Taking on a pivotal role in the scene around Montréal’s Mutek festival and label, Leclair at the time stood for a highly detailed, precise vision of techno music. As Akufen, he took tiny samples from the radio and other sources, meticulously edited and manipulated them, and arranged them into complex electronic tracks.

Their relative dancefloor compatability was due to the fact they were often held together by 4/4 rhythms programmed on one of techno’s standard Roland drum machines (usually the TR-808 or 909). Still, Leclair’s artistic lens had always been much wider than just focused on moving the dancefloor: a former visual artist, he was inspired by post-classical composition, experimental electronic music and jazz.

After releasing his Akufen masterpiece, the critically lauded album My Way in 2002, Leclair took an entirely different approach to his next album Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes, originally only released on CD through the Mutek imprint around two years later.

Inspired by three women in his Montréal circle who learned of their pregnancy around the same time, this project shifted Leclair’s focus further away from the dancefloor toward a more atmospheric, textural and emotional perspective on electronic music, while retaining the overall style of sound design and compositional mastery.

A young father himself who at the time had a three-year old daughter at home, Leclair slowly created a cycle of tracks that followed an entire pregnancy. That concept is reflected in the track titles, from “1er jour” to “236e jour”.

The album was a slow burner. It was who highlighted it for a wider audience through an almost enthusiastic Pitchfork review in 2006. Over the years, the rather obscure project became a cult favorite among collectors. Ever since then, adventurous listeners have been discovering this timeless 72-minute exploration of clicks, cuts, glitches and delay that, on the surface, sounds like the missing link between Berlin, Detroit and Montréal, but on a deeper level remains a profound meditation on the cycle of life itself.

More than 20 years after its first release, Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes has now been captured on double vinyl for the first time, and it’s also finally been made available on streaming services.

This brilliant collection of nine extensive ambient and dub techno tunes has soundtracked countless quiet mornings for me recently, so I reached out to Marc Leclair, who willingly answered a few questions about this special album.

Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes reminds me of some late-1990s, early-2000s music from Berlin – particularly Jan Jelinek’s works, but also Stefan Betke’s Pole trilogy and some of the more ambient-leaning Chain Reaction records. Were those influences at all?

I’d say definitely Jan’s music was a big inspiration during those years, especially the Farben material which I very much loved. I think we’ve all been listening to a lot of Chain Reaction, Basic Channel and Maurizio. Moritz and Mark’s music were on every turntable at every event. It was the Berlin dub sound that defined that era. And there were a plethora of young newcomers such as Scott Monteith who works under the moniker Deadbeat and Sasu Rapatti also known as Vladislav Delay who took that sound aesthetic to another groundbreaking level.

What were other influences on the sound of this particular album, in terms of music, but maybe also in terms of art, films or literature?

That album specifically was a tribute to several artists of all fields who obviously had an impact on my musical upbringing. WIthout getting into extensive name dropping, I will name a few major. Steve Reich is probably one of the most persistent throughout my career. Manuel Göttsching is another musician whose influence you can feel on the album, especially with the lush acoustic guitars.

Most of the artists from the Raster Noton collective, and Rechenzentrum as well. And there is a handful of film composers who weren’t necessarily afiliated to the electronica scene, such as Bernard Hermann who is a favourite of mine, and Ennio Morricone, whom I believe had an impact on most musicians.

Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle from the automatists movement and co-signer of the Refus Global manifesto has always been a personal inspirational source, for his entire body of work, but also for his dedication and strong contribution to Canadian cultural impact on the world, along Paul-Emile Borduas who was at the forefront of that revolutionary movement that defied all the social rules, conventions and traditions of art in Canada. They have sacrificed their lives, some even their families. The Automatist movement was the answer to the surrealists of Breton in Europe.

From the seventh art, If I may name a few inspirations I’d say Tarkovski, Kurosawa, Lynch, Cronenberg, Lumet and Hitchcock. I actually work on music mostly from images, visual memories and dreams. I’ve always thought of my music as being closer to the work of a visual artist, being myself an art student in my young adult life. I was primarily a painter and an illustrator and eventually chose music over being a visual artist.

There’s a tangible Berlin connection through the opening track, originally a commission from Rechenzentrum. How did this one end up on the album?

Originally Mark and Lillevan from Rechenzentrum who were performing at Mutek, met with me at a small event where all the artists who’ve played the festival that year were invited to exchange with local artists. And so Mark and Lillevan asked me to do a remix of one of their pieces from an album they’ve released at the time. And so I accepted their invitation with great pleasure, as I appreciated their work.

The remix at the time came out under the name “Empire of the Bees“, which later became the opening piece of the album with their kind permission. The song itself was built from a couple of sounds on the original piece. I just thought it illustrated perfectly the first instant of a pregnancy when the ovary is fertilized. The title itself says so much. The bees reference I think was the hint. And then I was invited to perform at the Berlin festival Transmediale the whole album and later the Tate Modern in London and Ars Electronica in Linz.

Why do you think you gravitated towards more atmospheric and calmer sounds at the time you recorded this album?

I spent much of my young teenager years listening to a lot of classical and experimental modern music. Lots of Russian music like Scriabin, and more obscure abstract music like Stockhausen, Boulez and Berio. Those musicians were looping in rotation in my big yellow Sony Walkman. I could walk forever listening to their work, and also to various more “popular“ artists such as Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Tangerine Dream, Asmus Tietchens and Andrew Poppy. And of course tons of films music scores. I am a confessed film buff. I listen to at least one movie every single day where I get a lot of my inspiration.

Who were the three pregnant women in your life at the time? What was your relation to them and how did their pregnancy influence the album and its genesis?

Valérie Jodoin who is my daughter’s godmother. Isabelle Painchaud who was at the time the girlfriend of my daughter’s godfather. And Élise Deblois who is a good friend of mine. There was clearly a baby boom around that period. Those three young future mothers were from the same circle of friends and artistic community in Montreal. They were also close friends which made these three pregnancies even more meaningful. They all got the news within a month or so. It was obvious that I had to highlight that event that has an impact on everyone in our community. My personal experience as a father some years earlier also had a lot to do with the recording of that project.

Do you remember the technical set-up for this album? Was it mostly software or hardware? Any special memories about the recording process?

A bit of both worlds. Obviously most of the editing was made on hardware, a traditional PC. I used Yamaha NS-10 studio monitors, a Yamaha automated sound board. A keyboard controller to play the piano and synth parts, a Nord 2, both electric and acoustic guitars, FL Studio, SoundForge, Cool Edit Pro, Acid, Reaktor and some granular synthesis DAW.

It took me roughly three years altogether. The first song was recorded around 2001 and was featured on an Akufen single on the Montreal label ORAL whose founder is a friend of mine, Eric Mattson. Then the Rechenzentrum remix happened, and I developed the remaining pieces slowly as I did not want to rush the project. I was quite busy at the time, as my career as Akufen kept me on the road steadily for several months sometimes. Not to mention that my daughter was fairly young still and necessitated my presence when I was home.

20 years later, this album absolutely holds up and still sounds gorgeous. Do you have an explanation why this one specifically turned out to be so timeless?

I think it is timeless solely because of its purpose. It’s been reported that a lot of women have listened to the album throughout their pregnancies. Some even have written to me to express their gratitude as it became part of their journey. As long as there will be pregnancies I believe this work will be relevant. I don’t see it as belonging to an era, a specific social context or historical event. Mother earth has been pregnant since the beginning of times. This album celebrates life itself in all its beauty.

What are you listening to these days?

A bit of everything as always. I just love music so much. I couldn’t live without it. A Tribe Called Quest, Bach, Liszt, Satie, Debussy, Django Reinhardt, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, XTC, Talking Heads, Steve Reich, Scriabin, DEVO, The Residents, Boris Vian, Gainsbourg, Nick Drake, Fela Kuti. I could go on for days.

The vinyl reissue of Marc Leclair’s Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes is out now on In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi in collaboration with Community Music.

I reckon some first and second generation producers in the scene share this narrow definition. A bunch of others would heartily disagree though, among them Bathroom Plants, an anonymous Philly producer who has been making original synthesizer-based vaporwave since releasing his debut album in 2019.

Of course you could also just call it ambient music, but Bathroom Plants’ music is deeply influenced by vaporwave aesthetics. It’s also inspired by solarpunk, an activist art and literary movement that counters the dystopian visions of cyberpunk with a hopeful, optimistic but decidedly anti-capitalist idea of sustainable societies and a better future through a peaceful coexistence of nature and technology.

There’s a brand new Bathroom Plants album out today – a collaboration with the Swedish vaporwave producer Paradise of Yesterday, released on the Geometric Lullaby label. Blossoming Tranquility is a project which was several years in the making and combines sample-based instrumentals with original overdubs on digital synthesizers.

I spoke to Bathroom Plants for this issue of Vapor Talks; a separate interview with Paradise of Yesterday will follow soon.

You’re in Philadelphia, right? Did you grow up there?

I live in Philadelphia now, but I grew up in New Jersey. I went to college here, and then I just stayed. I was like, “It’s cheap here, this is fine.” (smiles)

What styles of music did you grow up on?

My mom was a young parent. She’s Gen X, so it was a lot of early 90s alternative and grunge on the radio. Another big influence was video game music. I have so many soundtracks burned into my brain, whether it’s some level in Sonic or Mario or something like that. It didn’t click until I was older that video game music is a legitimate form of music. That’s another thing that interested me in vaporwave initially, that it’s taking music from video games, commercials, jingles or elevator music, all these things that the average person wouldn’t even perceive as actual music.

As I grew into discovering my own taste, it went all over the place. I got into free-form jazz towards the end of high school, as well as there was a pretty active experimental and noise basement scene near me in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the late 2000s, early 2010s, that was a lot of my music exposure – going to and playing a lot of really cool, stinky, dirty basements, just standing in front of a speaker with a wall of static hitting me.

Did you get any musical training or learn any instruments as a kid?

Very little. I played saxophone when I was nine or 10 for maybe two or three years, but then I got bored of it. Around 2005 I picked it up again, because me and my friends were making a band, and since the saxophone was the only thing I had experience with, I was like, “Okay, I’ll pick that up.” That project initially was me on saxophone, my one friend on bass, and my other friend on a Casio keyboard. We had a shitty tape boom box with a built-in microphone, and we just set that up in the center of the room and hit record and banged on all our instruments.

How and when did you first discover vaporwave?

Probably around 2012, 2013. I forget exactly how I found out about it. I had a general curiosity in how a genre is formed and becomes a movement, because it’s a lot of different people and things coalescing and then branching out. I was just searching music blogs and Reddit threads, looking for something new that piques my interest, and vaporwave jumped out at me. It was interesting, both from the idea of the anonymity of the artists and this weird repurposing of older incidental music, so that drew me in. I started finding certain artists or labels that were putting out stuff that appealed to me.

Which artists and producers were really inspiring you at the time and when you started making this kind of music yourself?

Initially, a big one was Macintosh Plus with Floral Shoppe. A lot of the early Dream Catalogue releases were a jumping off point for me; Golden Living Room, who I later got a chance to do a collab album with, was a big one to begin with. MindSpring Memories too, and a lot of the other early ones are hard to remember, because they were just Japanese characters that I never learned how to pronounce.

In addition to vaporwave, I was also discovering a lot of 80s and 90s Japanese new age music. Those just out of nowhere started popping up on my YouTube. Stuff like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green was a big influence. They were what really kicked off Bathroom Plants. I liked these very new agey digital, but still soft and warm sounding vibes. In addition with what I was listening to in vaporwave, these connected in a way.

You’re working mostly hardware-based, right? Have you ever made music on the computer?

I’ve always been mostly hardware. I use my computer basically as a glorified tape recorder. Everything you can see back there [points to a bunch of rackmount synthesizers] – all the actual production and playing is done on those. The software side is very basic for me: I use Adobe Audition for editing and iZotope Ozone for mastering.

I’ve tried a handful of times to get into making music on the computer. I don’t know if it’s just how my brain’s wired, but nothing zaps the creative energy from me faster than that. It’s just not tactile enough for me, not immediate enough. Something about having physical buttons and little screens and menus feels so much more inspiring to me than moving a mouse around and clicking on things.

Can you talk about the evolution of your setup?

For the longest time, it was just an MPC 1000 and a MicroKorg. Shortly before starting Bathroom Plants, I had a job where I had a decent amount of disposable income for the first time as an adult, and I wanted to buy some cool synths that were going to feel inspirational, but I also wanted to be smart about my money. So rather than going out and just buying new, flashy, expensive synths, I was looking at vintage stuff.

Prices for your vintage 70s analog stuff were just through the roof at the time, but I started noticing a lot of digital synths from the 80s and 90s were still sleepers, so I just very gradually was diving into researching 80s synthesizers. A big part of it too was recognizing preset sounds. Like, that sound in The X-Files, that’s from a Korg Wavestation. No wonder this has so much appeal to me, I used to watch this all the time. For Bathroom Plants, I wanted to have this 80s, 90s sound to it. What better way to do that than get a bunch of synths that were used or made at that time? Bit by bit, if I saw something on eBay had a good price, I went for it.

My main setup now is the Korg M1, the Wavestation, the Yamaha TG 33 and the TG 77. The TG 77 and the Wavestation are my favorites. Both are very deep and very weird synthesizers. For Bathroom Plants, I like keeping that specific sound palette. The only thing I added to it is a Roland R-8 drum machine. On my first albums, I didn’t want any percussion but on my last one, NewMind Solidarity, I wanted drums. The R-8 is still really cheap to get, especially the rackmount version. The brain of my setup is still the MPC 1000 that I use for sending MIDI and programming everything, so even the composition is all on the hardware itself. I just love coming in here, sitting down, turning everything on and having the nice little glow of the screens and just tapping on some keys.

From the beginning of the genre, most vaporwave was sample-based, and some would argue that it’s a key element to it. How did vaporwave influence the Bathroom Plants sound?

Even though it was original music I was making, the inspiration came from thinking of composing in the style of something you would hear in an elevator or in a mall or in a nature documentary from the early 90s, finding inspiration from the same sources that vaporwave was pulling from, as well as the tongue-in-cheek nature of how it was being presented. When I chose the name Bathroom Plants, I was trying to think of that artificial, insincere, corporate aesthetic. Around that time I had a job where I was going to a lot of law offices and doctors offices, so I was encountering a lot of that atmosphere in the wild, these really fake environments made to appeal to a vague sense of comfort, even though you’re not supposed to stay there. I started noticing that a frequent thing I was encountering was plants in the bathroom. The more I worked on the music, the more it shifted away into a more sincere approach to the sounds that I was making, but I still loved the name.

Going through your discography, I found some references to the literary and art movement of solarpunk. What’s that about?

It’s basically the opposite of that dystopian cyberpunk future. I didn’t realize solarpunk was a thing until well after I released the first album. When I found out about the ideas behind it, I felt this is exactly what I was trying to do, without even realizing that there was already somewhat of a movement and aesthetic of people doing this stuff for I don’t know how long. Once I found that out, I was leaning into it, because it’s 100% my vibe and intention with this music. But I’ve always approached it more as a general mindset than a specific set of rules or aesthetics. When I’m making an album, I have an idea in my head that would fall into solarpunk, but I’m thinking mainly about the sounds and feelings and less so about if I’m telling a certain narrative that fits within this specific framework.

Solarpunk – A brief primer

Solarpunk is an activist movement across speculative fiction, art and architecture that creates utopian worlds where society is shaped by values of social justice and ecological sustainability.

The movement’s roots can be traced back to the late 2000s and early 2010s blogosphere. The second half of the 2010s saw the publishing of various manifestos and fiction anthologies, as well as a more widespread use of the term in cultural discussions. It’s thought of as a reaction to cyberpunk, which describes a dystopian world as a consequence of unhinged capitalism and global warming.

Solarpunk themes and settings can be found in sci-fi classics like Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), as well as in works by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home) and Kim Stanley Robinson (Pacific Edge, Mars Trilogy, Ministry Of The Future).

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, a new generation of (often queer) authors set out to write solarpunk fiction, among them Becky Chambers (Monk & Robot, 2022), Ruthanna Emrys (A Half-Built Garden, 2022), Cory Doctorow (The Lost Cause, 2023) and Susan Kaye Quinn (Nothing is Promised, 2020-23). There’s also a number of underground solarpunk zines and independently published anthologies.

Find some of the best solarpunk books on Goodreads.

Musically, I think there’s a fine line between solarpunk and utopian virtual, that post-James Ferraro sound. The latter is more tongue-in-cheek because it’s referencing a time when hopes in a better future through technology weren’t yet dismissed as failed and naive, so it’s more of a hauntology thing. Solarpunk hasn’t actually abandoned these beliefs and hopes yet.

Yeah, so I initially was taking inspiration from the utopian virtual vibe. But while I was making my first album, it’s shifted into more sincerity, almost like an antidote for the abundance of cyberpunk sounds and aesthetics. Growing up, we were exposed to a lot of these false promises, but now that we’re kind of already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, I wanted to create something in response to that. I still want a better, greener, more accepting future and I’m trying to do my little part of making art to hopefully inspire people with this idea – because these things are still possible to do, and if you don’t have something positive to dream for, how are you going to make any change?

As Bathroom Plants, I want to create something that is a vision for a positive future, not just false hope but an open end. It’s not like all we need to do is cover skyscrapers in trees, and it’ll be fine. The future is what you make it, but that’s gonna require change of not just individual attitudes, but whole societal shifting. We need massive change at a very high level, and it’s not going to be accomplished just by buying the right things or buying carbon offsets or whatever. We can’t just buy our way out of global warming.

I really like this YouTuber Andrewism – he talks about solarpunk in a way that makes sense to me, not that kind of co-opted liberal environmentalism. His approach is more radical, where he ties in the reason the planet is getting destroyed, which is of course capitalism. We’re using too many resources too loosely, not necessarily at an individual level, but at the corporate and governmental level. The big lie told to myself as a kid was that we’re going to fix climate change by recycling and remembering to turn off the lights when we leave the room. Meanwhile, huge corporations are just dumping gallons of garbage into the oceans.

How would you describe the evolution of the project since you started it in 2019?

It’s been a gradual refining of my sound and an expansion of the musical and compositional techniques as I learn more through trial and error and through watching YouTube videos about music theory, which I don’t fully understand. I’d previously just done these improvisational jams with my friends; my first album as Bathroom Plants, Installing Symbiotopia, was the first time where it was just me sitting down, coming up with something. So the first one was very much feeling things out, and from there, it was just an increasing refinement and expansion of what I was interested in musically.

The second album I did was 9 Reflections, the collab with Golden Living Room. He does have a musical background, I believe he even teaches music, so having a back and forth with him took my musical approach in a different direction and up a level that maybe would have taken me longer to get to if I was just doing another one by myself and feeling it out on my own.

My third one, Garden of Accrescent Vistas, is an interesting one, because I made it during the pandemic. I got laid off and then was just living on the pandemic money for a good year. That was the first time that I could literally wake up and dedicate the entire day to just working on music. It was fucking amazing, so that one too, I feel like it was a really big jump musically, compositionally, the way I layered different things and came up with melodies, because I was able to give so much attention to it.

Then real world struck, and I had to get a day job again, and that was difficult to deal with for a good while. I had a lot of stuff going on in my life, which was a real creative block for a while. So the album after that was just a collection of compilation tracks, Virtual Herbarium, and NewMind Solidarity really took me a while to finish. Each track on there at some point during its production felt like an absolute struggle. At times I thought, “None of this is coming together, I’m gonna have to just abandon this.” I’d probably burnt myself out a little bit. After Garden, I didn’t give myself a second to breathe and enjoy what I had created. So I put it down for a while and then came back to it and eventually finished it.

After NewMind Solidarity, I stepped back a bit. I needed to get my head in the right place before I went any further. The last year or two, I’ve been pretty busy on a couple different projects, and one of them is the collab with Paradise Of Yesterday that’s coming out now, and then I’ve got two more really big ones that are finally coming together. But I have that creative spark and energy again. It feels really good. I’ve been putting my effort into these projects while also making sure I’m taking time off, just doing nothing, taking a walk in nature, or interacting with people.

Tell me about the collab with Paradise of Yesterday. How did you hook up, what was the general concept and process for the album?

I have a little list of artists that I like, artists that I should reach out to at some point and see if they want to collab. They were on that list for a while. I really liked one of their albums called Sentimental. I liked it enough that I bought the cassette of it, and then later on bought the vinyl as well, which I rarely do. I’d been thinking of wanting to collab with them for a while, and then I had this idea of a remix album of my first album, and Paradise of Yesterday was one of the people who made a track for that one. This was unpropped, like I didn’t reach out to anyone directly. I just put out this post like, “Whoever wants to do this, here’s the music, send it to me if you make something.” So they did that and sent it to me, and we started talking back and forth via email and just gradually started making stuff.

This album happened over several years. Maybe it was 2023 when we first started. Their project is all sample-based so they would make a track, send it to me, and I’d add my stuff to it. Honestly, working on this album with them was one of the things that helped me get out of the creative slump. They would give me something to add to, to complement or expand on, which is a lot less daunting than starting from zero. It’s also just nice to have another person bouncing ideas off of. Working on this really helped me get back into the creative flow that I’m in now.

Does the wider vaporwave community motivate you as well?

Oh yeah, definitely. Listening to new artists and what everyone else is putting out is always a huge influence and inspiration. I have a constant queue of releases to download and listen to. One good thing about the job that I’m working now is, depending on what I’m doing, a lot of times I can listen to music. There’s only so many hours of the day, but the amount of amazing music coming out from everyone is great and I feel it’s very much an active and supportive genre.

I’ve never performed live as Bathroom Plants, but I’ve been doing some of those virtual shows during the pandemic, and I’ve just been getting that itch again, to do live stuff. I just try to let stuff happen naturally, which can be difficult because I’m also very much an introvert and a shy person.

Blossoming Tranquility by Paradise of Yesterday and Bathroom Plants is out now on Geometric Lullaby.

Listen to Bathroom Plants on Bandcamp

Bathroom Plants’ Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Darksleep – Obviate (Business Casual, 2015)

• Kappa – Forsaken (Sunset Recordings, 2019)

• Golden Living Room – Welcome Home (self-released, 2014)

• Windows 98のご紹介 – これは魂のために (self-released, 2015)

• Zer0 Rei – NYX (Aquablanca 音楽レーベル, 2021)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki] – Final Transmission (self-released, 2019)

• Ghost Particles & ⦓🍊⦔ タンジェリン [Kagoshima Tangerine] – 🌕 (The Expanding Earth, 2021)

• desert sand feels warm at night – 我思う、ゆえに我あり (Midwest Collective, 2021)

• ™CENTURY – Sun Shining Optimism (Dream Catalogue, 2014)

• MindSpring Memories – Soul Visioning (self-released, 2021)

Aside from making music, John established Business Casual, a prolific independent label for electronic internet music, building a catalog of over 500 projects by dropping weekly releases for over a decade.

2016 was an especially important year in John’s career, as he released his classic album no lives matter and also reflection, the lauded second album in the 아버지 (father2006) trilogy.

I spoke to John about his beginnings in vaporwave, key influences and the genesis of his landmark albums released ten years ago. Along the way, we also touched upon topics like why only sample-based vaporwave remains the actual vaporwave to him, and why he hasn’t been feeling like making dark, depressing, angry or sad music anymore.

You’re based in Pittsburgh, but you grew up in New Jersey, right?

Yeah, Central Jersey, in the middle of nowhere at the time. I moved out to Pittsburgh for film school. It’s just a relatively clean, cheap city still to live in. I probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t as affordable as it is. For what you get, it’s great.

I’ve always been a wannabe city boy. My father grew up in the Bronx. He always wanted to have a garden and this big open area of forests, so he moved us out. I was born into that world, and yet I still yearned for the city – the opposite of my father.

What kind of music did you grow up on?

My mother was into 80s pop, 70s prog and disco. My father was into classical music, film scores and soundtracks. My aunt worked in theater for 30 years, and my mother also worked in theater to a lesser extent. There was always music playing in the house, on the boom box or the TV radio.

One of my favorite albums is Genesis’ We Can’t Dance from ‘91. Everybody apparently hates that album, and I don’t get it. It is a 10 out 10, flawless album. That was a car staple in our six-CD changer for a decade. For me, peak Genesis is after Peter Gabriel left. I don’t want to listen to fucking Foxtrot. That’s bullshit. Give me Duke. Give me Invisible Touch. Give me We Can’t Dance. That’s my peak Genesis.

You actually sampled it on no end, didn’t you?

Yeah, I pulled a lot from my personal music library. What I always say to any vaporwave artist starting out: Sample- or inspiration-wise, it’s good to start with and tell stories about what you know. Then you can go out and do bigger stories or more expansive things. But yes, I did sample some tracks from Genesis and Peter Gabriel, all the artists I grew up with, from my brother’s and father’s libraries.

Did you get any musical training and learn an instrument as a kid?

I originally wanted to learn the piano, so my mom would get me lessons, but I got chubby little fingers, and I don’t feel like practicing. Although I did play piano for probably about five years, I retained none of that. I can kind of read music but I’m not as confident or competent of a musician, so I focus on samples. Samples are easy.

Do you remember how you started seeking out music for yourself?

It was about getting online early on and discovering Limewire, YouTube and DeviantArt. That’s where I started finding things. Around the time, I got an MP3 player too, and every week, there’d be a new song of the week on iTunes, a free download, and I discovered a bunch of new music that way.

I think it was around 2007 that they cut off analog broadcasting for the US, so you had to switch to digital. Because I hadn’t had cable up to that point, I don’t necessarily have the same nostalgia for a lot the stuff that other people were growing up on. Once we got cable, I was watching Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, and I heard those bumps in between each of the shows, these experimental little things. Flying Lotus, Prefuse 73, those names came up. Prefuse 73 was a huge early influence.

Along with that, my local library had CDs that you could rent out for free. I would go based on cover, until I learned that you go by label. But that’s how I found LCD Soundsystem, and I liked this combination of rock and electronic music. That was my early exposure to these things.

Your site bio says you’ve been making content for the internet since 2006. You were 12 or 13 at that point, so what kind of content are we talking?

One of the first sites I joined was YouTube, and I would make these little skits with my friends. Around that same time, I discovered DeviantArt, where I would upload my crude drawings of edgy little characters. I loved Gorillaz at the time. Thankfully, I deactivated that account years ago, so a lot of it isn’t online anymore.

My first label was based around that early era where I had this username, MrHappyFace. I don’t know how I came across that moniker, but it just sounded pretty cool to a 13 year old. I was uploading YouTube videos, just taking my mom’s digital camera and recording my friends. I didn’t start making music till around 2010.

So you had another label before Business Casual?

Yes. Business Casual is technically my third label. The first one was MrHappyFace Records. I rebranded that to Dead Pixel Records [in 2012, ed. note], which I consider that my second label. In the early days, I was infatuated with this other net label called ROFLtrax, which later turned into Breakbit Music. This guy, MrSimon, had built out this site, because he’s a web developer, I think he now works in video games. This is before Bandcamp was a big thing. He realized there’s a bunch of people who are making funny YouTube videos and actually also making music.

I really wanted to be on that label. It inspired a lot of my own YouTube music, which was about chopping up weird samples, mishing and mashing them together into something different. Being a label head now, I see exactly how I was with MrSimon back in the day, because I have fans that are just like how I was to him to me today. Oh my God, it’s karma. (laughs) Because I was that person back then, I can give it a pass. I know that they’ll grow up. But MrSimon – cool guy, cool musician at the time, he could take much of it.

From 2010 until 2013, you released music as Bye-Product and under other aliases. How did you actually start making music?

I was already doing video and visual art, and I’m thinking the next best thing is music. I’m good at these other things, so I should be great at music, right? Because I’m stupid and young, you know? (laughs) So I downloaded a demo of Fruity Loops, but I had no way to export or record anything from there. I would plan and build out the entire song and then record it with a headphone cable into Audacity. It sounded terrible, unlistenable, but that was how I made those first couple of releases, just testing the waters.

Around the time I discovered Breakbit Music, and these people were using samples. I thought, “Why try to make original music when I could just chop something up?” I ditched FL Studio for a while and used this program Virtual DJ. You could speed a track up, slow it down, loop it, chop it, record it. I got pretty good at this way, and then went back to FL Studio. Not knowing what I’m doing, I found the most obscene ways of getting these programs to do what I wanted them to do. I’m still like that today. I brute force things. I’m not someone who looks up tutorials, I just figure it out. I’m not a technical musician. I’m stupid. (laughs)

This is where I still am today. I still use FL Studio for almost everything, but I’ll use Virtual DJ every once a while as a nostalgia trip.

Did you have some sort of community to make and share music with, either locally or online?

No one locally. It wasn’t until I got to college and started making stuff under christtt that anybody from my high school showed any interest. A year after I left, a couple friends from high school were like, “Well, this christtt stuff is pretty good!” And I’m like, “Where were you guys the four years prior? Okay, whatever.”

I was part of the Breakbit online fan club, but I got kicked off because I was annoying, just doing stupid things. But I had made some friends on there, and then my mentality was like, “Fuck these guys. I’m gonna make my own label.” I made this label basically for me. Around that time I was discovering other artists through DeviantArt. That’s where I found a couple of my early artist friends and people who I released music with in the early days. There was also people on SoundCloud and YouTube.

Back then I worked with Jamie Paige as a collaborator on a side project called stab something. We had an album and then a couple of small releases. It kind of fizzled out, because I moved on to vaporwave, and they moved on to what they were doing. They’re wildly successful at this point, and I’m happy for them. I don’t talk to them very often. They were in high school, I was a freshman in college, so we were pretty young, and at that age, you just tend to drift apart.

I didn’t really have a whole lot of friends, maybe one or two that I would consider pretty close with, but a lot were just acquaintances because I was just too annoying and unbearable to be around. I’ve grown up a lot since I went to college. It reflects in my early music, because it’s just terrible and stupid and dumb and poorly put together. There’s a little jewel in the pile of shit, but I’m so far removed from it at this point that listening to it outside of a handful of particular tracks, it just hurts.

You adapted the moniker christtt and pivoted to vaporwave in early 2013. Can you remember how you learned about the genre?

My first interaction with vaporwave was that an artist on my label sent me a link to the music video for Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Sleep Dealer” [from Replica, 2011], and I listened to that quite a bit. At the time, I wasn’t somebody who would dig deeper though. I just listened to the songs I liked.

It wasn’t until the winter of 2012/13 that I heard Macintosh Plus, which was interesting to me. After that, it was really a visual mix from Smash TV, Memorex, that was foundational. It was all 80s and 90s commercials chopped up, and it had music by VHS Head, Hype Williams, Boards Of Canada, LA Vampires, Ford & Lopatin… I was in film school then, and I saw it on Vimeo the week it came out [in February 2013, ed. note]. I was like, “Oh my god, this is so fucking good.”

It really sold me on not only the sound, but just a different area of the internet that I wasn’t in. To this day, every time I start watching it, I just end up watching the whole thing.

So at that point, I went back to Macintosh Plus, and to [Oneohtrix Point Never’s] Replica. I love that album to death, but I wouldn’t consider it vaporwave personally. It’s probably proto. Those were the things I first heard and really got into, and in March 2013, I started working on what would be the first christtt EP, 266.

Up until then, I was on a completely different side of the plunderphonics sphere. I was coming from YouTube, and I wasn’t privy to vaporwave. The first time I heard of it might have been in Anthony Fantano’s review of Floral Shoppe. That’s one of the things I remember watching because I had previously sent him a couple albums. I even got a message back one time. He said, “I’m just not a fan of your album. Sorry, man. Sad face.” I have it on my website now as “praise”. I wear it as a badge of honor.

What was it about the music on Replica, Memorex and Floral Shoppe that drew you in?

Honestly, I think it was the repetition, because it reminded me of a lot of the electronic and house music I was listening to, but it was all samples. I was coming from this more glitchy, more condensed sort of thing, like really dense sampling, and here was this other world that’s just more minimal with it. I gravitated towards it because it was just different from what I was used to. It felt more classical in a way, more structured. The 80s and 90s sounds were just reminiscent of that stuff I grew up with, and it was nostalgic, which is part of what vaporwave has ultimately become. It’s just nostalgia music for millennials, you know?

In May 2013, you started Business Casual 87, which later got shortened to just Business Casual. Why another label?

I’d sent an early version of Frasierwave to [Luxury Elite’s label] Fortune 500. I did not know Luxury Elite then. I do now of course, and she’s the sweetest person ever, but at that time I didn’t hear anything back and took it as rejection. It didn’t sit right with me, so just like I did in the past, I said, “Fuck you, I’m gonna build my own label.” That’s where Business Casual came from – it came out of spite.

I knew a handful of artists previously from my Dead Pixel Records days and they came on for the first record, which was Digital Office One. I’d learned from Breakbit that it’s good to start off with a compilation, get everybody a little bit of a taste, and then you can come out with releases. I did some digging on SoundCloud and YouTube, that’s where I found artists like Whitewoods or Windows96. I just reached out to them and asked them if they wanted to release on my label.

I don’t want to sound like I’m super important, but I’ve basically given them a platform, and that platform has helped them go on to do bigger and better things. I really do try to sound as modest as I can, because it’s hard to have an ego when you’re just slowing down Diana Ross, right? (laughs) Seriously though, I can’t take all the credit that I’d like to take sometimes, and that’s partially just because it’s better to be heard but not seen. I don’t even release christtt albums on Business Casual anymore. It’s my label, but I don’t want to give myself better treatment than my other artists, so I just do my stuff separately.

A lot of artists went on to be quite influential in the vaporwave space, from Architecture in Tokyo to Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza. How did you connect with them?

A lot of it was just cold calling on SoundCloud or even Reddit. It was definitely more difficult because it was still a new label, and there was some speculation, like, “Who is this christtt guy?” In retrospect, I got lucky that some artists took a chance on the label. It was this combination of cold calling and luck. Then again, when I think about it, what did they really have to lose? They were all sampling heavily so they couldn’t really do much with it outside of YouTube or Bandcamp.

Did you start meeting the artists you worked with in real life too?

No, I didn’t really meet anybody in the vaporwave scene until Econ 1 [the first 100% ElectronICON festival in 2019, ed. note]. Vaporwave is such an online genre, and it’s so spread out – it really has no singular home in the real world, so 2019 was the first time I met anybody in person. It was magical to go there and meet all these people, some of who you’d talked to and have known for years online, so you’re shaking hands, you’re giving out hugs. It was a great time.

Aside from classic vaporwave, Business Casual was pushing a lot of future funk in the early days. Was that due to your personal taste?

I’d say 85% of all the music that goes out on Business Casual is solely because I like it and I think it’s worthy of the platform. Some releases you just put out because if you don’t do it, someone else is going to put it out and they’re going to make bank on it. In the early days, I would release a lot of things I probably wouldn’t release today, just because I needed to fill a release.

I always look for three things in a release, and at least it has to have one or two of these things. One: Is it different? It doesn’t even have to be that good, it just has to sound interesting. Two: Is it marketable? Am I gonna make my money back on it? If I’m buying CDs or tapes especially, I have to think about that. Three is talent. It may not be the most interesting or original thing, but it’s really well-done technically. If I find something with all three, that’s great, but as long as I get one or two, I’m happy.

There was definitely a time where future funk was really a big thing of Business Casual. But future funk’s fucking boring now. I get to hear a lot of the same things. Sometimes you just want to have your classic vaporwave, or your classic future funk, so I’ll put those out from time to time, but I want to hear something that’s interesting, like a mish-mash of two different things, or a different take on a staple genre.

What was the rebrand in 2014 about, when you dropped the 87 part?

It was just because I finally got the URL businesscasual.biz. I’d only named it Business Casual 87 because I couldn’t get the URL. 87 was a nebulous number I came up with because it’s vaporwave, it’s the 80s, but then I’m thinking that could be holding back a little bit. Business Casual 87 was a vaporwave label, but Business Casual is just an internet music label. I don’t intentionally market it as a vaporwave label anymore, but as an all-encompassing thing for electronic online music. The original website was bright pink, teal logo and orange confetti things. It was very loud. Since 2014, it’s been black, white, teal, and just little accent colors. That’s the Business Casual brand.

In 2016, you put out the Haircuts For Men album Marble Fantasy. It’s a classic of the barber beats genre now, even though nobody even called it that back then. Did you realize how different it was?

Well, I listened to it and it wasn’t quite the sort of sound that I heard before. And honestly, with him being a designer – you’ve seen some of his covers, they’re just great –, I immediately gravitated towards it. The artwork alone was a big selling point for me. Certain people say that 90% of what gets people to actually listen to the music in vaporwave is the album cover. If the cover is shit, no one’s gonna listen to it. I’ll get demos sometimes from artists who make great music, but the cover is terrible, so I will ask them, “Can we change the cover?” I don’t step in very often, because when I’m releasing an artist, I want their entire vision to be recognized, and usually the artwork is part of that.

With Haircuts For Men, the visual matched the sound. It just sounded like vaporwave to me. I don’t know that I would have seen it as a different genre, because to me, vaporwave has alwas been sample-based. In my head, I called it post-plunderphonics. If it’s not sampled, it just is what it is – like 2814, it’s just ambient music. It’s not really doing anything different. It wasn’t the sound I was going for. I like stuff that’s got some punch to it.

You’ve opened up Business Casual towards other kinds of internet music, while the vaporwave space has been fragmented into subgenres and micro-communities.

It’s all just vaporwave to me. Can we all just stop calling it something different? Sure, there’s subgenres within the genre, and it’s been like that since the beginning. But can we all just come together and be happy together? We all know the weird uncle who comes over, but you still got to deal with him. You’re not gonna love everybody in your family the same way, but let’s just be nice to each other.

Look, I’m not a slushwave guy. Honestly, I don’t get it most of the time. It’s why you don’t see a lot of it on Business Casual, just because a lot of it doesn’t speak to me. And even barber beats – Haircuts For Men was doing his own thing for a while, but then AI music started to creep up and people were like, “Let’s just click export on this and upload it.” Even just for general vaporwave – there’s all these 10-hour mixes on YouTube, and it’s just AI-generated stuff. It’s why I still say that sample-based music is the actual vaporwave, because that really can’t be recreated by a computer authentically. They’re not taking something that already exists; they’re not taking a sample and slowing it down, speeding it up or chopping it up. It’s always interpolating it, and it’s much more easy to do that with the ambient type stuff.

Let’s talk about no lives matter, your 2016 album that brought you a much bigger audience within vaporwave. Did you experience it that way too?

Yeah, that one was the first peak, and the second peak would have been deep dark trench. I don’t think I’ve quite reached that since. I’ve had some albums that have gotten notoriety, but it’s a lot from my current fan base, and while that fan base is still growing and I’m still gaining new listeners, it was really no lives matter that put me on the map.

That album came out of work stress and a lack of sleep. At the time, I was working hard in college. We’re doing our senior thesis film, and I’m just tired. It was a very turbulent time in my life. For a lot of people, the music on that album didn’t really speak as vaporwave, because its sample choices were definitely more recent, but it was pulling from a certain time in my life and that music was representing it.

There’s a track on it called “I Can’t Remember His Voice”. I had an episode earlier in college where I realized that I couldn’t remember the voice of my father, who’d died in 2006. It had been so long since I’d heard it, and I broke down crying thinking about that. I wanted to document that feeling I had at the time, going through life without that father figure. It was a huge, cathartic thing for me, and I think it comes through in the music well enough.

It was after a two-year break from releasing new music, so I didn’t want to do it by myself. Oscob was starting up a label, so I sent it to him, and we released it on his label [Bedlam Tapes, ed. note]. The rest is history. Has it aged amazingly? I don’t know. I think it still holds up in some ways, unless so in other ways. In retrospect, I wish I called it something different, but I can’t think of any other title that would have worked as well. It’s a loud, poignant title. That’s how I felt like at the time, just super angry and sad. I don’t regret calling it that, but there is a part of me that’s like, “That was really fucking stupid.”

Well, your next album was called social justice whatever…

That’s one album title that I really do regret. It came out of the era when Trump first got into office and the internet was in this turmoil, so part of me was just missing the old internet and throwing aside these tantrums going on online. The thing is, when you make an album like no lives matter, where do you go from there? That one was a very personal album, so I wanted to make something that was fun and stupid and silly. It still had some moments of levity in there, but all in all, it’s just me being nostalgic for my childhood on YouTube and the internet at large.

In the mid-2010s, you were one of several artists with new visions of how vaporwave could sound, alongside people like Nmesh and death’s dynamic shroud. I would be interested in your musical inspirations at the time.

In general I’d say anything I’d sample. For a lot of my stuff, Oneohtrix Point Never was definitely up there as a huge influence. At the time I made no lives matter, he’d just released Garden Of Delete. That album is super rough and raw and edgy, so I definitely pulled from that. I’m sure a lot of artists in the vaporwave scene, maybe even Nmesh and DDS, would have pulled from that.

How did you approach deep dark trench?

After social justice whatever, I felt confident enough to make a little more conceptual, poignant albums again. deep dark trench was my American take on 9/11 – as opposed to [Cat System Corp.’s] News At 11, which was more about, you know, “What if 9/11 hadn’t happened?” To me, deep dark trench feels like ultimately a very American album. I was shocked when people around the world gravitated towards it.

Working on that album, I made a trip out to the museum in New York. Honestly, after going there, I was like, “Do I even make this album?” Originally I had TV clips throughout the album, but I took a lot of them out because it just felt wrong. As much as people joke – even for me, it was a punchline for a part of my childhood on the internet –, it really is a terrifying and terrible thing when you hear those audio clips.

I’m probably one of the last generation to really remember it as it happened. I was in first or second grade, and I lived in Central New Jersey. We got to school early in the morning, and two hours later, we’re on busses heading home, and we don’t know what’s going on. My father came home from work early. He used to work for MetLife – some weeks he’d be in New York at the MetLife building, some weeks he’d be in a New Jersey office. Thankfully, he wasn’t in New York that week.

Speaking of your father – in the second half of the 2010s, you released three hugely influential dark vaporwave albums as father2006. Tell me about how you came up with the concept.

I made the first one, White Death, in a day. It was at the end of the semester before I was going home for the holidays. All my schoolwork was done, so I basically had a week off, and I sat down and cranked it out. I was very inspired by what Bloody Carpet [BLCR Laboratories] was doing at the time.

I made it around the same time as no lives matter, like a companion album. I wanted White Death to be my deceased father’s perspective, going into the afterlife. It would start after “Offline” ends on no lives matter. That’s how I had it in my head. I don’t think I’ve really said it out loud to anyone. It’s a very personal album to me.

I released it, and I didn’t really think much about it. Then after no lives matter did very well, I was thinking, “What if I added more to the story on the father’s side?” That’s where reflection came from. It was meant to be before White Death, and that was probably made over the course of a couple months in 2016.

Years later, during the pandemic, I was home and felt a bit sad and scared, so I was thinking it’s time for another one. That one, residue, is meant to go before reflection. You know, my father got cancer, was cured of cancer, and then got cancer again. That album is like that first taste of it. Honestly, it feels like a complete story, those three albums, and I don’t think I will add anything onto that. If I do release more father2006 stuff, I’m not going to necessarily focus on a concept as much, because that story is done.

Right now I am not really sad about anything else that I could pull from emotionally, which is why it’s just been so hard to make something. I just couldn’t force myself to do something like that. Again, it’s a very personal trilogy. But I don’t feel like I did anything different than what I’ve done before, just a slightly different tone – a bit darker.

One thing I really like about vaporwave is that the idea of the album as a conceptual body of work is kept alive in the genre.

Yeah, since no lives matter, I’ve done mostly concept albums. From a technical standpoint, I’m not the best at making music, and that gives me a way to express myself in a way that doesn’t require me to be the most technically proficient. Some of my music doesn’t sound that great, but it works towards the concept of the entire story I’m telling, and some stories are more obvious or blatant than others.

It gets harder as I get older, because you just strive to have higher standards. My last album soft rock wasn’t really a concept album. I just started making songs just because I was feeling good. I don’t know, my life’s been pretty good the past couple years. I’ve just been happy, so it’s hard to make a sad album or try to work on a father2006 record. I mean sure, I get seasonal depression as well, I get stuck inside because it’s snowing outside, and I just want to stay in bed and doomscroll all day. But it’s not really a sadness that relates to I don’t know… Well, let’s just say I’ve always been kind of a happy person.

Listen to christtt on Bandcamp

christtt’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Careless Messenger Recordings – Suddenly Mega (CMR, 2014)

• George Clanton – 100% Electronica (100% Electronica, 2015)

• James Ferraro – Human Story 3 (self-released, 2016)

• Sacred Tapestry – Shader (PrismCorp, 2012)

• Nmesh – Dream Sequins (AMDiscs, 2014)

• Giant Claw – DARK WEB (self-released, 2014)

• eyeclick – 01-999-6363 拨号上网 sexxxline (self-released, 2021)

• .CASTING – HEATWAVE EP (Stratford Ct., 2014)

• trndytrndy – Virtua (self-released, 2024)

• toolgun – KILLCAM (self-released, 2024)

During our conversation, I mentioned my rekindled love for vaporwave since the pandemic. I’d started writing more about it here in my newsletter too – to the expected mixed reactions from long-time subscribers. My friend echoed the negative sentiments held by a part of my reader base: “Yeah, that’s actually why I haven’t been reading you as much recently.”

Coming from a friend and supporter, of course that hurt. But I also get it. I don’t expect every reader who signed up for my explorations of ambient and experimental music to suddenly develop an interest in vaporwave. Though I do think it isn’t too far off from what I’ve been writing about previously, I totally understand it’s just not everyone’s cup of tea.

At the same time, I think many music fans – including my friend – still judge the genre on a set of records pushed by the media in the early to mid-2010s. They might have casually checked out Floral Shoppe at one point in their lives and decided they didn’t like it. Maybe they got annoyed by the ironic memes, or maybe they think it’s still all about Roman busts, slowed-down muzak and badly edited 80s samples. Whatever it is, it makes their brain jump to a quick conclusion whenever they hear the word ‘vaporwave’: “Not my thing.”

Case closed.

While this reaction is understandable, a certain danger lies in closing your mind off like that. Because, you know, genres don’t really exist. They’re just made-up words for clusters of music bearing vague similarities in someone’s opinion.

These distinctions can be helpful in the discussion of art and its context, but they can also prevent us from discovering music we would like. Instead of truly listening, we make assumptions based on theoretical constructs.

In the case of my friend who thinks of vaporwave as a genre he’s just not very interested in, I could rattle off a list of artists and records that he would most definitely be able to get into. There’s only one prerequisite: He’d have to listen to the music with an open mind.

“Well, maybe I should look more deeply into vaporwave one day”, he added to his comment when we met. “Yeah, I really think you should”, I echoed, understanding his reluctance but knowing very well that one day might never come. But I’d argue there’s no better time to get into vaporwave than right now.

Here are 10 solid arguments:

1. Vaporwave is alive and kicking. Looking at the history of the genre, there was the early formation and first peak, followed by a period of stagnation and reorganization. Since the end of the pandemic, the scene has been on a roll – not even because of the popularity of the barber beats subgenre (which has significantly cooled off in the last few years), but because of the creativity in subgenres like signalwave and slushwave. I’m not aware of many places where real experimentation gets to unfold as freely as here.

2. It’s diverse. Vaporwave spans such a wide array of wildly different styles – from fun, upbeat future funk to relaxed, organic barber beats, and from nostalgic, melodic mallsoft to mysterious, dark signalwave. There are influences and samples from all types of music to be found in vaporwave projects, and I’ve spoken to producers with wildly different backgrounds coming from EDM, metal, pop, hip-hop, house, drum’n’bass or jazz.

3. It’s open-minded. Some of vaporwave’s founding figures are openly queer and/or trans. To this date that seems to lead to a statistic clustering of queer and trans people in the scene. Like most subcultures, it’s still a male-skewing community from my experience, but I’m doing my best to highlight female and gender-expansive artists in my Vapor Talks series.

4. It’s global. Many first- and second-wave producers came from the U.S., Canada and Western Europe, but the genre has now spread into other parts of the world. Barber beats and future funk are immensely popular in Latin America and Southeast Asia, while Eastern Europeans and Russians are among the most innovative producers in signalwave.

5. It’s (mostly) free. Many producers give their music away as name-your-price downloads on Bandcamp. If you’re into a certain producer, you can usually buy their whole, often abundant discography for just a few bucks. If you’re a collector of physical media like tapes, CDs and vinyl records, you can of course spend a small fortune on rarities and such, but if you just want to listen to the music, you don’t need to spend any money at all.

6. It’s not about money. It’s as simple as that: People don’t get involved in vaporwave to make money or even get rich – it’s just not popular enough, and there are too many monetization hurdles in terms of unlicensed samples. Most of the music isn’t available on streaming services. There’s no real live industry; many producers choose to not perform outside of the occasional audiovisual livestream. The activists that put on IRL vaporwave shows or festivals do it out of love for the community. Vaporwave is really just a fun creative hobby for most producers, and that eliminates the pressure of commercial performance and competition. Less focus on money and greed equals more focus on self-expression and artistic integrity.

7. It isn’t part of the entertainment industry complex. As someone who’s been working in music for many years but always felt more drawn to the independent side of that world, vaporwave’s radical DIY attitude feels refreshing and liberating. The non-commercial nature of the music means that it’s never tied to major record labels, entertainment corporations, private equity hedge funds or other deplorable schemes of capitalist extraction. Even that little amount of money you’re paying to the producers will not support exploitation, war and genocide, but mostly land directly in their pockets, with a certain percentage going to independent labels and platforms like Bandcamp.

8. It has a low entrance barrier. Especially Gen Z seems to enjoy the fact that you can literally start making vaporwave today – you don’t need to know any music theory, know how to play an instrument, buy expensive software or become a member of a band. All you need is a simple, free digital audio workstation (many vaporwave classics were literally made with Audacity or GarageBand), an internet connection, good ears and creativity. Due to platforms like Discord and the communal spirit in the scene, it’s easier than ever to get in touch with other producers, which means it’s also easier to make the leap from consumer to creator.

9. It’s a positive, welcoming community. Producers and listeners regularly gather on YouTube livestreams or Discord servers, and most of the time, they behave respectfully towards each other. In live comment sections, people tend to shower the artists – even beginners – with virtual hearts and other expressions of love and support. You’ll very rarely come across any negativity or snark. There’s just such a genuine overall positive tone in this scene; I’ve rarely witnessed that positivity in any other type of online music community.

10. The music is brilliant. Sure, there’s still a lot of generic, low-effort stuff being churned out, but even in the last few years I have discovered so much outstanding, deeply emotional music that will stay in my life for a long time. Just an in-depth look at the discographies of the artists I interviewed over the last three months in my Vapor Talks series will keep you occupied for weeks.

Want to read more about vaporwave?

In the article below (no paywall), you’ll find my personal history with the genre and a list of my personal favorite 10 vaporwave albums of all time:

Everyone with just a remote interest in Daft Punk should read it. It’s well-written in a compelling, unacademic way. I’ve plowed through it on two rainy afternoons.

To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to Daft Punk over the last decade. I still love some of their music, but I can’t deny that a certain fatigue set in after the monstrous success of Random Access Memories. Probably also a matter of seeing one too many older white dudes move rather awkwardly to “Get Lucky” at the odd music industry event.

At the risk of blasphemy, I want to preface these scattered thoughts by saying that Daft Punk always seemed a tad bit overrated, having existed almost 30 years and releasing only three good-to-great albums. Again, that’s not to say I didn’t feel strongly about some of their music.

When I was in my early 20s, Paris just seemed like the place to be. I’d previously visited the French capital as a teenager on vacation with my parents, but in the summer of ‘99, I first came there by myself. Me and my mate were on our way back from a summer roadtrip through France and Spain when we stayed on a campsite in the Bois de Boulogne, a forest west of Paris, for a prolonged weekend. We’d take the bus into the city in the afternoon and stumble back upon the campsite in the early morning.

During those days, my friend decided to move to Paris. The following year, he found a spare room in a flat in the La Chapelle area, right near Gare du Nord. He lived there with an artist who happened to travel quite a bit for work, so I had the opportunity to stay with him for some weeks in the summer of 2001. I was 23, Paris was burning hot, and we were drinking sparkling wine in the street before going out to posh clubs like Batofar and Le Queen, where they played the popular filter house that would later be dubbed French Touch (I can’t recall anyone calling it that then).

We wouldn’t even drink at the club – it was just too expensive –, and we surely wouldn’t do any drugs. It’s such a cliché at this point, but we were really just getting high off the music. House music, that is, for the most part. During daytime, we listened to a mix of old jazz, Air’s Moon Safari, St. Germain’s Tourist, Cassius’ 1999, Étienne de Crécy’s Tempovision, and, of course, Daft Punk. “One More Time” was just everywhere that summer.

I’d bought their debut album Homework (1997) just off the strength of the first single “Da Funk”. I’d seen the brilliant video on MTV; at the time, I was into hip-hop and drum’n’bass and hadn’t spent much time with house. With their bouncing bass lines, synth-heavy melodies and effect-laden vocals, tunes like “Around The World” almost felt like G-funk to me. “Teachers” handed me a convenient record shopping list to catch up on house and techno, and among many legends of electronic music, they mentioned the names of two musicians I already knew and loved dearly: George Clinton and Dr. Dre.

I can still see why Homework had such an impact, but as much as I loved it then, I don’t go back much to that album. As Ben Cardew points out in his book, Daft Punk’s early music was still very indebted to their favorite producers from the US. I’m not saying it lacked originality, because it did put a European spin on (African-)American house music, but I agree with Ben in that their sophomore album Discovery (2001) is the real stand-out from the Daft Punk catalogue. That’s the moment when they morphed from purveyors of tasteful club music to cultural mavericks that would alter the course of pop history.

Ben writes about the negative reception to the pre-single “One More Time” mainly from the underground scene. I didn’t immediately fall in love with the tune either. Cher had popularized the auto-tune effect on her ‘98 single “Believe”, and Modjo had just landed a mainstream summer smash with their commercial take on filter house, the gorgeous but rather sugary tune “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)”. Daft Punk wasn’t Cher or Modjo though – they were a credible electronic music act, and they had Romanthony on the song, an even more credible house vocalist. What were they thinking putting auto-tune on his trademark vocals?

When Discovery finally got released, I found its focus on rock tropes – particularly that Van Halen style guitar solo in “Aerodynamic” – quite bewildering, but I grew to love the record rather quickly. It would become one of the defining records of the 2000s, not just for me obviously. Reading Ben’s book rekindled my love for its metallic grandiosity. Ben accurately points out the influence it had on so many artists that followed – not just the obvious ones like Kanye West and The Weeknd, but also people like Scottish beatheads Hudson Mohawke and Rustie, who stirred up that global ‘post-dubstep’ / ‘bass music’ scene in the late 2000s, early 2010s.

Let’s just skip over Human After All (2007), Daft Punk’s forgettable third album. After reading his book, I feel that Ben hasn’t got much love for it either. I’ll admit I haven’t listened to it more than twice. When it came out, the French Touch era was definitely over. Ironically, the artists that defined those years were deeply indebted to Daft Punk’s legacy – namely Justice and the Ed Banger label (run by Daft Punk’s former manager Pedro Winter alias Busy P). But while the lineage was obvious, Human After All just didn’t take much of an effort to lure me back into their world.

What’s remarkable is how Daft Punk managed to come back so hard six years later with Random Access Memories (2013). That album, to me, is their crowning achievement. I’m paraphrasing Ben here but Discovery was more of a simulacrum, two 20-somethings dreaming up the sound of their childhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while Random Access Memories was a recreation of the actual, real thing. They’d made the music this time, not in the sense of creatively sampling a bunch of old disco tunes, but in the sense of creating it from scratch, playing it live in the studio. This album is just such a warm, organic, joyful thing – listening back to it this weekend, I could even sit through “Get Lucky” again.

While Ben was very thorough in pointing out the many artists and producers that were deeply inspired by Daft Punk and especially Discovery throughout the 2000s and 2010s, there’s one aspect that I found missing in his analysis. It’s not super important from a wider cultural perspective so its omission is not crucial, but as I’m currently spending a lot of time doing research in that specific area, I feel the urge to point it out – not as a critique of Ben’s book, but maybe as a small addendum, an afterthought of sorts.

In 2013, the same year that Random Access Memories would come out, the future funk movement started bubbling up on the internet as an offshoot of the vaporwave scene. Vaporwave itself had just been created during the previous two years by a generation of mostly very young producers who’d met on early social media sites and online forums, heavily influenced by Daniel Lopatin (alias Oneohtrix Point Never) and James Ferraro. Now a second wave started building on the innovations of the pioneering works by first-wave artists like Vektroid (alias Macintosh Plus) and Internet Club.

One of the new directions was future funk, a style of vaporwave that could be described as a nostalgic reframing of boogie, disco and early house music, quite similar to what happened during the French Touch era. These young producers were just using different aesthetic markers. But while most ‘classic’ vaporwave felt rather laid back and sometimes ironic, future funk approached the pre-millennium nostalgia theme with a less intellectual angle and more straight-forward hedonism. This music made clear that it was mainly about having fun.

At the time, mainstream dance music was dominated by harsh basslines, pounding drums and massive drops. We’re talking about the peak years of EDM trap and US dubstep. Future funk provided a counterpoint to those big-room styles – a vintage lo-fi form of dance music with a throwback vibe clearly harking back to the melodic filter house of the late 90s. This music wasn’t made for clubs but for livestreams and dorm room parties. Most of its creators were too young to get into clubs anyway.

The up-and-coming producer Ryan DeRobertis from Long Island, New York, had dabbled in online music scenes since he was a teenager. Between November 2012 and May 2013, he self-released nine albums to the internet under his Saint Pepsi moniker. These were highly acclaimed in the scene and laid the foundation for future funk. (DeRobertis had to drop the Saint Pepsi moniker in 2014 due to an impending cease and desist from the popular soda company. He’s been known as Skylar Spence ever since and pivoting towards more original songwriting, while remaining indebted to future funk’s basic sound world.)

DeRobertis built his early Saint Pepsi tracks out of sloppily chopped loops; he’d take multiple bars of old disco-funk and add vocal cuts and sound effects in a quite anarchic but entertaining way. The best albums from that early stretch – Studio 54 or Hit Vibes – became future funk classics, collections of simple but effective lo-fi disco edits, blended with some slowed down 1980s pop and new wave tracks for the vaporwave heads.

Other artists such as Childhood or Rollergirl! tapped into similarly nostalgic territory. The Business Casual label, founded in 2013 by the vaporwave artist John Zobele alias christtt, was instrumental in further establishing the future funk sound. Vaporwave pioneer Luxury Elite founded the Fortune 500 label around the same time, which would release some important early records of the genre as well.

Macross 82-99 was a young vaporwave producer from Mexico City who released some of his early works on Business Casual and Fortune 500. Having inherited a love of Japanese culture from his father, he added a new musical influence to future funk: City pop and J-pop. His releases featured bright, colourful artworks inspired by Japanese anime, especially Sailor Moon. In interviews, he’s also talked about growing up as a kid in the 2000s on the music of Daft Punk and Justice.

Other names like Yung Bae, Mike Tenay, (Luis) Lancaster, Dan Mason and Flamingosis appeared in those years from 2013 to 2015, turning future funk into an actual subgenre of vaporwave with a growing fanbase – among them music fans that weren’t into regular vaporwave at all, but came flocking in from the synthwave/retrowave community, another online music scene which had developed in France in the mid-2000s, right after the French Touch era had cooled down.

As an instrumental form of electronic music shaped by 1980s synth pop and soundtracks, synthwave achieved a popularity boost in the early to mid-2010s, around the same time that vaporwave and future funk arose. Though vaporwave and synthwave are distinct communities, there’s always been some overlap, and the lines remain slightly blurry to an extent – on the side of artists and labels, but even more so on the listener side. Synthwave would have its mainstream moment later in the decade, with the Stranger Things soundtracks and The Weeknd’s hit “Blinding Lights” (2019), a Max Martin production based on tropes of the genre.

Doing my Vapor Talks, I’ve been conversing with more than 30 vaporwave and synthwave producers over the last few months. What I found striking is how many of them – and clearly not just future funksters – were mentioning Daft Punk as a key musical influence. Reading Ben Cardew’s book and thinking more deeply about it, that throughline started to become much clearer to me.

For the vaporwave generation and their offspring, mostly young Millennials and older Zoomers, records like Discovery were what their parents listened to in the car when they were kids. Particularly on this album, Daft Punk re-established ‘cheesy’ 1980s soft rock and classic AOR as styles of music you wouldn’t need to be ashamed of liking anymore. Their anonymous ‘robot’ image was another alluring aspect for up-and-coming internet artists who didn’t feel like putting their name and face out there.

Not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things, but to me, the influence of Daft Punk and particularly Discovery on vaporwave and future funk is undeniable. I’ve also found another reason why I’m into those styles of music so much – they’re harking back to a sound world that played an important role for me since my late teens and early twens, ever since those glorious days in Paris.

Signalwave, a vaporwave subgenre focused on loops from vintage broadcast recordings, started in the first half of the 2010s, but lived through a second wave of popularity during the pandemic. At the time, TV2 – or Caroline, as she’s known to friends, fans and followers – was part of a group of younger producers inspired by the innovations of artists like Infinity Frequencies, Sport3000 and 天気予報 [Asutenki].

Discovering this strangely nostalgic, melancholic music as a teenager, Caroline started assembling samples from the local New Zealand TV channels she’d watched as a kid. “If I didn’t start making music through signalwave I don’t know if I would’ve made it at all”, she said in a 2025 conversation with fellow vaporwave producer .

Besides her main artistic persona, Caroline created several other aliases to expand beyond the original concept of New Zealand-themed sample collages: From thrift store vibes as carpet dust to creating a mysterious style she once dubbed ‘satellitesoft’ (a reference to the popular mallsoft subgenre) as ESIAFI 1.

Some of her early albums released in 2020 and 2021 blew up on YouTube and gathered cult status in the scene, but it wasn’t until 2024 that the reclusive producer released her masterpiece 1450Khz at Broken Grove, a collection of haunting, warped and distorted music made from static textures and muted melodies.

Caroline’s Bandcamp page has gone quiet since December ‘24, when her last ESIAFI 1 project dropped, but in our conversation she mentions that she’s currently working on a new album. Don’t expect it to drop very soon though – it will still “take ages” to finish, she adds half-jokingly.

Hey Caroline, how’s the weather in New Zealand today?

It was a really nice day today. The sun was out consistently, which almost never happens. I live in Wellington, the windiest city in the world. I’m originally from the South Island, but I moved up here a few years ago.

Your artist name refers to a local television channel, right?

Yeah, it’s the New Zealand state broadcasting company. The name of the channel is actually TVNZ 2, but TV2 is just what we call it. Pretty much any New Zealander watched it during their childhood. When I grew up, we had this thing called free view, for people who couldn’t afford Sky [pay TV]. TVNZ 2 was mostly where the kids shows ran; it had Spongebob, Teletubbies and stuff like that. It also had a few New Zealand-specific shows and game shows as well, but I remember it being targeted towards kids more than anything else.

What kind of music did your family play around the house?

My dad was really into weird indie music, a lot of local New Zealand bands, some shoegaze and art punk. He had a pretty eclectic music taste, which definitely rubbed off on me. I didn’t get much music taste from my mom, except for maybe a bit of Johnny Cash.

Did you learn any instruments?

Yep, I played the trumpet when I was a kid, and then as a teenager, I tried to get into guitar a million times, but that’s pretty much it.

When you first started seeking out music for yourself, what kind of music was it?

I just compiled random songs that I found catchy into a huge playlist. That was when I was around 12 years old. A year later or so, I found vaporwave. It was probably the first actual genre that I got into. Floral Shoppe was a pretty big thing on the internet, so it was kind of hard not to come across it. I definitely had a huge Whitewoods phase that lasted a very long time and was very influential. I was into synthwave as well, but that obviously didn’t really stick as much as vaporwave did.

What did you like about it?

I always liked sentimental songs – songs that take you to a place, or that make you nostalgic for a place that doesn’t really exist. I found that through vaporwave more than anything else. I was just trying to seek out that feeling more than anything.

Did you start making stuff around that time too, or was that later?

No, that was ages later. I was way too lazy to do anything. I started off trying to make future funk when I was about 16. If you look really hard, you can find my old future funk alias. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do that, because it’s really bad. Later that year was when I made my first signalwave album. I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I was just pulling shit off YouTube and making it into a sound collage. I didn’t know how to use FL Studio, but for what I had at the time, I think it came out not so bad.

Which formative artists inspired you at the time?

Sport3000 is the main one by far, without a doubt. Especially Eternal Intermission, that album basically inspires everything I make in signalwave. That and Signals were hugely influential to me, and I guess video forum and Asutenki influenced me in a certain way too. Not so much as in rubbed off on my musical style, because I don’t really make signalwave that’s very similar to them, but just the aesthetic packaging of an album, I definitely learned from people like that.

All of these artists kept their identity a secret. You never revealed much about yourself either – why actually?

I never really thought about it. It’s just so disconnected from my real life that it doesn’t make sense for the two things to even be linked. I mean, I’m not even as anonymous as some other people in the signalwave scene. A lot of people know that my name is Caroline, and that I’m from New Zealand, but I don’t like to attach a face or a voice or any kind of image to it. I guess I just don’t like to attach myself to it, if that makes sense, because that ruins the image that I’ve created.

Whenever I think back to the early signalwave scene, people were so anonymous – they would have their Bandcamp page, and that was basically it. They wouldn’t have profiles on Discord or Twitter or anything like that. They would just exist behind an alias. I think that was quite effective in putting all the focus on the work that they put out and making it less about [their identity]. I feel like [attaching your identity to it] takes away from it and ruins the illusion that it’s just this mysterious broadcast.

Would you agree that the attitude in the scene has changed in the last couple of years?

Totally, and I would honestly take some responsibility, because I created the Signalwave Discord server. Ever since that became a thing, everyone has become way less anonymous. People work with each other, are friends with each other, and give each other feedback on their work. It’s a really exciting and cool thing that I totally wish I’d had when I started out making signalwave, because it was so niche that there weren’t even tutorials on YouTube on how to make it. There probably aren’t now either, to be fair. But yeah, Discord especially has definitely killed the anonymity of signalwave artists.

How did you learn how to make it without any tutorials or mentors?

Literally just by a process of elimination – trying different effects on different samples and seeing how they sounded. For my first three albums, I really had no idea what I was doing. I was just testing random effects on stuff and keeping the ones that sounded listenable.

Were you already working with samples from New Zealand TV back then?

No, that was an idea I got when I decided I wanted to try and make signalwave. A lot of the signalwave I’d heard was either American or Japanese, and I was like, “No one’s made New Zealand signalwave. What if I did that? Wouldn’t it be crazy?” I just started pulling samples I recognized from my childhood and looking that stuff up.

You mentioned working in FL Studio. Have you changed your setup over the years?

I still basically only use FL Studio. I just know how to use it properly now. I definitely have a more refined production process, but it’s not complex by any means. The samples are a lot more important for my work than my production style. That’s not to say that none of my albums have a unique production style, because some of them definitely do, but it’s not a very sophisticated or complicated one that I spend ages perfecting. It’s just a few effects that I know how to use quite well by now.

Do you ever think about philosophical aspects of working with samples?

Not really, to be honest. I’m not a very intellectual person. But I try to sample ethically, if that makes sense. I usually make sure that what I’m sampling is really old TV library music from a major broadcasting company or something like that. I wouldn’t sample a soundtrack of a niche indie game, because that’s probably someone’s passion project that they’ve put a lot of effort into and didn’t get paid too well for. So that is definitely something I think about.

This is sort of a tangent, but another big thing is that if I find a sample that I recognize from another signalwave album, I tend not to use it – not for any ethical reasons, but just because I feel that when too many people use the same sample over and over again, it ruins the immersion of the album.

Like many other signalwave producers, you have quite some aliases. One of the more consistent ones is carpet dust; you’ve released four albums under that name between 2020 and 2023. What’s that about?

Yeah, so that one was definitely inspired by Eternal Intermission by Sport3000. I used to listen to the song “Artifact” from that album a lot while I was going secondhand shopping. There was an op shop right by the school I used to go to. A fun fact is that the first carpet dust album cover is a picture from that op shop. By the way, op shop means secondhand shop in New Zealand. I don’t know if you guys have a different way of saying it.

I’d probably say thrift store, but I do know the term secondhand shop too. I’ve never heard op shop before though.

Yeah, secondhand stores are very signalwave, and the sample for that Sport3000 song was this really old Spanish song from the 70s, so I was looking for other samples that sounded like that. I found a bunch of old Spanish karaoke videos, and when I slowed them down, they sounded exactly how I wanted them to. The carpet dust samples are basically all Spanish karaoke videos, and that’s what gives [the project] a cool unique sound.

There’s also ESIAFI 1, a name under which you’ve released five albums so far, among them your most recent one,月 (month), from December 2024.

I basically started it when I wanted to make signalwave that wasn’t just New Zealand related. For some reason at the time, I wanted TV2 to be specifically about New Zealand, which eventually changed. But ESIAFI 1 was a way to branch out from that. I’ve also always been really obsessed with satellite signalwave. It was ages ago when I first made the alias. I can’t really even remember my full thought process behind starting it. I think I just wanted to make something a bit more ethereal and weird.

In 2022 and 2023, you made four albums as SKY SPORTS, a project inspired by sports-themed pay TV. Is that one done, or is it still active?

None of my projects are really done, because I like to keep my options open. But I haven’t made anything for SKY SPORTS in a really long time. This was just so I could make Y2K-inspired signalwave basically.

You’ve previously mentioned that cortonwood colliery was inspired by Conflux Condwell’s noise album AM (2017). How did that one come about?

I just had this huge YouTube playlist that’s full of different kinds of TV static from samples. I was experimenting with slowing the static down heaps and layering it with a bunch of different stuff and adding weird effects to it. I got so caught up in that, I just forgot about the music entirely and decided I just wanted to make an album that was just that. So that was pretty much what I did.

I was going less for a super fruitful, intriguing listening experience, and more for something nice texturally to have on in the background. That’s why the songs on that album are all so long. I partly regret that because some of those seven minute songs probably don’t have enough variation in them to justify that length. But the reason was less because I thought they were crazy, awesome, interesting songs that need to be seven minutes. It was just my attempt at creating an ambience with just signalwave noise. I wasn’t even going for a noise album, even though it totally is a noise album. I was really trying to make an ambient album.

1450Khz at Broken Grove is one of a bunch of projects from the last few years, where the ambient layer is mixed unusually loud in relation to the music and the songs, similar to what’s done in mallsoft. Is there a name for that style of music actually?

To me, that’s just signalwave. This is gonna seem really hypocritical coming from me, because I used to name my stuff under heaps of random microgenres – I think I was actually the person who coined the term ‘satellitesoft’. And I look back at that with some regret, because it’s kind of a silly genre. I don’t know, it’s all just signalwave to me.

You mentioned in the liner notes that its inspiration was Narvon Nights by GlenOAX from 2017 – a signalwave release consisting of just two very long songs that featured a constant ambience layer of cicada noises.

For the record, I totally just ripped that album off like that. That is why I felt obligated to put my inspiration in the description of that album. I mean, the samples are different, but structurally, it’s basically the same album.

It’s great though, it’s actually one of my favorite albums from your catalog.

Thanks, man. Well, I won’t reveal too much, but that is also going to be the formula for my next album, which I’m working on currently.

That’s amazing to hear, because you haven’t released anything since December 2024. Didn’t you find any inspiration?

I’ve been incredibly lazy. That’s pretty much the only reason.

You mentioned that your normal life is quite different.

I mean, I do also make music in real life, but it’s totally disconnected from anything signalwave or vaporwave, and not many people in real life know about this stuff either. Over the past year or so, I’ve definitely had inspiration; I just haven’t really found the right samples. For me to get an album off the ground, I really need to have a few solid tracks that I can base the rest of the album around, or a really good album cover. That’s been really hard to come by, but recently I’ve gotten stuck into making this new album, and I’m very excited about it.

Are you still tuned into the signalwave scene though?

Maybe not super. I don’t really participate in the community that much. I still listen to signalwave every now and then. I definitely have a few albums that I still listen to quite a lot, but I just stopped keeping up at a certain point. I still check on the Signalwave server sometimes and say hi, but I guess I just lost track. A lot of the artists I used to listen to moved on from signalwave and a lot of the new artists I haven’t really given a proper listen yet. I don’t know who’s making the good stuff. It seems like I I still hold some sort of presence in the community though.

What are you listening to right now? Back when you spoke to VOD, you answered that question with the link to an old Disorder EP. Are you still into punk rock?

I play in a punk band in real life, and that’s what most of my music taste is – crust punk and that kind of stuff.

Where would you send listeners to start in your discography?

Probably Broken Grove first, then 电 [Electricity], and then maybe Pre-Love. Those are the albums that I’m most proud of, but they’re also just my best albums. I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone [to] listen to my stuff before 2022, even though I know a lot of people like those albums, but I made that stuff when I was a teenager and I’m kind of embarrassed by it now.

Well, some of the greatest vaporwave albums of all time were made by teenagers.

No shit, that is true. And I do hold a very soft spot for junk, the first carpet dust album [from 2020]. That’s the one album I made when I was a teenager that I’m still proud of.

I assume you won’t tell me the name of your punk band?

Nice try. (laughs)

Listen to TV2 on Bandcamp

TV2’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Sport3000 – Eternal intermission (self-released, 2016)

• Saint Pepsi – Hit Vibes (self-released, 2013)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki]・空気系・Kanal Vier – 成層圏・Guide・Nachtmusik (Night Coverage, 2019)

• video interface – Satellite Frequencies (Internet-Stories, 2019)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki] – 巡 (self-released, 2017)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki] – 1986 Earth Guide (self-released, 2019)

• CYBER CLUB – SENSUAL LOOPS (self-released, 2018)

• Infinity Frequencies – Shrines (self-released, 2013)

• INTERNET CLUB – FORMAT BLUE (self-released, 2022)

• 放射性Hi5 [Radioactive Hi5] – ⓢⓐⓕⓔⓣⓨⓦⓞⓡⓚⓢⓗⓞⓟ (self-released, 2015)

Starting out as a plunderphonics curator in the barber beats style, Mags’ creative practice soon expanded into other areas of the culture like slushwave (as forgotten sinner), mallsoft, signalwave and everything in between.

One of the most intriguing aspects about her work to me is her thoughtful approach to ethical sampling, which is reflected in her choice to only plunder and manipulate music from royalty-free databases. Most of her album liner notes also include the disclaimer: “I take credit for the vibe, not the music.”

I recently jumped on a Zoom call with Magdalene to discuss musical inspirations, philosophical aspects of creative production and some of her more nerdy interests, like repairing old Sony Walkman portable cassette players.

How come so many vaporwave artists are from the Midwest? Do you have a theory?

I think it has to do with the built-in boredom. There isn’t a ton of transportation and communal aspects in the Midwest, if you’re not in one of the hub cities. I’m now in Detroit, which is pretty helpful for having an art community, but vaporwave, being such an online genre, lends itself to places that may not have as dense of an art scene. I see a lot of malaise and apathy in the music, and having such neutral gray weather tends to contribute to that as well.

Angel Marcloid mentioned similar aspects when I spoke to her.

Yeah, I identify with a lot of what Angel puts out there thematically. She’s a transgender and queer artist living in the Midwest, which is not always the most friendly to it. I see a lot of elements of escapism and fantasy in her work, and that really hits home for me.

What kind of music did you grow up on?

I grew up in a traditional Lutheran household, and my musical upbringing was very stereotypical. We listened to a lot of Christian religious music. My parents had a tight control on the media that I was watching. When I ended up leaving the church in late high school, I gravitated straight towards metal and dubstep, anything that had crunch in it. I discovered Anthony Fantano’s The Needle Drop and things like indieheads on Reddit – just a lot of online music communities.

I got really into post-rock, that was my awakening. I have a tattoo of Lift Your Skinny Fists [Like Antennas] to Heaven by Godspeed [You! Black Emperor] on my ribs. That’s when I realized that music was not just something that could be pleasant and inviting to an environment, but also could be its own profound form of art. The work of Tim Hecker is incredibly important to me too, and Daniel Lopatin’s early ambient stuff is foundational for what I listen to.

Did you get any musical training and/or play in bands?

No musical training proper. I screamed in a band, so I did metal and punk vocals.

I read somewhere that your first job was at a record shop.

Yeah, a big corporate CD shop in a mall. I worked there when I was 15. They gave me a waiver to work before I was technically supposed to, and I got a bunch of promo CDs there, like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories – I remember getting the red one from Columbia. My co-workers all had really strong opinions on music.

How did you discover and get involved with vaporwave?

During the pandemic, I found my musical tastes shifting dramatically towards more calming and soothing things. I got deep into hip-hop beatmakers and ran across Macroblank and Oblique Occasions albums. I am a graphic designer by trade, so I was inspired by that and referencing it mainly visually. Then I realized there’s all these calm, lovely beats underneath it, and discovered how transgressive and different this music was in the way that it was sampled and not very manipulated.

That led me to learn more about hauntology and the concept of communal songwriting, looking back at traditions like The Great American Songbook, where it’s less about ownership of specific compositions and more about interpretations. The joy of this genre [vaporwave] seemed to be the accessibility, the ability to connect and reinterpret and put elements of a communal idea into your own framework. That was really why I decided I wanted to get involved.

Barber beats is all about the curation and manipulation of existing tracks and samples. How did you go about finding those?

When it came time to source my samples, I decided to go for royalty-free or commercial samples in all of my work. I can see how that might to some people signal it being a little less morally gray. But the idea was really to take something that was never intended to be isolated as the focal point, considering that certain pieces maybe weren’t ever meant to be art per se. That’s why I’ve ended up making music on a computer, because of this communal element and the conversation that it was having. I felt like it was so much more than the back and forth that I was feeling by screaming into a microphone in front of a few people in a basement.

What are you looking for when going through royalty-free databases?

What I’m looking for is sounds and motifs that would speak either to the emotional state that I’m trying to convey, or the concept behind an album. A lot of times I’ll have a playlist of the album before it’s ever been manipulated. There’s a familiarity aspect too, in trying to find elements and sonic pieces that are connecting. I might be pulling ideas and sounds that may be familiar from a peripheral place – you can’t even place it exactly, because you weren’t paying attention to the song, but it might put you back in that same space as when you experienced it the first time.

I’m a younger millennial, elder Gen Z, so I don’t have as many references to the CRT television fuzziness that a lot of vaporwave hits on. My references are more to the 2010s world of online content and media. A lot of the music I’m pulling is also where people who are creating content online are pulling – I’m thinking of YouTube creators especially. My childhood wasn’t as much watching the TV as watching YouTube videos, so I started recognizing songs from these video essays.

As the times continue, young people who find the genre will continue to pull in samples from their respective childhoods, and it’s only going to move forward what we’re pulling from. ‘80s sounds are on the radio now. The whole tongue-in-cheek cheesiness of vaporwave has been taken wholesale into pop music. There’s room to progress and start considering the way that other parts of our history are haunting us. Like, some albums right now are referencing Microsoft Encarta Kids – a learning software from the early 2000s that was a staple for some of my computer lab classes as a child.

So far, you’ve released 36 albums under at least three monikers on your Bandcamp page: There’s Magdalene for barber beats and vaportrap, there’s forgotten sinner for slushwave, and you also have a mallsoft and signalwave alias (マグダラのショッピングモール). What’s the chronology here?

The barber beats and classic vapor stuff was my jumping in point. The aliases came from learning more about the slushwave tradition and getting involved in Discord servers and online forums, where I’m learning more about how people are operating. At first I thought about putting it all out under one name, and forgotten sinner was just supposed to be a one-off Bandcamp Friday project for a limited cassette, but I ended up returning to the sound and it’s progressed in its own way.

I had a questioning period where I really thought about dumping all of the barber beats stuff, wiping it from my page. It wasn’t personally resonating with me as much. I go through these ups and downs with just being a little bit more manic or depressive. The signalwave stuff came from wanting to find more artistic credit, or maybe prestige? I’m trying to find the right word… In the vaporwave space, the more fuzz you’ve got on your samples, the more archaic and bleak it sounds, people tend to give you more artistic credit. Those projects that have that mallsoft moniker in my head are the ones that are more high-brow, because they relate more to sound design, creating my own space versus just curating samples.

In terms of the aliases – Mary Magdalene is the original sinner. The mallsoft alias translates to Malls of Magdala. And forgotten sinner, with slushwave being so manipulated and far away from the samples, the sinner – Magdalene – is basically forgotten at this point. It’s just a bit of wordplay.

You’ve alluded to your mental health struggles. I’ve spoken to many artists at this point, and there’s clearly a statistical clustering of neurodivergent people in the scene. Why do we gravitate to this music so much?

I don’t think it’s unique to vaporwave; a lot of insular online communities feel more welcoming to those types of artists. You can create your own persona and remove character from yourself online. You can put out ideas that you’re more nervous about putting out attached to your own name. Any insular community that offers a certain degree of camaraderie is going to be incredibly beneficial.

It also has to do with the founding figures in the community – looking towards Macintosh Plus, looking towards Angel [Marcloid], knowing that there have been pushbacks against fascist, transphobic and racist assholes. That pushback just communicates to people that we’re looking at ideas here that are a little bit outside of the box, and we’re not judging people for bringing up those ideas. That is going to be naturally where people gravitate towards, especially in places like the Midwest. People in those type of groups are going to be more urgent than ever to be looking for an online community that provides that to them.

I wanted to speak about a couple of my favorite albums from your catalog, just to hear more about the concepts and genesis of these projects. Let’s start with Frederik’s Holy Garden, which I love dearly. I understand it’s a mallsoft album but dedicated to a public park?

So that one, on its face, is an homage to Frederik Meijer Gardens in the Greater Grand Rapids area where I grew up. It’s an art gallery, a botanical conservatory and a sculpture park. It’s really an artsy kid’s dream, miles and miles of space, and you just walk around and see sculptures larger than you ever could have conceived of. It was the first place I’d ever seen a Calder sculpture as well.

I have fond memories of visiting that place with my very religious grandparents. Most conversations I had with them were centered around the church and God, but here it turned into a conversation about the glory of human creation and art and the wonders of the natural world. They have a wonderful event there, where they have a ton of moths emerge into butterflies at the same time. It was this really profound, life-changing experience for me. I fell out of favor with looking at things through a specifically Christian lens and was much happier to look at the joy of the world through humanism, just the experience and the creativity of people.

The album is trying to capture the way it feels to wander into that space. I wanted to create a sense of wonder with the samples that I chose; they were meant to evoke that divine connection where everything in the world is profound, and you just have to find your own way to appreciating that without having to take someone else’s framework.

You released two Magdalene EPs in 2025, Impromptu and Idyllic, which have been compiled for a physical release recently. What’s the concept behind those?

For a longer period last year, I didn’t really want to make music because I had something in my head about it being counterproductive and not what I needed to be doing at the time for my own personal sake. But then I just really wanted to make music, so I crawled back in bed and had my little impromptu night over with making barber beats again. It felt like an affair, and I was trying to figure out why I felt so guilty about continuing on with making music and returning to it.

Impromptu was about that addiction to creating and wanting to be back in a medium that you’re familiar with. It’s one night, in a metaphorical sense, of visiting an ex that you shouldn’t be visiting, and Idyllic is the apology moment, the recognition of the ways that making music wasn’t what I needed at the time, but also how I wasn’t holding myself accountable in the way that I wanted to. It’s basically an apology that I couldn’t make the relationship idyllic.

I also wanted to touch upon my current favorite from your catalogue, Honeycrisp Lament, from November 2025. This record was apparently inspired by the GlenOAX album Narvon Nights, a true signalwave classic. How did it inspire you, and how did you discover it in the first place?

Well, I actually went backwards, so I first heard CT57’s Road To Nowhere. I put it on a few times at nighttime, you know, going to bed after hours, wife’s already asleep, and I’m trying to keep it low volume. At first I was like, “Alright, so it’s songs with truck noise under it. Cool, what about it?” But soon I started craving it, because it felt so comfy and cosy. It was just really evocative with how strange the broadcasts were and the way that they would cut in and out.

CT57 had the references to Narvon Nights and TV2’s 1450Khz at Broken Grove [in the Bandcamp liner notes], so those just became part of the listening rotation as well. It got to a point where I didn’t really listen to any music that wasn’t including its own environment ambience. After a month of listening to only that music, we had a death in the family, so my wife was gone for a long weekend to go to the funeral and help with preparations. Something changed and the environments didn’t feel comfortable anymore. While she was gone for 72 hours, I needed to find comfort, so I ended up making Honeycrisp Lament.

It started with wave sounds on a beach – here in Michigan, we’re surrounded by all these great lakes, and when it came down to what space is going to actually get me to calm down, it was Lake Michigan. So that one is really me at the beach and then walking back through the wood trail to my car in the parking lot. It’s what I needed at the moment, and so I thought, why not share it?

This style has almost become its own subgenre, combining elements of signalwave and mallsoft. Narvon Nights and Broken Grove both have these layers of cicadas, Road To Nowhere has the truck noise, and Honeycrisp Lament works with wave sounds.

There’s also an M1 t e l e v í z i ó album with a similar concept about a summer in Hungary. That one is incredible as well, really awesome stuff – another cicada-heavy one though.

That album cover of yours, is that an actual childhood photograph?

Yeah, it’s just blurred for a bit of privacy.

You’re not sharing any photos of yourself on the internet, are you?

No, I don’t really do public persona. I used to have something that was an image of me, but it had some graphics and stuff.

Are you part of the vaporwave online communities on Discord?

I’m a bit of a lurker. I’m in five or six servers. I’m a collector of physical releases, and I also work on refurbishing Sony Walkman [portable cassette players], so I will post on audio gear channels every once in a while. Actually I just managed to get my hands on a Bean, this really cute plastic Walkman from Japan. This one is green, but they have a lot of different colorways. I just popped this one open and got a new belt in there. I love repairing them, I’m such a nerd about it.

How did you learn to do that?

There are some YouTube channels on vintage electronics. I usually go looking for manuals and then just get in there and try and solder and clean up any belts that have turned to goo. There’s only one variety of cassette mechanism manufactured anymore, so pretty much all anybody can do to make it better is soup it up with better metal parts, but the actual construction of the motor is pretty thick, so I really like the vintage ones because they have technology that’s frankly been lost to time.

You’re also running a DIY cassette label, Valkyrie Tapes.

Yeah, I’m just doing home dubs on a little Aiwa tape deck next to me here, and then using a paper cutter and a bone folder to make J-cards. I’ve also partnered with Rabbithole Club, who are doing our European distribution.

Which vaporwave producers are currently inspiring you?

known artiste is frankly just the cream of the crop when it comes to barber beats. Lately I’ve been really enjoying the way that he makes albums that are fully engaging, not just background listening. Now he’s gone through the barber beats to signalwave pipeline as well.

Magnum Innominandum is absolutely incredible. If you’re into some freaky funk, the most recent album by his band Harpo Jarvi is amazing. And I don’t know them personally, but all of CT57’s catalog is incredible too. I recommend you just go through every album and keep notes.

Which one of your more standard barber beats albums would be a good place to start into your discography?

If you want some calm music that will get your friends nodding their head, Profaned has always been my favorite album of mine in that style. Also the most recent one, Modern Violence – Beheaded Queens Declare Their Victory; if you’re American and you’re really frustrated right now, this one’s for you.

Anything else you want to plug?

Only thing is New Visions Detroit, a live show we’re doing in May in Detroit. It’s put on by Hushtones and Doki Doki Beats, two incredible labels where you can get a lot of really unique vaporwave stuff. If you’re looking for crazy drum’n’bass, Doki Doki has recently diversified with what they’re doing, and it’s sick.

Listen to Magdalene on Bandcamp

Magdalene’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Oblique Occasions – Anathema (2022)

• 猫 シ Corp. – Palm Mall Mars (2018) or OASYS ♁ 博物館 (2016)

• GODSPEED 音 – 情​熱​の​追​求 (2023)

• GORE – デ​ス​・​デ​ィ​ス​コ (2023)

• CT57 – Road to Nowhere (2024)

• modest by default – THE SIREN METHOD (没有出口) (2022)

• Macroblank – 色あせたエコー (2023)

• 氷河 – Tone Collection (2019)

• desert sand feels warm at night – 水に流す (2019)

• Looking Through Sheets – Death’s Full Regalia (2024)

Reading this Pitchfork feature on “the music that made him”, I could deeply relate to this nerdy boy, a son of Russian immigrants, who grew up in a suburb east of Boston, near the Atlantic ocean, exploring his surroundings on his bike and embarking on a life-long listening journey which started with rinsing his dad’s jazz fusion tapes while playing King’s Quest IV.

Moving into the present, Lopatin mentions that he’s been dwelling in this rabbithole of classic 1990s techno, obsessively playing albums by John Beltran, Carl Craig or Jan Jelinek. Returning to these records as well, what I found particularly striking was how damn jazzy they sound, and how this – at the time – highly experimental music manages to be extremely enjoyable and almost instantly gratifying from today’s vantage point.

Finishing his rearview reflections, Lopatin drops the following little gem of middle-aged wisdom that also resonated very much with me:

“(…) In your 40s, you’re in the weird, middle valley of your life. It’s all anticipation and no revelation. You finally figured out you’re not going to figure it out, and you are just finally, in a way, present. You’re right there watching every moment happen. You’ve given up on certain kinds of dreams, and finding out that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Before we move on to the roundup of my favorite ambient albums released in March, I want to point you to some of my recently published writings for other media:

• For Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, I conducted an in-depth interview with the practicing Buddhist and experimental composer David Shea. David spoke to me about growing up on the Downtown avant-garde under John Zorn since the late ‘80s, playing with Derek Bailey’s Company, the deep influence of East Asian philosophy on his works, and the notion of having somehow turned into an ‘ambient’ composer, even though he rejects the category. I recommend checking out his newest album Meditations on Lawrence English’s Room40 label.

• For Everything Jazz, I wrote a piece on pianist and composer Andrew Hill’s 1967 album Compulsion!!!!! on Blue Note, calling it an “Afro-Caribbean fever dream”. This brooding, percussive post-bop masterpiece just received a luxurious Tone Poet reissue, and it’s a showcase for Hill’s creative power at its most daring and avant-garde.

By the way, I am still offering a limited springtime 20% discount for all new yearly subscriptions. If you enjoy these monthly roundups and recommendations, please consider supporting me and my work! I appreciate you.

Get your 20% discount now

Ambient Album Of The Month

Green-House – Hinterlands (Ghostly International)

Somewhere along the way, Green-House turned from sound artist Olive Ardizoni’s solo project into an actual duo with her long-time collaborator Michael Flanagan. They’ve changed labels as well, moving from the tape imprint Leaving, an L.A. underground institution, to the slightly bigger but still proudly independent Ghostly label.

Green-House records would usually be filed under new age or ‘eco ambient’, which feels apt due to being heavily inspired by Japanese environmental music. But influences range wider this time, as the press text states, evoking “hypnagogic folk, tropical synth-pop, pan-flute mountain music, jazzy lounge, film scores, library sounds, and other forms of paradise-world-building. The duo simply makes the music they want to hear, earnestly dreaming of idyllic settings.”

Hinterlands consists of wondrous, melodic soundscapes, shaped by joyously bubbling synths, sweet strings and dreamy acoustic guitars. Rather than filing it into an entirely different genre category, I’d just say that it’s an impressive example of relatively song-oriented, intentional ambient music. It’s still the perfect musical backdrop to enhance your own creative practice, but it’s also the opposite of the “all-black frowning aesthetics” (Mari Rubio) prevalent in ‘serious’ experimental music – and I sincerely welcome that type of vibe shift.

Joachim Spieth – Vestige (Affin)
Appleblim – Liminal Tides (quiet details)

Two albums that feel close in spirit to me. Both Affin label head Joachim Spieth and Laurie Osborne alias Appleblim, an early pioneer of dubstep (the actual UK underground movement, not its commercial American persiflage), have dedicated decades to the exploration of deep, dubby forms of electronica.

Vestige and Liminal Tides share an appreciation for sound abstraction and surface noise, similar to some of Vladislav Delay’s works. Stuttering rhythms and sub-bass pulses never resolve into something resembling a linear, functional dub techno track; instead the listener is left with dreamy drifts of chords, textures and delay, evolving in unpredictable patterns of ebb and flow.

Though mostly a result of sound synthesis – except for the last track on Liminal Tides, which was generated from a field recording of a foghorn and a seagull’s call –, this music carries an analog, harmonic warmth, creating a sonic environment for the mind to wander and explore and get lost in, enhancing introspection without luring us into some kind of concrete narrative.

Joachim Spieth in his piece on Vestige:

“The music seeks no definitive meaning, and this text makes no such claim. What remains is an invitation: to listen, linger in the spaces between sound and silence, and follow what resonates forward in time.”

Laurel Halo – Midnight Zone (Awe)

This is not a new artist album from the L.A. based composer, but an original soundtrack for a new film work by the visual artist Julian Charrière.

The film follows a camera lens descending into a remote and deep part of the Pacific Ocean called the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, an area “rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining”, as the liner notes state.

“Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.”

Halo composed her instrumental, droning soundtrack on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano, layering it with tracks of violin and viola da gamba.

Quite similar to her 2024 dark ambient masterpiece Atlas in technique and effect, there’s a quietly lingering dissonance at the core of these stacks of synths and strings, perfectly scoring this glimpse into a beautiful but endangered landscape.

Ben Seretan & John Thayer – Sunbeam Of No Illusion (AKP)

A deeply reflective project from two musicians based in the Hudson Valley, this series of impromptu keyboard improvisations manipulated with minimal effects was inspired by transcendentalist literature and poetry; the title stems from a letter exchange between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. The blurb also references Hiroshi Yoshimura’s and Harold Budd’s keyboard miniatures, Christian Fennesz’ hazy guitar washes and Angelo Badalamenti’s uncanny but weirdly familiar melodies.

This is springtime music, unhurried and serene. Grainy, noisy recordings of pastoral Rhodes loops evoke nature’s slow awakening in this season; the duo recorded it at Thayer’s creekfront studio, looping these keyboard base layers and sending them through modular rigs, tape echoes or analogue delay pedals, overdubbing just minimal splashes of synthesizers, slide guitar and percussion. There’s really not too much happening here on an objective level, but it’s exactly the absence that conveys a deep sense of intentionality.

cloud collecting + Echoes Blue Music – gentle voices vol. 1 (Echoes Blue Music)

Released a few weeks ago for International Women’s Day, this lovely collection of peaceful, dreamy ambient tunes, co-curated by Cynthia Bernard alias marine eyes and Anita Tatlow, remains on heavy rotation. It includes contributions from women artists such as Drum & Lace, Karen Vogt, and so many other gentle voices emerging from the global ambient underground, providing a starting place for journeys of discovery into their individual discographies.

The musicians were paired together thoughtfully by the curators and asked to create a tune specifically with the compilation’s theme in mind, resulting in a collection of ‘soft power’ music. I’m loving everything about this – the droney wordless vocals, floating synth pads and shimmering textures, but even more so the collaborative spirit of the concept, deliberately shining a light on women and gender-expansive artists in a space still way too dominated by yesteryear’s ideas of (white male) genius.1

Let me quote from this powerful post by gentle voices contributor :

“Women definitely make the best ambient music. Maybe it’s because we know how to connect with other human beings, heart to heart. Or maybe it’s because we understand our inner landscape and our emotions better than most men. Or maybe we just approach things in a different way. Whatever it is, this compilation is unequivocal proof of women working better together, and making truly world-changing music for healing.

To any female ambient producers out there who might be nervous about taking the next step?

Go for it.

There’s a community of kind hearted women, who are ready to champion your work and help lift you up.”

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