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broken transmission

Broken Transmission

United States · 2010s

Sentimental Sad Dark Dreamy Chill

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Description

Broken transmission is a vaporwave-adjacent microgenre built from fragmented, channel-surfing collages of analog broadcast ephemera. Producers splice together tiny shards of TV idents, news stingers, commercials, interstitial music, and dead air, emphasizing tape hiss, static, dropouts, and tuning noise as musical material.

Often beatless or only loosely pulsed, tracks unfold like late-night flipping through channels: abrupt cuts, fleeting jingles, station sign‑offs, and half-heard voiceovers that dissolve into snow. The result is a liminal, hauntological mood—nostalgia filtered through the mechanical errors and material decay of VHS, cable boxes, and broadcast tape.

Where classic vaporwave slows and loops pop smoothness, broken transmission foregrounds the texture of the medium itself. It treats errors, transitions, and broadcast artifacts as hooks, creating an uncanny documentary of mediated memory.

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Influenced by

Vaporwave is an internet-born microgenre and visual aesthetic that repurposes late‑20th‑century commercial sound—mu zak, smooth jazz, soft rock, synth‑pop, city pop, and corporate training tapes—into hazy, slowed, and looped collages. Its sound foregrounds pitched‑down samples, heavy reverb, tape hiss, vinyl crackle, and dreamy pads to evoke a mood between satire and sincere nostalgia. Beyond music, vaporwave is inseparable from its graphic language: Greco‑Roman busts, Japanese text, retro operating systems, chrome logos, palm trees, neon gradients, and “mall culture” architecture. The result feels like a haunted shopping mall: part critique of consumer capitalism, part wistful memory of media and retail spaces from the 1980s–2000s. Tempos are typically slow (roughly 60–90 BPM), harmonies tend toward lush seventh and extended chords, and rhythms range from barely perceptible loops to minimal, gated drum programming. Many tracks are short, vignette‑like studies in texture and mood.

Plunderphonics is a sample-based music practice in which new compositions are made entirely or predominantly from pre‑existing recordings. Rather than using short, unrecognizable snippets as texture, plunderphonic works foreground recognizable materials—pop hits, classical excerpts, commercials, voice-overs—and transform them through juxtaposition, layering, pitch-shifting, time-stretching, and collage. Coined by Canadian composer John Oswald in the mid‑1980s, the term names both a technique and a critical stance that questions authorship, originality, and ownership in the age of reproducible media. Plunderphonics often functions as cultural commentary or satire, drawing attention to how meaning changes when familiar sounds are recontextualized. Stylistically, it ranges from dense cut‑up cacophony to groove-oriented rearrangements that remain danceable and accessible.

Sound collage is a practice and genre that assembles disparate recorded sounds—speech, field recordings, musical fragments, noise, and media detritus—into a new, cohesive work. It treats recorded sound as raw material to be cut, layered, looped, juxtaposed, and transformed, often privileging texture, timbre, and context over conventional melody and harmony. Emerging from mid‑century tape and electroacoustic experiments, sound collage spans avant‑garde, popular, and club contexts, ranging from radical tape splices to sample‑dense pop and hip‑hop. Because it recontextualizes existing audio, it can be narrative, political, archival, or purely abstract—oscillating between documentary and dreamlike mosaic.

Musique Concrète

Musique concrète is an electroacoustic approach to composition that uses recorded real‑world sounds (objets sonores) as primary material rather than traditional instruments or notation. Composers edit, splice, loop, reverse, time‑stretch, filter, and otherwise transform these recordings to create works designed for loudspeakers. Emerging in late‑1940s France, it introduced acousmatic listening—focusing on the sound itself, detached from its source—along with a morphology‑based vocabulary of gesture, texture, and timbre. Historically realized on tape and now on digital audio workstations, musique concrète privileges montage and transformation over conventional harmony and meter, inviting listeners into a rich, tactile world of sonic phenomena.

Eccojams is a microgenre built from extremely short, looped fragments of 1980s and 1990s pop, R&B, soft rock, and smooth jazz recordings that are slowed down, pitch-shifted, and drenched in echo and reverb. The aim is to induce a hypnotic, memory-haunted mood through minimal alteration and obsessive repetition. Rather than full remixes, eccojams isolate a few seconds that feel emotionally resonant—often a single vocal melisma, chord change, or sax flourish—and stretch it into a drifting, sentimental vignette. The texture typically includes VHS-like degradation, tape hiss, and retro consumer‑media aesthetics, emphasizing nostalgia, melancholy, and the uncanny. The term and template come from Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010), a seminal release that served as a primary blueprint for early vaporwave and its many satellite styles.

Hauntology is a retro-futurist strain of experimental electronic music that evokes the "ghosts" of lost cultural futures. Emerging in the United Kingdom in the mid‑2000s, it draws on half-remembered media—library music, public information films, children’s TV idents, and Radiophonic textures—to produce an atmosphere of eerie nostalgia and cultural memory. Sonically, the style favors degraded media and analogue patina: vinyl crackle, tape hiss, wow and flutter, and dusty archival samples. It often pairs subdued drones and detuned synths with looped fragments, sparse percussion, and unresolved harmonies to create a feeling that is at once comforting and unsettling. The term originates in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and was popularized in a musical context by critics such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. In music, it names both a sound palette and a way of listening that foregrounds memory, media archaeology, and the uncanny persistence of the past within the present.

Noise is an experimental music genre that uses non-traditional sound sources, distortion, feedback, and extreme dynamics as primary musical materials. Instead of emphasizing melody, harmony, or conventional rhythm, it focuses on texture, density, timbre, and the physical presence of sound. Practitioners sculpt saturated walls of sound, piercing feedback, metallic clatter, contact-mic scrapes, tape hiss, and electronic interference into works that can be confrontational or meditative. Performances often highlight process and immediacy—improvisation, body movement, and site-specific acoustics—while recordings can range from lo-fi cassette overload to meticulously layered studio constructions. Though rooted in early avant-garde ideas, the genre coalesced as a distinct practice in the late 1970s and 1980s, especially through Japan’s ‘Japanoise’ scene, and subsequently influenced numerous styles across industrial, punk-adjacent, and experimental electronic music.

Ambient is a form of electronic and electroacoustic music that prioritizes tone, atmosphere, and texture over conventional song structures and rhythmic drive. It typically features slow-moving harmonies, sustained drones, gentle timbral shifts, and extensive use of space and silence. Rather than drawing attention to itself through hooks or beats, ambient is designed to be as ignorable as it is interesting, rewarding both background listening and focused immersion. Artists often employ synthesizers, samplers, tape loops, field recordings, and subtle acoustic instruments, with reverb and delay creating a sense of place. Substyles range from luminous, consonant soundscapes to darker, more dissonant atmospheres.

Tape music is a form of early electronic and electroacoustic composition that uses recorded sounds on magnetic tape as the primary material. Composers assemble, cut, splice, loop, reverse, and vary the speed of tape to sculpt timbre, rhythm, and form, often transforming everyday noises into abstract musical structures. Emerging from post–World War II studio experimentation, it blurred the line between composition and sound design. Works are typically fixed-media pieces intended for loudspeaker playback rather than traditional performance, privileging timbral exploration, spatial projection, and montage over conventional harmony and meter.

Lo-fi is a music aesthetic and genre defined by an embrace of audible imperfections—tape hiss, clipping, room noise, distorted transients, and uneven performance—that would be treated as errors in high-fidelity recording. Emerging from the DIY ethos of American indie and punk scenes, lo-fi turns budget constraints and home-recording limitations into a signature sound. Songs are often intimate, direct, and unvarnished, prioritizing immediacy and personality over polish. Typical lo-fi recordings use 4-track cassette or similarly modest setups, simple chord progressions, and understated vocals, spanning rock, folk, pop, and experimental approaches while retaining a homemade warmth and nostalgic patina.

Burmese stereo refers to the wave of Burmese popular music recorded with stereophonic equipment during the late 1960s through the 1980s, after Myanmar’s studios transitioned from monaural to stereo recording. It blends Western pop-rock idioms—beat music, rock and roll, garage, surf, psychedelic rock, soul, and funk—with Burmese melodic sensibilities and Burmese-language vocals. Typical recordings feature tight rhythm sections, prominent electric guitar (often with spring reverb or mild fuzz), Farfisa/Hammond-style organ, occasional brass, and three- to four-part vocal arrangements. Compared with the earlier “Burmese mono” era, Burmese stereo showcases wider imaging, clearer separation of instruments, and more polished arrangements. Releases circulated on vinyl, open-reel, and especially cassette, and often included localized covers of Western hits alongside original songs.

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