Despite his friendly and professional demeanor, he doesn’t come across as a man of many words. Which, of course, is perfectly fine and also fits very well with the enigmatic sound collages he creates under the alias CANAL+ using looped clips from European television shows of the ’80s and ’90s.

It turns out that although he mainly sampled French programs for his CANAL+ releases – and the project’s Bandcamp page even lists Paris, France, as its location – he is actually a producer from Tucson, Arizona, a major city in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, not very far from the Mexican border. He has spent his entire life there and speaks virtually no French.

As I talk with him, I learn that he’s a true child of vaporwave – and that might explain some of my earlier observations. Ever since he discovered the genre a decade ago, he’s been immersed in the music and culture of the 1980s and 1990s, viewed through vaporwave’s hazy, nostalgic lens.

From his early days as Super Nintendo through his brilliant signalwave catalog as CANAL+, to his more experimental and versatile works as Copywrong, he has gradually freed himself from all restrictive constraints while remaining true to the plunderphonics idea.

During our conversation, we talked about his various pseudonyms, his biggest influences, his search for samples and his musical tastes. We also discussed what led to CANAL+’s involuntary three-year hiatus between 2022 and 2025 and what the future holds for the artist behind CANAL+ and Copywrong.

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When you think of your childhood, do you hear a specific style of music playing?

I would always just listen to the radio in the car when my mom would drive me to school, and I remember on road trips my dad had this CD of Meddle by Pink Floyd. He would also just listen to [internet radio] Pandora a lot.

So what type of music did you get into as a teenager?

One big occurrence was that I was just looking at this YouTube channel one day, it might have been [EDM/dubstep channel] Monstercat or something similar to that, just looking through their songs, and I found this one that had this weird pink thumbnail with a black checkerboard on it.

It turns out it was that “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing” song [by Macintosh Plus alias Vektroid, ed. note], and that just really blew my mind. When I was listening to it, there was this weird feeling inside my body. I can’t explain it. It was crazy. After I heard that, I wanted to seek out more music that was like that, and that’s how I got into vaporwave.

You didn’t listen to any other styles of music before discovering vaporwave?

Not really a whole lot. I guess it just wasn’t a big interest for me.

Did you start making vaporwave right after discovering it?

Not immediately, no. This was in 2016, maybe early 2017, and I started releasing my own stuff on Bandcamp in autumn of 2018. But it was under a different name – super nintendo. It was mostly just regular vaporwave, not specifically focused on TV recordings. But the super nintendo Bandcamp page got mysteriously deleted in 2022. [Some super nintendo albums are still available through the Bandcamp page of the label Palm 84, ed. note]

In 2020, you launched a new alias, CANAL+, which became really popular in the signalwave community. What was the reason for starting anew?

I just thought it would be fun to try something different, because even though I experimented with signalwave a bit as super nintendo, I wanted to try and delve into it a little further. I was influenced by Asutenki (天気予報) a lot at the time.

I suppose you were into Sport 3000 as well?

Oh, totally. I was into all the aliases, not just Sport 3000, but also Kanal Vier, Video Interface, VVVX Software… I would listen to all of the signalwave stuff, and then a lot of the Italo disco stuff too. A super formative artist.

Did you seek out the online vaporwave community at the time?

Yeah, I did. That was mainly just on Discord servers, not even for music though, just to hang out with people.

Canal+ is a French pay tv program, and your music samples a lot of old French broadcasts. What’s your connection to France?

There’s not really much of any connection. My original plan was to have this Japanese television-themed alias, Fuji TV, but there was a lot of Japanese-themed signalwave out there already, and I decided to go with something else. I thought maybe it might be nice to try something different.

When I was looking for samples around the time that the original incarnation of Fuji TV was being developed, I found this YouTube channel called TELE 80 TELES 90, which had a lot of French television clips, and I just thought those looked really interesting. They were certainly different from all the Japanese clips I had been looking at.

Do you speak fluent French?

Not much of any French at all. When I was looking for samples, I would turn on YouTube’s auto-caption to figure out what they were saying. Towards the end of CANAL+, I was trying to de-emphasize the vocal aspect in a way, tried to focus more on purely instrumental songs, but when I released the newest album [in 2025], I had realized that people who spoke French were actually listening to my music, and I felt more compelled to include speech in the music again.

You released 15 albums as CANAL+ in 2020 and 2021. Was the pandemic a catalyst for you to create more music?

No, not at all. It was more just trying something new that I hadn’t done before. Something that would happen often was that I would come up with an idea and I would make that idea into an album, and then maybe I felt that I could refine that idea a bit further, so I made another album with the same idea. You can see that with Dimanche après-midi and Vendredi, and then Revenir and Diffusions nocturnes, those are pretty similar. The same goes for Lumière et ombre and Repères.

That makes a lot of sense. Another pair of similar albums would be Ensoleillement and Le spectateur.

Oh, definitely. Here I wanted to try and move further into a sort of mid-90s sound, whereas with previous albums I had mostly focused on a kind of late 80s, early 90s sound. Looking back at it, I guess there’s not really a whole lot of difference, but at the time I thought there was a big difference.

What led to the temporary end of the CANAL+ project in 2022?

Well, the hiatus wasn’t really a decision that I made. Départ wasn’t intended to be a farewell release. It was just that the super nintendo Bandcamp had been mysteriously deleted one day, so I went and re-uploaded everything, because luckily everything had been saved, but the next day the page had been deleted again, and I had also been booted out of the account that I had been using to access the CANAL+ page.

That’s why I stopped releasing things, because I didn’t have access to it. At least I thought I didn’t. Because in early 2025 my computer broke, and I had to get a new one, and when I tried to log back into Bandcamp, I suddenly found out that my login for the CANAL+ account still worked. The super nintendo page was still gone, but I had full access to CANAL+ again, so then I put out the latest album, Modulations sans frontières.

Did you make any music as CANAL+ during that involuntary hiatus from 2022 to 2025?

Only one song, it’s from fall 2024, this 30-second joke song for The Gas Station MegaCompilation on Hitachi Home Video.

You’d gotten a lot of positive reactions from the community to the original CANAL+ discography though. It really influenced many artists in the newer signalwave generation.

Yeah, I guess some people really liked my stuff.

I just want to understand why you let that Bandcamp hiccup basically end the whole project.

Well, at that point I was feeling constrained by super nintendo, and in a way I had also felt somewhat constrained by CANAL+ too, so I decided to start again under a new alias, Copywrong, and I decided that under Copywrong I would let myself do anything. This included just regular vaporwave, signalwave, and putting all kinds of effects on tracks. In that way, since I wasn’t limiting myself anymore, I didn’t really need CANAL+ as an outlet for signalwave.

What would be something that Copywrong can do but CANAL+ could not have done?

For CANAL+, I’ve usually favored a clean sound for the samples, whereas in Copywrong, I like to make the songs a little dirtier sounding. I like to put more effects on them. Also, I look for samples that aren’t obscured by a whole lot of speech. I try to focus more on the musical aspect.

Would you say there is a message contained within your music?

I don’t think there’s a specific message. It’s more just creating an atmosphere.

Can you talk about how you create that atmosphere? What do you gravitate towards when looking for samples?

That’s difficult. I really enjoy sort of melodic things. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’ve been really into International Telecom over the past couple years, and that kind of music is very melodic too.

Do you listen to a lot of original music from the 80s and 90s?

Definitely. Let me go to last.fm and look at my top artists. (silence) Well, Pet Shop Boys and New Order are pretty high on the list. I really like Devo too.

Do you still follow the signalwave scene closely?

Yeah, I’ve definitely been making an effort to keep in touch with new releases. In terms of collaborations, I haven’t done a whole lot of them, but it would be nice to do more.

Anyone in particular that you’d want to collaborate with? International Telecom, I suppose?

That would be cool. I’d definitely like to collaborate with Contoso or any one of his other aliases.

Do you see music as a creative hobby, or is it also a career option for you?

Definitely more of a hobby. Right now I’m in university. I’m studying environmental science. I guess it’s just fun for me looking for samples, to look through all these old television clips and to know what kind of keywords you have to use in order to find the specific kind of thing that you’re looking for.

How many people in real life know that you’re making vaporwave?

I think pretty much just my family.

Is there a local music scene in Arizona that you’re tapped in?

There’s no local scene. KJ Valium has been hosting shows a few hours away in Phoenix, but I haven’t been able to go to those yet. I think I appeared at one of those once, but I was a teddy bear.

What does that mean?

Oh, I wasn’t able to go there, so there was a video projector playing the songs, and then on stage, there was probably like a teddy bear on top of a desk.

Do you have any plans to perform live at one point?

Yeah, I think that would be nice.

What are your general plans in terms of future musical projects?

I’ve been working on a new signalwave album for Copywrong that I think a lot of people will like. It’s very similar to Vendredi. In the last couple years I’ve also started to learn keys and guitar, and I’ve been trying to arrange and compose my own [original] music. That hasn’t really been released, but recently I’ve had the idea of putting together an album of covers that mainly just use this analog synthesizer I have, kind of like “Music for Parties” by Silicon Teens [a 1980 ‘virtual band’ project on Mute that re-imagined rock’n’roll standards through a new wave/synth pop lens, ed. note].

What are you listening to right now?

Recently I’ve been getting back into KROPN, this signalwave artist that had a lot of really good releases back in 2016. It’s not music-focused like my stuff, it’s definitely more sound collage, kind of like Negativland, and it definitely focuses on American television. It’s really fun to listen to. He’s wiped his Bandcamp, but you can find his stuff on Internet Archive, and I’ve uploaded three of his albums to YouTube.

Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.

Thanks, you too. This has been a really nice talk.

Listen to CANAL+ | Copywrong on Bandcamp

CANAL+/Copywrong’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Eleven Eastern – Eastern Standard (2018)

• Mere Notilde – Solanin (2018)

• Ｓｐｏｒｔ３０００ & バーチャル Paragon ™ - ｓｅｃｒｅｔ ｐｌａｃｅ (2018)

• Glitching – Channel Selector (Ultimate Edition) (2023)

• ロフト tapes – Trackpack カセット 2 (2018)

• 骨架的 – Holograms (2010)

• Surfing – Deep Fantasy (2012)

• luxury elite – prism (2018)

• haircuts for men – テ​ロ​カ​セ​ッ​ト (2014)

• chris††† – new wounds (2014)

The person behind the 식료품groceries project is the artist and composer Jordan Bortner, a Texas native who’s been living in New York for many years. Aside from four albums released over a ten-year period under his most prominent alias, he’s been keeping himself busy making noise, glitch and experimental electronic music as JPEGSTRIPES or Null Object. As a home for his different projects, he’s founded his own independent label Consumer Electronics.

Needless to say, I was excited when Jordan agreed to take part in my Vapor Talks series. Find an edit of our conversation below – over the course of 90 minutes, we talked about his upbringing and career, his most important albums, what led to his separation from Dream Catalogue in the mid-2010s, why he lived in South Korea’s capital Seoul for several years after that – and why he feels slighty disconnected from today’s vaporwave scene despite having produced a bunch of the genre’s most well-known and lauded works.

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Jordan, did you grow up in a musical household?

Pretty musical. We had a piano – my mom was a pianist when she was younger. My sister plays guitar and bass, and when I was in middle school, I started doing percussion in band. At the end of elementary school, I’d also picked up the viola. I wanted to play the cello, but I had a friend who was playing the viola, and for some reason I ended up going with the viola too.

What kind of music was playing around the house when you were young?

Mostly just the radio. I didn’t really like pop music, but I thought it’s all that existed in the world. It wasn’t until I got older that I learned how to seek out other types of music. I was never a rock person either. My dad and my sister would bond over classic rock, and she would get into the types of stuff that he liked, but it never resonated with me so much, so it took a while for me to find my niche.

Were there any other formative people that introduced you to music that interested you?

Well, being in band and orchestra introduced me to classical music obviously, and I liked that, but I thought composers were something that happened in the past and they all died. Later I pieced together that there are still living composers when eventually in high school we got a new percussion teacher who was fresh out of college from Ohio, and he showed us all the most experimental 20th century music, like John Cage and Steve Reich.

Growing up in Texas, even the music taste is very conservative. I remember when this new percussion teacher joined the faculty, we had a little concert. There was just this room full of local families watching this young guy from Ohio do these insane modern performances – he was doing Kabuki-style theater and playing the marimba, and these people from Texas, they just can’t comprehend.

I was curious enough to stick around, and I was glad that he was there to talk to me about modern and experimental music. It wasn’t long before I was going to college to study music composition, but it was nice to have someone in high school who primed me and pushed me in that direction before I went off into the deep end.

Did you study in Texas?

Yeah, I studied music at the University of North Texas. It’s actually a pretty good music school. Its claim to fame is that it had the first degree in jazz in the country. The UNT’s jazz program is world famous. I didn’t go for jazz, but I was still in the music program.

Was there also a period where you got into indie music or subcultures?

I think music school made me into a bit of an academia snob, but then I was able to become a little more sensible. I had to discover that there were interesting people out there making forward-thinking pop music. That’s when I got really into Animal Collective and stuff like that.

So we’re talking about the mid- to late aughts, I suppose?

Yeah, I graduated high school in 2007, and college in 2011. It was a great time for music actually.

Did you start producing music on a computer at that time?

I had always been interested in electronic music, and I liked making it on the computer when I was a kid, but it was just midi sequencing, and I didn’t know anything about production and working with audio. I went through college learning to compose for instruments of the orchestra. It wasn’t until the end of college that I made the choice to just sit in on a class that was an intro to electroacoustic music. It’s funny, because even trying to get into anything resembling music technology or electronic music was still through this academic lens. We were gonna study musique concrète and Pierre Schaeffer and this type of stuff – which is great, it’s all very important, but I didn’t learn much about just working in DAWs or anything like that.

I’m 99% self-taught when it comes to production. I had a friend who was a little bit more talented at it than me, who would help me out and show me how to do stuff. It was really tough for me at first. Honestly, it wasn’t until somewhat recently that I got a good synthesizer, a Korg with good presets, so I don’t have to think about sound design, I can just think like a composer. I don’t want to sit and try and make the sound myself. I just want to find a sound I like and work with it.

Did you learn about plunderphonics in your studies of modern experimental music?

I don’t think so. In music history class, you start basically in the middle ages with early music and you work your way up. At the end of the program, you’re in the 20th century, and it kind of fades out into like, “Well, then jazz happened, and then the Beatles happened.” We definitely talked about some early electronic music, but I think we stopped just before getting into the time when plunderphonics was happening. It was me getting into vaporwave that introduced me to that kind of stuff.

How did you discover vaporwave then? Was there a specific moment?

I moved out to New York in 2013, when I was 23. I moved with a couple of friends of mine from music school in Texas. One of them was that guy I was talking about, who was also a better producer than me, and he was very knowledgeable about what was happening in the cutting edge of music and culture.

Actually this was right before I moved to New York, but at the time, Oneohtrix Point Never had that label, Software, and an artist called Slava had just put out an album there called Raw Solutions. My friend linked me to a review of that album; it was written in Russian, and they [Software] basically said, “If anyone can translate this into English, we’ll send you a copy of it on vinyl.”

I think Daniel Lopatin is of Russian descent, but I don’t even know if he speaks Russian, so I don’t know if this was more for fun or whatever, but I had actually minored in Russian in college, so I remember sitting down at my computer with a coffee and just translating it. I’d come across words like [with a fake Russian accent] ‘seapunk’ and ‘witch house’, and I’m looking through my Russian-to-English dictionary, but I don’t see these words. So I’m googling it, finding out these are genres of music that I’ve never heard of. I eventually got the copy of the album on vinyl for translating it, and I fell in love with the record.

Back in the early days, I was on the vaporwave subreddit a lot and then downloading all this vaporwave from Bandcamp. There was an artist called Vincent Remember, do you know him?

Sure, he did the split with Telepath on Dream Catalogue.

Yeah, so I downloaded some of his stuff, and he just sent out an email, like, “Hey, thanks for checking out the music” or whatever, which he probably did for anyone who was buying his music. But I replied, and he was replying back to me. In his reply, he talked about mallsoft, so I was reading up on it on the subreddit, and honestly, it really resonated with me.

I’m not the type of person who can listen to something and just give you an immediate reaction. If I’m gonna give you my thoughts on an album, I need to listen to it repeatedly before I really build a relationship with it. With mallsoft, you’re listening to it like background music, and then in a future time when you’re listening to it, it might remind you of the time in the past when you were listening to it. It’s very aesthetic, almost like music as a flavor. Something about that resonated with me, so I just thought, maybe I’ll make music that’s leaning into this concept of mallsoft, and that’s when I started making my first 식료품groceries music.

That Slava album you mentioned was released in April 2013. You moved to New York in the summer, and 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open came out in April 2014.

Yeah, I graduated from college, moved to New York and just hit the ground running. I was only in New York from 2013 to 2018 before I moved out and went to South Korea, and now I’ve been back in New York for about five years, but I feel like those first five years I was here, I lived a whole lifetime. I moved here in the summer of 2013, learned about vaporwave and started making it, and within six months, it got noticed by the owner of Dream Catalogue [David Russo alias HKE, ed. note], and eventually he asked me if I wanted to release an album on his label, which didn’t even exist at the time.

What were the inspirations for 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open? I’d imagine early mallsoft albums like Disconscious’ Hologram Plaza (2013) and Hantasi’s Vacant Places (2012) would have played a role?

Those were the main examples then, and those were definitely some of the earliest influences, for sure. I was really into Vacant Places. I was obsessed with that record, and it was my first vaporwave purchase as well. I got it on CD-R. I love that record a lot. And nowadays, when I see people talk about mallsoft, they often put 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open in a context with those records, which is very flattering to me.

Mallsoft was definitely a powerful thing and I resonated with its message, but I deviated from it a bit because I wanted it to be my own version of it. I’d have memories of going to this huge H Mart, a Korean grocery store, with my college friends. It’s a giant store, and it had so many cool things from different countries, but I was the only person who was actually interested in food. My friends and roommates were not very interested in cooking, but they obviously knew we’d have to eat. They would go to the store to buy food and wouldn’t know what to buy, because they didn’t know how to cook. It was very funny, like, “I’m here at the grocery store because I know I need to be here, but I don’t know what I want.”

Just that thought of being in a store and looking at all the things and being like, “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be getting. I need something, but I don’t know what it is,” something about that feeling stuck out to me. I liked this mallsoft thing, but then I thought what if I swap the mall with a grocery store, and what if I swap the escalators and the fountains and the mannequins for aisles and sample displays and the announcements on the speakers. I just made it into a different public space.

You mentioned the ‘message’ of mallsoft. There’s this ongoing discussion about vaporwave being at its core anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist, but ever since those early Adam Harper articles in 2012, artists and listeners have been pushing back against that notion.

I think it’s complicated, because there definitely is a strong anti-capitalist message, but it’s soaked in irony. It’s not a protest message, it’s almost like, (speaks in a very soft voice) “Just let the capitalism wash over you. It’s okay, just let it happen. Just be a mindless consumer. You’ll be happy, you’ll have everything you want.” It’s that dystopian message, but over time it’s gotten diluted a bit, and a lot of people now just like making it. There are also all the people now who are just like, “Buy my t-shirt! Buy my album!”

That’s what happens. It’s just capitalism, I guess. It was a cool, weird thing at first, and then there was an audience for it, and then it became a way of making money. And I think it’s good for artists to get money. I definitely don’t know what I would be doing if I hadn’t had some success from that. I’ve spent my 20s being a struggling artist, so the fact that I was making money at all was fantastic. You know, at a time, people were cringeing about other people being like, “vaporwave saved my life” or whatever, but I actually agree [with that statement].

You said that HKE reached out to you and asked if you wanted to put an album out on his label Dream Catalogue. How did he even find you?

Well, I was just messing around and making mallsoft tracks for fun, and I would put them on SoundCloud. There weren’t a lot of people doing it, and that was the fun thing about the early days of vaporwave. It was all a very online thing, and anonymity was one of the pillars of it at the time. I would get a follow from someone who would have a profile picture that looked like it was from some old VHS tape, so I would follow them back, see what they’re making.

I used to work at Starbucks, and I would actually put on my mallsoft music in the café just to see if anyone would notice, because it’s like music that’s pretending to be music, you know? It’s like, “Don’t pay too much attention, this is just very normal music.” (laughs) I would just put it on and look around and no one would react. That was my testing grounds, playing it at Starbucks.

There was actually one weird dude who would come and sit at the Starbucks, and he definitely knew what was going on. I could just tell he knew, because he would come up to the counter and talk to us about music. I’d be playing some reverberated smooth jazz thing, and he’d be like, “Oh, this is great.”

That’s such a brilliant story.

Anyway, one day I started getting a lot of comments from David [HKE] on my SoundCloud tracks. I went to his profile, and he had his Twitter linked, and I saw he had just tweeted, “I’m laying on my bed listening to 식료품groceries.” I was like, “Wow, he really likes this.” Eventually it turned into, “When’s your album coming out?” I’m like, “Well, I guess I’ll have to make an album now.”

At one point he DM’ed me and said, “Hey, I’m starting this label called Dream Catalogue. It’s just me and this other guy, Japan Airlines. Just curious if you wanted to release your album on it.” I think 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open was the fifth release on Dream Catalogue, and that’s how it started. David was a really nice guy. We used to talk all the time, but one day we just stopped.

It’s weird because a lot of the early people in vaporwave are gay or trans, you know – people like Vektroid, christtt or myself –, but there’s also a lot of these straight white dudes either just trying to make it about themselves, or just super fascist, Nazi-adjacent people. And unfortunately, some of my earliest vaporwave friends went down that route, so I stopped talking to them.

It’s funny – a lot of newcomers in vaporwave now have lots of friends who are really passionate about it too, but I didn’t have a lot of friends for a while. Because I had friends, and then I didn’t want to be friends with these people anymore, and then new people came, but they were doing their own thing. So I feel like a bit of an outsider now. I’m still friends with people who have persevered through that, like James and Tech from Death’s Dynamic Shroud, Marc from R23X and Kevin [alias] Equip. We all went on tour in Japan together, and I’m still friends with them.

[The second Neo Gaia Phantasy Tour took place in November 2019, ed. note]

The big Dream Catalogue purge happened towards the end of 2015. They took down many albums; apparently they were threatened with lawsuits due to unlicensed samples. Were your albums part of the purge as well?

Yeah. This is where things started getting weird. I guess David started drinking more and drunkposting on Twitter. It was just causing a schism a bit, and the fascists were revealing themselves. In my opinion, the beginning of the downfall was when they put out that Floral Shoppe 2 album. At first I was just like, “Oh, we don’t need a Floral Shoppe 2. That’s stupid.” Then I realized this was just a shitty album he made in one night when he was drunk, because he basically couldn’t believe that people liked this one Internet Club album that he thought was bad. He could have just not done anything, but he had to make it all about him.

This is also just before meme culture caught up to vaporwave, and then there was the copyright scare. I remember he sent an email through Bandcamp, and then I saw that my stuff was taken down. He didn’t tell me [personally] that he took my stuff down, it was just gone. That’s when I made my own Bandcamp and just put it there. It was great actually, because he never really paid me, so now people were just buying it directly from me. I didn’t even have a label at the time, I was just self-releasing. Only in the past couple years I started a label for myself, and I wish I’d done it a long time ago, but at the same time I didn’t have any money back then. I wasn’t really prepared for this to have any success, honestly.

I guess I wouldn’t have had any of that clout if the album hadn’t been on Dream Catalogue in the first place. I remember David sending me messages when my album was first getting attention. He would show me those charts that people used to make with the essential vaporwave, and my album’s on there. But then after that purge happened, it was just weird and I didn’t really get to talk to anybody about it until years later. When I went to Japan touring with DDS and Equip, that conversation finally came up.

I think I ultimately see myself as lucky in that way, because when Dream Catalogue started to become shitty and controversial, other artists wanted their music taken down, and they had to fight for it, because [David] just wouldn’t do it. I guess I was lucky that I didn’t have to have that argument, because my music [already had been] taken down.

Before that fallout, the second 식료품groceries album HOUSEWARES had come out in 2015 though. Let’s talk about that one, because I feel it’s underrated.

Honestly, a lot of 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open and HOUSEWARES was made concurrently. I made the first two albums around the same time, and then it became this narrative. That’s when I decided it was going to be a four-album series. It took me years to actually do it though.

That’s interesting. To me, HOUSEWARES sounds much more experimental than the first one, more droney and ambient.

Like I said, I’m basically a self-taught producer, and making 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open really pushed me outside my comfort zone – in a good way. I needed that as an artist. Getting into vaporwave was a powerful thing for me. Coming from an academic background, I had an almost elitist idea of what art is supposed to be, and vaporwave is very punk, very DIY. It’s about using whatever you can get your hands on, just try and make something with it.

In the beginning, I was like, “Oh, so I’m just gonna use other people’s music, and I’m not even using original studio recordings, but I’m just downloading it from YouTube, opening it into my cracked version of Fruity Loops and putting effects on it?” Like, “Ew, gross, This is disgusting.” (laughs) But it was liberating in a way, and it made me do things I wouldn’t have normally done. I really see every album I put out as a stepping stone, a snapshot of who I was at that time.

I would go to YouTube and look for people’s vacation videos or video scrapbooks, and I would just let these videos play and wait for something that sounded cheesy, sappy or silly, and then I would try and figure out what it is – or I would just use that, which sometimes wasn’t the best quality version of the song. I didn’t really care at the time. I wasn’t precious about it. That was the punk part for me – it doesn’t matter if it’s the highest quality, just use it.

I was just trying very hard to make an album that didn’t sound terrible and somehow made sense. People liked it, but honestly, I think it was more about the effort and the story and the time and the place, and the fact that vaporwave was emerging. It was not even 100% about the actual music and more about the statement. I can’t tell you it’s my favorite of the albums that I’ve made, because it isn’t.

When it came to HOUSEWARES, I had a much better sense of what I was doing, and I tried to work with chopping things up more. In the first album I still worried that if I tried chopping things up, it would sound stupid. I tried to apply a bit more of my academic musical understanding in the second album. I always tried to do something a little more than just play the music, like decorating things with recordings.

For 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open, I had this recording of a room full of people talking. I’d had it for years and just never had a reason to use it. I was just going through the backlogs of things I’d recorded over years and now I’d find a use for it. I had an audio engineer friend who’d taken one of those binaural microphone heads into a subway platform in New York, so he had these binaural recordings of subway trains. I used that on HOUSEWARES, it’s on the second track, “지하철Morning Commute”.

After HOUSEWARES, there’s a two and a half year gap until your next album. Those years, 2016/17, always strike me as a general watershed in vaporwave history, also a generational shift.

Yeah, I think vaporwave has gone through multiple waves very fast, because it’s such an internet genre. I feel 2016/17 is when mainstream culture caught up to vaporwave and it became a huge meme. Suddenly everything was just purple and palm trees and The Simpsons for some reason. It was tough, because people didn’t think of vaporwave as a serious genre. I mean, it came from a joke at first, like all good things came from a joke, and then people made a joke about the joke, and it’s like, “No, you’re not really getting it.”

It just got chewed up and spit out, and it was hard after that happened. In 2018, 2019, it felt like you couldn’t really say that you like or make or listen to vaporwave, because everyone was just like, “Oh, you’re still on that meme?” No, it’s not a meme, it’s actually a real thing… Well, either they don’t get it, or they think that it’s just not cool anymore, that you can’t talk about it anymore.

Your third album 인터넷 쇼핑 (Ascension) came out in December 2017. It seems like all that vaporwave drama slowed down your release schedule.

Like I said, I came up with this concept for four albums, but I was also terrified of the idea of sounding too repetitive. I don’t want to put out something that just sounds the same, like I’m just trying to recapture this former glory. I was very self-conscious about the fact that it had been [almost] three years between HOUSEWARES and 인터넷 쇼핑 (Ascension), because I really wanted to keep the momentum going. Looking back, three years doesn’t feel that long, but at the time I was just like, “Everyone’s forgotten about me, it’s over, no one’s gonna care when I put this out.” That wasn’t the case, of course, not at all.

For 인터넷 쇼핑 (Ascension), I wanted to take midi music and make that into audio samples, but my original idea was actually to do a compilation or a collaboration album. I messaged all of the vaporwave musicians I knew, like, “Hey, can you make something for me to sample and then make a track out of?” But nobody replied. Actually one person did, and it was christtt, which made me realize the problem, because he was like, “I sample music and chop it up, but I can’t just make original music.” And I was like, “Oh.” I was asking people to do original compositions, and no one knew how to do that. I hadn’t really thought of it.

Then I thought, well, I have a degree in music composition, I should really just put that to work. I’d been making midi music before, but always found it sounded cheesy. Now I thought, so what if I just lean into making cheesy midi music? Just do it on purpose, you know? So I just made these original tracks, and I played them on my keyboard, recorded them, added effects and mixed them, and then I treated it like sample material, so I chopped it up and just used it as audio.

Had you actually heard James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual at that point?

Yeah, definitely. I was a big Ferraro fan. I don’t think I made it necessarily to sound like James, but there’s definitely a connection there with Far Side Virtual, and also some of Vektroid’s aliases.

I can totally see that. On some of her projects from 2012 and 2013, like the PrismCorp albums, she was already anticipating all this Utopian Virtual stuff. In my opinion, she basically invented most subgenres, including vaportrap and signalwave, in a period of just two or three years, starting in 2010.

She’s an unbelievable musician. And I hope she’s doing well, because I always see her struggling on the timeline a little bit, and I’m like, “I really want you to be okay.” I haven’t talked to her in a long time. I’ve gotten the sense that she’s not interested in talking about vaporwave anymore – and I get it. I’m just like, “You have so much potential and you have an audience, so you don’t have to make vaporwave. If you make something, I guarantee you, people will want to hear it.”

I agree. She’s not released anything in a few years though. But she’s streaming on Twitch every other day.

I’ve seen some of her streams. Even those are brilliant. It’s all down-sampled VHS quality, and she has this amazing avatar and these insane effects and things that you can do in the chat that she’s programmed herself. It’s incredible.

Actually, your JPEGSTRIPES project reminds me of her Fuji Grid TV alias, like an early broken transmission thing.

That’s nice of you to say. Fuji Grid TV definitely inspired me to shift toward the VHS stuff. I do like the broken transmission or signalwave type of sound, but I don’t think I do it the way that other people do it. I do it in a more mallsoft kind of way, where the sound is not meant to be harsh, but more like, “Oh, you fell asleep with the TV on”, that kind of feeling.

I’ve had the JPEGSTRIPES project since I was in Texas. It’s also just my online name, and I consider it as my main project. I view 식료품groceries as a thing that I did, but I’m kind of done with it. JPEGSTRIPES came about because I was interested in making noise music and glitch art, and that was even before I got into vaporwave, and when I then discovered vaporwave, I felt very at home because people here also liked VHS tapes, video games, digital art and noise music.

JPEGSTRIPES is about VHS audio samples, corrupting video games and recording the output from that, making albums out of that material. I never know what to call this music. I like glitch, but when people say glitch, they basically mean hip hop with a weird beat. When people think of noise, they think of Merzbow and harsh noise walls, something more analog. Mine is kind of hard to describe. It’s just corrupted video game music. I guess if I gave it a cute name, people would like it more.

Like mallsoft.

Well, when I put out 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open, I threw in additional [tags] that I thought were funny. People were using computergaze at the time, so I threw in aislegaze. Some people took that seriously. I saw people online talking about aislegaze, and I was like, “That was a joke.” (laughs) But I mean, mallsoft was also a joke, so who cares?

What’s Null Object?

That actually came from the idea of just wanting to make more straightforward dance music. At the time, lo-fi house was becoming popular. I was really into lo-fi house, and I thought there were a lot of similarities to vaporwave – it’s house music, but it’s also very analog, with lots of samples and pitched down things, so I had the idea to apply some vaporwave concepts to lo-fi analog house music.

The idea for Null Object actually came from a job I had. I was working at a taxi company doing customer service. It was my first tech job, even though I wasn’t working in a tech role, but it was a startup and my first job that wasn’t food service. I was working a lot, and it was really disorganized. I had to deal with angry customers and drivers. Things just weren’t working. At some point I vowed that I was going to make an album of music about this experience, and that became Cooperative Taxi Station. The artist name, the album title and the track names all were just jargon from my job, these weird phrases that I just thought were funny or interesting.

It’s a vaporwave thing to use the corporate tech lingo – that strange, abstract but flowery presentation deck language.

There’s a definitely a thing of evoking this corporate atmosphere and stuff, but this was very real to me – it was my actual job. And then of course we all got laid off at one point. I did continue with the project though. I’m just using it as an outlet for straightforward types of dance music. It definitely has its own oddities and weirdness, but it’s not drone, it’s not mallsoft, it’s something you can dance to.

I read in the biography on your website that you spent two years living in Seoul in the late 2010s. Tell me about your time in South Korea.

Well, in the year after getting laid off from the taxi company, I put out my first physical merch, and I started to get the hang of it. I also spent that year applying to teach English in South Korea, because it seemed like a good time to just do something different. I’d always wanted to travel, and people kept saying that one way to travel easily is to just take a job in another country, because then you’re just paid to be there.

I got the job, moved out of New York and brought all my stuff to my parents’ place. After a couple of months I flew to Korea. We had two weeks of orientation and training, and I didn’t even know where I was going to be until I was there. Then I got assigned my school, and it was in Seoul, which was great, because I wanted to be in the capital. I taught English in elementary school for two years there.

I was traveling, I was seeing the country. I visited Japan twice, visited Malaysia and Taiwan. I wasn’t making much music though. I would try to go to shows, but in Korea, shows tend to start really late, and the trains don’t run after midnight, so if you’re going out, you’re going out until the early morning. As a teacher, I have to get up at 7am, so I just can’t do this very often.

In my second year I was starting to feel like I left New York right at at the peak of my musical career and just disappeared as things were getting good. I felt out of touch with people and art and music and vaporwave and just everybody. I don’t know, it was becoming a little depressing. When COVID happened, I almost felt like a little bit of relief, because now nobody is doing anything, and everybody is stuck at home, and I feel like I’m not missing out – which is a very selfish thought.

So I moved back to the US, and I’ve struggled to reconnect ever since then. It’s just not quite the same. Global politics have really screwed things up. The reason things were the way they were in 2010 was because the world was just doing better. I didn’t use to be the type of person who listens to the news all the time, but now I’m a news junkie, and that has taken away from time that could be spent doing more creative and fun things. Everything’s about survival now. For the past ten years, things have been tough.

I would love to return to a time when things felt better, but I get the sense that there’s a new scene bubbling up somewhere. I can see that the new generation of artists are trying to cook up something, and I’m curious to see where it goes and if there’s a place for me in that anywhere. I think there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and there’s a bright side coming.

In August 2022, you’ve finished the series by releasing the fourth album, 폐점 . I’ve seen people online referring to it as the white album, others say Closed, or Closed for Business. How do you say it?

In my head, I refer to it as Closure, in the sense of the store closing, but also as in the summarization of the narrative, the closure of the story. Part of the narrative over time has been the album and track titles becoming increasingly difficult to understand. The first album is almost all English, the second album a little more Korean, and the third album has a Korean title and then an English word. The track names are all English, but they’re all in that monospace text. And then the fourth album, you have to dig to get to what the names of the tracks are. I wanted to make it a little more difficult, not to listen to, but to get to know.

It doesn’t even have separate tracks, there’s just the A side and the B side, even on the digital version.

Yeah, some people have been mad about that. But I wanted it to be like that, because one, it’s supposed to be listened to all together, and two, I’m not doing this to be nice to you, I’m doing this to make it difficult. There are track names, they’re just in the album artwork. I’ve provided an English translation for everything as well, so that’s out there on the internet.

I’ve talked to a few younger producers who were really influenced by that album, especially from the signalwave scene.

That’s awesome. That album came out just toward the end of COVID, and I don’t really know what people think about it. I haven’t heard people talking about it much, but I definitely worked really hard on that one. I said before, my albums are stepping stones, and I feel like by the time you get to Closure, it’s clear that I’ve improved as a producer and composer. I’m very proud of that album. I love the notoriety that my early albums have given me, but I think my albums have only gotten better over time.

Listen to 식료품groceries on Bandcamp

식료품groceries’ Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

“A list of the 10 most influential to me when I was new to vaporwave and listening to it the most.”

• Miami Vice – CULTURE ISLAND (2012)

• death’s dynamic shroud.wmv – シェンムーONLINE (2014)

• Music For Your Plants – Expedition Chant Cup (2012)

• INTERNET CLUB – REDEFINING THE WORKPLACE (2012)

• Hantasi – Vacant Places (2012)

• YES USB – NO USB (2012)

• Bye-Product – .GIF (2012)

• CVLTVRΣ – Virtual Life (2014)

• General Translator – CONTEMPORARY (2013)

• Eyeliner – High Fashion Mood Music (2012)

Signalwave is clearly having a moment right now. Many participating artists just started their journey a few years or just months ago; many are in their mid-20s, like the lauded newcomer Strmi or 直子coed herself. But that new (signal)wave is also home to a certified late bloomer, a Gen X’er who goes by the artist name of УВБ-76 (UVB-76). His real name is Michael Mitchell, and he’s from Wilmington, Delaware.

The now 55-year-old producer, shortwave radio fanatic and record collector grew up on a diet of punk, gothic and industrial music in the 1980s and 1990s, dabbling in the local underground before leaving music-making behind for a long time. Discovering signalwave in 2025, he found back into a regular creative practice routine, processing decades of mental health struggles in his uncanny soundscapes made from sampled shortwave signals.

In just a few ultra-productive months since November of last year, Mike has been able to solidify his status as one of the most interesting newcomers in the scene. He’s released a bunch of captivating works, from an unnerving hommage to his crime-ridden hometown, Murder Town USA, to a trilogy of albums diving into his history with mental illness and substance addiction: Long Road to Recovery, Product of my Environment and Patient No. 18.

Most recently, he’s been experimenting with original synth music in a dark ambient style, as well as exploring samples of traditional East Asian folk music or Gregorian chant. A decades-deep collection of weird experimental records might come in handy when you’re trying to make strange sound collages.

Over the last few months, I’ve been immersing myself in the УВБ-76 catalogue, following Mike’s journey and evolution in real time. In June 2026, we jumped on a videocall to talk about his musical biography and how finding his peers and an audience through vaporwave is just a big blessing for him.

Trigger warning: This conversation at times dives into topics like severe depression, self-harm and suicide, so if you’re potentially triggered or retraumatized by such material, you might want to opt out of reading it.

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You’re based in Wilmington, Delaware. Is that where you grew up?

No, I literally grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Maryland. My father had been a farmer for years. The family house was in the middle of just all these corn and soybean fields, so I had nobody around me. It was a desolate place to grow up.

Did your family listen to any music at home?

My dad listened to country music, my mom would just put on the radio. It was my brothers that really had the influence on me, and what I listened to. One of my earliest memories is when my mom and dad had a cocktail party at our house, I just remember going into where the stereo was set up and putting on the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and “The Fool on the Hill” came on. I was absolutely captivated by it. I just kept playing that song over and over and over.

What type of music did you get into as a teenager?

That would have been the early 80s, and by that time, my brothers’ influence really waned, because they kept listening to the same things: Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, that kind of stuff. But I was getting into other left of center for my conservative upbringing type bands that were coming out, like [New wave band] The Fixx. We used to go to a record store at the mall every Friday. They’d be like, “Ever heard of a band called King Crimson?” They would hand me a copy of Discipline [from 1981, ed. note], and I’d take that home and I’d be mind-blown because I’d never heard anything like that.

The people at the record store were always introducing me to new music, and when I was 16, I actually got a job there. They were just like, “When you’re old enough to drive, you got a job.” I thought they were just bullshitting, but sure enough, I walked in one day, and they’re like, “Oh, did you drive here on your own?” “Yeah.” “Well, let me get you a job.” Working at the record store was huge for me, because there’s just all these tapes and records and promo stuff coming in, so you’re always grabbing something and throwing it at the stereo and seeing if it sticks.

Did you get musical training or play in any bands?

I took some guitar lessons when I was younger. It was nothing that I stuck with, because the instructor that I was with, he was wanting me to play standard folk type stuff, but I wanted to learn “Fly by Night” by Rush, you know? I actually did get switched to a different instructor, and he taught me “Fly by Night”, and then I quit lessons. I just learned some basic stuff like chord progression and things like that.

It wasn’t until ‘91 that I started a punk band with two friends of mine that I knew from working at the record store. We called ourselves DeERtiCk [capitalization intentional, ed. note]. We were really heavily influenced by The Cramps, and this [punk/blues] band called Mule on Touch and Go Records. We just had fun with it for a while. We went into the studio and cut a demo, and then we never did anything with it. We only did two shows, and at one point the drummer quit. We got a different drummer who turned out to be a real asshole – he insulted my wife, so I quit the band, because I wasn’t dealing with that.

After that, were there any other opportunities for you to do music?

A little bit. The guy that played guitar in my band, he kept playing and he got together with a couple other guys, and he was like, “Why don’t you come out and see if there’s something you can do?” But there was already a bass player, which is what I played in the previous band. He pretty much had guitar down, and the drummer was there. So I have one of those little... I forget what they’re called, but it’s the thing you blow into, and it’s got the keys…

A melodica?

Right. I have one of those, so that’s what I played for a couple of gigs. It didn’t sound very good, and then I just dropped it. Then nothing, until I started doing UVB-76.

That’s like, what, a 20-year gap?

Easily, maybe even 25.

Was there ever a time when you got more into electronic music, before discovering vaporwave?

Yeah, absolutely. I got a lot of electronic music in my background too. Even when I was younger, hearing Vangelis’ epic soundtracks for Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, and getting into Tangerine Dream. I actually bought a Roland Juno 106 keyboard back when I was 16, to try and replicate that type of music, and of course I never did.

I remember when Slowdive reformed and started coming back around [in 2014, ed. note], I remember seeing them live and seeing Rachel Goswell still playing that keyboard. Realizing that people are still playing them, I wanted to get mine fixed, but it was just one of those things, like, what am I actually going to do with it when I get it fixed? Maybe I would use it, maybe I would not, you know?

When I first listened to your stuff, even just without knowing your background, I didn’t really see it just in a vaporwave context, but rather in this lineage of experimental music, noise, industrial, sound collage, musique concrète et cetera. Is that completely misguided?

No, that is totally accurate. Like I said, being in that record store, I started getting introduced to a lot of off-center type bands, like Current 93, Sixth Comm... especially Nurse With Wound is a huge influence on me, I think Steve Stapleton is a bonafide genius. From there, I got into avant-garde classical stuff: John Cage, Stockhausen, Isao Tomita, Xenakis… In my first year of college, I took an electronic music class, and that’s where I got introduced to Philip Glass and Steve Reich, especially his tape stuff, so that all really colors what I do.

A little bit later on, I started getting really into dark ambient. Inade is probably my favorite dark ambient band, I think they even took it a couple steps further than [Brian] Lustmord did. That’s just my opinion, but their stuff is absolutely captivating to me. Rozz Williams is another huge influence on me – [his band] Premature Ejaculation inspired me to want to jump into doing this type of sound collage work. Because I’ve only been into listening to vaporwave for about a year, you know?

That’s what I figured. During all those years when you didn’t make music actively, between those punk bands and the UVB-76 project, were you always listening to tons of music and collecting records?

Yeah. And that’s gotten me in trouble. One of the bands that I collect is The Residents, right? And they’ve got so much stuff, hundreds of releases, so it’s easy to get in trouble with.

Some of them are quite expensive as well.

Big time.

So how did you discover this weird genre called vaporwave?

It was actually through my kids. This is going back a few years. Because I was into electronic music, they told me about vaporwave and gave me some names – Saint Pepsi, Luxury Elite, Macintosh Plus, so I downloaded a bunch and started listening to them, and I could see where that stuff was coming from. But it just went in one ear and out the other, you know, because it all depends on what or who I’m really into at the time. That’s one thing about autism, that thing about just focusing on one thing at a time, that’s very real, you know? So that was just not on my radar at the time.

It was just a couple of free download things from Bandcamp that caught me about a year ago – one was an album by 818181, and Astrid and I have gotten to be great friends. It was one of her albums and a couple others, and something just clicked so I was like, “What else is out there?” Of course there was tons of barber beats stuff, and I started listening to that. At one point I heard a Florida Rains album and a CANAL+ album, and I was just captivated, so I started investigating some other signalwave artists and it just snowballed from there.

So after downloading and listening to loads of albums, you just started making it at one point?

Yeah, I was trying to get as much vaporwave and hear so much of it, because I thought it was so interesting to have this genre that’s got all these subgenres, but it’s already a small genre in itself, so it’s these little mini-slices of things, and it absolutely fascinated me. I don’t know what it was, but there was just one night I decided I’m gonna go pull up Audacity and see what I can do.

The first track I did was on my Demo EP called “Frankie’s Ghost is in the ether”. I connected to this shortwave station, they were playing “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and this guy was just like talking all over it, right? So I just hit record, and basically that’s all it is. A couple days after that, Paco [Moreno] from PMP was asking for tracks for a compilation, so I thought, “The hell, I’ll submit it.”

After that, I got the EP out there, and then I started getting a little more ballsy, and I reached out to Paco like, “Hey, I have that one song on your compilation, how would you feel about doing an album?” He was just like, “Absolutely, I loved what you did.” And I’ve just taken off from there.

I’ve read up on UVB-76, this mysterious shortwave radio signal called The Buzzer, which is somehow related to the Russian military…

…well, supposedly. We don’t know that for sure.

Right. Why did you pick this alias?

Knowing the direction that I wanted to go in, I just wanted shortwave to be the main thread of everything, so I must have found an article that came up when I was searching for shortwave stuff. I just liked the story and the mystery behind it.

Your first album came out shortly after that. The cover shows a pill dose of this prescription drug and tranquilizer, Clonazepam. In general, you’ve been quite open about sharing your personal history with mental illness and depression. Is music a way for you to process these struggles?

It really is. It’s that and more. When I would be in a really dark place, there were some albums that would keep me there, but some albums could actually get my head above water. There’s nothing else but music that can evoke so much in a person’s psyche, their emotions and memories of what they were doing at a certain point in time. It’s hard for me to describe what music means to me. It’s everything to me, and has been since I was really young.

Like I said, there’s stuff that can keep you in a dark spot, but there’s stuff that can bring you up from that spot too. There’s also taking those matters into your own hands, and that’s really what my music is born from. I just released a tape through Molten Aqua, it’s a compilation of my first two albums and the demo tape, but all the songs are reordered and mixed up. I’ve put out so much more stuff since then, but listening to that with fresh ears again takes me back to that point.

I remember I had to take a six month sabbatical from work, because my mental health had deteriorated so horrible, and I went into an intensive outpatient program to deal with it. In the group, they kept saying that it’s really good to have a hobby, because it’s something that can take you out of your mindspace. Something that you actually enjoy doing can help start to lift the fog, and it was shortly after I got back to work in November 2025 when I said, “All right, I’m gonna do this.”

That tape on Molten Aqua is called Out of the Depths, because it really came out of the depths of my depression, my anguish and my burnout. It meant a lot to me that they wanted to put that stuff out, because I thought of it as just my starting, and I felt like I’d evolved from there, but there’s something so pure about it. Not only was I just trying to find my rhythm, but it was just me expressing myself and getting myself out of that depression space.

With what you’ve just called hobbies, the autistic hyperfocus can help, because you’re really zoning in on one activity, right?

Oh yeah, a couple people have said to me, “God, you’re really prolific”, and I think, “Am I really?” Because there’s other people who are putting out tons of stuff, and I don’t even think I’m in that club. Maybe I am, I don’t know. But there’s so much in my head that I want to get out, and every chance I get I’m just constantly getting this noise out of my head, out to somebody else who may click with it.

You didn’t have a way to express yourself artistically for a long time. When we spoke over Discord before this interview, you mentioned all those struggles you’ve had with mental health, alcohol addiction and substance abuse…

Yeah, I’ve got 50 years of shit to get out in one sitting. It kind of piles, I guess. Looking back, I’m 55 now, and it’s been a hell of a ride. It really has been. I’m fortunate to still be here, honestly. I owe that to my wife and kids. If I didn’t have them, I might not be here.

I’m happy you’re still here.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, I’ve been there so many times, but just that thought of what am I doing to them pulls me out. I just could never go through with it.

It’s not a surprise that a lot of your music sounds very dark and unsettling. I suffered from depressive episodes in my life and I’m neurodivergent too, so I can relate. Some of us, when we are in what you call a dark place, we need to lean into those emotions and explore them, others just need to chase them away.

Yeah. You know what, to me it’s kind of funny that people say the music is so dark, because it’s just an extension of my head, and anybody that knows me, knows me as a smart-ass, smiling and joking and cackling and laughing, all that kind of stuff.

We’re all learning to mask over time.

Exactly, it’s that whole Robin Williams thing. But I didn’t intentionally want the music to be dark. My whole method of recording is to find the shortwave tracks first; there’s a couple different programs that I just scan to find a noise or somebody talking or music playing or whatever, and I’ll record that bit. I’ll get 20 different tracks, say, and then I’ll go back to it later and see what’s that evoking in my head.

For whatever reason, I just know what to use. I’ll go and grab a dialog sample, a drone to sample or whatever. It all just happens so quickly, and then I don’t think about it again until the whole album’s done. All that time, it just never occurs to me that it sounds dark or depressing or whatever. A lot of that shit’s just in my brain.

There is a certain humor to it as well. That aspect actually reminds me of Nurse With Wound, where it’s dark but it’s also ridiculously funny at times.

Absolutely, I hope that my stuff’s kind of like that too. Recently I haven’t really been into doing song titles much, because it can get really prescriptive, but the albums I did about the mental health struggles – Long Road to Recovery, Product of my Environment, and Patient No. 18 – I definitely wanted to have titles for them, because I’m trying to really give people a photo book of that point in time of my life.

Is it all samples though? Are you doing any overdubs at all?

For the most part, it is sampled. I’ve just done a dark ambient EP on Wave Racers, that is all me doing the music instead. There’s also an album on Botanica1 that has a lot of samples of Eastern music from Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and so forth, but the music behind it, I did all that. It just depends on what I want to do for that album. It’s all digital stuff though, I don’t have any way to bring my bass guitar out and hook it up into the computer. I’ve not gotten that technically advanced yet.

For such a late bloomer, you’ve gotten a lot of love from the signalwave community, haven’t you?

Yeah, at first I wasn’t even aware that there was such a tight-knit community around it, so that was just a happy accident finding that. It was really Astrid [818181, ed. note] who put me on to the Discords, getting me the invites to join the Slushwave and Signalwave servers. Getting on there and seeing all these people, it was definitely a way to connect. S u i t e B and I did a collaboration together, just because I met him through Discord.

Coming from a punk and gothic background, those scenes try to portray themselves as if they were really united and supportive, but it’s really the most backstabbing environment to be in – it’s actually maddening. So far, I haven’t found that with vaporwave at all. Everybody is just so cool and really supportive. That’s been a great benefit for me. I don’t even talk too much in the Discords. I’ll join in a couple conversations here and there, but I think my age gap with a lot of those people is probably one of the reasons why I don’t try and communicate more.

It’s the same for me. Not that I don’t want to talk to younger people, it’s just that I sometimes feel really disconnected from what they’re talking about and how they talk. I realize I sound really old now.

(laughs) Yeah, it’s kind of crazy, that age gap.

There are some older heads in the scene though. They’re probably like us and not too active on the Discords.

Yeah. I was just talking to ホテル shampoo the other day, and he was saying there should be an old folks vaporwave retirement home with people like me, him and Kratzwerk. (laughs) No, I mean, it’s very helpful having so many people that are out there genuinely rooting for you. It’s just so nice, and it’s really unlike any group I’ve ever been in before.

The diversity of the scene is fascinating, not just in terms of age, but in that it’s truly global, and many people in it are neurodivergent, trans and/or queer – just a lot of people who are not seen as the norm in society.

Absolutely. And personally, I didn’t come out as bisexual until five or six years ago, just because my upbringing was so redneck and so anti-anything that wasn’t hetero, so I had to suppress that part of me for a long time. My father was also a local politican so I really had to hide it. My best friend is actually gay, and my parents never understood that. They were like, “Why are you friends with one of them?”, that kind of thing.

That hurts.

It really does. I just have no tolerance for people with that narrow mindset anymore. Coming into this community which is so accepting, it’s just beautiful, and I really, really appreciate that.

You have to tell me about Stuck at Everest Base Camp. It’s such an outlier in your discography, but I love it so much. How did you make it?

It’s funny because I wanted to get an album on Bogus Collective. He’d reached out to me and was like, ”We don’t do anything that’s overtly political or controversial.” The stuff I talk about is often quite heavy, so I was like, “Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to find some really good tunes, and I’m just going to put a shortwave noise over it, maybe add some reverb here or there, and that’s it.” I mean, don’t get me wrong, I did put 100% into that album too. My song choices on that album – or a couple of them, I should say – really mean a lot to me. It’s not like I just glossed over it.

I was nervous about putting it out, because it’s so different from any of my other stuff, and it just made me happy that he loved it. Then I was hearing you talk about it, and everybody’s saying it’s really good and they like it, which feels weird because it’s the album I put the least amount of effort into. My youngest does music also, and she just said, “It’s always the one that you least expect gets the most attention, and the one you want to get the attention doesn’t get it.”

Well, it just reminded me of this strain of signalwave albums with one very specific ambience noise that goes back to GlenOAX’s Narvon Nights and has since been picked up by TV2, CT57, m1 t e l e v i z i o, Magdalene, Strmi and a bunch of other artists.

Yeah, now that you mentioned it I can definitely see that thread, because I used this one constant fuzz noise that runs through the entire album. I’m just imagining somebody who’s stuck there with this crappy little radio, and it’s the one station that’s coming in, and they don’t touch the dial, so it just kind of stays there and this is what they hear, like it or not.

Any other recent projects you’d like to plug?

Children of Vapor put out an album of mine called Chant. You have to remember when Gregorian chant was all the rage in the early 90s?

Sure, with Enigma having #1 hits and all that.

Yeah, so this is very reminiscent of that. I’m so happy that they accepted me into that group, Children of Vapor. They’re just the most accepting, nice people in the world. Especially Pool Plants has been so good to me. [Pool Plants, an artist from the Children of Vapor collective, did the cover artwork for Chant, ed. note]

If you had to highlight one album from your catalog, one that people should really listen to, which one would that be?

Probably Long Road to Recovery. That one felt the most like an exorcism. It’s the one that really catches my essence at its most pure. I’ve been asked before why I use shortwave on all my tracks, and that’s just because being autistic and having depression, PTSD, OCD, and I’ve also gotten tinnitus due to a medication, so there’s constantly noise and chatter in my head. With shortwave, because of the narrowness of the bands, you always get so much bleed over and that’s how my head sounds, so that’s why I use it in every single track. Especially on Long Road to Recovery, it is so symbolic of what I’m putting out. It’s like, if anybody wanted to take a picture of my soul, it’s that album.

Listen to УВБ-76 on Bandcamp

УВБ-76’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Florida Rains – Airport Lounge (2025)

• 夢想家 bliss – 水商売 (2024)

• 猫 シ Corp. – Palm Mall (2014)

• Kagoshima Tangerine – Kent, 1956 (2024)

• Ancient Fan Death Studios – Late Night Sci-Fi (2020)

• International Telecom – 3 a.m.S i g n a l s (2023) or T e l e c o m (2023)

• Western Digital – Wasted Digital (2015)

• Mom and Dad’s Computer – Aquarium I-V (2023-25)

• victory over death – code 不滅 (2025)

• 818181 – Life After (2025)

Special shout out to my fave album so far of 2026:

• all that I once was – tempest (2026)

Around the same time, a 16-year old from Detroit’s suburbs started producing music under the artist name Architecture in Tokyo. Ben, that’s his real-life name, was immersed in that primordial online soup of chillwave, synthwave and early vaporwave. His debut album Summer Paradise came out in June 2013 on the Business Casual label and is widely regarded as a bonafide genre classic today, even ending up on a recent Reddit list of 30 ‘Vaporwave All-Timers’.

Ben would drop another full-length album on AMDISCS the following year, exploring the future funk style that fellow producers like Saint Pepsi and Macross 82-99 had just come up with. After releasing a few more singles and SoundCloud loosies, the Architecture in Tokyo project slowly fizzled out during vaporwave’s generational shift in the second half of the 2010s and finally dropped off the radar.

Almost a decade later, Ben is still DJing, producing and releasing music. He might have left vaporwave behind, but since the start of the pandemic, he’s been making original tunes under the name Young Muscle, a project heavily influenced by UK bass and experimental techno. His most recent EP, Music Is My Perverse Fantasy, came out in February 2026. In the conversation below, he talks about his early days in the vaporwave scene and the creation of his classic album, and ponders whether he’d ever return to the Architecture in Tokyo moniker.

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Did you actually grow up in Detroit, Ben?

I grew up in the suburbs, about 25 to 30 minutes outside Detroit, an area called Sterling Heights. I lived there till I was 18, then moved down to Detroit and have lived there since, so it’s been a little over 12 years now.

Was it a musical household that you grew up in?

Not really. I grew up with my mother, and she grew up playing piano, but it was never something that was transferred on to me. I took some piano and violin lessons when I was a kid, but both didn’t stick for very long.

In music technology class they taught us to use GarageBand. That stuck with me and laid the groundwork for my experiments in Ableton when I was a teenager, which is what led to the Architecture in Tokyo project. But my exploration with music came from my own seeking out of music culture through the internet.

What kind of music were you into as a teenager?

I was a very avid follower of imageboard culture, and I browsed 4chan’s music board a lot. I found a lot of electronic music through it. I grew up listening to hardcore punk and folk music, but both felt kind of inaccessible, whereas electronic music felt like something that I could do.

If you were into hardcore punk and folk, did you ever play in any bands?

I didn’t, I was mostly alone in my bedroom making music, but I made it with the reference in mind that I wanted to make it for my friends. I had a close group of friends who were the same way, where they wanted to be in bands, but they never learned any instruments, so they spurred me on to make music for them and cheered me on in that sense, when I was starting to make vaporwave.

Did the cultural heritage of your city play a role, with Detroit having been such an important hub for electronic music since the 80s?

You know, it’s very funny. As close as I was to the city, we were always more interested in the sounds that were coming out of the UK, from places like Sheffield. I was very interested in IDM as a teenager, and it felt a little bit too inaccessible to make during that time, but it was still a very big influence on me. I grew up listening to a lot of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. I’ve listened to Music Has the Right to Children more times than I can count. I had a bunch of friends who listened to glitch hop like Flying Lotus and Lone, so that kind of rubbed off on me too.

Aside from imageboards, were you into blogs as well? Altered Zones comes up a lot when I talk to people about proto-vaporwave and internet music.

Yeah, I was following blogs like Tiny Mix Tapes and a bunch of others. I can’t remember them off the top of my head, but Tiny Mix Tapes was one that contributed to Altered Zones. I remember first learning about Oneohtrix Point Never from there. They did a piece about his project Infinity Window. Learning that he was using just a handful of synthesizers and reverb pedals, that felt very accessible and inspirational to me. It felt like something that I could do.

I had a MicroKorg growing up as a teenager – I still have it, but I don’t use it anymore –, and some of my earliest experiments, before I even started making vaporwave, was messing around with the MicroKorg, running it into Ableton, putting reverb and delay on it, and seeing what I could get out of it, just trying to push the synthesizer to its limits.

Were you tapped into the scene that started meeting on the early social media and streaming site turntable.fm in 2011/12?

I was. One of my friends, Alfred, was tapped into that scene, and I remember venturing around the website and listening to all the things that were coming out. I wasn’t an avid user by any means, but I did use the site from time to time. I do remember going there and listening to the music that my friend Alfred would play.

Vektroid was a huge influence on everyone there, right?

Definitely. A few of my friends were friends online with Vektroid when she was still going by Vektordrum. The music that she was making blew my mind. Still to this day it blows my mind that she was making proto-synthwave back then, stuff that would remind me of Com Truise.

I remember Vektroid’s New Dreams Ltd. album was featured on Altered Zones as one of their albums of the week, and I remember being really intrigued by it before I knew that Vektroid had created it, because she made it under an alias [Laserdisc Visions, ed. note]. I remember thinking, “Who is this mysterious artist that is creating these crazy tracks that sound like the nostalgic early 90s music that reverberated around in the corners of my head?”

It felt very reminiscent of early internet that I remember as a child, the kind of mystery of the internet, before you could really grasp things that were going on. At least for me, as someone my age, it reminded me of the mystery of not knowing who an artist was, or seeing these images of foreign culture, not really knowing a lot about it. That mystery was the main point that connected with me.

Like many other vaporwave producers, you were still a teenager at that point. Did you connect with many other kids in that early internet music scene?

Yeah. I remember even reaching out to Vektroid as a teenager, and just making a lot of friends through Facebook. There was this ‘Weird Facebook’ scene that was going on in the early 2010s. Actually, New York Magazine wrote about Weird Facebook once. It was a scene of music producers and internet artists who were working in graphic design, creating just abstract, absurdist avant-garde material. Seapunk too spawned out of Weird Facebook around the same time. People from Weird Facebook had a lot of clout in the seapunk and early vaporwave scene.

I remember some of the collabs that I took on with Architecture in Tokyo ended up coming from Weird Facebook and making friends in that scene. Parrot Jungle 95, he was one of the Facebook friends that I made, Yung Bae too. We had a Facebook group chat with a bunch of other future funk and vaporwave producers called Healy Hunks. We would talk to each other on there, and that’s where some of my early collabs spawned out of.

Summer Paradise came out in June 2013, but when did you actually start producing under Architecture in Tokyo?

To be honest, there wasn’t any particular moment that started it. I was just very influenced by chillwave and glitch hop, and then it was the influence of albums like Skeleton’s Holograms [2010], Com Truise’s Galactic Melt [2011], Laserdisc Visions’ New Dreams Ltd. [2011] and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica [2011] – all those projects made me want to start making music, because learning that they were all sample-based felt very tangible to me, like something that I could do.

I was around 16 when I first started making music, in an attempt to make chillwave-esque stuff, but after hearing Vektroid and Skeleton [the anonymous proto-vaporwave artist who went by 骨架的, ed. note], I wanted to make those sorts of things because it felt possible. Even though at the time, when I was making vaporwave, initially it was just an experiment. It was never fully intended to be heard by so many people, it was something just to pass along on to my Facebook friends and to my real life friends.

I just wanted to replicate those early internet memories that I had of foreign culture, and the other sample-based music that I was hearing from places like Facebook and 4chan’s /mu/ board. I wanted to have a hand in that, even if it just initially was for real life friends and internet friends. Early Architecture in Tokyo was just me trying to capture that sound and capture that feeling of browsing the internet and coming across these mysterious reference points that felt very nostalgic in a way.

How did you hook up with Business Casual?

I think John [Zobele alias christtt, founder of Business Casual, ed. note] reached out to me. He might have reached out through Facebook or SoundCloud, one of the two.

The same year, you put out two more singles – one was Marble 大理石, a collaboration with a producer named Ultra, and the other one was a split record called Lilac ‘97 with another artist called Drip-133.

Ultra was a SoundCloud friend, a fellow vaporwave producer, when things were kind of kicking off in the scene early on. I don’t think he ever got as much credit as he deserved, but he was one of the early vaporwave producers that was making these mysterious tracks without any sort of information on who he was, where he was located or things like that.

Drip-133 was actually a close friend of mine. As teenagers, we lived very close to each other, and we ended up deciding to put out a split tape. It came out on Memory No. 36, which was an internet label that one of my Facebook friends was running.

In 2014, you released your second album, the self-titled Architecture in Tokyo album on AMDISCS. There’s an interesting shift in direction, the first one being influenced more by chillwave and classic vapor, while the second one has a focus on future funk and seems influenced by filter house and nu disco.

Yeah, with the rise of SPF420 and hearing my internet friends making future funk and chopped up disco edit type music, I shifted my approach in sound and composition. Daft Punk was another big influence that had always kind of been in the background, as well as a lot of the artists on KEATS//COLLECTIVE and people like Ryan aka Saint Pepsi. His album Hit Vibes was a very big influence on me when I switched to rather focus on this disco-house type of music.

Did you get a lot of feedback to those first two albums at the time?

I think I did. I don’t remember exactly, but I know the first Architecture in Tokyo album exploded on SoundCloud. It definitely took off and had this life of its own that I didn’t expect out of it, and then I felt a little pressured to create something to follow up, but I decided to shift in a different direction to keep the sound from going stale.

How did you experience those years after the second album came out, when the vaporwave scene evolved into several different directions?

It felt like vaporwave and future funk had gone into split directions, with vaporwave becoming more ambient and more focused on the 80s nostalgia, and future funk being more based on disco and house. There were lots of people popping up on SoundCloud who were trying to imitate the early vaporwave sound. I figured I didn’t want more clones to compete with, so I would try to stick with whatever was on the horizon. Future funk still had yet to become as popular as it was. That was before it had turned into this anime-inspired neon thing that it is now.

Did you also notice a general vibe shift in the vaporwave community around that time? I think there was a lot of gatekeeping, infighting and snark that resulted from a new generation coming in, attracted by trends like Simpsonwave.

I would agree. I never really experienced much of the snark, but as I said, I did see a lot of the imitations of one another popping up, and people hopping on the vaporwave bandwagon, trying to create their own sound. I think that’s what caused people to become defensive of it. Maybe they had felt like their scene was being taken over by newcomers who wanted a hand in this, in the same way that I had felt a few years prior, making the first Architecture in Tokyo album.

When and why did you decide to leave the scene behind?

I was about 21 or 22 when I decided to stop making vaporwave and future funk. I felt this very strong push to make music that was original, that wasn’t sample-based. I’d always had this feeling in the back of my mind. Vaporwave was R&B and city pop tracks slowed down and chopped up, and future funk was more or less disco edits. I wanted to make something that was more focused on just having an original sound, creating tracks almost completely from the ground up, instead of relying on big chunks of other songs to create them.

Sample-free vaporwave became a thing quite early though, with artists like Eyeliner or 2814.

Some of those early artists who were making sample-free vaporwave did inspire me. I’m glad you mentioned Eyeliner, because his albums like High Fashion Mood Music and BUY NOW were very influential on me leaving the vaporwave scene. Learning that those albums were made without any samples made me want to start making music that was kind of not relying on these big chunks of other people’s songs.

In 2020, you put out another Architecture in Tokyo compilation, Singles (2013-2018). Shortly after that release, you started the new project. Did you just want to clear the slate?

Yeah, kind of, and I had a lot of SoundCloud tracks that were just floating around on the internet without a proper home. I thought that I would wrap them up and put an end to the Architecture in Tokyo chapter for the time being and let myself start over with Young Muscle, creating UK bass and techno music. I still do toy with the idea of returning to vaporwave and future funk at one point though. I just haven’t felt the pull that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult to make those kind of tracks. So, time will tell.

Listening to the music you’ve been releasing as Young Muscle since 2021, I’m quite heavily reminded of someone like Skee Mask. What are your main inspirations and influences for it?

Skee Mask is definitely a big one. Lone was another huge influence on me, especially his EP Echolocations, and a bunch of other UK artists too. When I discovered Blawan’s Bohla EP on R&S, I was working a job in landscaping. I would clock in at the very beginning of the day and listen to that EP over and over and over, until the time that I was supposed to leave, and I did that for an entire summer. I would listen to that EP night and day, literally.

Do you still follow the vaporwave scene in any way, or still listen to any contemporary vaporwave-adjacent music that comes out?

Not really anymore. I did keep up with future funk for a while, but it seems like both vaporwave and future funk have become this bloated corpse, this parody of what it first was. I think it lost the reference point of being a parody of commercial capitalist culture, and now it’s just at this point where people are trying to make clout and money off of it.

Summer Paradise was just voted into Reddit’s Top 30 vaporwave albums of all time. Does it annoy you that people are still raving about those early records of yours, as simple as they were?

Not at all. It blows my mind that people are still interested in it. I do really appreciate all the love that it has gotten. I guess I just feel a bit disconnected from the things that I was making as a teenager and young adult.

What are your plans for the future, in terms of musical projects?

As I said, I would still like to return to Architecture in Tokyo one day. I do have some new material that I just haven’t put out yet. Around the time I was asked to play [the 100%] ElectroniCON [festival in 2023], I created some new original filter house tracks that have yet to see the light of day.

One of my friends, Ian, is a multi-instrumentalist, and he helped me create these funk-based tracks with original samples that don’t rely on any preconceived material. It would be nice to put out an EP or a collection, but I’d like to find a proper label home for it, as well as continuing the Young Muscle project.

I have another project called Skam, which is a reference to the UK label that Boards of Canada put out their early EPs on. That’s my side project for more abstract glitch, micro house, dub techno and other things that don’t necessarily fit in the club scene. So far I have recorded a bunch of demo tracks, but haven’t released them publicly yet.

Bonus Beats

Architecture in Tokyo’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Infinity Frequencies – Computer Decay (2014)

• Chuck Person – Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010)

• MediaFired™ – The Pathway Through Whatever (2011)

• Laserdisc Visions – New Dreams Ltd. (2011)

• Nmesh / t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – ロストエデンへのパス (The Path to Lost Eden) (2015)

• Saint Pepsi – Hit Vibes (2013)

• Luxury Elite – Fantasy (2013)

• 骷 [Skeleton] – Holograms (2010)

• S U R F I N G – Deep Fantasy (2012)

• 札幌コンテンポラリー (Sapporo Contemporary) – 情報デスクVIRTUAL (Jouhou Desk VIRTUAL) (2012)

Young Muscle’s All-Time Top 10 Albums

• Saint Pepsi – Hit Vibes (2013)

• Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner (2010)

• Laserdisc Visions – New Dreams Ltd. (2011)

• Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica (2011)

• Washed Out – Life of Leisure EP (2009)

• Boards of Canada – Music Has the Right to Children (1998)

• Lone – Echolocations EP (2011)

• Blawan – Bohla EP (2011)

• Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)

• Autechre – Amber (1994)

Scott might be relatively new to vaporwave, but he’s been involved in ambient music for decades. Since starting to record in the early 1990s, he’s been working across multiple subgenres from light and dark ambient, New Age and solo piano to avant-garde, noise and drone music, plunderphonics and sound collage. It’s not hugely surprising that he’s recently been exploring the most ambient-adjacent of all vaporwave subgenres – slushwave.

Diving into the 59-year old keyboardist’s discography can be daunting. To say he’s prolific or an avid collaborator would be understating the facts severely: On his Bandcamp, you will find almost 800 albums he’s been involved in. According to Discogs, he’s released around 550 solo recordings and appeared or been credited on another 250. Since 2023, the Geometric Lullaby label has been putting out his ‘slushy ambient’ music on vinyl and tape as well.

A lot of Scott’s music is improvised live in the studio, but he’s also creating fascinating pieces from layers of drones, choral samples and shortwave radio recordings, processing them with effects and overdubbing them with synths, making them sound like transmissions from another world, maybe an afterlife or even a place like the Backrooms, where distorted memories are stored indefinitely.

I wanted to find out more about this ultra-prolific ‘Ambient Hermit’ (that’s one of his aliases). The following conversation was conducted over several emails in early May 2026.

Scott, where did you grow up and where are you currently residing?

I grew up in Rhode Island before we moved to Florida in 1976. Went to college in North Carolina, graduate school in Ohio, then moved back to Florida for a while before moving to Texas and getting married. Now we live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we’ve lived since September of 2023.

Did you grow up in a musical household?

I’ve always been interested in music since I was a small child. I was a loner and not interested in sports like the rest of my family, so I always gravitated towards music.

My mother told me that when I was two years old, I ruined her Elvis collection by scratching the needle across the vinyl using a talking book record player that I had. It was a special device that played talking book records recorded by the library for the blind and physically handicapped. It had three speeds, 33, 16 and 8. I used to listen to other albums that my parents had at speed 8.

My parents got me a toy organ and drum set when I was six years old so I was always experimenting around with those, and I would spend hours in the basement of my Aunt Joanne’s home in Cape Cod playing on the piano.

I was inspired by a lot of strange sounds when I was a child. As an example, my dad used to work for IBM and in the 70s, he’d bring home cassette tapes of computer programs that he had written and I’d just play those on my cassette player, listening to the tones, static and sounds that would later be known for the noises a modem would make when connecting to the internet in the 90s.

What kind of music did you grow up on?

When I was a teenager in the 80s, I listened to a lot of pop music of the time – Bee Gees, Duran Duran, Planet P Project, Tonio K and Rush, but also the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix.

Did you learn instruments or get musical training? Did you play in bands throughout high school and college?

When I was in high school, I took a year of piano lessons and was also in the chorus. In college, I played drums in the band for a couple of years. When I was in graduate school in 1990, I took another year of lessons from a music student who taught me the scales and some playing technique.

After that, I took some lessons from a music professor who tried to teach me some classical pieces, but he didn’t like that I would go off the path and improvise, so I just left after a while.

Who were some of the formative artists and releases that got you particularly interested in electronic and ambient music?

My introduction to electronic music was in 1986 when I was listening to a program called Musical Starstreams. The host played some tracks by a band called Tangerine Dream, and I was immediately hooked, went out and got every album I could find. I was then also introduced to the music of Kitaro, Suzanne Ciani, Deuter, Jonn Serrie and Richard Burmer. Before that, I was into heavy metal – bands like Slayer, Morbid Angel, Obituary, et cetera.

It would be around ten years later that I would hear a sleep concert by Robert Rich and decide to try my own hand at ambient music for the first time. Those recordings became the album Times Escape which was published in 2013 on the weareallghosts label. Before that, I wrote mostly New Age music in the early 90s, inspired by some of the aforementioned artists. That collection was published as The Lost Early Archives.

From the liner notes: “These tracks were recorded between 1991 and 1997 including a rare rehearsal from 1985 when I was a senior at the Florida school for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine. (…) The tracks were recorded to cassette directly from my Ensoniq sq1 synthesizer. (…) I would play many of these songs in coffee houses, restaurants, a friends wedding in her backyard and even a mall or two.”

What effect did your blindness have on your musical education as well as your creative process?

I actually wanted to be a music major in college, but it was hard to find people who could read the music notation for me. And even though there is Braille music notation available, I found it impossible to interpret, so I just do everything from memory.

Your Bandcamp archive only goes back to 2013, when you were already in your mid-40s. What happened then that made you start releasing music regularly?

When I first started recording music in the early 90s, I used hardware and a cassette recorder. But I took a 17-year break from recording music and didn’t start up again until late 2012. There was the one-off piece I’d write here and there, but I couldn’t find a keyboard that I liked that didn’t have a touchscreen, so I just didn’t bother very much with any creative projects.

I purchased an Ensoniq TS12 from a dude on Craigslist which I used from 2012 until mid-2014, then I got a Roland FA-08 synthesizer after that, used it for six years, had to memorize the layout and count button clicks to get to menus because it didn’t have speech capability.

In 2020, I finally got Komplete Kontrol by Native Instruments, which has speech output, after some other blind friends of mine suggested that I try it. I was nervous to do so because I had heard horror stories about Windows updates wrecking people’s music production machines et cetera. After getting the midi controller and all the software, I was up and recording in Reaper in five days.

Since 2013, you’ve been extremely prolific, releasing hundreds of albums. Is most of it recorded live in the studio and released without much post-production?

Well, actually though there is a lot of music in that one-off improvisation, especially in the early days, a lot of my music now is multitrack and involves several layers of drones and other improvising. Some projects can get pretty complex and take a while to put together.

I think there is this misconception about artists who release a lot of material, like myself, that we publish every single thing we record. The reality, at least with me, is that I have hundreds of hours of music going back as far as 2014 that hasn’t been released yet. In fact, I know some artists who have over 2,000 albums on Bandcamp. [Scott currently has about 800 albums, ed. note]

If you had to point someone who’s new to your music to a handful of your releases for a start, which ones would that be and why?

A couple of my favorite ambient albums that I’m most proud of would be

• Theotokos [2019],

• Life Passes Slowly Unto Death [2020] and

• Journey of a Dying Girl [2021].

For people who like progressive rock, they may enjoy my cover of [Pink Floyd’s] echoes [2019].

For people who enjoy the Berlin School sound, they may like Dreaming the Timeless Dream (a Tribute to Edgar Froese) [2020].

In the last couple of years, you’ve also started making albums in a slushwave style. I’m interested – how exactly did you discover vaporwave and slushwave? What did you like about it?

I first discovered slushwave after hearing desert sand feels warm at night [one of the first artists who started making sample-free slushwave in 2019, ed. note]. I don’t even remember how I found him. Maybe it was a Pad Chennington video on YouTube?

I like the dreamy adagio quality of the music – it probably goes back to when I would listen to those records at speed 8 on that old talking book record player from when I was a kid.

In terms of other vaporwave artists, I like victory over death, known artiste and Paradise Of Yesterday. [You can find a list of Scott’s favorite vaporwave and slushwave albums at the bottom of this article, ed. note]

Many of your albums are self-released. In 2023, you started releasing through the vaporwave label Geometric Lullaby as well. So far you’ve released four albums with them, most recently Pastoralia and Fading Echoes of Tomorrow in 2026. Was that also about reaching a new audience?

It was partly about reaching a new audience, but I also like the music of the label and I was pleasantly surprised when Dennis [Mikula, founder of Geometric Lullaby, ed. note] said that he wanted to put my music on vinyl and later, cassette. I am honored that he has that much confidence in my music to make an investment like that.

Usually, most slushwave is sampled, but you’re using your own synth-based compositions, processing them in a slushwave style. Could you describe your creative process?

First of all, the reason my slushwave is sample-free doesn’t have to do with any moral notions about not using samples, I just don’t want to take the time to hunt for them.

So I record the music at regular speed first, then import that music into [Native Instruments] Komplete, play it maybe 4/5ths of an octave down and add additional reverb. [Scott is hereby referring to a technical process that changes the pitch and the speed of the original music, ed. note]

It’s really pretty simple, but even though there is simplicity involved, I’d rather be open about how I do things than to be one of those artists who says “it’s a secret” – yes, we even have those people in the ambient community, and it’s so annoying. It’s like those people who won’t share their recipes. Good food and music should be shared without limits or secrecy, it would be a better world were it so.

Have you connected with the online vaporwave community on Discord and the forums, or are you keeping away from that part of the scene?

I’m not a big fan of Discord, I haven’t figured out how to really engage with the app. I have a love/hate relationship with some technology and that is probably demonstrated by my lack of interaction with some communities.

I love email and always respond to people who reach out to me so it’s not that I don’t want to connect with people, I just don’t go for the whole “there’s an app for every platform” thing, I’d rather keep it simple with email, text and the occasional phone call.

Having said that, I love collaborating with people so I’m always up for improvising over anything that anyone might want to send me.

You’ve made a collaborative album with 818181 under the alias The Ambient Hermit. Tell me about the collaboration and the vision behind that project.

I heard her pre-slushed music for one of her Slushwave sets and thought it would be cool to run those tracks through the pretty complex effects chain I have set up for this side project.

I tried it out and liked the sound of it so I asked my friend Ingrid N, with whom I’ve had many collaborations over the last two and a half years, to help me come up with titles for the tracks. As much music as I have available, it can be difficult for me to come up with titles for everything. Though I’m not a big proponent of AI, especially when it comes to music, there are benefits to using it to help come up with narrative for a concept.

What’s the idea behind The Ambient Hermit, as opposed to the music you release under your real name?

That project is a bit different because it is pretty sample-heavy, using classical and sacred choral music of which I have an abundance of already.

Would you say you have hermit tendencies in real life?

Yes, I’m a stay-at-home dad and I am quite the introvert. I’ve always been pretty shy and not the best in social situations. So much of social interaction is visual at the outset, waving to people, eye contact et cetera. I have often wondered how many people assume that I’m rude because I didn’t return a wave or a visual gesture that I couldn’t see in the first place.

In 2025, you also kicked off a new series called Shortwave Nostalgia, of which you have so far released five parts. It contains samples of shortwave radio broadcasts that were run through a multitude of effects. Please talk about the concept behind it.

That series was based on my love for shortwave that I had as a child. My grandfather had a giant shortwave radio at his desk in the kitchen and I would play around with the dials just listening to whatever signals I was able to stumble upon, exploring the sounds, listening to all the different voices and being enamored with the static and other radio harmonics I'd hear as I scanned the channels.

What are you generally interested in outside of ambient and slushwave, in terms of music, art, films, other media?

I like classical music, progressive rock, some alternative and even some avant-garde.

I’m not one for watching much television but I do have my favorite TV shows form the 70s and 80s. The last show I binge watched was Cobra Kai.

What are you working on right now, anything you can tease?

Some of my future releases include two albums for the Advent season which were recorded in 2024, as well as a very special collaboration with Ingrid N to be released in early November.

I’ve also got albums planned for the first days of autumn and winter respectively, and there may be another slushwave album but I haven’t contacted Dan of Vivarium Recordings, since I just recently released Blessings of Time on that label.

From the liner notes: “Scott Lawlor continues his incredible streak of slushy ambient to soothe the soul on Blessings of Time, a mesmeric loop of cavernous voices in slow dance with gentle chimes and deep, rich guitar swells. We are also treated to a peek behind the curtain, offered an alternative take on the composition featuring pre-slush ideas and a downtempo atmosphere. This contrast, this magic spun from tempo manipulation and patient modulation, itself proves to be a blessing of time.”

Listen to Scott Lawlor on Bandcamp

Scott Lawlor’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• 818181 – SLUSHWAVE 2024

• 818181 – SLUSHWAVE 2025

• u v . e x e – 君がいないもうひとつのクリスマス [slushwave christmas special III] (2025)

• International Telecom – ＨｏｌｉｄａｙＴｒａｎｓｍｉｓｓｉｏｎ (2022)

• Lost Colossus – Insomnia (2023)

• s u p e r m a r k e t 슈퍼마켓 – New Generation of Shopping (2015)

• Kid Mania – COLLATERAL MURDER (2020)

• Local News – Ghost Broadcast (2013)

• Stefan Dowsing – Beyond the Radiant Horizon (2026)

• Narcoleptic Choir – The Dream Beyond the Words (2026)

To fans of sample-based, experimental electronic music, he’s better known as the founder of the popular vaporwave label Geometric Lullaby, and as a producer under aliases like Electric Specter or runescape斯凱利. Some people believe that he is also the creative force behind the mysterious Begotten project, which he’s never actually confirmed.

Dennis just seems to be into creating this kind of mystery and lore for his bands and projects. When Ghost Bath released their debut album in 2014 on a Chinese label, they were initially believed to be a band from Chongqing, China – it was only later revealed they were actually from Minot, North Dakota.

These days, the 35-year old Mikula is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. While Ghost Bath blew up in the metal world and toured the globe, he’s managed to turn Geometric Lullaby into a key hub of the vaporwave scene. It’s become the label home for Telepath, arguably still one of the biggest artists of the scene, and he’s released albums by other established figures like 猫 シ Corp., Nmesh, 식료품groceries, MindSpring Memories or desert sand feels warm at night. Many of Geo’s releases sell out instantly, and the label is known for high quality and reliability.

Just home from an U.S. tour with Ghost Bath, Dennis generously took an hour out of his busy schedule to talk to me, so I got to hear some fascinating stories about his upbringing and his musical journey, as well as terrorizing sleeping bandmates on the tour van by playing vaporwave all night and bonding with Telepath over hot Chinese chicken dishes and 90s VHS rips from Hong Kong.

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You grew up in what I imagine to be a rather rural area, North Dakota. What was that like?

Well, I was in this rural area, but my dad was in the Air Force. On an Air Force base, there’s people from all over the country and even from all over the world, so it’s a bit more diverse than just growing up in a farmland. I was always touring too, even with my previous band before Ghost Bath, so I traveled a lot and stuff, but I lived in North Dakota for a long time and even went to college in Minot.

What music did you actually grow up on?

I’d say two main things. One was worship music, because my parents are Christian. I was a Christian till I was 15 or 16, but I still enjoyed the worship music after that – not for the message, but for the chord changes and the melodies. I can hear that influence in my metal stuff, because it’s really emotionally driven.

On my own, I would always listen to the alternative rock station. They would play 90s grunge stuff and alt rock: Sugar Ray, Vertical Horizon, stuff like that. I would have the radio in my bed when I was going to sleep and listen to it and picture myself playing the guitar to it, pretending I was on the stage playing the songs.

At one point you must have turned towards harsher sounds...

Growing up in North Dakota, we had a pretty good post-hardcore scene. At a certain age, I would listen to The Chariot, Norma Jean, Fear Before the March of Flames, all that kind of stuff, but then I would also listen to metal. I found Dimmu Borgir early on, this metal band from Norway. I would watch MTV Headbangers Ball, and I’d find a bunch of stuff on there, like Cannibal Corpse, even foreign artists and groups – if it was in a different language, for some reason I really liked that.

Was that why you invented your own language when you started Ghost Bath?

That came from being influenced by Sigur Rós. I was in a post-rock band called I, Apparatus before Ghost Bath, so when I wanted to do the black metal thing, it’s just natural that some of my post-rock, post-hardcore influences is just part of how I write.

There clearly was a post-rock to black metal pipeline in the late 2000s, early 2010s. I knew people that were listening to Sigur Rós, Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed! You Black Emperor, then got really into Wolves In The Throne Room, Deafheaven and Liturgy. Have you actually ever seen that that Noisey documentary about one-man bands from 2012? That became quite influential at the time of that shift.

Oh yeah, that influenced me too. Well, let me rewind. When I was in the post-rock band before Ghost Bath, we were already touring and really trying to make it, and we actually put out this really good record which didn’t go anywhere. I’m thinking, “We’re not gonna put out a better one than this,” so I quit the band and just went to college.

I was living in a house with six, seven other college guys. It was insane. I have a lot of stories about that time. But halfway through college, I was living there in the basement room, and then it flooded, so I moved back home with my parents. At some point after that, I guess I saw that documentary, and I was like, “Oh, I can just still make music and do it on my own.” That’s around the time I started Ghost Bath.

As someone involved in the post-hardcore and then the black metal scene, how did you actually discover vaporwave?

The first thing I found definitely was Floral Shoppe, and I found it on YouTube somehow, liked the thumbnail, clicked on that, and I was like, “Oh, this is really weird.” I started listening to it more and more, so I guess I kind of liked it. I started collecting tapes and posting in the Vaporwave Cassette Club on Facebook.

I remember Secret Schools – he’s a designer I’ve worked with before – reached out to me there. I sent him an album I’d made but never released, it was me just trying to make Floral Shoppe with my own samples. He found that interesting, and he was like, “Let’s have a phone call about vaporwave.” I was like, “What? Who does that?” So then he actually called me on the phone and explained vaporwave to me, and he told me, “You got to check out Death’s Dynamic Shroud’s I’ll Try Living Like This [from 2015, ed. note].”

So I checked that out, and that’s what really sold me on it, because to me it was super artistic and a little dark and abstract, and that’s what I really like in music. When I’d heard that, that’s when I made the first Electric Specter album. I was like, “Everyone’s slowing stuff down. I’m going to speed it up, and it’s going to sound all icy and cold.”

That record came out on Business Casual in 2017, right?

Yeah, Business Casual was one of the first labels I followed. I downloaded the whole discography for $1, and I was listening through all so many different albums. I still don’t think I’ve gotten through them all, but I sent my album to John [Zobele alias christtt of Business Casual, ed. note], and he was interested in it, which was awesome of course.

The first Ghost Bath album had come out in 2014, so the band already got some traction at that point. How did you find the time to start another career as a vaporwave producer and label owner?

At the time, I actually lived in Iowa, an even smaller town called Buffalo Center. It was on a farm, and the town had just [a couple of hundred] people, so I was just by myself in a house with a lot of time on my hands. I was doing the Ghost Bath thing, and we were starting to get tours and stuff, but I was also collecting vaporwave cassettes and making my own vaporwave albums. I made the runescape斯凱利 album and the second Electric Specter, and I couldn’t find a label, so I made a Bandcamp to put all my different projects in one spot. And I’m calling it Geometric Lullaby, which originally was the name of another Electric Specter album I was gonna do.

Did you have friends who were also into vaporwave? Did you try to get your bandmates into it?

None of my friends listen to vaporwave, and none of my bandmates. I’ve tried. I’ve shown it to them, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, this is cool,” but they don’t really listen to it on their own or anything. I don’t think they ever really got into it.

I’m pretty nocturnal, I stay up overnight, so when we’re on tour, I’m always the night driver. Everyone would be sleeping in the van, while I’m just blasting some weird vaporwave stuff. I get into a hypnotic state when I’m driving, and I just play whole albums. My band members were just so confused because we would be on a highway in the middle of Iowa, and they would wake up to some eccojams in the middle of the night. I can imagine it’d be kind of weird. (laughs)

As a collector on the Facebook group and a vaporwave producer, did you connect with other vaporwave artists and collectors online?

I mean, you would post and comment in the Vaporwave Cassette Club, but it was mostly about selling and buying tapes. Other than Secret Schools, I just became good friends with Jeff [Cardinal, who’s known as] VAPERROR. I remember talking to him a bunch on there. I also remember seeing David Russo [alias HKE] from Dream Catalogue having drama in there a bunch. He was like some mysterious figure, he just had some screenshot from this Hong Kong movie [as his avatar, ed. note], and I was like, “Who is this guy?”

But the main thing I remember is when you would buy releases back then, it was kind of a crapshoot whether you would actually receive them. A bunch of people weren’t shipping stuff. It was kind of sketchy. Everyone would always be complaining, like, “I didn’t get my tape, I want a refund, blah blah blah.” That was a little bit of a catalyst like, you know, “If I put out tapes, I will actually ship them.”

Was that the idea behind starting Geometric Lullaby?

Yeah, so the basic idea was just to be reliable and professional, make sure everything gets shipped out, and then just have a cool package that looks like I actually put my care into it. I didn’t want to just toss the cassette in a box and ship it off.

In the house in Iowa that I lived on the farm, I had this room where I set up a foldout table, and at first I would order 50 cassettes at a time. I thought it was a cool idea to do little extras, so I put a tarot card into each case. I also loved the obi strip idea, I’d never seen that before in vaporwave, so I did one with every single cassette. Originally I had a little crystal in there too, but it was kind of sketchy because it could damage the case during shipping, so I eventually stopped doing that. I also did a resealable sleeve to keep it in just to keep it safe, because I was a big collector myself. I wanted it to be a premium little package.

You also seem to love lore, fantasy and speculative fiction. Just looking at the stuff you did with the Begotten project for example, those little horror stories you wrote for the liner notes. Where does that come from?

I’ve always been a big reader, I’ve always read fantasy growing up, like my dad did, so he got me into it. I read a ton of books, mostly epic fantasy. What I like about albums is the whole package, not just this song or that single – I like the album art, the titles, the music and the storytelling together. I think it’s super interesting to play with as well. I could show you the same album with two different covers and you’re gonna perceive it way differently. Vaporwave allows you to do that, and I do that a lot, just recontextualizing things with different titles and artwork – with Ghost Bath too. The lyrics could be super dark, but the music could sound really happy, and that contrast is really weird and interesting to me.

Is Geometric Lullaby still essentially a one-man operation?

I run it, I’m in charge of everything. I do have some people help out here and there. I have a guy who makes all my YouTube videos, and I have one guy running TikTok, because I have no idea how to do that. Sometimes I’ll commission a designer or an artist. Other than that, I do everything else.

But the label has grown significantly since those early days, hasn’t it?

Yeah, even my first releases would pretty much all sell out on day one, which surprised me. I didn’t know what to expect, so when I first opened the label I had no credit. I got a credit card that had a $500 limit, so I could buy the cassettes and then I’d sell that out, and I’d have enough to buy the next release, and they were selling out right away.

People would basically get mad at me for artificial scarcity, but I just didn’t know what to risk. I couldn’t guess, “Oh, this is gonna sell 200 in one hour.” I didn’t know. When I made the jump to vinyl, it was scary, because it’s way more expensive to deal with. Luckily Jeff [VAPERROR] helped me out, because he had done vinyl before. I think my first vinyl was MindSpring Memories’ GATEWAY 2000. I really liked that album, and it sold well. From there, it just took off.

Back then you could put out any album and people would buy it, because not a lot of people were doing vaporwave vinyl. It wasn’t as big as it is now, with as many labels and stuff. I could even take a chance on more obscure artists. It sounds weird now, but Desert Sand hadn’t really blown up yet, so I could take a chance on someone like that, put it out, and everyone would just buy it. Now it’s so saturated that you have to be more careful about what you pick, because any given Friday there’s going to be minimum 10 different vinyl records coming out.

What about your own vinyl collection, how big is it now?

I keep two of everything I put out, so it’s accumulated quite a lot. But I try to be very strict with what I collect, because you can go crazy and start buying all kinds of stuff. It’s a really weird mix: I specifically collect vaporwave and depressive suicidal black metal [DSBM]. Because if I went into just black metal, it would be way too much.

What’s your process in finding new music to release?

Right now I just have like so many releases lined up that I haven’t really done that in a while, but usually, as far as demos coming in, maybe one in 50 will catch my eye. It’s not very often. It’s usually either an artist I already know, and I want to put out something that they’ve already had out, or I want something new from them. Sometimes I’ll go on Bandcamp and just search tags until I find something I like – that’s more for cassette releases and box sets, I can’t do that for vinyl nowadays. That’s just pretty much albums that I know from artists that I know, which for some reason never got pressed on vinyl.

Do you look at metrics in terms of deciding whether to put something out?

I mean, I’ve looked at Vapor Memory, so anything bigger on there that hasn’t gotten a vinyl release, I might look at it. But even if it’s big, I also have to like it. I don’t want to put out something that I don’t enjoy just because it’s big. For example, I don’t really do future funk stuff because I just don’t listen to that, it’s not really for me.

Is Geometric Lullaby a slushwave label now?

I’ve definitely went more in the slushwave, ambient direction. Before I was a little more open to stuff. It was still only stuff that I liked, but it was a little more all over the place. I think with so many labels now, I want to have more of a vision, more of a focus in the space. I did a few Barber Beats things, but my label is now more known for darker slushwave, ambient stuff, and it just helps build that audience.

For me, it’s been taking over where Dream Catalogue left off. You’re basically continuing their early work by putting out high quality, well-curated ambient vaporwave and slushwave music.

I can see that. They’re definitely a big influence, I liked a lot of the stuff that they were putting out. It definitely has a darker edge to it, which I also do. I’ve talked to David [Russo alias HKE of Dream Catalogue, ed. note] a little bit, when I first did the vinyl release of [Telepath’s] Antara. Since he was the first one to put it out, I kind of wanted permission. I know Luke [Telepath] still talks to him, so [David]’s like, “Oh yeah, you can put it out, just put the new Dream Cat logo on it.” It’s just a little meditating guy, so that’s on that record now. But I haven’t spoken to him since.

Telepath is now arguably the biggest artist on Geometric Lullaby. How did the connection come about?

Well, he’s always been one of my favorite artists. I really liked the mysterious aspect. I like that in black metal too. What really drew me to the DSBM genre was this band called Silencer: You didn’t know who he was or what he looked like, and he had all this lore and backstory to him. I feel like Telepath had that same thing, where the music’s emotional and soothing, but there’s this mystery and eeriness to it that really drew me in.

Anyway, I went to [100%] ElectroniCON 2 in L.A. [in 2019, ed. note], and I rented a car, and then Jeff [VAPERROR] hit me up – he was like, “Hey, you want to come hang out with me and Telepath?” So I picked them up and we went to a Chinese restaurant, and I started talking to Luke [Telepath]. I remember we connected over both really liking Szechuan chicken. At the end we exchanged numbers, and I said, “If you ever want to do a release or anything, just hit me up.”

More than a year went by, maybe even a few years, I don’t remember. One day I’m at the mall and I get a call, I look at my phone and it says “Telepath”. I’m like, “What is happening?” He’s just randomly calling me out of the blue. We had a long conversation, probably an hour. He wanted to do vinyl for Beyond Reality and Antara. Those were the first two releases. I was super excited that I get to work with one of my favorite artists. I think everyone was surprised when they came out. I like surprising people.

Me and him actually connected on a lot of levels with our philosophy on art and music. We’ve had four-hour voice chat conversations regularly. I’ll send him things I’m working on, he’ll send me things he’s working on. We’re definitely friends now. He actually stayed at my house last year. He lives two hours from me – he’s in Ohio, and I’m in Pittsburgh –, so he came out to work on music together, but I was having this weird problem with brainfog, I was super exhausted, I couldn’t really think straight, so we didn’t get anything done. We just hung out mostly and watched a bunch of 90s VHS tapes from Hong Kong that he’s ripped and brought over.

Like, early Wong Kar-Wai films?

Underground stuff – no idea what it was. Some of it was really messed up, some of it was just super pretty, some was just random shots. I don’t know where he got this stuff. He said he has somebody over there that buys them and sends them to him.

That’s such a Telepath story.

Anyway, we just have a trust in each other now. He trusts me putting out his releases, and I love his music, so it kind of works out that way. Like me, he’s very prolific, he writes a ton of stuff when he’s inspired. Last year he was like, “I’m gonna do all these albums,” so we put out these four new records.

Aside from Telepath, which ones are the most successful releases on Geometric Lullaby? desert sand’s Dream Desert must be up there, right?

Yeah, that one blew up. I originally did that as a cassette box set, and then it’s my only four LP box. It had a bunch of problems though. The original box it was supposed to go in didn’t fit, so I had to pay for all new wrapped boxes. It’s super expensive, so that kind of sucked. But yeah, that blew up on Vapor Memory, I think it has millions of views. Secret Schools made that cover art, and I even did sweaters and T-shirts with that on it too. That was definitely a bigger one here.

Off the top of my head, I know that 슈​퍼​마​켓​Yes! We​’​re Open by 식료품groceries was one of, if not the biggest. The first Begotten album, (life cycle), was really big, the Towers record too. The Sewerslvt one was huge, even though it’s gone now, because they wanted me to take it down, and I don’t take rights from any artist. NEWS AT 11 and Palm Mall Mars [by 猫 シ Corp.] were really big, and Pharma by Nmesh was pretty big for me too.

I’m surprised to hear that Towers was such a big one. I always liked that album, ever since I discovered it in the pandemic, but it’s extremely mysterious to me.

See, that’s another one I just took a chance on, because nobody knew who Towers was, and it was early enough to where everyone was still just buying any vinyl. I did two different variants with three colors in it each. I wish I could do that nowadays, but it’s so expensive.

If you can tell, who was actually behind that project?

Oh yeah, it’s Imcopav, he’s done some other projects, and he plays live under his own name. Towers was a two-person thing, but the other guy in the project ghosted everyone completely, screwed Imcopav over and basically said, “You can’t even play live under this name anymore.” He just kind of went crazy. I don’t know what happened to that guy.

Are there any new artists out there that you’re really excited about?

Yeah, right now I’m really into 818181. I just did two cassettes for them, working on some more stuff with them. I really like their stuff. There’s a lot of good slushwave stuff out, like Illusionary and Nether, and Psicadence is really good. A lot of newer slushwave is what I’ve been looking at lately.

Any future projects you wanna tease?

In August we’re releasing a new Telepath album for Bandcamp Friday. What he did last year was a series of four, but this is apart from that, so it’s gonna be different. I have not heard any of it yet. He usually gets me stuff right up on the deadline, then I have to rush and put it together, so I can’t tell you anything about it, but it will be a new Telepath album, under the Telepath name.

Are you working on any music right now?

I am in the middle of the new Ghost Bath record. I’m putting together the tracks. That’s the main thing I’m working on. Most of my vaporwave stuff is anonymous, secret stuff, so I am working on vaporwave too, but I don’t really talk about it.

Discover Geometric Lullaby on Bandcamp

Dennis Mikula’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• death's dynamic shroud – I'll Try Living Like This (2015)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – 現実を超えて (2014)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – 永遠の愛 (2015)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – アンドロメダ (2014)

• 虛擬夢想廣場 – 一見鍾情 (2015)

• MindSpring Memories – GATEWAY 2000 (2018)

• 鬱 – ・薔薇綺麗躊躇網羅就職痙攣蝋燭鷹麟爨齉馕龘爨齉龘・ (Pink Album) (2020)

• 猫 シ Corp. – NEWS AT 11 (2016)

• Outer 神殿 – Hidden Empire (2017)

• desert sand feels warm at night – 夢の砂漠 [Dream Desert] (2022)

Like many of his peers, he was inspired by stumbling across random cues online – finding an Infinity Frequencies song in a forum post related to Backrooms lore, seeing a friend on Instagram posting a 猫 シ Corp. album, discovering the infamous Pad Chennington video, landing on the Signalwave Discord server and finally finding a global community of like-minded sample hunters.

Starting out with a Balkan take on classic genre tropes like old television transmissions, Strmi soon started using the signalwave template as an actual storytelling tool. His highly creative album concepts include the lost broadcast of a basketball game, an attempt at capturing the vibe of psychotherapy sessions, and the depiction of a night at the bunker as a kid during the Yugoslav Wars.

Even if it’s just a tiny online niche that knows about Strmi’s atmospheric sound collages yet, his conceptual works are already finding an immense amount of resonance in that community. However, Strmi isn’t resting on his laurels. Even if he’s been making this style of music for less than a year, he’s concerned about repeating himself and encourages himself and his community to constantly keep creating something new. Follow me into the restless mind of one of the biggest talents of the signalwave scene.

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You live in Serbia, did you grow up there as well?

Yeah, I grew up and still live in Belgrade, the biggest city in Serbia. It has two million residents, which is quite big for Balkan standards. I’d say I had a pretty normal childhood past the age of 13, after my parents’ divorce finally got settled and I moved in with my dad. Now, though, I live alone.

My parents weren’t really that much into music. My dad listened to some Hispanic music, and my mom was into Turbo-folk [popular Serbian style of music mixing traditional folk with pop and commercial techno, ed. note], so I didn’t resonate with her music much. But Belgrade is a really vivid city. There’s something going on everyday, not just on the weekends. I met a lot of great people here, music and non-music wise.

What type of music were you into as a teenager?

It started very bland with just radio and YouTube recommendations, so I was listening to really popular music. Eventually I started listening to rap. That was the first genre I tackled. For three years, I was really into hip hop, first just the mainstream stuff like Eminem, and then I started digging into more niche hip hop artists.

One of my favorite albums was Man On The Moon II by Kid Cudi, a hip hop album influenced by [psychedelic] rock, and with that I started to transition to other genres and more abstract music. I also have it on vinyl as well, so it has a special place for me even if I don’t listen to it anymore.

I started listening to everything – ambient, jazz, progressive metal, trip-hop, drum’n’bass. It wasn’t like I had a father who was a metal fan, so I’d become a metal fan. I had to build my own music taste. I had to listen for myself to learn what I like. Some of my friends now are in a hardcore band, so I discovered hardcore going to their venues and listening to their music. I’m still very open in terms of genres I’m listening to.

What about musical training? Did you learn any instruments as a kid?

When I was in seventh grade, my mother encouraged me to learn how to play guitar. I got some lessons for about a year, but it was pretty pointless, since I wouldn’t ever play outside of the lessons. Now I’ve started playing bass. I’m all self-taught though. I’m playing in a math rock/mathcore band with some friends now. It will take time, because I’m fairly new to this and they’re also still new, but a bit better than me already. It will be a process, but I really want to focus on this band in the future.

When and how did you first discover vaporwave?

At first I discovered random YouTube mixes, with [thumbnail covers of] futuristic cars driving into a sunset. I also heard of Macintosh Plus, just who she was and the famous song [“Lisa Frank 420”, ed. note], but the first actual encounter with vaporwave was when I discovered Infinity Frequencies. I was not a very social kid at the time. It was post-pandemic, and everyone still stayed inside a lot. I was a big fan of Backrooms, and I was checking all the descriptions in the forums. That’s where I stumbled across “A Faint Signal”, and I was so amazed by it. I didn’t even know what samples were, I had zero musical knowledge. It just sounded very impressive to me. At the time, I was still listening to rap, so it was this weird foreshadowing.

For some reason I didn’t explore Infinity Frequencies’ discography at the time. I just went back to listening to other music for a while – metal, jazz, trip-hop and so on. Around early 2025, I stumbled across vaporwave again and started looking more deeply into it. One of my friends posted News At 11 [by 猫 シ Corp., ed. note] on Instagram. I was impressed – like, “Wow, a 9/11 vaporwave concept album, I want to hear this.”

And then I came across a video that probably everyone knows, the Pad Chennington signalwave video. That one actually brought a lot of people to the genre. I watched it three times in a row, and it’s an hour-long video. At the time, I already was making ambient and trip-hop music in FL Studio. I knew how to make vaporwave when I stumbled across signalwave but I didn’t know what they were actually sampling.

On your Spotify profile, there’s only one EP called Druwork. It sounds completely different from anything you have on Bandcamp. It’s not signalwave, more trip-hop adjacent I’d say, quite breakbeat-heavy and funky. Is it sampled music as well?

Yeah, everything on that is sampled. Nothing is played live on that actual album, but I did perform it live with some friends last year – one played drums, another one played guitar, and I did all the rest. I originally made this album just for myself to listen to at home. I just make music all the time, and I listen to it all day. One day I felt like finishing this EP, and then I did that live event, and it turned out really awesome. Over 220 people came out that night. I am still to this day impressed how many people came. But right now I feel I’m kind of past that project already, it’s basically a closed chapter to me.

Can you try to describe what drew you particularly into signalwave? What did you like about it?

I like the ambience, I like the aesthetic, I like that it’s about forgotten media. I’m not super fond of the Japanese aesthetic though, because it’s been overdone for ten years. Personally I wouldn’t do that anymore. I would want people to go outside of their comfort zone. I want the signalwave scene to become even more experimental.

I’m a very conceptual person. I read and write a lot of fiction. So I’m very into concept albums, not just listening to them but making them as well. Not just bashing out five songs that sound similar, but making up an actual storyline around it. I was drawn into signalwave because there aren’t any limits to the genre. I look at it not even as music, more as audioplays. I can sample anything and create little audio dramas. On my album The Night of March 24th, at one point there’s 30 seconds of just people packing up their stuff. That wouldn’t make much sense in many other music genres.

Which artists or releases outside of Infinity Frequencies and NEWS AT 11 have influenced you the most?

CT57’s Road To Nowhere is an obvious one, TV2’s [1450 KHz at] Broken Grove too. Those inspired me a lot. There’s another album called 2 Million something by S.N.R.T.M. – it’s a Moroccan signalwave album. When I saw that, I was like, “Okay, I’ll make a Serbian signalwave album, just to represent my culture.” That would become Dnevnik. It’s the first signalwave album I released. I didn’t even have a Bandcamp at the time, I had zero followers, but I put so much work into it. Searching for the right samples, I even asked my friends to ask their parents about old Serbian media. I was using game shows, children’s programs, jingles, everything. It’s just how I work – I dig really deep.

Originally I just wanted to make this one album with Serbian samples, and then continue making other music. When I finished it, I remember I sent a message in the Signalwave Discord server saying, “This will be my only album ever.” That was ten months ago, and since then I’ve released ten albums. (laughs)

It’s not even been a year, but you’re already getting a lot of traction in the community. When I asked around on the Discord server about young talents to interview for my series, your name immediately came up, even from a couple of really established producers.

I feel so honored! I don’t even care about being popular, I just want my music to resonate with people. Even by the third album, people were already hyped for my music, since I had a more theatrical approach of announcing albums. Some have also commented on how well my albums resonate with the concepts sonically. I have to say I am quite a perfectionist. I build a new chain of effects for each album and try to change my approach on every release, because I really want them to sound different from each other, depending on the concept.

Are you engaging with the online signalwave community a lot?

Yes, I am very engaged. I hype people up, especially if they release experimental or conceptual albums. I’m very open with praising people and supporting the community, because without it I would have never gotten the traction that I did. I think it’s just important to support the community you are in. A lot of people in music are so fixated on building their own popularity, so they forget about the community that built them, but to me, that feels like betrayal, as if you’d betray a friend who was there since the beginning. Also wanna shout out the Channel 0 comp since its the community of new artists that also helps push me and praise me, so big thanks to them.

Going back to your album concepts, how do you actually come up with them?

For each album, I write these essays in my notes. I write down quite a lot for each album. There’s a whole essay for each album I made, except for Dnevnik, because it doesn’t really have a concept, and The Balkan TV Cycle has just a bit of concept, but not a very special one. But generally, I sit down and write a story – the concepts do take up a lot more time than people think, more than the music itself –, then I collect some visuals, and I start making anchor songs, that’s what I call them. So I make a song, and I’m basically like, “Okay, I want this album to sound like this song.” It’s mostly a certain emotion that the song evokes. For Sessions, I had three anchor songs for example, since I wanted three different emotions evoked on the project.

The Balkan TV Cycle is your longest album – it’s 150 songs that run for over three hours.

(laughs) That album was a nightmare to make. I wanted to exclusively feature Serbian and other Balkan media, but there’s just not that much content online, whereas for Japanese media, you’ll find millions of YouTube videos. I’d discovered some archives, a lot of ripped Balkan vinyls. It was a tedious process. I just came home from school, sat down and made 10 to 15 songs a day for a month. Finding 150 good Balkan samples is hard. I wanted it not to be monotone or stale, so I mixed a lot of different genres on the album.

A fans’ favorite is definitely Sessions. I really like that one too, and I think it was the album that introduced me to you as an artist.

It’s an important album to me, because I’ve been going to psychiatry since I was very young. It was a recurring thing in my life. Emotionally, I was always in that place – yet that place still feels so unknown. The album is trying to capture that liminal feeling of therapy sessions – somewhere between “I feel heard” and “I don’t feel heard.” That’s why it needed three anchor songs, because it captures so many different emotions. It’s a bit happy, a bit sad, just like a session. I wanted that album to resonate with people who had the same experience as me. It’s definitely inspired by Infinity Frequencies and the Backrooms, because I always wanted to make a “liminal” album, but I didn’t just want to copy-paste the same feeling. I think I did a pretty decent job.

One of my favorites in your catalog is Game That Never Aired. How did you come up with that strange concept?

Well, in Serbia, NBA games run at 3am in the night [due to the time difference, ed. note]. My dad and I used to joke, like, “Imagine waiting for 3am, and then a game disappears.” So when I started making vaporwave albums, I thought, “Maybe I can make this into something.”

The Night of March 24 is another really interesting one, because it’s autobiographical. It basically tells the story of the night when NATO started bombing Serbia in 1999, and how you suddenly had to hide in a bunker with your family.

This one was actually inspired by NEWS AT 11. It’s also more of an audio play, it’s not even that much music. I wanted it to sound as scary as it was back then here in Serbia. I wanted to raise awareness about it, because a lot of people don’t even know this actually happened. It’s not to point fingers or blame. No one’s responsible for this except for the higher-ups [in politics and the military, ed. note]. I just wanted to use my platform to raise awareness about an event that lasted 72 days, but impacted my country for another 30 years.

This album is the perspective of a kid in that time, because this came very abruptly. We knew about the tensions, but we didn’t know this would happen on a random Wednesday. So this little kid is watching TV, nothing unusual, and then suddenly his whole world falls apart, you know, now he’s packing up, the news running in the background, now he’s outside with his family, and you hear the sirens, the bombs. The last song is actually the longest one, the bunker song, and it’s five minutes of just ambient drones with these bunker sound effects. I tried to capture that feeling of not knowing if and when you will get out of there. There’s no ending to this album. The kid ran away to the bunker, and it doesn’t know if tomorrow will even come.

You just released a trilogy of albums called Act I: Encounter, Act II: Sanctuary, and Act III: Graveyard. What’s this about?

I’ve been very fascinated with the idea of a multi-album concept for a long time, and when I had some free time before my university exams, I started to conceptualize this series of three albums. So there’s an unknown, nameless guy, he’s watching TV, and a girl appears, she talks to him by switching channels to words. It’s like Bumblebee from Transformers when he switches the radio to talk. The first album is about that confusion, when you’re taken into this vivid world of an unknown entity.

The second album, Sanctuary, is about the place where they live, this cartoon world that’s stuck between TV channels. Entities have formed from old TV characters and cartoon animals, and they live in these cartoonish mythical places. So this girl actually managed to break the bounds of that cartoon city and contact the outside world – and she shows this guy this place of imagination. It’s all a bit glitchy, because it’s not supposed to be there, as it’s all made of media that wasn’t properly decomposed, and you’re seeing this world of entities using stuff from old TV ads to make their sanctuary beautiful. The whole album is just them walking through this sanctuary, going to a mountain, seeing the sunset.

Then comes Graveyard, and it’s the realization that it can’t last forever, and that the sanctuary energy is just going to be used by a new program, and every sanctuary gets destroyed whenever a new program is made. You’re watching this beautiful vivid place disintegrate and literally black out in front of you. It’s a horrific scene. Plus, the main character actually developed a friendship with the girl, and she knew the whole time this would happen, she just never told him.

You basically wrote this piece in the form of a classic drama in three acts?

Yeah. Since the whole concept is a theater play and I very much love theater, you can even hear the audience clap at the end, like a curtain call. There’s also a lot of hidden lore in the downloads. I left notes, I left pictures, so there’s actually a lot more to dig into.

The whole concept is kind of an allegory. I’ll give you one explanation. So the girl is a vaporwave album that expanded the borders of vaporwave, the sanctuaries are vaporwave’s microgenres, and the graveyard is a burnout, a warning that without enough evolution, the genre will eventually collapse on itself.

It all starts with you stumbling across an album that’s actually “the girl” / “the entity” – it could be any album, could be Macintosh Plus, could be Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night, whatever. You’re coming into this world, and you’re starting to explore things. Every sanctuary you come across is a microgenre, and every entity that lives there is a producer, and they all make their sanctuaries so beautiful by using old, half-decomposed media. So you walk around Bandcamp, you walk around YouTube. And then comes the graveyard. This is a slow burn of a person getting bored of the same stuff, a warning that vaporwave will stagnate and die if not pushed forward. I want to encourage people to experiment, to do something interesting, or else vaporwave will collapse into itself.

You know, I really love vaporwave and the community, and I want to inspire people and show people how beautiful it is, but also how fragile it can be if you just stay in the comfort zone. I don’t want another sea of Japanese media, when you can sample anything in signalwave. I don’t even see signalwave as a genre, more like a tool. For me, it’s a tool to make these little plays, these little audio dramas. Every album is its own universe, its own experience to immerse yourself in.

I never want to stop making vaporwave, I want to keep pushing and reinventing myself. I hope everyone realizes that I put much thought into my work and my concepts. I plan everything quite methodically – every song, every album title, every image. Nothing is random in my music. But it’s not even about myself being the greatest or whatever. I just want vaporwave to live on, maybe in a different form, and evolve. My only goal is to be the ignition for that change. Whenever I read about a cool concept or a great interview, it makes me want to be better as well. And whenever I watch a really good bass player, it inspires me to pick up my bass and play. That’s the impact I want to have on people too.

You haven’t done any collaborations with other artists yet, have you?

No, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do them. I just have a very particular workflow, and some of these visions are really emotional to me. I mean, an album like Sessions just couldn’t be a collab album. But I’m definitely open to collaborations. We’d just need to find the right concept. Actually, I had a concept collab album planned with M1 t e l e v i z i o, but we never did it. Both of us just had a lot of work and other priorities in life. It would have been an interesting one, for sure. He’s Hungarian, and I’m Serbian, so you can probably imagine what the concept would have been. I don’t want to spoil it though, because maybe we’ll still get to do it one day.

At this point, is music more of a hobby or an actual career option for you?

Actually, I don’t want music ever to be my career. I fear it will lose its essence. If I have to make an album to pay my rent, it will probably be shit, and I won’t like it. So far I’ve made every album because I really wanted to. I’ve made so many albums in those couple of months, but if I ever don’t feel like making music for three months, I won’t force myself, because anything that would come out of it wouldn’t be genuine, and I don’t want to make non-genuine music. So music is definitely more of a hobby. I don’t want it to be a job, because then I will look at it as a job, not as art. I want to get a normal job – I study psychology, so I’d like to work in psychology – and then do music on the side.

Listen to Strmi on Bandcamp

Strmi’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Nmesh – Dream Sequins® (2014)

• Hallmark 87 – Quiet Storms (2022)

• CT57 – Road to Nowhere (2024)

• 猫 シ Corp. – NEWS AT 11 (2016)

• death’s dynamic shroud.wmv – DERELICTメガタワ (2014)

• Infinity Frequencies – Between two worlds (2018)

• Dreamcastle™ – Lego Castle: 1979-98 (2024)

• Chuck Person – Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010)

• S.N.R.T.M. – 2M القـنـاة الثـانـية

  (2023)

• desert sand feels warm at night – 新世界の弟子たち [new world disciples] (2021)

The mastermind behind the label, the Ukrainian (now Paris-based) artist Tim Six, clearly isn’t a newbie to underground DIY music. Starting out in Kyiv’s drone and noise scene in the mid-2000s, he made acoustic, ritualistic drone music as Creation VI. Since discovering vaporwave in the early 2010s, he’s been exploring different styles from classic slush to new-age-ish, solarpunk-inspired ‘naturewave’.

I spoke to Tim about his two-decades long journey through ambient music and his move from the dark, dystopian, doom-laden sounds of his beginnings to a more hopeful, bright, renewable-energy-powered vision of the future.

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Where are you from, and where have you lived over the years?

I’m originally from Crimea. I spent my childhood there, then went to university in Kyiv, lived there for ten years. At some point, I started bouncing around between Crimea, Kyiv and St. Petersburg. Around 2016, I moved to St. Petersburg. I found a scene of like-minded people and fellow geeks there. It’s such a diverse, multi-cultural, multi-genre city – St. Petersburg is really the cultural capital of Russia, while Moscow is the business capital.

When this full scale invasion [of Ukraine] happened, I was still in Russia. I’m Ukrainian, my wife is Russian, and we just had our kid. We immediately left for Paris, because my wife had already worked there, and that’s where we’re still living right now.

Did you grow up in a musical household?

My dad is a school teacher, and he started teaching in the early 80s. This was during Soviet Union times, pre-perestroika, and there was a lot of illegal music circulating among high school teachers. They were actually exchanging reel-to-reels back then, because cassette tapes were still kind of pricey. They were copying all these Western records, often imported from Eastern Germany, like Pink Floyd and stuff.

We had a bit of musical diversity at home – some Soviet records, some pop music, but we also had Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre on reel-to-reel. My earliest memory of music is probably listening to Zoolook on my dad’s huge headphones. We were also enjoying Baltic space rock like [Latvian band] Zodiac, I guess that’s left a trace.

Did you learn any instruments as a kid?

I played some guitar in high school, and then I just started making music on my own. I started doing the vocals in a metal band. It was doom metal, black metal and grindcore as well. I was really into that type of music throughout high school and even the first years of university.

Until then, I’d wanted my music to be as fast, brutal and extreme as possible, but suddenly it just changed to be the exact opposite – really slow and minimal, but still heavy guitar music. I discovered drone music and ambient – Brian Eno, Terry Riley and the whole minimalist movement. I got really into that and the so-called British esoteric underground – Coil, Psychic TV, stuff like that. A lot of influences were colliding, and I was trying to do something in between. Sounded really shitty at first though. (laughs)

This was all done with acoustic instruments?

Yeah, I didn’t get into playing any synthesizers until much later, so all my early stuff under the Creation VI name was done with just voice, guitar, flutes, some other acoustic instruments processed with effects in Ableton, and tape loops. I was basically doing musique concrète, manipulating the sounds of the real world. I didn’t have the skills to do electronics properly, so I was relying on manipulation of guitar and voice, which is what I knew. When I started releasing albums, people would ask me, “What kind of synth does that deep, heavy drone?”, and I would say, “Oh, that’s just my voice pitched down three octaves.”

Were you part of a scene in Kyiv at the time, in the mid- to late Aughts?

Yeah. This was still pre-social media, pre-Bandcamp. I had MySpace and would meet some people through that, but there was a local community mostly around guitar music, like stoner, hardcore and metal stuff. I remember we had a doom metal internet forum called Just Doom, and I was the admin of the drone subforum.

There weren’t many gigs though. Obviously there were metal gigs, but no one wanted to hear drone music – people would just get bored. I played my first gig in 2012, at a dance festival in a squat in Lviv [in Western Ukraine, ed. note], and it was pretty cool. I played at the very end, deep into the night, and people were laying down on the floor, tripping out completely. Afterwards I was getting invited to more shows, because people realized that live drone music is actually a thing.

When I moved to St. Petersburg, the drone scene there was on a different level. It had been happening since the 90s, so there would be gigs in public galleries and all kinds of festivals. It was way more accepted in general. You had this sound museum right in the city center, downtown in the tourist area; it was called Experimental Sound Gallery at first. We would play there every week, whereas in Kyiv, you still had to persuade people that it’s actually worth it.

Did you go to university to study music?

No, astrophysics. (laughs) But I didn’t make a career out of that. Today, my life is all about music. I’m running the label, doing artwork, mastering and mixing, playing live –all kinds of stuff really.

When did you first learn of vaporwave?

Around 2010, when the drone forum started dying out, I started running a blog about drone and dark ambient music. Tumblr was happening in parallel to the blog network, those were the early days of social media, and I saw this seapunk thing popping up there first. I didn’t really connect it with music though.

As I’d been part of the drone and noise scene, I was already listening to James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, the stuff they did as The Skaters. I’m still friends with Spencer, he’s been a really big influence on what I do. He wasn’t ever associated with vaporwave, but he was doing noisy psychedelic music, which was quite often sampled as well. You just didn’t immediately hear that it was sampled.

Skeleton [骨架的] was probably the first proto-vaporwave I discovered – the Holograms album. It was just ambient music to me. I didn’t realize it was sampled. The term ‘vaporwave’ hadn’t even been invented yet. But at the time, Bandcamp started becoming a thing, and I started searching for music there. That’s how I discovered all this other experimental proto-vaporwave stuff that Beer On The Rug was putting out.

I was really into New Age music, like these cheesy old New Age tapes, which I still listen to these days. There was an artist, Transmuteo, who was doing a mix of New Age, vaporwave and drone. At some point, Floral Shoppe came out, and I remember this online festival, SPF420 – they were doing a show with Transmuteo and Macintosh Plus. I found this interesting and cool, but I still didn’t follow it too closely.

It might have been 2014 when I first heard Luxury Elite and Telepath, and I found that really cool. A friend of mine from Kyiv actually released Nightlife [夜遊び], the split album by Telepath and Silver Richards, on his weird label called Freak Friendly D.I.Y. – he was putting out all kinds of music, some black metal, some hip-hop, some noise and some vaporwave. We were listening to that as he was dubbing the tapes, and I remember really liking it.

Wait a second – a Ukrainian DIY label released that split album?

Yeah, it’s actually a funny story. At that point, PayPal wasn’t working in Ukraine, so we had to create fake accounts pretending we were UK citizens. We actually photoshopped our IDs to be able to receive money from Bandcamp. But we couldn’t withdraw the money, because we’d need a British bank account, so we were just receiving the funds in PayPal and spending them right back on Bandcamp, creating sort of a natural circulation of the money.

Those fake accounts were shut down quickly by PayPal, and that meant they were going to take away your money, so we would make sure to spend it before we got shut down. When my friend was just about to release this Nightlife split, his account got blocked again, so he asked me if he could use mine. I remember being at my day job, watching my email, and suddenly all these sales were popping up. I was like, “What is happening here?” Before that, he’d sold maybe 30 or 50 tapes, and for this one, he’d made 100 and they went pretty much in one day.

We didn’t even really know Telepath back then. He was still self-releasing everything on Bandcamp for free. Dream Catalogue might have been around, but I think they’d just started doing tapes, so my friend just wrote a message to Telepath like, “Can I do a tape for you?” And he was like, “Sure, dude.” Of course it would become the best-selling tape in the history of his label. (laughs)

Did you start making vaporwave then as well?

Yeah, pretty much immediately, but I didn’t really like the results. I was still learning. I didn’t put anything out until 2016 when I started Global Pattern. The first release was my still shitty, but halfway listenable attempt at vaporwave. As usual, I did it anonymously, the alias was lucid beach85’. I didn’t tell anyone it was me. I just made some tapes, took a photo and uploaded it to the Vaporwave Cassette Club group on Facebook. I’d already been part of it for some years because I was collecting vaporwave tapes – early Dream Catalogue, Luxury Elite, stuff like this.

Before I started Global Pattern, I was running this ambient label called Pantheon, which was pretty successful actually. I had a lot of releases coming out, and I was pretty busy with that, so it took some time to start a new label as well, because I really wanted to do it, but I didn’t have much time. I still had a day job and I was doing the ambient label, which was all about DIY handmade covers, so it took a lot of time. We were making box sets manually, carefully decorated with leaves and hand-stitched covers, a lot of gluing assembly.

For me, Global Pattern was a way to just make just a plain tape with a plain J-card again. I was simultaneously in this drone scene, but also listening to vaporwave. I always listened to many genres. When I moved to St. Petersburg in 2016, I decided to to make Global Pattern a proper label for other artists, not just my own projects.

The original idea was to feature post-Soviet vaporwave artists, to make it a local scene label. I released this Ukrainian girl, M4, who was doing classic future funk, and then Zhurnal Mod and a little bit later, From Tokyo to Honolulu. There were plenty of people doing vaporwave in Russia and Ukraine. Demos started pouring in, a lot of people started reaching out to me, and I was reaching out to artists as well.

You started releasing music under the name Tim Six in 2016 too, right?

Well, when I started to get into electronic sound and synthesizers, I decided to separate that a bit from the stuff that was using my voice or acoustic instruments. That was when I started the Tim Six project. I was into New Age, I was trying to do something dreamy and positive, and Creation VI was already associated with dark ritual industrial music and this heavy drone style.

I’d support people like Aidan Baker or Attila Cihar, artists from these experimental metal circles. I wanted to branch out into this more lightweight ambient sound, so I started using the Tim Six alias for that. That’s basically a translation of my name from Ukrainian, by the way. My real name is Timothy, and Six is the direct translation of my last name.

I find this shift from dark ambient and drone doom to New Age and solarpunk in the latter half of the 2010s really interesting. In speculative fiction – books as well as films – the 1990s and 2000s were all about cyberpunk and dystopia. In the 2010s, it felt as if we had enough of those bleak visions and were craving some form of hopeful utopia, so the movements of solarpunk and climate fiction arose.

Yeah, because the dystopia became reality! It came too close to what we’re actually experiencing. So while we were reading the cyberpunk stuff as a warning, some others were apparently reading it as an instruction. For people like Elon Musk or whoever, it wasn’t so much criticism but more of a manual, right? (laughs)

New Age music has always been this guilty pleasure for me, and I still really enjoy that cheesy stuff that most people usually discard. Vaporwave is often working with discarded music. People would be sampling Muzak, which wasn’t even seen as actual music but just some byproduct of capitalist economy, or commercials in signalwave. Basically, you take the most annoying thing possible and turn it into music.

With New Age, it was kind of the same, but not many people tried to recycle it. Transmuteo did it really early. When I started to connect with Telepath around 2017, we would spend hours having the most esoteric talks, because he’s really into that stuff – all this New Age, chakra, astrology, numerology kind of stuff. Telepath is basically a New Age pillar in the vaporwave scene, not just with his more recent aliases, but even back when he was doing classic slushwave. It wasn’t always obvious, but from the beginning, it was very symbolic and esoteric.

Telepath is also a huge synthesizer nerd. He would buy and resell retro synths, and he would talk about it a lot. I didn’t know anything about it, so he’d tell me to try the [Korg] Wavestation A/D, this 1980s synthesizer. Both Jornt [Cat System Corp.] and I got our synth advice from Telepath. It’s thanks to him I started to get into hardware. He released one of the first Tim Six albums on his Virtual Dream Plaza label. It was me, Jordan Christoff, Origami Girl, a bunch of other people, this little community of New Age enjoyers.

When you started making New Age and solarpunk-inspired vaporwave, were you inspired by books as well?

I didn’t really know that many hopeful [science-fiction] books, just some short stories. But I was really inspired by the political side of things. I was reading Buckminster Fuller and Murray Bookchin, these early figures of eco-anarchism. I was trying to understand how we arrived here. At one point we were still imagining this really positive, optimistic future, which vaporwave is often about, when we were promised prosperity, freedom, democracy and equality. But it didn’t turn out that way, so I was trying to understand: Where did we go wrong?

Around the time, I started getting annoyed with people online just being edgelords and shitposters and vouching for accelerationist right-wing thinking. For some reason, that started to get really popular in the [vaporwave] scene. HKE of Dream Catalogue was a huge catalyst for it. I even had a big fight with David [Russo alias HKE, ed. note] on Twitter; he was calling solarpunk “leftist bullshit” and I was like, “No dude, it’s anarchist. It’s not even about left or right. Surveillance capitalism is not a fiction anymore. We don’t have to imagine a dystopian world, it’s already here, and we’re living in it, so why not try to imagine something different?”

That edgelord/accelerationist school of thinking has luckily vanished from the scene. But where do you see it heading currently? Is there actually still a bigger vaporwave community, or is it just a bunch of micro-communities quietly moving away from each other?

Both is kind of true, actually. Pre-pandemic, you had [the 100%] ElectroniCON [festival], which was a big uniting force. People came out and actually showed their faces for the first time. I remember watching the streams late at night and chatting to all my friends online, and we were really excited about Telepath playing live, for example. It was just a huge thing for the community. Everyone felt this is now on the verge of becoming something bigger, more real and tangible.

The pandemic cut that off, but then a lot of online things started to pop up, like Slushwave. At the same time, these subgenres started drifting away from each other. Barber beats came out, and it’s really a scene of its own. It’s not even vaporwave to me. Dreampunk separated itself from vaporwave completely too. Slushwave started to become its own thing, and signalwave as well.

At the same time, a lot of people are still communicating between those scenes, so I wouldn’t say it’s become too separated. See, I’ve been into slushwave for a long time, and Global Pattern is kind of a slushwave label, but I also have a signalwave alias and I try to stay in the loop with that community as well.

People in these communities are really engaged and dedicated. Everyone who comes to the IRL Slushwave festival is an actual fan who knows all the artists. It’s a cool experience to meet those people because you don’t have to start from the beginning and explain what vaporwave is or whatever. You just immediately know what to talk about. It’s so liberating and inspiring to be surrounded by like-minded people who really know their stuff.

Now if ECON would be happening again and if I was to do it, I would make separate stages – a signalwave stage, a slushwave stage, a future funk stage. Because it’s really different audiences right now, and the music serves different purposes, moods and desires. At the same time, it can all coexist pretty much like in the early days, it just needs some really powerful force to unite it all. For example, the Nobody Here documentary reunited a lot of people. Not everyone liked it, but that’s not the point. The fact is that everyone in the scene watched it and had an opinion on it, and people were discussing it online.

If you’re looking at Global Pattern, which is about to turn 10, and your own music as Tim Six, what’s on the horizon for both?

The label currently has just a few releases per year, and I see it as a time to reflect. At some point I thought maybe I should close it, because I was feeling sort of a disappointment, I guess, with how things were going in the scene. That was around the time when all that Twitter drama was happening. But then I decided I was still seeing a lot of potential. Even if a bunch of people started to associate vaporwave with some sketchy right-wing thinking, I decided to continue.

I think we hit something really potent with the solarpunk thing. Those compilations that we did were really successful – probably the most successful releases in the whole catalogue, in terms of numbers of streams and feedback as well. So I have an idea to continue the series, but a little more sophisticated than before – not just a compilation, more a collaborative project, so people can really come together to create something and to lead by example.

But you know, since having kids and moving to Paris, things have just been slowing down for me. I just needed some time to regroup and settle down in a new place, in a new country, to process the war, the politics and all that stuff. Only recently I’ve felt that I’m starting to get back on track. I finally realized that If I just spend my days doomscrolling, it will have me thinking we’re all done.

But I want to keep pushing and trying to imagine a different world. I stick to this principle – if you want to see something happen, you need to become the force that makes it happen. Right now I’m really looking forward to this year’s Slushwave festival, which is getting bigger and bigger each year. It’s just so good to get together and have some beers with the legends of the scene sitting right there next to you under the sun in the park, you know?

Listen to Tim Six on Bandcamp

Discover Global Pattern on Bandcamp

Tim Six’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• luxury elite – world class (2015)

• Transmuteo – Cymaglyphs (2011)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – ゲートウェイ (2014)

• 猫 シ Corp. – 家族. 劳动. 쇼핑. (VHS version!) (2018)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki] – 真夜中の天気 (2017)

• MindSpring Memories – मुक्ता भव यत्रासि (2016)

• ll nøthing ll – artificial nature (2018)

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

• Vaperror – Mana Pool (2014)

• Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – NTSC Memories (2013)

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I wasn’t even a huge fan of live-streaming events, but I hadn’t been to a real concert in a long time and I was pretty curious to know what the vaporwave scene was actually like these days.

Over the next two nights, me and my friend sat in front of our laptops in different cities, with chat windows open, listening to ambient soundscapes made predominantly from slowed-down and manipulated samples, and watching psychedelic visuals edited from old films, videos, commercials, found and computer-generated images.

I remember being completely blown away by the creativity and diversity of the participating artists, most of whom I’d never heard of. They all remained completely anonymous and hid behind strangely spelled names like ⦓🍊⦔ タンジェリン [Kagoshima Tangerine], S O A R E R , Illusionary ドリーミング, y o u s t i l l f e e l t h e m o u t t h e r e , d o n ’ t y o u , or days of blue [天].

Their sets took me on a whole series of Bandcamp explorations over the following months. Going down these rabbitholes ultimately reignited my love for vaporwave as a whole, which had significantly cooled down in the late 2010s, for various reasons.

One reason had been that around 2015/16, the scene started feeling like an increasingly toxic environment, where conversation mainly boiled down to anonymously firing snarky comments at each other. Gatekeeping, elitism and infighting seemed to dominate ‘discourse’ in the forums and on social media. The wider public was convinced that vaporwave was dead and had always been nothing more than a bad joke.

Attending the Slushwave festival online, it wasn’t just the music and the visuals that surprised me – it was also the positive, supportive and respectful tone in the chat during the livestream that struck me as extremely refreshing. I learned that the slushwave subgenre, which had been around since Telepath’s legendary first run of releases in 2013/14, was on the course of evolving into its own, independent community and along the way was apparently getting rid of the infantile, immature attitudes that I’d previously become so tired of.

“Slushwave is so far away from vaporwave now. It’s much more ambient-adjacent”, the festival’s founder Will Hallworth-Cook said when I spoke to him earlier this year. He’s better known as the trailblazing UK artist desert sand feels warm at night. “Separating from the main scene has only done it a world of favors, because we’re now in this bubble. We’re very much self-innovating, we’re a strong community, and everyone’s so supportive of each other. We really don’t accept pretentious people. We don’t like that at all. We thrive on just helping each other out.”

“The Slushwave crowd is an insanely thankful, happy, joyous crowd, and the musicians as well”, the Belgian artist and activist Sebastien Dessauvage alias Zer0 Rei confirmed in our conversation, “just really genuine people full of love for the music and the artistry around that. I’ve done a lot of live shows, and I’ve really never had this few problems and this much appreciation for what we do.”

Sebastien is the driving force behind organizing the IRL version of Slushwave festival which has been happening annually since 2024 in his hometown of Kortrijk, Belgium. “It’s a village pretending to be a city”, he explained to me. “It’s 80,000 people, but we punch seriously above our weight when it comes to culture and music. It’s a good place to be.”

The first remote edition of the festival went down in 2020, when “online festivals were everywhere”, as Sebastien remembered. “I was chatting to Will [desert sand feels warm at night, ed. note] over Discord a lot, and at some point I had the crazy idea of doing it IRL. I ran a punk music venue here in Kortrijk for more than 10 years with my wife. That got me hooked up with the local BUDA Arts Center, which is quite outsized for the city.”

That local arts center slash movie theater seemed like the right venue for a live audiovisual experience, with just enough space for a couple of hundred people to really immerse themselves in the Slushwave experience, while still maintaining the atmosphere of a family reunion.

“I pitched Slushwave not just as a music event, but as this audiovisual experience with projected, pre-recorded visuals on a cinema screen, and it came together in an absolutely magical way”, Sebastien told me. “It’s tough to describe, but if you’re in the room with the plush cinema seats, the huge screen and sound, you just melt away into it. It’s a really fun experience.”

Over the last years, the annual festival in Kortrijk has become a real-life meeting hub for an otherwise decentralized online community. What started as a simple pandemic livestream has expanded into a long weekend with a mix of URL and IRL sets on Thursday and Friday, a full night of back-to-back IRL sets and live panels and interviews on Saturday and a special closing event called Naturewave on Sunday, where a bunch of vaporwave, ambient and drone artists play live music for free in an outdoor location – a cozy picnic in the park with some great music.

Once again in late August this year, the small Belgian city will welcome slushwave and ambient artists from all over Europe – the UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Finland, Belgium. The U.S. will be represented by days of blue skies, 818181 and you still feel them out there, don’t you, who will all be heading over the Atlantic ocean. The ‘26 lineup feels more diverse even than in the last few years.

“For Will [desert sand], it really is about that little corner of the scene which is uniquely creative, valuable and authentic”, Sebastien told me, “and showcasing the best and brightest in both upcoming and established artists from that scene.”

I shot Will a message over Discord and asked him about his intention behind the curation for this year’s edition. His statement truly exudes the passion and commitment that Sebastien described:

“Slushwave 2026, like its predecessors, celebrates the wonderful and ever-growing diversity of culture and sound in the community. This year we have more live acts than ever; 15+ live performances across the 4 day festival. The curation of this monumental line-up happened as a result of unwavering enthusiasm from artists, volunteers and members of the core team.”

“People from all over the world attend for the love of the genre, to spread joy and happiness, and above all to listen to some ethereal soundscapes in the slushwave capital of the world – Kortrijk. I am ecstatic and cannot wait to meet everyone there.”

(desert sand feels warm at night, Slushwave festival founder)

Facts: Slushwave/Naturewave 2026

• Date: Thursday August 27 – Sunday August 30 (4 days)

• Location (IRL): Kortrijk, Belgium, at Textielhuis (Aug 27/28) and Budascoop (Aug 29). Naturewave (Aug 30) is a daytime outdoor event – location tba.

• Location (URL): Vapor Memory livestreams all days for free.

• Lineup: See posters below, timetable tba.

• Tickets: Regular: €60 / VIP: €90

• Access: Kortrijk is one hour by direct train from Brussels main station.

• Accomodation: Affordable hotels and apartments are available.

Get your tickets for Slushwave 2026

Join the Slushwave Discord

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“Then again, what do I know? I’m approaching 50, I listen to vaporwave and I dress like the stereotype of an American trucker.”

Last year, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the state of music journalism at a conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. Moderating the panel was the local journalist Svetoslav Todorov. Among many other things, he works as a freelance writer for a Bulgarian culture magazine (print and online) called VIJ mag.

Since he had been commissioned to write an article for their newest issue, which focuses on subcultures and countercultures, he reached out to talk to me about one of my key areas of expertise: vaporwave.

Here’s a direct link to the published article. Yes, it’s in Bulgarian and written in Cyrillic. But you can use a translation tool – and I am also sharing the full original Q&A in English with you below.

Read on if you’re interested in how skateboarding got me into music and subcultures, as well as my thoughts on the development of vaporwave, the gap between online and offline culture, and the state of the punk/DIY ethos.

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What was the first scene or subculture you personally felt a part of during your youth, and how did that influence the rest of your life?

Stephan Kunze: I got into skateboarding in the late 80s. The eclectic music I heard in skate videos over the next decade would have a tremendous impact on me, whether it was punk, metal, hip-hop, jazz, rock or electronic music. Interestingly, it was also a skate video edit where I would first discover vaporwave many, many years later!

In my teenage years, I was a smalltown skate kid with goth leanings. I loved discovering different styles of non-mainstream music and I was immersed in 90s “alternative” culture. As I didn’t live in a major city, options were limited in terms of concerts and such.

At some point in the 90s, I got more deeply into hip-hop and electronic music like trip-hop, drum’n’bass and IDM. The underground hip-hop and beat-making scene would become my subcultural home for all of my 20s and into my 30s. At the same time, I developed a huge love for and much knowledge about many other genres just through sample-digging and record collecting.

This influenced my life insofar that I’d dedicate my whole professional and huge parts of my private life to subcultures – I’ve been a music journalist for a quarter of a century now, and I’ve worked across many other functions and jobs in the music, media and tech industry. None of that would have happened without my subcultural background.

Recently, you’ve been writing quite a lot about experimental electronic subgenres from vaporwave to signalwave. Some of these movements draw on a vintage Y2K aesthetic, yet offer something oddly futuristic. What is it about this that you find so interesting?

I’ve been interested in vaporwave since 2013, with varying degrees of intensity. Since the pandemic, the scene has lived through a creative resurgence, mainly because of highly active online communities for subgenres like signalwave or slushwave on platforms like Discord and Bandcamp.

While classic vaporwave was mainly about 80s/90s nostalgia, artists have been diving into more recent cultural phenomena as sources for their works, like the Y2K aesthetic or the Frutiger Aero design language of the 2000s. I think it’s only natural that vaporwave – at its heart a hauntological form of pastiche – will be embracing and exploring new subjects of nostalgia as it evolves. A Gen Z vaporwave producer just doesn’t relate as much to CRT television static or smooth jazz samples; they might have fond memories of YouTube kids documentaries, anime films or early learning software instead, and those will reflect in their inspirations and sample choices.

Signalwave in particular has gradually morphed into a framework for digital collage art that explores the distortions of human memory. I’d even say it’s more of a method or a technique than an actual genre at this point. Historically, it was also called broken transmission and made exclusively from snippets of old radio and TV transmissions. Right now, I feel that you could use any musical genre as source material for signalwave, as long as it serves the purpose of creating an immersive experience that will try to take you to a certain place, evoke a feeling or tell a story.

You’ll find whole signalwave albums dedicated to buildings, landscapes, historical events, films and TV series, or even ultra-specific personal memories like a calm summer vacation in the Hungarian countryside, or a Serbian kid’s experience of the day in March 1999 when NATO started bombing their home. One of my recent favorites is Stuck at Everest Base Camp with a Crappy Little Radio by the producer УВБ-76; he’s American despite writing his name in Cyrillic, by the way.

Would you say that this is more of a digital subculture that cannot be easily transferred to the offline world, or at least not in a recognizable form?

Vaporwave is truly the first decentralized subculture, meaning that it never had a local community in the real world that it grew from. Even the earliest forms of proto-vapor in the years 2010/11 started purely online and digital, in chatrooms and forums. The music was distributed through SoundCloud and Bandcamp. It was made by teenagers from different parts of the US who were bored and lonely in their bedrooms, craving for connection.

It should be noted that there’s a statistic clustering of trans, queer and neurodivergent artists in the vaporwave scene – people who often feel misunderstood and marginalized as outsiders in society, so these anonymous digital communities could feel like safe havens for them to freely express themselves.

It’s correct that this whole idea doesn’t translate as well to offline culture, though there was a push for live events in the second half of the 2010s, with concerts and festivals like 100% ElectronICON starting to take place and even attracting bigger crowds. Those efforts were set back by the pandemic, but in recent years I am seeing a lot happening in this direction again, maybe in a healthier, more local, grassroots-oriented form.

I think that artists and listeners – which often overlap in this culture – will naturally want to find places where they can meet IRL instead of URL, to experience the music together but also just to connect as humans. Due to the fact that the culture has originally formed on the internet and remains driven by digital technology, it will probably always be online-first though.

Do you think this disconnect between the digital and the offline world applies to more and more music genres? These days, someone who listens to rap might not look the part at all, and someone who has goth-style features might not actually be into that kind of music.

I think that kids raised on the internet tend to see genres and subcultures more as aesthetic choices than as exclusive clubs. Someone might still be in their “emo/goth phase” today, but tomorrow they’ll dress in a vintage 90s hip-hop style, because they’ve seen someone wear it in a TikTok and they feel it expresses their emotional state really well. They will also sample and combine elements from different subcultures more freely.

The idea that you’ll have to commit to a certain uniform to identify as part of a subcultural in-group, might indeed be passé. Then again, what do I know? I’m approaching 50, I listen to vaporwave and I dress like the stereotype of an American trucker.

It seems that the artists you interviewed were often fans or collectors before they started making music themselves. Do you feel like there’s a bit of that punk/DIY ethos in all of this – something that might have been lost in other genres?

Vaporwave has often been called a form of “internet punk”, and to a certain degree that’s quite accurate. What makes vaporwave and punk feel close in spirit is definitely that DIY ethos, more specifically the low entrance barrier and the conscious disconnect from the entertainment industry complex and a lack of enthusiasm for playing by the commercial rulebook.

This in turn will of course appeal to people who might have grown up in cultures that once carried a similar spirit, but might have lost it along the way. For example, I know many vaporwave artists grew up in 2000s emo culture, aka the “scene”, while others came from metal, various strains of electronic music, or even hip-hop – myself included.

By its very nature, vaporwave is not prone to commercial exploitation. No one starts making vaporwave just for the money and/or the fame – there’s simply too little of both to be won in that scene, so there tends to be more focus on artistic expression and personal integrity than on audience growth or just financial motives.

The downside, of course, is that no one can live off their art. Even some of the biggest vaporwave artists have to keep day jobs and therefore have less time to spend on their artistic endeavours. So there’s an inherent danger that it might appeal more to privileged and financially well-off people, but from my actual experience talking to people in the scene, that’s not really the case right now.

Do you still believe it’s even possible for a scene, a genre, or a subculture to originate in an IRL place?

I was just discussing this question the other day with a friend who’s actually a professor of sociology focused on academic studies of subcultures. He basically concluded that it just doesn’t seem possible anymore for a scene to originate in an IRL place, and I tend to agree with him.

I do believe that local music communities will keep on emerging; there will probably always be groups of people of roughly the same age that come together in certain places at certain times because they share an enthusiasm for underground or non-mainstream music. Though I have a feeling that those communities will be much more driven by creating opportunities than a similar aesthetic or stylistic vision.

I remember going to Sofia last year and getting the opportunity to dive into the local independent music scene just for a couple of days – to an outsider, it felt absolutely vibrant but not even remotely bound to a specific style or sound. It seemed really all over the place musically, with a bit of everything from goth pop to Midwest emo to avant-garde folktronica happening at the same time.

What I loved was that everyone seemed to support each other, and people were coming together despite those musical differences. I don’t think you could call that a music scene or subculture in the traditional sense, due to the lack of any common musical ground, but I would like to think that it’s some form of eclectic post-internet underground community, maybe.

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