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In 2010, Daniel Lopatin under the guise of Chuck Person released the cassette tape “Eccojams Vol. 1”. Each track on Eccojams looped a subtle sample of a pop song with constantly varying pitches and rhythms. A YouTube channel Lopatin created named ‘sunsetcorp’ played snippets of these tracks with the backdrop of obscure advertisements from the late 80’s and early 90’s. Although the whole project was meant to be a joke, the album was highly influential in the electronic sub-genre "Vaporware" and in many ways sets up his next album “Replica”.

Instead of sampling one pop song for each track, “Replica” uses many samples from Lopatin's collection of 80’s and 90’s advertisements with similar and more sophisticated looping techniques to Eccojams. The use of obscure television samples makes the album similar to Boards of Canada’s “Music Has The Right To Children”, eliciting a sense of nostalgia and dejavu. But “Replica” is much less an IDM record and more of an ambient, almost spiritual experience. The samples chosen are warped beyond recognition, in fact only a handful of the original samples have been discovered online despite being advertisements for large corporations. I believe this sense of obscurity fits very well into Lopatin’s themes of immortality, as he states:

" the idea of the replica in culture as a way we deal with the decline of knowledge, or human knowledge going to waste because we're not immortal. But it's not a solution, it's just a way of coping with those mysteries... it's like an artistic attempt at conveying the original, and not a copy, so there's inherit failure to it."

There’s this cynical feeling, almost a lament, that everything done in an attempt to immortalize a culture dies quickly and fades into obscurity because of the shear volume of new but banal ideas. It’s an excellent concept, although it kind of became more of an ironic joke once Vaporwave went viral in the 2010’s. But regardless of Replica’s themes, it’s still a great ambient electronic record. I listened to “Replica” before knowing its context or Lopatin’s intents, and really enjoyed it for its odd and ethereal composition. There are a lot of little motifs, like a choir of chanting children and ringing bells that string the tracks together. There’s a clear structure to the songs, but the slightly unpredictable rhythms, pitch and samples always keep the album interesting. There’s a great emphasis on atmosphere, having spiritual and even noire tones. For example, the titular track “Replica” sounds like it could have been an outtake to the Blade Runner soundtrack, with heavy piano chords and buzzing synthesizers. Overall an excellent album and yet another standout in the art of sampling.