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09/25/2023

Blank Banshee, Oct. 4th at Mississippi Studios - Preview

 By MATT HANSEN //  Canadian vaporwave artist is on tour in support of the new album '4D'

If you’ve heard the term ‘Vaporwave’ before and wondered what it meant, then next month’s Blank Banshee show at Mississippi Studios will undoubtedly answer your inquiry. The first aspect of understanding the appeal of the genre although, would be the demographic. Vaporwave has a strong nostalgic appeal to those born at the tail end of Gen X through the middle millennials. Those that were young right before the internet was ubiquitous, and before smartphones dominated every facet of daily life. These are the people that internalized the early animation in computer games, right up until the movie Toy Story in 1995, when Pixar Studios expanded the general consciousness of computer generated images.

Take the joy you had when playing in the computer lab in elementary school, mix it with some chopped and screwed dance music from when George Bush Sr. was president, and there you have vaporwave. It’s visual music that dwells within our nostalgic unconscious, fashioned from a bygone era when we anticipated a highly technological and green future that we seem to have fallen short of in 2023. But don’t fret, we may not have flying cars or jet packs, but there is still music like Blank Banshee to transport us aesthetically to the future we deserve.

Blank Banshee’s performance at Holocene in 2017 combined glitchy video game images and his emotionless mirrored faced over the mixing board, making it a night of multisensory spectacle. Released last month, 4D is Banshee's most focused effort to date, and continues to mine an alternate future of cyberpunk textures that could easily score a film like Johnny Mnemonic or Hackers. And with a title that implies jumping a whole dimension above the three dimensional, we can only guess what visuals Banshee has cooked up to compliment the new album 4D. Leave your VR goggles at home for this one, you’ll leave feeling nostalgic for America Online free trial discs and Netscape browsers.

ON TOUR: Blank Banshee at Mississippi Studios on Wednesday, October 4th, 2023. Doors 7:00PM / Show 8:00PM. (Tickets). 21+ show. 

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