NEW ALBUM DEAD INTERNET THEORY VOL II AND ITS AN ESSAY ABOUT IT

Dead Internet Theory Vol. II: An Ode To The Internet, But To No One On It

(for songs visit https://fishmanoffical.bandcamp.com/music)

To start, what is this album? To put it simply, the album is Fishman’s (producer of fishgod, sohai, etc) 2nd solo album. Fishman’s debut, “High School Was Okay I Don’t Wanna Time Travel Though” (H.S.W.O.I.D.W.T.T.B.T.T), was a sound collage based ambient rendition of his final highschool years and his thoughts after it. This time he’s focusing on a more broader topic: the internet. To simulate this, the barrage of genres lead you down a rabbit hole where the songs decompose and break apart eventually becoming a droney ambience. The album goes through a colorful plunderphonic sample palette on tab one, a lush vaporwave experience on tab 2, soft textured ambience on tab 3, a messy sound collage on tab 4, and an unrecognizable ambience on the 5th and final tab. To further enhance this, it is highly recommended to download the album and play it with a 5 second crossfade as the tracks weave between each other. The album takes heavy inspiration from DJ ROZWELL’s “NONE OF THIS IS REAL” with its crossfade shuffle concept. Further inspiration comes from Oneohtrixpoint Point Never’s “Replica”, James Ferraro’s hypnagogic pop, and will (hopefully) feature videos from Sweguin’s review of potted plants iceberg of youtube videos in its music video. 

The album’s concept is not necessarily the decomposition of the internet physically, but more mentally, and the twisting of it. We forget about the things that make us happy and want to cling onto those things that did or didn’t even exist in that timeline. In more recent years people on the internet have revived the “old internet” aesthetic, and some of this revival consists of things that never existed. I believe this makes us forget actual things on “old internet” or even be distracted from some of the negative things on the internet. All this loops back to the concept of vaporwave (not in the musical sense but concept as a whole) and the remembrance of “old internet” is sort of the 2nd vaporwave movement. We have edits, drawings, animations, songs, of this past similar to the original vaporwave movement. So in a sense this album is sort of a response to this second vaporwave movement that has the same philosophy about it from Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never; not to cling onto the past because it may not be what you may think it was, or what you remember it as. Though there are no dark samples of death or violence (out of respect), the downward spiral simulates that. It shows us what we don’t remember and what we want to forget from the past. In the beginning it’s fun and bouncy, then calming, which moves towards a more scarce ambience, eventually being uncanny, and finally bleak.

The album started as an inspiration from ROZWELL’s album after Fishman realized the random projects he had. A random test vaporwave album, then a the texture based ambience original called A.F.P.S (Ambience From Pure Samples), and a plunderphonic tape inspired from “Dreamcast Summer Songs” from Devon Hendryx/JPEGMAFIA. None of these original individual projects play onto the actual album however, except from some all of A.F.P.S. A lot of them didn’t fit the theme and were mainly songs from Spotify and not from Youtube. Youtube being the main source for samples really varied the palette of the sounds that would be chosen for this album. The Spotify and main label songs stop after the vaporwave section in fact to further confuse and draw attention away from the more surface level samples. In general I think the art of sampling is a great tool and I hope this album further shows that, as they use almost everything. Big inspiration and thanks to some of my favorite plunderphonic/sound collage albums like “Plunderphonics” (John Oswold), “amor de encava” (weed420), “The Lemon of Pink” (The Books), “Since I Left You” (The Avalanches), “Wide Open Spaces” (People Like Us, Wobbly, Matmos). Thank you to all of these people teaching me how to sample, I can’t wait to explore styles of music in many different genres to come. It’s been my favorite technique and will stay that way till the end of time. This has been Fishman’s essay on the up and coming album “Dead Internet Theory Vol. II”, I hope you enjoy all 3 hours.