Eccojams are existing songs looped, slowed and soaked in echo until a few seconds of pop become a long, hypnotic piece. The form began in 2010 with Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 by Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, and it supplied the template for early vaporwave.[1] The Frekvenci archive lists 239 eccojams releases from 179 artists, so people are plainly still making them.
What are eccojams?
Bandcamp Daily treats eccojams as more or less the same thing as vaporwave in its first years: the pattern most vaporwave musicians followed when they turned forgotten pop culture into material.[1] The method is simple enough that Lopatin himself called it "a very simple exercise", as the article quotes, and described taking music he liked, looping a segment, slowing it and adding echo.[1] To Bandcamp's writer the result celebrates, mocks and condemns the source song all at once, which is how the article reads vaporwave's stance on pop culture.[1]
The spelling varies. Wikipedia notes that Simon Reynolds wrote "echo jams" and that later sources settled on "eccojams"; it also says the original cassette's artwork borrows fragments of the cover of the 1992 game Ecco the Dolphin.[2] The archive uses the double-c spelling.
Chuck Person and 2010
According to Wikipedia, Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 came out on 8 August 2010 on The Curatorial Club in a limited run of 100 cassettes. Lopatin had been making the pieces for years and posting them as videos on a YouTube channel since 2009.[2] The source material was 1980s and 1990s pop, treated with delay, reverb and pitch shifting, and the article ties the technique to the chopped-and-screwed slowing of DJ Screw.[2] It was a quiet release at first. When Lopatin put out a remastered digital version in November 2016, original copies were selling on Discogs for a median of about 250 US dollars.[2]
Not every account of vaporwave's start leads to this tape. Sources disagree about the first record and the first use of the word, so the safe summary is that vaporwave took shape between 2010 and 2011, with Eccojams, Far Side Virtual and Macintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe in the same period.[3] Tiny Mix Tapes puts Floral Shoppe's first cassette release in December 2011.[3] In our archive the Chuck Person tape is the only eccojams entry from 2010, and the next listed one is two years later. The best-known record of that cluster has its own page: If you like Macintosh Plus: artists to try next.
How an eccojam is made
- Pick a few seconds of a song. The best loops are a phrase that already wants to repeat: a vocal hook, a chord change.
- Slow it down. Pitch drops with speed, and voices turn dark and thick.
- Loop it and add echo. The echo gives the style its name and much of its sound.
- Change it slowly. Small shifts in the loop or the effects keep the track moving over minutes.
That outline matches the two places we checked: Bandcamp quotes Lopatin on loop, slow, echo, and Wikipedia lists delay, reverb and pitch shifting.[1][2] Wikipedia also lists an eclectic set of sampled artists, from Toto and Fleetwood Mac to Michael Jackson, Kate Bush and Tears for Fears.[2]
Eccojams in the archive
The archive shows two waves, not one.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 1 |
| 2011 | 0 |
| 2012 | 1 |
| 2013 | 4 |
| 2014 | 19 |
| 2015 | 9 |
| 2016 | 34 |
| 2017 | 28 |
| 2018 | 26 |
| 2019 | 21 |
| 2020 | 14 |
| 2021 | 14 |
| 2022 | 15 |
| 2023 | 18 |
| 2024 | 17 |
| 2025 | 12 |
A first bump comes in 2014, with 19 releases, then a dip to 9 in 2015 and the peak of 34 in 2016. The count holds at 28 in 2017 and 26 in 2018, then falls to 14 in 2020 and 2021 and settles around 12 to 18 a year. The method has not died; much of its audience has moved into other tags. Of the 239 releases, 54 are also tagged mallsoft, 37 slushwave and 30 future funk, all branches that grew from the technique, and 22 carry the post-vaporwave tag. The format is the album: 152 LPs, 45 EPs and just 17 singles. Only 33 are self-released.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Label | Releases |
|---|---|
| Elemental 95 | 14 |
| Seikomart | 10 |
| B O G U S // COLLECTIVE | 8 |
| Night Plaza | 6 |
| Sunset Grid | 6 |
| Occasionally Tapes | 5 |
| Ailanthus Recordings | 4 |
| power_lunch recording corporation | 4 |
Elemental 95 leads with 14 eccojams of 78 listed releases. Seikomart follows with 10 of 114, then B O G U S // COLLECTIVE with 8 of 222. One small label, Night Plaza, has 6 of its 7 listed releases in the tag, and Occasionally Tapes has 5 of 14.
Country is known for only 43% of eccojams releases, so treat the ranking with care: the United States has 54, Japan 15, Australia 6, Canada 5. The most prolific artist is Star Printer, from Japan, with 12 of 16 listed releases in the tag.
Why the form lasted
Eccojams are cheap to make and endlessly repeatable. Any song can be an eccojam, and every song makes a different one, because the loop that works depends on where the hook falls. The form has served as an exercise, a joke and a serious art practice for different people, and it shows up in many other tags. Bandcamp says Vektroid and Mediafired carried the framework onto new songs and sounds, naming Floral Shoppe and The Pathway Through Whatever, which showed it could work beyond a one-off project.[1]
The cost of that openness is a fuzzy tag. In the archive, 221 of the 239 releases also carry the plain vaporwave tag. To hear the original sound, look for loops of a single recognisable song rather than ambient washes. When the loops give way to long reverb with nothing recognisable left, you have reached slushwave; when the setting turns to a shopping centre, mallsoft. The other main thread in Bandcamp's map is the clean, corporate side, covered on our utopian virtual page, and the whole family sits under What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music (Synthwave vs vaporwave: same neon, different music covers how it differs from synthwave).
Records to start with
The first is the one everyone starts from. The rest run through the years, with a mix of labels.
- Chuck Person · 2010 · The Curatorial Club · LPThe 2010 cassette that began it, released by The Curatorial Club.
- Rad Magma · 2012 · self-released · LPA 2012 self-released album, the next entry in the archive.
- バミューダ b e r m u d a · 2016 · Adhesive Sounds · LPA 2016 album on Adhesive Sounds, from the peak year.
- SUNSET PRISM LTD. · 2017 · Flamingo Vapor · LPA 2017 album by Sunset Prism Ltd., on Flamingo Vapor.
- Sponge Person · 2019 · power_lunch recording corporation · LPA 2019 album whose title nods at the form.
- ECCO 深い夢 · 2021 · DreamSkyプラザ · LPA 2021 album by ECCO, a name that points back to the dolphin game.
Sources
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Simon Chandler, Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Macintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe is coming to vinyl · Tiny Mix Tapes, 7 Aug 2017