Macintosh Plus - Sic & Panic 12"

Where have the alienated masses gone after vaporwave? Producer Ramona Andra Xavier, aka Vektroid, Macintosh Plus, Laserdisc Visions, New Dreams Ltd., and a few others, is a good resource, being a reliable throughline from the genre’s peak to our current moment. Since her most recent studio album Floral Shoppe in 2011, Xavier has traveled further and further away from slowed-down R&B samples, challenging and complicating her own production style. But “Sick & Panic (First Mix)” is her first return to the Macintosh Plus name since 2011, and it sounds almost entirely unlike the curious complacency of Floral Shoppe. This new twelve-minute track breaks apart a few key components of vaporwave, but more readily takes influences from glitch music and the freeform design of a DJ set. But by calling this a Macintosh Plus record, we’re forced to see it with a strangely human face. Between the hundreds of interrupted thoughts and microscopic silences, something organic is growing.

This is the sort of music nobody is really built for, but that one learns out of idle curiosity. While we may not be androids for a few more years, this compact, biting music speaks to some metaphysical data analysis we’re hardwired to be fascinated by. In a twelve-minute span, it has more than exhausted every notion and idea. It’s a tactical deployment of thoughts too scattered to fit into their own slots. Which is where it wraps around again to vaporwave, because nothing ever changes.