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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, to 75 Bands in 75 Days, where we bring you the best talent that the Pacific Northwest has to offer, one day and one band at a time. And no, you aren’t reading that headline wrong. Today, we’re going back to Portlandia to explore a great eccentric from their electronic music scene, one YUNG BAE.
As you may be able to extrapolate from their moniker, YUNG BAE is a quirky, ironic music producer from Portland, Oregon, whose recordings could very easily under the “vaporwave” label. His songs are heavily sample-based and beat-driven, sample a lot of old ’70s and ’80s popular music, and have this strong sense of nostalgic bliss to them.
The difference with YUNG BAE, though, is that he doesn’t just use the usual bedroom vaporwave strategy of taking a familiar classic soul or funk track, slowing it by 60%, adding an airy reverb effect to it, putting a throwaway bare-bones hip-hop beat behind it, and calling it a day. YUNG BAE plays around with the subgenre’s formula in unique and innovate ways, mixing this familiar Plunderphonics formula with straight-up funk music, as well as the faint, pleasant-on-the-ears beat-driven sound of artists like Slow Magic, Odesza, and Washed Out.
YUNG BAE is a fairly young artist, with not much material to his name outside of a few great singles and an EP/album of sorts by the name of Bae. However, the future looks bright for this very inventive artist, and we can’t wait to see what he does from here on out. Along with fantastic fellow collaborators PARROT JUNGLE 95 and マクロスMACROSS 82-99, the future of vaporwave belongs to YUNG BAE.
