Night Clerk Radio: Haunted Music Reviews

Have you ever wished that your music could whisk you away to a fantasy world of corporate culture and values? If so, look no further than the dulcet MIDI-inspired tones of Muzakcore. A niche genre th…

Inspired by the positive reception received by Miles to Midnight we decided to dig deeper into the genre of dark jazz. Dark jazz combines noir instrumentation with the cinematic sensibilities of dark…

Dream Catalogue is one of the oldest and most prolific record labels for vaporwave and beyond. Their founder, Hong Kong Express (HKE), has commented excessively (and sometimes controversially) on the…

How do you find new music? For some, this can be a difficult question as the landscape of music distribution continues to evolve. In this episode, we talk about some of ways we scour the Internet for…

This episode we are joined by our good friend Bridget to discuss the music and sound design elements that go into making horror video games. Great games, like those we discuss, create an atmosphere o…

Dark ambient could not exist without movie soundtracks. The quiet moments of dread in a horror film sparked something in musicians and listeners alike - who craved more of these soundscapes of dread …

What do we mean by the term "haunted music?" This phrase is rooted in the concept of Hauntology, a philosophical concept that refers to how we relate our memories to the past, whether that past is re…

We sit down with Caleb Stokes to discuss Cryo Chamber's 2019 release "Hastur," part of their Lovecraft Collection. This massive double album is a collaborative effort by over 20 artists who worked to…

Hypnagogia is the state of consciousness one experiences when transitioning from waking to sleeping. Hypnagogic vaporwave attempts to capture this sensation through the production of music that can b…

Whether it hits you with aggressive 808 kicks or lifts you up with airy synths and trap beats, vaportrap offers a unique and wide-ranging blend of hip hop and vaporwave that can't be found anywhere …

Dungeon Synth is a genre that presents a unique blend of aesthetics by combining the fantastical themes of role-playing games with the moodiness and storytelling of dark ambient. In this episode, Ros…

We recently talked to Ron Parres, the organizer behind Vaporspace StL. They are launching a massive online vaporwave concert on May 22 and 23. Find out what the live vaporwave scene was like before C…

Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985. It describes any music that is constructed by mutating existing audio recordings into entirely new compositions. By making plunderphon…

Mallsoft is a subgenre of vaporwave that aims to comment on our relationship with retail spaces and consumerism. By emulating and sampling muzak, often mixed with field recordings of actual stores, M…

Vaporwave is haunted music because it’s about being haunted by our recent past and futures they never came. Dark Ambient is haunted because it pulls us into a subtly horrifying realm. It’s a form of …

Without video game music, vaporwave would not exist. Just as vaporwave is music for a future that no longer exists, soundtracks for fictional games now haunt the Internet. These concept albums evoke …

Both Birk and I stumbled onto vaporwave through the Internet. I can place my discovery of it within a few days thanks to archived emails and chats. Caleb Stokes, friend of the podcast messaged me on …

A poet once described vaporwave  as “It kinda like living in a junkyard but you're in a dystopian future and you find a bunch of VHS tapes and you're the only person in the world and everything is lo…