Most music that comes out of the vaporwave scene seems to thrive on nostalgia. It plays upon samples from older urban music, spun to sound like some sort of warped elevator music that pries upon the familiar sounds in which it was build upon. It has fascinating mixing techniques that seem to build a landscape of which actually sounds like vapor trails and obscurely familiar structures. Nyetscape follows these rules, but gets extremely dark, vastly experimental, and sometimes quite un-nerving on his third release, titled Nyetscape 3.0.

Starting with the record’s second track, “Tumbling Down,” it’s built off of a sample from the anime Evangelion and throws itself in circles with the string arrangement, through the stereo mix. It’s spiral never lets up, sounding like a drowning of the childhood dreams of which it was built upon. A bit crusher distorting effect, some buffer play, and lots of panning play into the track, and while it’s seemingly a scary piece, it’s charm rubs off in a sort of light at the end of the tunnel fashion.

“Only In Time” is the hardest track to follow as it sounds so schizophrenic and droned-out in the beginning, so the heartbreak based upon the actual production of the song is extremely confrontational. Pitch bending is there, slowed down vocal effects are vast, and the sound is so warped, filled with long delay effects and percussion that’s shoved into the backend of the mix that it goes against everything the original Nyetscape vibe has brought. Once the song settles down, the outro brings in a more spacious scene with pitched down vocal samples off of “Ragged Wood” by Fleet Foxes that are just as lonely and forlorn as the record gives off. A turn afterward brings in heavy guitars that lay against distraught rhythmic elements.

It’s not until “In [Our] Life” that things start returning to normal. While it’s still pretty desolate, there’s inklings of some female sirens in the background of the track, bringing a cool Hip-Hop vibe that recalls the straight forward, self-titled debut from Nyetscape. However, it’s quickly squashed by the following song title “ただの友達であることができます” or roughly translated to “You Can Be Just a Friend”. In fact, the Japanese track title is filled with children’s giggles, against a lethargic landscape that’s just down right spooky. It ends just before the one minute mark, where the song takes a drastically classical tone, that fades in and out through nice analog techniques.

Nyetscape comments, “I made “ただの友達であることができます”  when I was thinking about a life to death transition, or witnessing divine intervention. Not that I’m religious, but I still find that fascinating and kind of scary to think of when I think of an omnipotent being.”

The last track is about a minute and a half long, but most of the songs on this effort are short. “Heaven” is sort of an ironic title for the song, seeing as though it’s not that sampled, like the rest of the tracks on this effort, but instead is using parallel compression techniques to squash down the mix on kick drum hits. It leaves abruptly, wishing more to be bestowed upon the listener, but it seems as though the song is cut short because since it’s not really heaven after all, why keep trying?

It’s unclear of what the motives are behind Nyetscape 3.0 but when 2020k was able to catch him for a quick questioning on what inspired this record, his response was “The main inspiration behind Nyetscape 3.0 was to drive away from the beat driven expectations of electronic music. I wanted to make washed out pieces of music too prove that, just really weird tracks. But when I started too make the music, I noticed it started to get way more introspective.”

While it’s short, it is, in fact, the most inward looking we’ve seen Nyetscape, or in this case, we think we’re seeing more of the man behind the moniker, Chris Kamas, more than ever.

Download Nyetscape 3.0 over at Nyetscape’s Bandcamp