Floral Shoppe

Background and composition

Vektroid's alias for Floral Shoppe was Macintosh Plus, named after the computer of the same name. The album is frequently cited as an example of the then emerging Internet-based vaporwave subgenre, along with works from other artists released by the record label Beer on the Rug. Prior to Floral Shoppe, she had previously produced other chillwave and vaporwave releases under multiple pseudonyms, including Vektroid, Laserdisc Visions, dstnt, and New Dreams Ltd. Adam Harper of Dummy, in an article about the vaporwave culture, described the album's content as "chopped, glitching and screwed adult contemporary soul alongside twinkling spa promotional tunes."

Xavier's production on the album is characterized by her use of looped and time-stretched samples of adult contemporary soul music, and its overall stylistic quality has been described as "chopped and screwed meets AOR, synth funk, contemporary R&B and new-age". Xavier takes a rather unsettling approach to sampling throughout Floral Shoppe, with "voices slowed to wordless drawls, tempos abused at whim, [and] snippets mashed over each other at clashing time signatures." Material sampled throughout the album includes several songs from new-age group Dancing Fantasy's 1993 studio album Worldwide, various funk and R&B songs from the 1980s, and the soundtrack for the 1997 video game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

The album's second track, "リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー" (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing), has over 20 million views on YouTube as of February 2017.

Release

Floral Shoppe was released digitally to Vektroid's Bandcamp music store on December 9, 2011 by independent record label Beer on the Rug. The album's tracks titles are all written in Japanese. It received much online popularity, eventually becoming "the most hyped vaporwave release on the Internet." Beer on the Rug later announced a re-release of the album in C44 cassette format. The cassette edition, limited to 100 copies, includes two bonus tracks not found on the digital issue and a code to download the album. Several songs appear in edited and/or crossfaded forms, while "Library" and "Mathematics" are featured at slower speeds than the versions found digitally. Vektroid later launched a line of tank tops and hoodies sporting a variation of the Floral Shoppe album cover.

Reception

Floral Shoppe was met with a polarizing reception from critics and casual listeners alike, being equally "criticized and acclaimed for [Xavier's] soulless take on muzak". Jonathan Dean of Tiny Mix Tapes wrote positively of Floral Shoppe, citing the album as "one of the best single documents of the vaporwave scene yet, a series of estranged but soulful manipulations of found audio that carefully constructs its own meditative headspace through the careful accretion of defamiliarized memory triggers." Stephen Purcell of Noise praised it as one of the year's best albums and wrote: "It's mind warping, it's refreshing and more importantly when it's done as well as this, it needs recognition."

Giving the album a perfect 5.0 rating, Adam Downer of Sputnikmusic characterized the album as "constantly—and delightfully—unsettling" and "a beautiful record that's both warm and strange, nostalgic and futuristic, bizarre and totally simple."

On the year-end annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll for albums, administered by The Village Voice, the album received two votes. Perfect Sound Forever's Miles Bowe cited Floral Shoppe as one of his year-end best albums. It was also named the sixth best album of the year by Tiny Mix Tapes, with reviewer James Parker opining that it "slid seamlessly between pure pop pleasure and the ironic framing of that pleasure, the presence of the artist at turns barely noticeable and dramatically foregrounded." Assessing the influence of Floral Shoppe on vaporwave, assuming it to be the genre's apex, Parker wrote:

In many ways, New Dreams Ltd., the umbrella moniker for Macintosh Plus, 情報デスクVIRTUAL, Laserdisc Visions, and Sacred Tapestry, embodied the [vaporwave] genre best. Not only did it provide some of vaporwave's most essential releases, but it also cannily folded at just the right moment, thanking us all for visiting the Virtual Casino. 2012 wasn't just the year vaporwave broke; it was also the year it exhausted itself: morphed, rebranded, its practitioners moved on. If any single release deserves to be remembered, though, it is surely Floral Shoppe. From the very beginning, it stood out not only for its artful marrying of the conceptual with the sensual, but also for its performance of the inseparability between the two.