The Vaporwave Album Conditions in Hickory It starts off with static, like you’re tuning into a 1940s radio broadcast. First and second tracks “Foothills” and “Daily commute to work“At first it’s all pretty monotonous and benign. Then the mood changes. The sounds feel like warnings, notices of something ominous that’s coming. Beeps and tornado sirens start to interrupt the music. By the time you get to “Thunderheads” and “Squall,” you’re already in the thick of it.
Kanaalso known as Dreamweather, released the seven-song album on YouTube, where it includes a freeze frame: a bright red severe weather warning for Hickory, North Carolina. It could be that Conditions It’s trying to warn you of an impending storm. It could be that the album, with its soft AM radio jazz tones, is trying to lull you to sleep through it.
Kana is one of many artists who have taken broadcasts of weather reports from yesteryear and fused them with the lo-fi electronic music genre known as vaporwave. Vaporwave, which emerged in the early 2010s, has exploded on YouTube recently, musicalizing nostalgic video footage like family trips to Florida in the 90s or Transformers Cartoon clips. The effect is as disturbing as it is comforting: a visual reminder of a different, perhaps better, era that cannot be relived.
As the trend has evolved, many of the most popular vaporwave clips have been those that layer ambient sounds over Weather Channel broadcasts from the 1980s and 1990s. TornadoesThese broadcasts, sometimes eight hours long, hark back to a time when television and radio offered storm guidance — and a time before climate change made extreme weather events more frequent.
Popular vaporwave artists play their music while listening to weather forecasts from intrepid storm chaser Jim Cantore. Others, sometimes practitioners of the subgenre known as weatherwave, soothe you with sounds as veteran severe weather expert Steve Lyons frantically waves his hands in warning of an impending tornado in Indiana.
“As a kid, I used to sit and watch the weather channel for hours,” Kana says. “I loved local forecasts, their music and their shows, so finding out that other people were interested in this extreme niche blew my mind.”
Some of the most popular Weatherwave clips use a VHS recording of a Weather Channel broadcast on a cold winter night in the 1990s. One of them, a 41-minute video by YouTuber Once in a lifetimehas almost 900,000 views; another is an eight-hour megamood Quilvester with nearly 650,000 views. Many comments below them speak in nostalgic terms: “I basically grew up living in hotels (long story). The Weather Channel was the only real constant from place to place. It helped me a lot back then and it still helps me today.”
The weather channel was founded in Atlanta, Georgia in May 1982. From the beginning, it paired its solid weather broadcasts with a steady stream of smooth jazz, a combination that came to define the 24/7/365 Weather Network. Whether you tuned in to the tropical update segment or international weather, the sounds remained consistent and steady, even if the weather wasn’t.