Aloe City Records is a UK-based label that hosts experimental music. With that being said, quite a few successful vaporwave albums are listed in their discography. Located in Portsmouth, Aloe City has an extensive catalogue of electronic music-centric releases. Coma by メディカル (translates roughly to Medical) is an ambient horse of a different color.
The album opens up with “Room 406”, four pulses of a heart monitor. The track is then followed with “Dextrose”, “Naloxone”, “Flumazenil”, and “Thiamine”. Those four chemical compounds comprise the “coma cocktail”, which is a group of drugs commonly used to attempt to revive someone from a coma.
Coma overall utilizes very stylistic, ambient, drone-y and dreamy piano chord variations, but the most notable usage of this is in the monumentally long track, “Flumazenil”, humming on for around 35 minutes. The shimmery chords are also eerily distorted with reverb and glitch effects, giving a seemingly calming song an unsettling aftertaste.
The album closes out with “Awake”, which is the same heart monitor that was gently pulsating in the beginning. But instead of the hopeful sounds of life in the first track, a singular beep wraps up the album—the end of the life of the album until it is revived back in “Room 406” once more.
Very similar to the minimalist aesthetic of the Nicole Dollanganger album I reviewed a few weeks ago, the tone of the album is bone-chillingly comforting. The cover is an image of a pale, grungy, rose-tinted hospital room equipment rig, giving off a “creepily calm” vibe, which fits in perfectly with the overall stylized aesthetic of the album. I actually acquired a limited release of the cassette a while ago, and even the physical edition of the record does not falter in conveying these feelings.
Coma is not like any other vaporwave album I have heard yet. The interesting use of plunderphonics gives the listener a droning, dreary taste of what it could possibly be like to fade into an alternate state of consciousness, a place of medical solitude.
