On Friday, January 2, an online label called Vaporcake debuted with a digital split by its two founders, experimental artists Vapor Lanes (aka Aroon Karuna, a former Chicagoan) and the Kendal Mintcake (aka Thom Soriano). The release went up shortly after noon on Bandcamp, and within ten minutes it was “out of print.” Karuna and Soriano had limited the number of downloads to ten, after which they removed the music from Bandcamp and deleted it from their hard drives.
Vaporcake and No Part of It use purposeful inaccessibility not as an attempt to provoke viral online coverage (those channels generally aren’t open to underground artists anyway) but rather to maintain a sense of intimate, engaged community in the face of the vast reach and overwhelming, anonymizing profusion of the Internet. Vaporcake isn’t hoping to command collectors’ prices for its music by limiting supply; its debut split single was free, and so far it has no plans to charge for future releases. The label hasn’t even circulated any press materials. Karuna sees what he calls “digital ephemera” as a way for Vaporcake to approximate the communal experience of a cozy concert on the Web. “A huge part of why we go to live shows is to get this sort of temporal, brief, fleeting moment where you’ve experienced something you’re not going to experience again,” he says. “It definitely still exists in those small DIY scenes and basement shows around Chicago and elsewhere.”
It remains to be seen whether Vaporcake’s releases can foster a sense of community among its listeners. Most of the people who downloaded its debut tracks were probably part of Karuna’s or Soriano’s online networks already, and the label has no plans to establish any infrastructure to encourage interaction—Karuna hopes it’ll happen naturally. After all, he and Soriano started the label after gravitating toward each other on Twitter and MetaFilter, and Karuna doesn’t even know for sure where his label partner lives.
