“If there is anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, it’s that a male model’s life is a precious, precious commodity. Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn’t mean that we too can’t not die…” – Zoolander (2001)
Page one tells you everything you need to know about Victor, protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ underrated and underread 1999 novel Glamorama: “Who the fuck is Moi? […] I have no idea who this Moi is, baby.” Indeed, this is the question around which everything else in the novel turns: Who is Victor Ward? (This question could almost serve as the vaporwave inversion of the same question, in another context, about a certain John Galt…)
On the one hand, the answer to Victor’s question is straightforward. Ward is a male model, the current “It Boy,” and a stupefyingly vacuous denizen of celebrity and fashion culture. Despite his many aspirations (including scoring a role in the then-satirical idea of Flatliners 2, a movie no one needed or wanted in 1998, or one year after we passed through the event horizon of time itself, in 2017, when this movie, unironically, was actually made…), Victor is one hollow man among many.
Art by @Cerulea_dlux
When the novel opens, he is trying to open his own small night club, virtually under the nose of his erstwhile boss, Damien, a nightclub owner and also the romantic partner of Alison Poole, with whom Victor is having a meaningless affair. He is a creature of pure appearances. Indeed, you could say his whole life is a meaningless affair – this is one of the recurrent objections raised by his girlfriend, top supermodel Chloe Byrnes: “You don’t care about things that don’t have anything to do with you” (158). “So you don’t have any lip balm?” Victor replies, entirely in earnest.
On the other hand, Victor Ward is also Victor Johnson, son of the ambitious Senator Johnson, who lowkey finds Victor a disappointment and an embarrassment:
“You’re not a loser, Victor,” Dad sighs back. ‘You just need to, er, find yourself.” He sighs again. “Find – I don’t know – a new you?” “‘A new you’?” I gasp. “Oh my god, Dad, you do a great job of making me feel useless.” “And opening this club tonight makes you feel what?” “Dad, I know, I know – ” “Victor, I just want – ” “/ just want to do something where it’s all mine,” I stress. “Where I’m not… replaceable.” “So do I.” Dad flinches. (79)
But by the end of Glamorama, Victor, in fact, has seemingly been replaced, whether by a Manchurian Candidate version of himself or by some postmodern literary surrogate. At this point, Victor Johnson and Victor Ward quite literally seem to split in two – and this is not a metaphor. Victor Johnson, who supplants the Victor we’ve been following all along, is getting his life together, moving on from whoever Victor Ward is now.
“Goodbye,” this new, improved Victor (or, rather, his replacement) tells Victor on the phone, in one of the novel’s late moments of surreality (476). Meanwhile, Victor Ward, imprisoned in a safehouse in Milan against his will, is trying to get his life back. He fails. Even former intimates, like his sister, fail to recognize him when he sneaks in a phone call. Indeed, his physical execution seems imminent. The lifespan of the husk is over. Ultimately, he is a disposable man, the citizen and then refugee of a disposable culture
In one sense, Glamorama is about Victor’s inability to integrate the real into the play palace of his perceptions. His world exists in an almost purely semiotic register. Hence, the novel’s incredible fixation on listing brands and the names of celebrities, in vast chains of association and depthlessness. Who’s in; who’s out; who’s where; who’s not. Whether they’re even really present at the party is irrelevant. What matters are the invocations and lists themselves, the decorative citational explosions that guild the undead lily of a life lived entirely inside the virtual plaza.These explosions of hyperreal intensity leave behind detritus – like confetti scattered on the sticky floor the morning after a big party, or the dread and irritating “specks” (often interpreted by Victor as mysterious confetti) that continually intrude into the bisexually litsoap bubble of Victor’s sensorium. Welcome to the desert of the real, indeed; the sand gets in everything…
Art by @Uy_que_Paila
So, Victor cannot acknowledge or integrate the real, either because he is so structurally deformed and shallow, or perhaps because he is himself a kind of projection, a cheap hologram, a false self, an escape route posed by some other self. Imagine finding out you are nothing more than a cover story, your personality (or lack thereof) a mere pretext for some deeper, stranger politics, beamed into the virtual plaza from a VIP dimension or some cosmic plane you’ll never be allowed to enter. Indeed, throughout Glamorama, Victor constantly encounters people who mention seeing him in places he wasn’t, at fashion shows and openings he did not attend: in Miami, at the Alfaro show, at Pravda last week. (One recalls a brief scene from Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups [2015], which explores the same themes as Glamorama, but with a rather different trajectory to the narrative… Christian Bale’s character is being robbed, but the thieves are frustrated at the emptiness of his life. It’s an existential joke, or a riddle: What is a life that contains literally nothing even worth stealing?) This never fully, consciously registers for Victor, beyond occasionally irritating him, because he wishes he’d been there instead of his distant doppelganger. No further questions.
Likewise, Victor seems to believe increasingly that events in his life are scripted or staged. This does not alarm him. If anything, it’s a source of strange succor; events have the promise of meaning, perhaps, if they unfold in the sixteen-millimeter shrine. He perceives increasingly the ghostly presence of film crews, intimate conversations with mysterious directors, and other people in the flux of life around him, who appear as characters or “extras.” In part, Victor is incapable of understanding the events of the novel’s plot outside of this framework. Indeed, these events may be inaccessible, structurally occluded, haunting the text itself. After all, within the glamorama, everything is appearance (consider the etymology of “glamour”…). What better framing device, then – or refuge – than to perceive all the happenings of your life as if they’re just part of the movies, if these horrific and terrifying events represent some internal logic rather than the fatal trajectory of a car crash with the Outside?
Ultimately, Victor falls in with a group of nihilistic supermodels who have, for reasons Victor is never fully able to understand, started a vast campaign of stochastic terror and hideously random violence. Their leader, Bobby Hughes, is himself a former It Boy, a male supermodel of incredible charisma, since retired. Victor encounters Bobby’s gang almost (but not actually) inadvertently. After fucking things up in the States, Victor is recruited via skyhook to go to Europe in order to track down an ex-girlfriend, who supposedly has gone missing (she hasn’t). The man who recruits him does not exist. Again, Victor has few questions. Quelle chance!
But the sense of dread in the novel grows and grows. It’s like Victor can see disaster approaching, just out of the corner of his eye. But, since he’s always avoiding it, or in some way unable to register the real, he never focuses on what is happening in –or to-the world around him. As Bobby tells Victor, when Victor asks why Bobby seems to like and trust him: “Because you think the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes […] Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman.’” Also, note how the chapters are always counting down. To what, or whom? Quis est iste qui uenit?
Precisely here Glamorama becomes comprehensible primarily as a vaporwave novel: Victor, denizen (and ultimately victim) of the virtual plaza, encounters the radical exteriority of a world that exceeds the hologrammatic dead mall dimension where his dreams play out. Perhaps, in the end, he’s the only person who ever really lived there. Consider again the etymology of glamour: “1715, glamer, Scottish, ‘magic, enchantment’ (especially in phrase to cast the glamour), a variant of Scottish gramarye ‘magic, enchantment, spell, said to be an alteration of English grammar (q.v.) in a specialized use of that word’s medieval sense of ‘any sort of scholarship, especially occult learning,’ the latter sense attested from c. 1500 in English but said to have been more common in Medieval Latin.”
A glamorama, then, is perhaps an updated term for an illusory space, like a fairy circle, or a virtual machine, running in the void…
Pick up your copy of Glamorama from Penguin Random House here
First released on June 15, 1987, the GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) was invented two years before the Cold War went underground, making it truly an artifact from before the time factories all shut down. A GIF, of course, is an image format that allows for multiple images to be represented in sequence as the file references its own palette, producing (or reproducing) simple animations in repetitive, somewhat static loops. The GIF is the vaporwave artifact par excellence – especially now, in its long afterlife, where image andspring break forever come together as one in a strange and endless ballet under the red desert sun of the real.
As an example of vaporwave literature, J. G. Ballard’s collection of short stories Vermilion Sands (1971) is incomparable. It is also a literary GIF; the entirety of the book could be reconstructed out of wordless GIFs with no aesthetic loss whatsoever. But it is not fundamentally a hybrid object, like Jon Bois’ melancholy, mutating hypertext 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future (2017: “To pass all that time, many Americans have turned to football, contorting it in a variety of strange ways to suit their new reality”). Unlike Dennis Cooper’s GIF “novel” Zac’s Haunted House (2015: “an experience somewhere between carnival mirror labyrinth, deleted Disney snuff film, and a deep web comic strip by Satan”), which Cooper first created as a specifically visual artifact intended to emphasize intersections, juxtapositions, and loops, Ballard’s stories are resolutely textual.
Or are they?
After all, each story targets a specific media form: sculpture (“The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” and “The Singing Statues”), opera and horticulture (“Prima Belladonna”), painting, poetry (“Studio 5, The Stars”), fashion (“Say Goodbye to the Wind”). Each one reflects – no, refracts – how media become entangled in, or perhaps even constitutes, the strange loops of desire and dream that unfolds within and beyond the prison of the human psyche, opening it up and splaying out the psychological strata of all our looping, nested dreamworlds. Recall the horrifying, and horrifyingly suggestive, nature of the libidinal “body,” or landscape of desire, as autopsied by Jean-François Lyotard in his Libidinal Economy (1974): “All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities […]” Much like how the GIF is a “flat” image (even superflat), yet captures both depth and motion traversing the deeps. This is what it means to speak Muybridge, after all. You probably think Stephen Wilhite invented the GIF – and he did, in its current disguise – but it was Eadweard Muybridge who first uncovered the primordial form of the GIF, lurking in the world’s heart like a fossil from the future. Imagine a paleontology of the future, an idealistic morphology of media artifacts, waltzing backward through time, approaching the event horizon of the perpetual now, the long 2016… Vaporwave literatures invert media archaeologies.
Back to Vermilion Sands: “No one ever comes to Vermilion Sands now, and I suppose there are few people who have ever heard of it.” So, what even is Vermilion Sands? It’s a “bizarre, sandbound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting perspectives.” It’s a dream archipelago of abandoned villas, awash in crimson sands from the environing desert, shadowed by flying albino and purplish sand rays, “wheeling above the rock spires in the blood-red air.” It’s the posttraumatic landscape of the arts, all of which operate like so many ghostly robots, totally burned out but still fueled by vaporous promises. Vermilion Sands is a hologram: it looks a lot like things happened there, but remains peopled by dead souls and the dying stars, fragments of subjects from a Golden Age that never existed. Vermilion Sandsis the primal scene of the end of history, casting neon shadows out of time.
“The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” (originally 1962): “All the houses in Vermilion Sands were psychotropic.” In other words, the architecture is perpetually plastic undeath, adapting to the drives, moods, and quirks of the occupants and always carrying the psychic impress of former occupants inside its mutable and rippling structuration. Imagine being haunted by abstract moods; imagine living inside an undersea fan, gently swaying. “Living in one was like living in someone else’s brain.” Howard Talbot and his new wife, Fay, buy a new house at 99 Stellavista. All the perennials are polyurethane. There’s a heart-shaped swimming pool in the foyer. Through its glass bottom, you can see the garage, the finned car parked below “like a coloured whale asleep on the ocean bed.” Its previous owner, Gloria Tremayne, had been a beautiful, diaphanous woman “with a powerful and oblique personality,” a movie star who murdered her husband to end his abuse. Ironically, Howard had been the assistant to Gloria’s lawyer at the trial, ten years ago. “The water was motionless, a transparent block of condensed time.” But the house remains haunted by Gloria’s psychic residues, which enfold Howard like a mass of invisible tentacles; the house grows jealous of Fay and tries to murder her, too. Howard becomes increasingly entranced, all wrapped up in the fossilized contours of this doomed movie star’s emotional echoes. The house, “like an anguished squid,” flexes and changes color. “The place must have been insane. If you ask me it needs a psychiatrist to straighten it out.” But Howard can’t break the spell of its psychoactive past; the house beckons him into its plasticine embrace. Fay’s long gone. You could give everything to the past which ensorcels you. But for now, at least, the house is turned off, and yet I know that I shall have to switch the house on again” (this always happens in Ballard)
“The Screen Game” (originally 1963): “Soon we were overrunning what appeared to be the edge of an immense chessboard of black and white marble squares. More statues appeared, some buried to their heads, others toppled from their plinths by the drifting dunes […] the whole landscape was compounded of illusion, the hulks of fabulous dreams drifting across it like derelict galleons.” Paul Golding, an artist, returns to the scene of the failed Orpheus Productions flick, Aphrodite 80. Like many of the artists who encounter (or haunt) the desolate, lush fastness of Vermilion Sands, Paul had been experiencing a “creative pause” (in his case, “showing signs of beach fatigue”). Specifically, Paul has been employed to paint numerous screens that would serve as the backdrop to the obscure psychodrama of this film, staged as a comeback for the dishy, mentally unwell actress Emerelda Garland, a ghostly Venus… “Decorated with abstract symbols, these would serve as backdrops to the action, and form a fragmentary labyrinth winding in and out of the hills and dunes.” Paul meets Emerelda multiple times; she is attended by jeweled insects who seem to be expressions of her underlying psychic state, or at least somehow under her control: “I felt that I had strayed across the margins of a dream, on to an internal landscape of the psyche projected upon the sun-filled terraces around me.” The director, Charles Van Stratten, reveals to Paul the purpose of the film’s production: “Its sole purpose is therapeutic […] I’m convinced the camera crews and sets will help to carry her back to the past […] It’s the only way left, a sort of total psychodrama […] With luck, the screens will lead her out into the rest of this synthetic landscape. After all, if she knows that everything around her is unreal she’ll cease to fear it.” Note that Ballard writes “The Screen Game” two years before John Fowles published The Magus (and both get echoed in The Prisoner). The grand psychoanalytic ritual (or is it a trap?) goes awry, of course: Charles Van Stratten, a petty tyrant, is swarmed to death by Emerelda’s “armada of jeweled insects.” The production ends, and only years later does Paul return to the deserted villa, to the ruins of the backdrops he had painted. “The whole question of the illusions which exist in any relationship to make it workable, and of the barriers we willingly accept to hide ourselves from each other: How much reality can we stand?”
“Cry Hope, Cry Fury!” (1967): “Hunting for rays, I sometimes found myself carried miles across the desert, beyond sight of the coastal reefs that presided like eroded deities over the hierarchies of sand and wind. I would drive on after a fleeing school of rays, firing the darts into the overheated air and losing myself in an abstract landscape composed of the flying rays, the undulating dunes, and the triangles of the sails. Out of these materials, the barest geometry of time and space, came the bizarre figures of Hope Cunard and her retinue, like illusions born of that sea of dreams.” Note: “I was twenty miles from the coast and my only supplies were a vacuum flask of iced Martini in the sail locker.” After crashing his yacht, Robert Melville is taken in by the mysterious Hope, recuperating under her care at the isolated Lizard Key: “both villa and island had sprung from some mineral fantasy of the desert.” Hope is a painter, and Robert becomes her model as he recovers. But these paintings are psychogenic, or perhaps even mutagenic… “Given a few hours each day, the photosensitive pigments would anneal themselves into the contours of a likeness […] Little did we realize what nightmare fish would swim to the surface of these mirrors.” The paintings, somehow, become haunted by another figure; in the background of this endless, hazy misadventure, a disconcerting figure stalks Lizard Key. Hope has a ghost, it seems. A former lover, supposedly murdered, but who survived the attempt. “I tried to explain why Hope had shot at him, this last attempt to break through the illusions multiplying around her and reach some kind of reality.” Libidinal fog embraces everything, heightening the hyperreality of these starkly blurry images, like a Gerhard Richter painting in drag.
You’re getting the vibes: a man, typically some kind of artist or functionary, ensorcelled by his own visionary encounter with a doomed icon of desire from the past, who exists as a real or virtual specter haunting some media form or another. The landscape is decadent, though not depraved; time no longer really exists in Vermilion Sands. Recurrent throughout the stories is the intimation of a “Recess,” “that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years.” When the Recess ended, it “started up all the clocks and kept us busy working off the lost time […]” This is the endlessly looping fever dream of Vermilion Sands: imagine the red desert, crisscrossed by the fading yet perversely resilient libidinal intensities of a faintly posthuman class. Ivory rays glitter in the skies above you. You board the shining silver yacht that will take you into the deeper wastes. In the shifting sands, you will find mysterious artifacts, treasures of the past, strange remnants of a whole culture mummified by the omnipresent heat. Here, time is a painting of a stopped clock…
My edition came with 3D glasses included. But the glasses are cursed. Or perhaps they emancipate one’s vision. Wearing them, you see in Ballardian all the time now. All I know is I can’t take them off anymore. These mallwave mirrorshades have become adhered to the very structure of my face, like a Cronenbergian artifact. I think its fused with the bones of my skull. I can feel them restructuring my psyche, penetrating the distant recesses of my desire, reworking the primordial sludge of self into strange new chromium sculptures. Even if I could, I’d no longer remove them.
Can there even be such a thing as vaporwave literature?
If so, what could such literature do, which isn’t already done, or done better, by other literary forms and modes of expression? For example: cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, the New Weird, anonymous and distributed literary projects like _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, the “open pop star” Luther Blissett, the pseudonymous collective Wu Ming, the theory-fictions of the CCRUor 0(rphan)d(rift>), and so on? Smash cut from Neuromancer’s “Hong Kong on a really bad day,” its sky “the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” to Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station: “The smell of rain caught them unprepared. It was spring, there was that smell of jasmine and it mixed with the hum of electric buses, and there were solar gliders in the sky, like flocks of birds. Ameliah Ko was doing a Kwasa-Kwasa remix of a Susan Wong cover of ‘Do You Wanna Dance.’ It had begun to rain in silver sheets, almost silently; the rain swallowed the sounds of gunshots and it drenched the burning buggy down the street […]” There are exit ramps along this literary superhighway – to George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen, to Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, even to China Miéville’s New Crobuzon.
So, what could vaporwave literature even do, which could be said to exceed or surpass all these grimy, neon-drenched speculative cities and locales, these psychogeographies of the future, littered with artifactual echoes, stalked by ambivalent pin-ups decked out in chrome, all the fantasmatic junk of a virtual culture haunting its own labyrinth? Imagine meeting the ghost of yourself; imagine a literature that functions like a darkly mirrored multiverse. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. There’s our answer, lurking like a fractal dolphin somewhere down inside the semiotic spiral.
If there is vaporwave literature, it is hologrammatic. A hologram is an image, of course, a projection of a three-dimensional object made of light, which appears as such, but nevertheless doesn’t exist in three dimensions at all. Holograms are illusions. Each part encodes, or refracts, the whole image. From the little shiny pictureson your identification papers to complex, moving ghosts (like Tupac Shakur’s temporary resurrection in 2012) or digitally spawned reflections who never were (like Hatsune Miku), temporally distended symbolic performances (of body, depth, and motion) no longer require personal identity. Identity itself becomes structurally analogous to the commodity form. I am become fungible, destroyer of dreamworlds…
If there is vaporwave literature, it is hyperreal. This does not mean it depicts anything caricatural, exactly, as much as, instead, it mobilizes the avatars and gradients of meaning already latent in the world around us. Waking up all the twitching spirits of a consumer culture that only delivers marketing materials for itself, the ultimate cargo cult, dedicated to spam, stranded on the terminal beach at time’s end. Vaporwave literature mobilizes and unveils these spirits in ways that flense away the material lag factors obscuring the virtual plaza and all its technicolor glory, the dead mallwhere we’ve been stuck together for a long time, listening for the zombies outside… Look around you: “Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?” Look around you: everything glows and pulses, helplessly and hopelessly alive. Or is it? Imagine peeling back the skin on your hand, like plastic wrap off chromium bones. Were you ever really here? You’ll know nothing, and be happy…
If there is vaporwave literature, it is an endless fever dream, an alien blipvertbeamed directly into the meat of your brain and animating the shell of you, filling you up with fantasies, nightmares, and promises. Bisexual lighting in prose at the end of history. Libidinal vaporware. Vaporwave literature is the literature of the eternal present, trapped in diffuse, neon amber, lurking just out of reach. You can never touch a hologram, after all, and having a fetish for ghosts will get you nowhere fast. In a formula (like a brand catchphrase, repeated by pixelized parrots, glowing bright, and self-extracting directly into the archive of your dreams): Vaporwave literature is the hologrammatic, hyperreal literature of the eternal present. Like Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World (1967), causality works differently inside the vaporwave megatext. To produce the illusion of forward momentum, it ties itself in knots, all tangled up in prosodic shibari. The prose becomes turbid, turgid, turnt. You still think you live in time, but the time factories have all stopped production. You live in the model house of history, just outside the city limits of Marienbad; out of canned goods, your culture is eating its own echoes. Welcome to the enormous space…
As a first example, take Simon Sellars’ Code Beast (2023). In many ways, as we will see, it is paradigmatic of vaporwave literature, this marginal literary animal, or ghost of such an animal. What’s Code Beast about? The text summarizes itself: it’s about “watching the man that I was enter the code beast that I am” (49). But what does that mean?
The Setting:
Code Beast takes place in the near future. In it, the Vexworld supervenes base reality, called the shell world, a crapsack world existing as an afterthought, a cybernetically-infected, post-apocalyptic hell world: “The shell world is dying, and no one knows first aid. Extreme virtuality is the repudiation of that uncertainty” (121). Everything is saturated with augmented realities and artificial intelligence, living hardware, nanotech bots, and predatory architectures. It’s the metaverse gone wild. And everything is glitching out. Or is it? Who would even want to live in the real world, after all? It exists at the lowest level. Virtually in the sewers. Stalked by who knows what, armed with shining knives. Your reality’s a fucking drag, man… People trapped forever in the shell world are called two-percenters: “part of an underclass that can never be released. They’re locked out of the Vexworld for whatever reason, bad credit or bad eyes, and they’re insanely envious of those that aren’t. Well, who wouldn’t be? They’ve been sentenced to slow death […]” (91). The Vexworld, by contrast, is a nightmarish fractal of complex permissions, digital animals, hybrid intelligence, legacy code, whole spiral galaxies of mutually incomprehensible bubbles of solipsism or tribalism, only partly legible to non-subscribers (“producing recombinant animal species inside an infinite ecology” [17]). You constantly manipulate conceptual and sensory navigations using cheaters, implants in your eyes that transport you, eyes rolling back and whiting out. (“Cheaters were originally developed to restore sight to the blind, using a combination of bulky cameras embedded in the skull, memory prosthetics, and primitive VR. It was the beginning of the Vexworld. When that application proved overwhelmingly successful, the technology was adapted into mixed reality for sighted people and the Vexworld grew into an interdimensional maze” [176].) Remember, the eye is the only part of the brain that can be seen directly. It begins when the machine starts riding you when you become a donkey for an abstract machinic intelligence that uses bodies for bootstraps. “Acceleration breeds mutation” (16). Imagine taking the singularity seriously, but building it in the world you’ve got, instead of some glittering solarpunk reverie. Imagine an infinite stack of Second Lives, painted over everything, layered to the nth dimension. Ever seen a window painted shut? Now, imagine that window is your eyes. You’d be surprised by what goes bump in the net.
The Plot:
Kalsari Jones (“I’m tired of being second banana in this non-stop clown show” [172]) is suffering the cronk: “a by-product of sustained, fully immersive vexing. When you’re deep inside the Vexworld, your body forgets that it has a physical correlate. The capillaries on the skin are perpetually raised to compensate for the disembodied sensation, forming unencapsulated mechanoreceptors on the epidermal topography” (28). “Where is my actual body? […] I have lost the texture of it. All I have is the light-born persy that I now inhabit, and I must trust that I have a physicality somewhere. I was going to say ‘up there’ but there is no up or down where we are” (101). Kalsari Jones is fighting with Rimy, the genderless love of his life, an artificial intelligence he created to be his companion. He likes to fuck code, but they’ve gone and dumped him. He’s devastated, picking fights with every AI he meets in the surrealist ARG of life in a post-truth world. So, Kalsari Jones is going to rehab. Sanderson, Jones’ “chronosthesia supervisor,” insists: “I’ve let you operate like a bucking bronco for too long, but no more. Now, let me tell you exactly how it’s going down. You will submit to Ingram, and he will cure you of your digisexuality and your rampant vexing. He will break you down and reintroduce you to normality. You will be whole again, no longer a creature of fragmentation” (164). That’s the deal; that’s the imperative. Go to the Magic Mountain, and find yourself there. If only you knew. So, Kalsari Jones goes to meet Ingram Ravenscroft (a “shadowy physician grown monstrous in my mind” [171]), looking for the cure to being himself. And Ravenscroft (part Dr. Adder, part Dr. Benway, possibly named after the anthroposophist Trevor Ravenscroft) delivers. This guy’s into some weird shit: “We’ve been conducting focused training sessions, developing protocols for something called remote viewing” (250). Re-imagine Project Stargate as a kind of nominally psychotherapeutic cult intended to bootstrap… well, something. Jones: “I don’t get it. […] In the shell world, everything has been mapped and every object is wired. There are trillions of grain cams floating through the air, no blind spots left. We can travel to mirror clones and experience those coordinates exactly as they exist in the shell world, or we can savour them from a distance. Isn’t that the very definition of remote viewing? That’s why it’s ludicrous to talk about adepts and psychic powers. We’re all psychic now […]” (256). Turns out, Ravenscroft is trying to break down and rebuild his disciples into a new kind of First Earth Battalion, into combat parapsychologists custom-made for the Vexworld: “We hunt ghosts. Digital ghosts. We call them glitchglots. They’re an evolution of spamglots, a virulent new species, more resilient than previous variants. They’re sentient, with the ability to infect targeted cheaters […]” (227). Strangely, this dovetails with one of Jones’ fixations: “How many digital ghosts would pass through my body at any one time? Now I know I can never be rid of them because the signals have infected me, turned me inside out, made me a grotesque mimicry of what I once was” (24). Think of this in terms of Wi-Fi; think of this in terms of all the invisible code strings and encrypted messages (texts, wire transfers of vast amounts of money, sexts of unimaginable depravity) and gaming sessions passing through your physical body right now. You can’t see any of it, without the right devices, and sufficient access, but it’s all there, right now, swarming around you, like spermatozoa, seeking entry… They want to make something new of you – and they have. In the end, it seems, everything shifts yet again. Jones, himself, has always been a digital ghost, the code beast he therefore is: “More than human. Less than an animal” (262). In other words: Jones has never been a real boy. He is an echo of someone dead, a digitally resurrected deepfake, a grief tech artifact suffering the (data)bends. “‘Have you heard of hyperstition?’ Halo says. ‘Hyper what?’ ‘It’s a theory of creative energy. According to believers, by participating in ritual acts of fantasy, the fantasy can be made real. The scenario is actualized through a combination of pure thought and ritual repetition” (303). In 2022, the MIT Technology Review asks, “Technology that lets us ‘speak’ to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready?” From the Vexworld future, Dr. Ingram Ravenscroft writes a reply: the paper’s title “Sentient Glitchglot Cheater Infection: From Discovery to Ongoing Review” (n.d., 327-349). One recalls something Marshall McLuhan writes to Eric Voegelin in 1953: “a person feels like an awful sucker to have spent 20 years of study on an art which turns out to be somebody else’s ritual.”
The Conclusion
So, the Code Beast eats itself. Echoing Virilio, “The flipside to any new technology is the accident. Invent the car and you also invent the car crash” (91). Transplant this science-fictional fever dream into the vaporwave megatext. Crashthem together. We started with the following question: What can vaporwave literature do? Sellars gives an answer. He takes us on a submarine trip into the gritty tain of a darkling mirror. Ocean grunge in prose. What cryptids, what squid live here? Underneath the glossy, rippling, aquamarine-and-pink surface of the perceptual stack of experiences and spam filters and subscription plans, what remains? Can you dig down that deep, through the strata of perceptions? Can you find the bones of the earth? Consider: To vex (verb): from the Old French vexer, “to harass,” from the Latin vexare, “to shake, jolt, or toss violently about, to attack, harass, trouble, or annoy,” from the PIE root *wegh-, “to go, to move, to transport.” Invent the car, and, congratulations, you’ve also invented the car crash. But, as J. G. Ballard teaches us (and who knows thisbetter than Simon Sellars?), crashes are really just opportunities in disguise.
Kalsari Jones, the posthuman Möbius strip, is a ghost, a ghost with a fetish for being real. He is, we are, code beasts just like all the others. And Code Beast reveals something about the kind of subject who haunts the virtual plaza. Broken, impossibly smooth marble statuary. The sensory theater flickers as the power stations of the previous world slowly die. When you look away, the subject gets closer – until you merge together, becoming one new thing. Avatars of a weird past that never existed, heralds of a future that will never arrive (which is always arriving). Sellars shows us that the dreamworld of the posthistoire, the virtual plaza, is populated with the living dead, with undead icons going through strange loops of spasmodic behavior, like twitching holograms on repeat. We have vaporgrave personalities; identity is millenarian vaporware… Time for the Virtual Exodus™…
PlayStation VR2, the latest headset from Sony launched back in February. Among the massive launch lineup for the virtual reality peripheral were upgraded ports of two of the previous generations’ best titles: Moss, and Moss: Book II. The Moss titles are action platformers that see you assume the role of “the reader,” a magical being who has a spiritual connection to the adorable ASL-fluent mouse heroine, Quill. To celebrate the re-releases of these two gems, we sat down with series composer Jason Graves. In addition to scoring both Moss titles, Graves has lent his talents to a number of games, including Until Dawn, the underappreciated The Order: 1886, and perhaps most significantly, the Dead Space franchise.
Over the course of this conversation, we’ll talk about the challenges that go into making a sequel sound fresh, how differing time signatures played a big role in Book II’s musical identity, and yes, even a quick little question about Dead Space. Let’s dive in!
During the course of this interview, there are references to a past discussion with Jason. This is in reference to an interview conducted by this writer for the PlayStation website Push Square, and for anyone curious about what was discussed during that interview, you can find that article here.
Utopia District: Really glad to be talking again! Years ago we actually talked about your work on Moss over at Push Square!
Jason Graves: I remember! I totally remember, it was great! I had such a good time!
UD: Awesome! I’m happy to hear that! Some of the questions ended up almost as companions to that interview, so let’s have a look at how things went for this time with Moss: Book II!
On completion of Moss, were there any ideas that stuck with you? Melodies or bigger picture ideas that you might have wanted to explore if you had the chance to work on a Moss sequel? Like “Ah dang, I want to do that now!”
JG: When we finished the first one, there was this big question mark. With any game, it’s like that. I’ve scored so many games where it was like “We have three games planned” but only the first ever gets made. It just winds up not being financially viable to continue. Musically speaking, thematically, I think…[Moss] was one of the first times with themes where I got to explore them this much. I didn’t feel like I had short-changed any of them, and then when the second game came around and we knew it was going to be a thing, I thought I should be coming up with a bunch of new themes. Not for any reason other than “new game, new themes! Maybe I’ll use one of the old ones!”
There were a lot of smaller themes that came out of the second game, but most of the second game is a reiteration of the themes from the first game. They just sat really well with me and with the audio team at [Moss developer] Polyarc. We just really liked them. We felt like they didn’t wear out their welcome the first time. And I had them playing everywhere, just all the time! But I think, for an emotional connection to the music, having that sort of theme, like the Indiana Jones theme [“The Raiders March”], something that allows you to connect with a character. It was written, well, hopefully anyways, as something you never get tired of when it shows back up. As long as I can dress it up in different ways!
UD: And then when the original version of the melody shows up again in sparse moments of Book II, or even at later points in Moss, as the player you’ll be able to better recognize it. Like, “Ahhh, I know that. I recognize that!”
The reprisal of “Dear Reader,” [from the first game] that melody, I noticed quite a few times playing in Book II, which I found interesting. It reminded me of John Williams, especially Star Wars. Star Wars of course relies on reprisal a lot more than many other properties. And it’s effective in that context, and I think that Moss is using reprisals in a similar fashion.
JG: That’s actually great to hear! That’s the sort of thing that John Williams is just so well known for. Whether it’s “The Flying Theme” from E.T. or Star Wars, I already mentioned Indiana Jones. That was just my gut reaction to thinking “What sort of theme when I hear it, evokes a certain thing.” And I love film music. I love ballet music, and classical music, and that performance-oriented underscoring of action in music. And for me, John Williams, many others as well, but mostly John Williams, is the pinnacle of that sort of writing. I didn’t look at any John Williams music and think “I want to write Moss like that,” but it’s an indelible part of my DNA now since I’ve heard those scores and watched those movies so much that I can’t help but write my music for games in a cinematic way.
The tracks on the CD, for Moss and Book II both, were the tracks that I gave the developer when they said “We need some music for when Quill’s [the mouse heroine from the games] fighting some mechanical bugs.” So you hear this dancey combat track, and it ebbs and flows. Gets louder, and quieter. I’m just doing all that based on my internal monologue. How I think the action could be playing out. And that’s just so much fun!
UD: I think that shines through loud and clear in the music!
To step back briefly, I think that the key melody (see the Bandcamp embed above) that shows up in the first game, and all throughout the second game, is a good relationship anchor. Not to harp on John Williams again, but he’s especially good at writing themes for characters, especially compared to contemporary composers. On soundtracks now, you don’t often get “theme for so-and-so” anymore unless it’s a contemporary Williams score.
But with Moss, I feel like that key melody functions as a character theme for Quill, but also as a theme for “The Reader” [the character players control in both Moss titles]. And it of course helps to connect those two together as well.
JG: Totally! And that was the purpose behind it for the first game. And it helps to forge an even stronger bond in the second game! There were instances where I was working with Stephen [Hodde] and Kristen [Quinn] at Polyarc, on the audio team, and they would say “This would be a great time to have the theme there, but maybe it’s shaded slightly sadder, or more heroic. Or this would be a great time to have the theme, but we want it to hit as nostalgia. We want it to feel like the first game in how it’s presented.”
This helped, as I just get really bored quickly, so I’m constantly re-harmonizing things, trying to make it feel like it’s saying different things. Even if it’s just the same two notes repeated.
And those intervals are very open and there’s no third in them. So the third of the chord is what makes them feel happy or sad. And I intentionally wrote that for the first game so I could put a minor chord, a minor third in there and it would sound sad, or a major third in there so it would sound happy. Without having to change the notes of the theme. I didn’t do it much in Moss, but in Book II, I did it everywhere. Every time I used it, I was reharmonizing it in different ways. If the first game was my dream come true to be able to write like that, the second game was like winning the musical lottery. I got to write twice as much music! And so many more themes. But really, falling back on that first song that I wrote for [singer] Malukah that’s at the end of the first game and the end of the first soundtrack, those melodies were the keystone to the whole thing!
UD: So going back to the newer themes that you worked on for Book II, how did you evolve those sounds? The ones removed from the melodies you wrote for the first game. Obviously, they’re an accompaniment to what you’re making elsewhere in the game, but how did you want to make these new ideas distinct?
JG: So to keep it fairly surface level and not get “musical nerdy,” a lot of it had to do with the type of harmony that I was utilizing. There was a general “bad guy” theme in the game that a lot of the time is played by super low bass clarinets, contrabass clarinets, and bassoons and I would double it with low piano, and low electric bass guitar. And that creates a lot of mysterious intervals. Lots of half steps. So when you hear this texture play, even if it’s just a single note, it’s this low, weighty thing. And then you get these half-step meanderings and it sounds…well it sounds evil.
As opposed to something like the theme for [Quill’s uncle] Argus, who is sort of your quest in the first game. And…spoiler alert, but it’s a 5-year-old game!
At the end of the first game, you rescue Argus, but he did not have a theme in the first game because he was more the impetus behind Quill’s journey. But. as the second game picks up right where the first game left off, now Argus needed a theme. And that one’s using warm, familial, friendly nostalgic harmonies. So when I was able to play his melody underneath those harmonies, you could recognize it. Any time he’s on-screen it’s basically playing his theme. But I could also play just his harmonies without the melody and you kind of get that same warm cozy nostalgia despite the melody not playing. I think it’s important to have the harmony and melody distinct, especially in games. So I gave the audio people at Polyarc the harmony and melody separately so they can just play an English horn playing Argus’ theme by itself if it’s a quiet moment. Or just play the harmony by itself if it’s an exploration moment. The music needs to be modular that way it can still evoke the same feeling for the player even if half of the things for the music aren’t actually being heard at that time.
UD: Plus since it’s up to the player to dictate when the action moves forward, you don’t want to see the figurative “seams” in the music. In areas where the music loops.
JG: Totally! I’ve been such an opponent of just merely looping music in games for at least the last 15 years probably. To me that’s just the telltale sign, you can see the seam, like you said, I like that! I don’t want the music to loop. I want it to play through in its full 5-minute state that I give them, and if for some reason the player is still in that area, half the music gets very quiet. The conductor would tell all the melodic instruments in the orchestra to stop playing, and all the higher instruments and now we just hear the lower part of the orchestra quietly in the background. And it makes it feel like the music is continuing and not looping.
UD: Even though it’s a stripped-down version of what you’d been hearing. But masked effectively where it feels wholly unique!
UD: So my next question involves the technical end of things. I’m curious to hear about how your approach to composition has changed for VR in the time from Moss to Book II. Or if it has? I know when we did the Moss interview, I asked about how composing worked for you in VR, and I’m interested to see if that process has changed?
JG: [Laughing] It hasn’t. It’s a really quick answer. As a matter of fact, the few things that I did for VR specifically in the first game, the second game was so much larger in scope, that the music took more of a step back, and plays more of an emotional background role. This time, we didn’t want to call a lot of attention to the fact that you’re in VR. We likened it to being in an interactive storybook, which I suppose it is. So the music is in the background, and no fancy VR tricks this time!
UD: I’m glad you mentioned the scope of the game having expanded because that relates to my next question! So in Book II, the scope and complexity of the environments are much larger. The puzzles as well. But what did that expansion present to you for musical opportunities? You mentioned the music taking a minimized role this time, but with all these new environments and types of locations, did that open up anything new for you musically?
JG: Absolutely! The game is just on a bigger scale. With the first game, it sort of crescendos and feels bigger by the end, but you still have this mouse-sized perspective on everything. A lot of the instruments I used were small, very high [sounding], very quiet. And I wanted to take half of that and continue in the second one, but also augment things. Not necessarily in a subtle way, but I didn’t want it to sound like a gigantic orchestra.
I just did small things. So instead of using a solo violin, which I used extensively in the first game, I opted for a solo cello. You get this deeper voice from the cello, and when it goes up higher, you get a beautiful, longing, mournful sound. It’s one of my favorite instruments to write for. And instead of using the Celtic Harp, which was also featured a lot in the first game, I just got tired of tuning it. I didn’t want to buy a super expensive harp, because they can get really really expensive, I just had a little lap harp, but it was always going out of tune. So instead I bought a piano! Honestly, the piano ended up being so much more expensive than a harp, but I’ve always wanted a piano. And it’s a grand piano. But I bought it with the intent of composing the score for Book II on piano, in the same way that I scored Moss primarily on the harp. And you can get some similarity there. The harp is plucky, and has a sustain that slowly dies away, and the piano does the exact same thing, but on a larger scale. Those were the instrumental options that seemed like a natural progression from the first game. As a result, it naturally expanded my harmonies and the rest of the sound palette. Everything was opening up and feeling bigger, without having to force it. Without the big Hollywood drums or brass.
UD: An organic expansion of the sound as opposed to a Blockbuster [film score].
GS: Yes! Exactly!
UD: So my next question is an accompaniment to my last one, especially in regard to the environment. Book II has an industrial lilt to it. Especially with the forge.
JG: Yeah, the underground stuff! Beneath the castle.
UD: Exactly! What opportunities did that new kind of environment present to you that basically weren’t at all there in the first game? There’s a little in the first one I guess, mostly with the enemies, but in Book II the environments themselves are a lot more industrial, some of them almost feel Steampunk!
JG: Yeah! It’s tricky. So, I’ve been doing this for 25-something years now. So the first half of my career was everyone telling me what they wanted the music to sound like, and me having to sort of get as close to what they wanted but also make it different. So I was trying to be original. But now in this second half of my career, people are instead asking my opinion. Like, what do I think it should sound like?
And there are a lot of traps you can easily fall into. And in Book II, the perfect example could have been “Oh there’s a forge, and there’s molten metal and big steampunk-looking things and this giant robot to fight. We should use big industrial metal sounds!”
JG: [Laughs] Even if it was “Mossified” in a way where it worked in that universe, it just didn’t feel like the right approach to take. So a lot of it was just using guitars especially. I played a lot of guitars, and I had Tom Strahle, an incredible guitar player, play Oud and Bouzouki, which are these incredible world guitars. And what I would do is distort them. Well, not like Trent Reznor distortion, but more that they had some edge to them. If you hear a clean guitar, and then I played you [these] distorted guitars, and you see those visuals of the forge, it’s just a little bit rock and roll with the tone of the guitars. And I played some electric guitar as well. It’s this bouncy, busy, slightly edgy guitar sound from Tom, and myself on an acoustic guitar. And then there’s a lot of really distorted electric guitar, but I’m playing it [with] this big reverb, and it almost sounds like a pad. A washy, background thing, but it also has an edge to it. It sounds so subtle when I’m talking about it, but if I played the track for you and took it out, you’d be like “Yeah, this feels like there’s something missing.”
Additionally, everything that takes place aboveground in Book II is composed in triplets (three evenly-spaced notes played within the span of two notes). Which gives it an almost Celtic snap. But everything that happens underground is recorded in groups of 4, so it’s very square sounding. I like the idea of it being more mechanical, square like that down below. Whereas up top it’s beautiful and pretty. But [this is] all pretty subliminal. I would never expect anyone to actually pick up on that.
UD: That has to have been premeditated right?
JG: Oh yeah, absolutely. At first, I was thinking the whole score was going to be in triple meter, and very bouncy. But then I saw the underground forge stuff, and the caverns that Quill and Sahima [an additional playable character for portions of Book II] explore. And I thought, “Oh, this should be in 4/4”. It just feels like it’s different. And then you combine that with the textures and the beautiful visuals. When you’re playing the game, it’s like “Oh, okay.” We are in a completely different area now, with no sonic relation or any other kind to what was upstairs.
UD: That’s why I was so curious about it, because, it’s night and day, almost literally, while you’re playing. Such wildly different areas to explore!
Anyway, with that progression of sound, where the music almost took a step back but was equally important in Book II, what kind of advancements would you be looking forward to or expecting in a hypothetical Moss: Book III?
JG: No idea. Only because everything from the instrument sizes –violin to cello, harp to the piano—all of that was based on the story and the setting of the game. And I know the overall story, what happens between different games, but the specifics are really what draws me in and starts painting musical ideas in my head for instrumentation and everything. I’d have to get that pitch from Polyarc and simmer on it for a couple of weeks.
UD: Ruminate on ideas like how you arrived at those time signatures for the different areas.
JG: Yeah, totally. It’s the kind of thing that’s almost more of a reaction to getting input. And I need that input [from Polyarc] to process some sort of a decision.
UD: So for my final question, I want to ask about something apart from Moss. Plus I just can’t help myself from asking about Dead Space. Obviously, the remake came out a couple of months ago, so I was curious if you had a.) played it, or b.) if you had any thoughts on the soundtrack?
JG: Oh boy. Well, that’s going to be an easy answer, because I have not played it and I have not heard the soundtrack. But I am in the middle of watching Servant on AppleTV, which Trevor [Gureckis, the composer for the Dead Space remake] did the music for, and it’s brilliant! So I can say that I do love his music. I don’t know him personally, but I’m sure he did a great job sort of filling in where they added all this extra gameplay and bridging the gaps between the score and everything else. I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about how well the remake was done. I was just tickled that they left any of my music behind, let alone all of it, and supplemented it with other stuff. Talk about the best compliment in the world!
Although, if I could get my hands on a PS5, I would totally play through it with one of my daughters because she’s dying to play it, but it’s just been impossible [to find a PS5].
UD: Luckily, Sony’s finally managing to meet at least some of the console demand, so you might actually be able to get one soon!
JG: Hopefully. We’ll see!
UD: That does it for me! Thanks so much for taking the time to do this!
And there we go! A pulling back of the proverbial curtain. A glimpse at the intense world of crafting video game music! If you enjoyed the interview, please check out the game! And the music!
