The Virtual Ocean is the “Let’s Listen” vaporwave discovery podcast.

What is vaporwave?

Vaporwave is a music genre (and internet meme) that appropriates mood music from the past while presenting subtle takes on modern-day consumerist culture. The genre has drawn many passionate listeners with its powerful immersion, ambiguous commentaries, and the genre's unique ability to amalgamate with the memes created as its byproduct.

It's a genre with several subgenres that are extremely distinct from one another in sound and style; and yet evoke similar archetypal ideas that say, either explicitly or implicitly, a lot about the modern world.

It's also very, very, aesthetic.

In each episode, we listen to tracks that make up genre and give our thoughts, emotions, and commentary on them.

In episode 8, we dive into the abstractionist internet orgy sounds of Giant Claw.

A musical project from Ohio, Giant Claw is one of the most experimental artists that we've covered.

We discover two of their albums: Dark Web, and Soft Channel.

Dark Web has one of the most interesting album descriptions:

"Dark Web doesn’t sound “like the internet.” It sounds like therapy for a generation who grew up with the internet, where the density and modularity of music has flourished at such a rate that we never get time alone with just one song or idea anymore. A latticework of strangely cohabitant pop partials, trap clicks, and piano rolls skipping around in bottomless MIDI-space; a clipped and thrifty collage, reflection, and superimposition of pop art through a trippy mash-up mechanism made of recycled SoundCloud footwork singles and YouTube R&B remixes. Dark Web’s fractured sonics work according to our current economy of space — they uncover shared emotional resonances across a variety of genres (trap, pop, classical music, vaporwave, footwork) at a stunning quickness. For a generation that by necessity has to be selective in its listening habits, this is less experimental than savvy. Dark Web is a document of bubbly eclecticism in 2014 passed from web guru Keith Rankin to a listener in need of a digital tour guide. A distinctly instructive art object, a confident curation of the weirdest parts of the now age.
– Adam Devlin (tinymixtapes)"

While Soft Channel stands as one of the most hazardous, highly-reactive musical experiments we've ever heard.

You're in for a wild ride with this one.

Let's set sail to the Mists of Giant Claw.

ALBUMS:
DARK WEB: https://giantclaw.bandcamp.com/album/dark-web

SOFT CHANNEL: https://giantclaw.bandcamp.com/album/soft-channel