the actual music. Slow Jazz not my thing. 1.5

Yeah nah. This arty experiment does not make an album. Definitely something different, but not something that works for my ears.

This LP wraps around itself in knots trying to be clever that it ends up back at perfect banality. I've listened to a good chunk of vaporwave, and slightly slowing down some Weather Channel music doesn't really cut it for artistry even by this genre's flexible standards. Also incensed by the entire theming of '9/11 but nothing happens' – It's clear from the album's Wikipedia description that this was simply Weather Channel music before suddenly becoming this grand conceptual statement, and the whole thing reeks of an art school project being thrown together the night before its due with some bullshit cover to make it necessarily #deep. The fact that the artist actually commented on the YouTube stream to point out that side A has 9 tracks and side B 11 (eh, EH? DO YOU GET IT? LIKE 9/11?) felt a little pathetic and encapsulated how hard it felt like this ablum was trying to say somethign meaningful while being a whole bunch of mostly plagiarized music and barely recontextualized samples. Giving this a 2 because it generated a lot of meaningful discussion amongst my friends about what makes music original and noteworthy (and generally challenged my thinking about what constitutes artistry), but even as a jet fuel can't melt steel beams guy this just seems cheaper and tackier the more I think about it.

I do not like the transitions, or the full ads.

Could not listen to this album

Let’s take a look at the weather in your neck of the woods. No I’d rather not. This is just transition/interlude music for the public access television. Not quite sure how this could be considered an album let alone someone’s favorite. 1.5/10