Review Summary: Inside the mind's eye
Adventures in Schizophrenia marks the end of Fortune 500, the net label largely responsible for keeping Bandcamp and experimental music as a whole interesting throughout the past year. Since the label's inception in January of 2013 it has managed to act as a kind of sonic boiler room, hosting a plethora of experimental projects helplessly lost within their own fascinating sense of sound and realms beyond our own; from the syrupy lo-fi funk of Luxury Elite and Saint Pepsi, to the whimsical Japanese spirits マク*スMACROSS 82-99 and 日本人, to the cryogenically entombed extraterrestrials 회사AUTO and SunCoast Web Series. Perhaps more than anybody in this circle, Denys Parker of 18 Carat Affair is no stranger to these realms; having been a purveyor of his own nocturnal nostalgic collages since the mid ‘00s. So it’s only appropriate that his latest album scores the closing credits of Fortune 500, because as it attempts to reflect upon its own cluttered memory and logic it incidentally ends up as a statement for a much larger musical happening.
Adventures in Schizophrenia immediately wisps listeners away to buried static pasts of bygone technological culture; pictures of saturated ‘80s television commercials, action flicks, and shameless fashion reel in and out of decayed VHS, Betamax, and audio cassettes. The album represents sound that is inherently familiar, yet strikingly inconsistent; the byproduct of memory and consciousness through the shadowy and withered gaze of time. Putting this to example, ‘In The Mind of a Child’ warps an easy-going instrumental into a haunted caricature of itself; a hallucinogenic drone slowly zooming in on an introspective face. Before long this droning is abruptly cut out by a series of fragmented pitch dropped collages, like an adult desperately clawing at a childhood memory, but ending up with completely different, nightmare representations of the past. In this way it also acts as a pessimistic representation of the modern world, as static and abrupt cuts of juxtaposed sounds are spliced together throughout the album to overwhelm the listener, much like the jaws of technology and maximization on the conscious mind. A good example of this concept is heard on the track ‘Rock Hard Abs’, which takes various samples of fitness commercials and brutalizes them to the point of sheer demonic unrecognition; like a twisted parody of the grating effects the greed and lies of corporate television can have on the mind.
Say what you want about the legitimacy of Vaporwave as a definable genre,
Adventures in Schizophrenia is proof that music rooted in practices of plunderphonics, sound collage, and sampling as a whole can have unique and singular qualities that transcend their genre politics. What we choose to name and tag music, beyond basic filing and categorization (which is, admittedly, convenient and subsequently leads to easier ways to find similar artists throughout the cosmos of the internet), is completely irrelevant, because artists like 18 Carat Affair and many of his Fortune 500 contemporaries don’t operate under genres, but rather their own sonic prerogative that doesn’t need to be validated by a term like “Vaporwave” to maintain relevance.
Adventures in Schizophrenia succeeds in this way by transporting the listener through the mind of its artist, using sound to channel ulterior modes of thought as a series of schizophrenic sketches that document the delusions of memory, consciousness, and the modern world to those willing to listen closer.
