GooglePlex Bionetwork

hey y'all, it's Your friendly neighborhood two Rivers Cuomos in a trenchcoat Hypercollider here and we're finally checking out a vaporwave album that isn't completely ambient!

The album we're looking at today is Pyravid's Googleplex Bionetwork, released in September 2014 under the Dream Catalogue label.
Now this review is gonna be a little different, cause not only I'm gonna give you my thoughts on the album as a whole, but I'm also gonna tell you my thought process during my listen.

First off, this album has a very present jungle feel. More specifically, it sounds like it could be a soundtrack to an obscure PC adventure game, it's a really good stylistic choice for the album.
The sound design on this is great. Even though the songs rarely go past the 4 minute mark, in every song there's always something that catches your ear, like the raindrop-like sounds in Nightfall, the field recordings throughout the entire album or the Windows 95 sound effects interspersed in certain tracks, like in Office Scenery (which we're gonna talk about later).
I love just how weird this thing can be, like in LSD Forest or Satellite Navigation Through The Palm Islands.
I did notice that i tended to remember the sound design aspects of the songs more than the actual songs, but that might be just me being me. Also i feel like the album starts to drop off from the title track onwards, but not that much that it'll make a significant difference in my scoring.

Alright, this is where the review will start to get a bit...interesting to say the least, so strap in, cause i have a theory about this album.
I know this might seem a bit far-fetched, but i think this is actually, at the very least, asemi-concept album.
Now you might be asking: "Mr. Hypercollider, what in the absolute hell are you saying?" Well, just wait a gosh darn second and hear me out.
I already touched on the fact that this album has a strong "90's adventure game" feel, right? Well, another thing that made me think that were the Windows 95 sound effects peppered throughout the entire album. I thought that was a nifty idea to put in, but didn't think much more of it. The tracks continue and we arrive to Nightfall, which my mind interpreted as the music you would find in a secret level of a videogame, with that eerie "i shouldn't be here" vibe going on. The track After that, Nocturnal Celeste, felt really triumphant and like the music you would hear during the credits, which made me check my phone to see if the album had finished already. But lo and behold, there were 10 songs left. That felt very weird to me, putting the most "closer-like" song in the album as only the sixth song, i had no idea why Pyravid would do that.
But then, i arrived at Office Scenery.
This track felt kinda like the first few tracks, but it also had that weird Windows stuff, like what was happening in thi-
And then, it clicked.
This album is a concept album about the Tetris Effect.
Now for all of you who don't know, the Tetris Effect, according to our lord and savior Wikipedia, is when "people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams."
I think this album is about a game designer spending so much time on creating a videogame that it starts to affect his own thoughts in real life.
Now honestly, i don't have that much proof, but damn it it's enough for me so here we go:
1) Checking the track list of this album, you'll see tracks with job-specific names, like Office Scenery and Senior Software Engineer. I think this correlates to the job the protagonist has; they're a senior software engineer working in their office on this videogame;
2) The weird position in the tracklist of Nocturnal Celeste is because it's actually the closer of the videogame, and everything else we hear from Office Scenery onwards is in the mind of the protagonist (F-Cavern Water can be another weird secret level or something i don't know that's a bit of a plot hole);
3) The Windows 95 sound effects can represent the protagonist working on the album, which is why we don't hear them anymore from Office Scenery onwards.
And that's why I think this album is actually a concept album about Overworking and the Tetris Effect.

anyway what was i talking about? oh yeah the music.
Yeah, weird conspiracy theories aside this album's good. It's not spectacular or anything, but i think it does deserve an 80/100, it's a nice album to listen to if you want some nice vaporwave that's not too experimental but just enough to peak your interest.