Have you ever, half-asleep, felt a melody drift with ease through your brain, humming with electricity, only to lose it again? In The Vapornet, Claudia Khachan and Ziad Moukarzel mind-meld in a collaboration that makes that moment come alive.
Beirut’s Ruptured Records is on a roll, as I keep saying. But now is a good excuse to check in with Ziad, one of the people behind the Beirut Synthesizer Center, too. Ziad’s electronics murmur and rumble and crackle into murky spring reverbs, sometimes as if they’re metal structures trembling in the breeze, and sometimes almost like a mic to your bloodflow. Claudia inhales deeply and sings, sometimes wordlessly, sometimes with her poetry (plus some fragments of Firas El Hallak. Long, aching drones from the synths and Claudia’s organ playing swell and recede in some deep melancholy. It has the feeling of reading an old love letter or gazing into the courtyard trees with the smell of ozone after the rain – the guitar parts literally mixing with fuzz and rustling leaves.
But the songwriting can also be fierce and blustery – power in the shadows.
It’s all somewhere between nature and autobiography, half-remembered troubadour duos. Then “Spitfire” finishes out with a drum part, like a protest.
There are lots of things to pick up on this Bandcamp Friday, of course – what has become the day of a thousand promos shouting at you at once. But this is one you’ll come back to later and play and then play again.
Don’t miss Claudia’s solo debut, too, an ice bath of emotions. The two fit together in a perfect diptych.
The Vapornet the Ruptured album is not as far as I know related to or inspired by this Vapornet project – an AI-driven fever dream of the vintage internet, which you can run as a Docker image. But this is wonderful, too, so let’s add it to this story:
VaporNet turns any web request into a portal to an alternate timeline where:
- GeoCities never died.
- Everyone has a fan page.
- The moon landing was faked by an interdimensional record label.
- The internet is a dreaming organism held together by webrings and good intentions.
Hell, yeah. That’s my kind of Web server.
Just reading this readme is fun. It’s somehow a kindred stream of consciousness to the album above, in a way.
https://github.com/ivy/vapornet/blob/main/README.md
More goodness is coming soon from Ruptured, too.
