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Interview: Dream Catalogue founder HKE | Marcel’s Music Journal

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Interview: There is no story here, just little windows into brief moments, like watching a ship pull into the harbour under the lights of the towers as you stand on a balcony in the middle of the night, or taking the last subway home as the fluorescent lights of the carriage flicker on and off. There are elements of futurism, nostalgia, and exotica to a degree in all of these albums, absolutely. Ultimately, it’s all about viewing this life for the surreal dreamworld that it is and finding a certain romanticism and joy within that.

How do you respond to accusations of racism within vaporwave’s set of signifiers? Interview

[Laughs] That’s a pretty heavy question to open up the interview with, but it’s definitely an interesting one worth thinking about. I have seen a couple of people accuse vaporwave of “appropriating” Pacific Asian cultures, which I suppose is what you’re referring to, although I’ve never seen anyone accuse it of being racist, that’s a first. On a surface level, they may look to be right, but I think the use of Pacific-Asian-themed context goes much deeper than that for some artists.

I can speak for myself on this matter and say that in regards to my earlier HKE music I was more fascinated with the film works of Wong Kar Wai and wanted to re-create the unique ambience of his films within the vaporwave style, so naturally I used screencaps from his films for album covers and promotional images, as well as alluding to the concept through the use of Chinese language on some track titles. That’s a mood I couldn’t re-create in a Western context, because it can’t exist in the same sphere. I could do an American-themed hazy, romantic album of late night lo-fi if I wanted, but Luxury Elite already does that perfectly, and nor was it my inspiration. If I tried doing a British version, it wouldn’t work because there’s a lack of romanticism in our culture — the closest thing we have to that musically is probably the first two Burial albums, and they’re perfect too, in the way they capture a melancholic sense of romanticism that does exist here to a minor extent. But again, that wasn’t my inspiration. I’ve been inspired by the idea of Hong Kong as a city and its culture for many years now, so for me it was a genuine appreciation that drove me. I’ve had many messages from people out of HK over the past few years saying how much they enjoy my stuff, too.

I do think it gets boring when people treat the use of Japanese characters as a “meme” (for lack of a better term), to the point where it just becomes the case for using it because it’s “vaporwave,” like the way witch house uses triangle shapes just because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do, or the way seapunk uses dolphins or whatever. That, for me, is when vaporwave is at its worst — when it’s devoid of context or narrative, and it’s just bad Floral Shoppe or Eccojams copycatting and reduces the idea of the music to a tired formula. I’m quite surprised people are still even making that stuff.

That said, I still don’t find the use of Japanese music samples, language or imagery by non-Japanese artists who use it more mindlessly and in a meme-y fashion to be racist, or even appropriating Japanese culture. In general I don’t have very much interest in social politics, but I think saying only one specific race or culture can make use a specific art style is pretty segregational and racist itself. I don’t see anyone batting an eyelid at the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra for being a largely white afrobeat band, or Hiromi Uehara for playing old jazz standards, or Wu-Tang Clan for ripping dialogue from classic Kung-Fu movies in their tracks — so if some kid on SoundCloud wants to use anime screencaps and katakana text for track titles and rip J-pop tracks off YouTube and side-chain them to some drums in FL Studio, it’s not a big deal in my opinion. They’re just making music they enjoy.

Even in regards to my own work last year as Hong Kong Express, I think you can look at Wong Kar Wai’s films and detect a lot of influence from French New Wave in there, especially in his earlier stuff. It just goes to show that culture is fluid like that – especially in today’s globalised world – and I think that’s cool. I’m all for cultural globalisation. I think it’s inevitable. As everyone becomes more connected through technology – the internet and mass media now, and eventually to the time when we’re connected by underwater bullet trains that take you from New York to London in fifteen minutes, the world will increasingly become something of a giant sprawl, rather than separated entities.