Prolific Miami-based ambient and vaporwave artist Dan Mason released on average more than two albums per year between 2013 and 2020.
Color (2013) contains an original take on ambient and cosmic music, the
14-minute Saturation.
Night Day (2014) is psychological droning music, notably the
eight-minute whirling noise of Terror.
Alas, Mason converted to conventional vaporwave on
Sun Bleached (2015), with plenty of light jazz and lethargic melodies.
The best track, the eight-minute Sunset Sky, is nothing
but old-fashioned new-age music.
Miami Virtual DMT028 (2015 - My Pet Flamingo, 2020) is therefore but
a parade of sleepy new-age music with
obnoxious soft-jazz themes (1, 2, 5), rearrangements of pop themes (4)
and an anemic autotuned ballad (7). The exotic disco music of 3 partially
relieves the torture.
Miami Virtual 2.0 - DMT250 (2016)
marked the conversion to the kind of "future funk" launched in 2013 by Saint Pepsi (Ryan DeRobertis, later better known as Skylar Spence) with the album Hit Vibes; i.e. the album sounds mostly like
a tribute to the exotic horn-driven disco music of the 1970s (1,2,3).
However, the album also includes the
light jazz of Night Drive,
the hip-hop skit X Gonna Funk Ya,
and the
instrumental ballads After Sunset and especially Sayonara Sunshine.
Summer Love (2016) added the
exuberant disco-music of Beach Body and Na Na and the
nostalgic vignettes Splash and Natsu Ai.
Electric Elevator (2018) contains brief "elevator music" instrumentals
that are unusually funny and jovial,
from the funk-jazz jam Fiscal Fusion to the mechanical synth-pop ditty
Bossy Bossa (a career highlight).
The bulk of
Void (2018) sounded like a tribute to the 1980s, whether the
lethargic soul ballad (Pain Reliever) or the synth-pop (Wishful Thinking) that topped the charts of that decade.
He turned to singing in a deep voice on
Hypnagogia (2019) over slow instrumentals still inspired by the
dance-pop hits of the 1980s.
Forever Nothing (2020) are truly difficult to listen to, especially
the terrifying ballads of the latter.
Surprisingly
I'm Not Going Anywhere (2020) is a regular singer-songwriter album,
with warm and pensive elegies, and even the
slocore ballad From You and the pastoral instrumental Air.
As it is often the case with musicians whose last name is not Mozart,
the quality of Mason's "music" is inversely proportional to the quantity.
