Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 in the context of "Chopped and screwed"

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, an Internet aesthetic and meme that emerged in the late 2000s-early 2010s and became well known in 2015. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s, similar to synthwave. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates 1990s Web design and imagery, glitch art, anime, stylized Ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, Memphis Design geometric shapes, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.

Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, evolving from hypnagogic pop as well as similar retro-revivalist and post-Internet motifs that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the era, such as Tumblr's seapunk. The style was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Ramona Langley, who each used various pseudonyms. In 2010, Lopatin would release the influential cassette tape Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, which was later followed by Ferraro's Far Side Virtual. After Langley's album Floral Shoppe (2011) established a blueprint for the genre, the movement built an audience on sites such as Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan while a flood of new acts, also operating under online pseudonyms, turned to Bandcamp for distribution.

Daniel Lopatin (born July 25, 1982), best known as Oneohtrix Point Never or OPN, is an American electronic music producer, composer, singer, and songwriter. His work experiments with tropes from an eclectic range of musical genres and eras, and has featured sample-based composition and complex MIDI production. He began releasing music in the 2000s, and received early acclaim for the synthesizer-based compilation Rifts (2009) as well as the influential vaporwave side-project Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010).

Lopatin signed with Warp in 2013, and has since released studio albums on the label to positive critical reception. He has also contributed production work to various artists, most extensively the Weeknd, Moses Sumney, and Soccer Mommy. He has composed scores for films such as Good Time (2017), Uncut Gems (2019), and Marty Supreme (2025); the first won him the Soundtrack Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.