YYU // TimeTimeTime&Time // May 7 // Beer On The Rug

We’re close to wrapping up the year and it’s fair to say that the mysterious Beer On The Rug wins the best new label of the year award. Mostly because they have been the home to the increasingly interesting vaporwave movement. Vaporwave, in case you are so slow and have no idea what it is, is a genre that bases itself on anonymous producers screwing around with samples to achieve something similar to Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica. No point in talking about producers, it’s just music. Refreshing.

YYU is not someone I can talk about, I know about this person even less than I know about the person behind the Vektroid/Macintosh Plus moniker. TimeTimeTime&Time is the new release from this individual and it works with the confines of badly sampled sounds to create interesting results. Unlike other records that were reviewed by Seal On Psychedelics, TimeTimeTime&Time doesn’t take the samples from really bad 80s songs or elevator music. TimeTimeTime&Time consists of voices, guitar and some keyboard to achieve something that ends up sounding like the least sample based effort to be attached to the label in recent times. TimeTimeTime&Time allows the listener to draw their own picture for it too. Unlike the releases by Oneohtrix Point Never or Virtual Information Desk, the music on TimeTimeTime&Time feels like it could have its own place outside the internet. Um (Don’t Be) sounds like a genuine moment from an early Dirty Projectors song while YYYY and (((*~*~ under that are basically a reworkings of James Blake’s Unluck and Olivia Kept respectively. At some point you will start asking yourself whether YYU is actually an vaporwave artist. TimeTimeTime&Time doesn’t sound nostalgic and other than awkward cutting of samples this has very little to do with the music that comes out on Beer On The Rug. It works as some sort of post-internet folk and peaks when YYU allows his own voice into the mix. His voice is the strongest instrument on here and the freak folk moments are the highlights of the album. The pitch sifting of his own voice, even if amateurish comes across as interesting without being mind numbingly repetitive. Some moments on When You Said That even sound like that recent AlunaGeorge single. Blimey.

Guess what. TimeTimeTime&Time isn’t a vaporwave record. Just because it comes out on Beer On The Rug doesn’t make it one. It’s the sound of someone messing about with guitar and laptop to create something that is highly amusing at times, derivative at other times but always sounding like it has been done better justice by someone else. Repetition and loops are the name of the game on TimeTimeTime&Time but even at the short length of 25 minutes, even the patient ones will start wondering where this is going.