James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual stands as one of this decade’s most polarizing records. Depending on your perspective, it can read like a provocation, a joke, an incisive reflection of techno-utopian naiveté or some combination thereof. It was also, as it turns out, the unlikely harbinger of a New Aesthetic. To scroll through the vaporwave tag on Tumblr (or any of its wonderfully ludicrous sub-tags, which include troutwave, aloewave and simpsonwave), is to witness the world that Ferraro hath wrought, a warped reflection of ’90s futurism, computer-generated textures and postmodern culture jamming. Following recent detours into hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music, Ferraro has now returned to the vaporwave aesthetic he helped define with his latest full-length, Human Story 3.
At the time of its release, Far Side Virtual was novel in Ferraro’s catalog for its clarity—most of its songs dispensed with the hazy, degraded tape sounds of his past work, embracing the production values of the commercial music that it sought to emulate. Human Story 3 goes further, jettisoning the last production artifacts of Ferraro’s experimental pedigree; every sound here gleams as if examined under the nauseating fluorescents of a big box store. The melange of noises that made up Far Side Virtual’s sensory overload are all represented here—conference call hold music, royalty-free sound effects, keyboard presets and chirping ringtones—though Ferraro balances out these elements with piano, synthesized strings, flutes, chimes and marimbas this time around. The result is a densely-composed record that vacillates between straigtfaced muzak, minimalist classical and manic hypnogogic pop.
Recent Ferraro projects have made use of vocaloid spoken word and every track on Human Story 3 is punctuated by these disembodied voices. The two primary “vocalists” on the album are a woman’s and a man’s voice, both of which straddle the uncanny valley—not quite human, not quite computer. These voices repeat a series of brandnames and phrases (“Ikea,” “GPS," “Starbucks,” “market crash,” “mobile payments,” “FedEx," “smart car,” “latte”) at seemingly random intervals throughout Human Story 3’s songs. These phrases sometimes feel like mantras (“protecting your data and your identity”, “embrace all individualism”), sometimes toe the line between credulous marketing speak and hilarious sendup (“cloud security, with ambition and passion!”) and occasionally serve up cutting critiques with an impressive economy of words (“buy now, pay later,” in this context, reads like a succinct motto for our consumptive society as a whole). For the most part, however, the vocals tend to wash over these tracks in a constant stream of babble, a torrent of audio pop-ups that can’t be blocked.
Unlike on his last few releases, Ferraro himself doesn’t sing on Human Story 3, though on a handful of tracks he does introduce choral arrangements, which cut a contrast against the album’s largely synthetic sounds. The record is bookended by such songs—“Ten Songs for Humanity” and “Plastiglomerate & Co”—both of which layer robotic sloganeering over human voices that reach for the sublime. These rank among Human Story 3’s more intriguing songs, providing a juxtaposition that complicates our reading of vaporwave’s now familiar tropes. It feels like Ferraro is trying to tell us something about the piousness with which market capitalism is applied as an organizing principle for human life, though we’re largely left to draw our own conclusions.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Human Story 3 is not nearly as subtle, and that’s where this album largely fails. The beauty of Far Side Virtual was that Ferraro never tipped his hand; whether the album was intended as a sincere homage to or cutting sendup of elevator music was left unsaid, at least on the record itself. Human Story 3, on the other hand, puts too fine a point on its critique. Its constant barrage of verbal rubbish makes the record feel something like a less artful, album-length version of Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier”. The aim here is fairly clear—to foreground the hollow dread that lurked just below the surface of Far Side Virtual’s slick, plastic veneer. In practice, however, these songs are often just as tiring as the commercial music they seek to skewer. That may well be Ferraro’s intent—he's never been afraid to make willfully ugly songs in order to get an idea across—though Human Story 3 tends to belabor its point to the detriment of the music.
