SHARK 2 パラサイトシングル was released in June of 2015 on the up-and-coming vaporwave label Midnight Moon Tapes. As the name suggests, MMT specializes in releasing experimental vaporwave and other electronic music on cassette tapes. This album has a lot of neat compositions on it. Unlike other vaporwave artists that I’ve heard, G A M E S H A R K ™ uses samples of orchestral excerpts. This simple difference in stylistic approach to contemporary vaporwave makes for a very interesting release.
SHARK 2 パラサイトシングル opens in a very interesting way. Compared to the movie dialogue and teaser track that started Saint Pepsi’s Hit Vibes and the extremely experimental and other-worldly sounds of Sacred Tapestry’s Shader, “Time” is almost exclusively acoustic and orchestral. Throughout the minute-long intro, a dissonant guitar arpeggio plays in time with a ticking clock. The monotonous sound of the clock along with the other instruments creates somewhat of an existential crisis for the listener. “Time” is different, but it works. How else is a shark with a martini supposed to make you feel?
“Sedated”, the album’s first shot at contemporary vaporwave, is a really neat composition. G A M E S H A R K ™ follows in the footsteps of many vaporwave artists before them in the way this track is composed. This track begins with skipping low-end samples at various speeds before settling into a cohesive rhythm. Throughout the song, there are distant voices in the extreme left or extreme right channels. You can’t quite make out what they’re saying, but it’s made obvious that someone is there. The vocal samples share sonic space with other glitchy sounds, all of which are run through a high-pass filter in order to sharply contrast the existing bass line. Having such high-frequency sounds and chirps in only one channel can be jarring at times, but overall the effect is fairly nice.
One part of the album that confused me was the implied duality between “Desolate” and “Isolate”. The two tracks are stylistically polar opposites, and yet they are placed in conjunction with one another on the album. “Desolate” is a worldly orchestral composition, whereas “Isolate” is almost exclusively electronic. Parts of the latter track seem to manipulate acoustic instruments themselves or alter existing recordings of them. The tracks on their own sound nice, but I’m not entirely sure whether or not they have anything to do with one another.
More often than not, the samples on this album aren’t altered much. While I’m not opposed to compositions without chopping or looping, the effects used at the very end of “Closed” makes me wish this idea was expanded on. Until this point in the album, very few acoustic-based samples were altered. To me, “Clouded” seems like a great fragment of an idea in the form of a 46-second sequel to “Introspection”.
The highlight of this album is its final track, “Existential”. Though instrumentally very simple, this track functions very well as a pleasant and conclusive ending to the album. Like “Sedated”, there’s a distant voice speaking about something the listener can’t quite grasp.
SHARK 2 パラサイトシングル is a really interesting album. While the songs themselves are nice on their own, the sporadically different styles across this album were unexpected, though not quite out-of-place. The track titles vaguely convey themes of existentialism and general ill-being, the content of the songs don’t always reflect these ideas. As stated before, the back-to-back songs “Desolate” and “Isolate” feel like they should mean something more, but they don’t. If they do, it’s incredibly subtle. Despite these thematic irregularities, I enjoyed listening to this album.
Favorite Track: Existential
Ben Heels 