Shinetiac - Infiltrating Roku City

Shinetiac take us right back to 2009 with this debut outing of hypnagogic hyperreality for West Mineral. A trio made up of producers Pontiac Streator, Ben Bondy and Shiner, working under an assumed collective moniker seems to have provided them the opportunity to explore some of the less celebrated influences floating around in their shared consciousness. Infiltrating Roku City carries the kind of computer game fantasy world name you'd typically associate with vapourwave and immediately evokes the awake-in-the-dream synthetic sounds Hippos in Tanks, Tri-Angle and Olde English Spelling Bee might have once had the monopoly on. A decade and a half is probably long enough to allow for reappraisal, and even if a term like 'chillwave' doesn't necessarily carry with it the most flattering of connotations, there's no doubting the links between the gauzy, utopian escapism of acts like Macintosh Plus, Balam Acab and early Washed Out and Shinetiac's version of the type of shoegaze influenced ambi-pop that's very much de rigueur. If you have your doubts, then know that the press release even acknowledges the presence of a Passion Pit sample. And even if you think the aesthetics slightly different, like chillwave, and particularly vapourwave, this is Highly Online music, a veracious pop-will-eat-itself impulse hidden behind fogged glass where the message, as indistinct and without root as it is, becomes the medium. It feels like a suitable reflection of our current times.