The words “balance, focus, control” repeat like a mantra on Donovan Hikaru and Corp’s track “Outdoor Seminar”, a tune whose sound palette of MIDI slap bass and gated snare drum is as sterile as the corporate rhetoric it samples. That’s the point. Enjoying “Corporate Mixtape” means giving yourself up to its squeaky clean, office-complex vibes. The EP is a collaboration between Corp and Donovan Hikaru, two artists off of the vaporwave record label “Ailanthus Recordings”. While there are a lot of ways to describe vaporwave as an emerging style of music, Corporate Mixtape encompasses what I love most about the genre: it turns into art what’s not supposed to be art. At its best, Corporate Mixtape is pure smooth jazz schlock. It’s the sound that inspired the joke “If Kenny G and Hitler were in a room, who do you shoot? Kenny G – twice.” Brutally soulless, braindead, and apathetic to the human condition, Corporate Mixtape sets the script for a whole new musical paradigm that elevates insipidness to a sublime extreme. To hear Corporate Mixtape, visit ailanthusrecordings.bandcamp.com.
Howard is a member of
the class of 2017.
