Floral Shoppe


Floral Shoppe is the ninth studio album by the American electronic musician Vektroid under the alias Macintosh Plus, released on December 9, 2011 by the independent record label Beer on the Rug. It is her ninth full-length album and was one of the first releases of the 2010s microgenre known as vaporwave to gain popular recognition on the Internet. Since then, Floral Shoppe has been considered by some critics to be the defining album of the style.

Background and composition

Vektroid's alias for Floral Shoppe was Macintosh Plus, named after the computer of the same name. The album is frequently cited as an example of the then-emerging Internet-based vaporwave subgenre, along with works from other artists released by the record label Beer on the Rug. Prior to Floral Shoppe, Ramona Andra Xavier had previously produced other chillwave and vaporwave releases under multiple pseudonyms, including Vektroid, Laserdisc Visions, dstnt, and New Dreams Ltd. Adam Harper of Dummy, in an article about the vaporwave culture, described the album's content as "chopped, glitching and screwed adult contemporary soul alongside twinkling spa promotional tunes."
Xavier takes an unorthodox approach to sampling throughout Floral Shoppe, with "voices slowed to wordless drawls, tempos abused at whim, snippets mashed over each other at clashing time signatures." Material sampled throughout the album includes several songs from new-age group Dancing Fantasy's 1993 studio album Worldwide, various funk and R&B songs from the 1980s, especially Diana Ross' take of "It's Your Move", the soundtrack for the 1997 video game and the 70s-80s soft rock band Pages.

Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing

The album's second track, "リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー", has become nearly synonymous with the term "vaporwave" within popular discourse. The song had over 40.5 million views on YouTube before being taken down on April 27, 2018, due to copyright claims by Sony Music, and has spawned many covers. The song was used in the Digg video "The Most Satisfying Video in the World".
A fan made music video was created by YouTuber "Sun Levi" in 2014. It features highly surreal and colorful imagery with crude animation. The video was made from CGI shorts from the 1980s uploaded by YouTube channel "VintageCG". The shorts in the video include ' and '. The video has over 2 million views on YouTube.

Release

Floral Shoppe was released digitally to Vektroid's Bandcamp music store on December 9, 2011 by the independent record label Beer on the Rug. All of the album's track titles are written in Japanese. It received considerable online popularity, eventually becoming "the most hyped vaporwave release on the Internet." Beer on the Rug later announced a re-release of the album in C44 cassette format. The cassette edition, limited to 100 copies, includes two bonus tracks not found on the digital issue and a code to download the album. Several songs appear in edited and/or crossfaded forms, while "Library" and "Mathematics" are featured at slower speeds than the versions found digitally. Vektroid later launched a line of tank tops and hoodies sporting a variation of the Floral Shoppe album cover.
On August 6, 2017, New York-based record label Olde English Spelling Bee announced an official version of Floral Shoppe on vinyl. The record is colored "bubblegum pink" and follows the cassette version of the track listing. It included a fold-out poster and a download card for a digital copy of the album that included a download-only bonus track.

Reception

Floral Shoppe was met with a polarizing reception from critics and casual listeners alike, being equally "criticized and acclaimed for soulless take on muzak". Jonathan Dean of Tiny Mix Tapes wrote positively of Floral Shoppe, citing the album as "one of the best single documents of the vaporwave scene yet, a series of estranged but soulful manipulations of found audio that carefully constructs its own meditative headspace through the careful accretion of defamiliarized memory triggers."
On the year-end annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll for albums, administered by The Village Voice, the album received two votes. Perfect Sound Forevers Miles Bowe cited Floral Shoppe as one of his year-end best albums. It was also named the sixth best album of the year by Tiny Mix Tapes, with reviewer James Parker opining that it "slid seamlessly between pure pop pleasure and the ironic framing of that pleasure, the presence of the artist at turns barely noticeable and dramatically foregrounded." Assessing the influence of Floral Shoppe on vaporwave, along with the genre's perceived decline, Parker wrote:

Legacy

Floral Shoppe has since been heralded as one of the most significant albums in the early days of vaporwave. In a retrospective review, Adam Downer of Sputnikmusic characterized the album as "constantly—and delightfully—unsettling" and "a beautiful record that's both warm and strange, nostalgic and futuristic, bizarre and totally simple." Writing for Pitchfork, Miles Bowe concluded, "Nothing could change or improve its sound which, even after thousands of soundalikes, has lost none of its perception-shattering power." Vice included Floral Shoppe on their ranking of the 100 best albums of the 2010s.

Track listing

Notes