The new A24 sci-fi/horror smash hasn’t yet been released in theaters over here – it will premiere next week in Germany – but as a fan of Kane Parsons’ YouTube series and a lover of creepypasta lore and liminal spaces vibes in general, I’m really looking forward to finally seeing it soon.

At just 20 years of age, the director seems like a pretty cool and sane person to me. Just as an example, in a recent interview for Deadline, he’s been outspoken about the harmfulness of generative AI to human creativity:

“We already live in a world where you walk outside and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop. That’s become part of our visual reality. To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”

Looking at the film music credits for Backrooms, most of it was written by Parsons himself with the help of a Canadian composer named Edo Van Breemen and another composer/producer called Jeffrey Innes.

It’s not a huge surprise – Parsons has always been involved with composing his own film music, even for the YouTube shorts, and he’s previously even released a bunch of albums with the music to his Backrooms web TV series.

For some scenes in the Backrooms film, Parsons and his co-writers have apparently used these forgotten 1960s crooner lounge tunes, which they might have obtained from some rare APM library music compilations. They also used the Spanish holiday standard “Feliz Navidad”, a short track from Klaus Doldinger’s soundtrack to the 1984 fantasy film The Never-Ending Story, and those “Greetings in 55 Languages” that NASA put on the Golden Records for Voyager 1, designed as a message from human civilization to alien lifeforms.

Judging from the song lists circulating online, there are some original tunes used in the film as well. I’ve been playing these four songs below on repeat in anticipation, and I’m curious to find out how they’ve been used in the movie.

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1. The Payolas – Eyes Of A Stranger (1982)

This is the biggest hit that the Canadian new wave band The Payolas ever had, first released on their album No Stranger to Danger. A brilliant early 1980s deep cut with some serious reggae influence in that off-beat guitar. It feels pop-leaning but weirdly experimental at the same time, somewhere halfway between dubby The Clash/PIL songs and a Duran Duran B-side from the Rio era.

The song appeared on the Valley Girl soundtrack in 1983; the teen comedy in the vein of The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink is sort of a cult movie in the hauntology/vaporwave scene. It was also used some years later in a Miami Vice episode from Season 4 (1987/88). It feels highly likely that Parsons discovered the song through one of these syncs. In any case, it’s a bop. Are young people actually still saying that? Seriously though, it’s a strong tune from one of my favorite eras in pop history.

2. Who’s Who – Ulterior Motives (1986/2024)

A 17-second clip of this strange, unknown synth pop song first appeared online in 2021, allegedly found by a Spanish user in an old DVD backup archive. To the Lostwave online community, which revolves around identifying forgotten songs from the past, it was only known as “Everyone Knows That” – tentatively named after a prominent line in the chorus. It took three years until someone from that community found the full song in a p0rn movie from 1986, Angels of Passion.

Turns out the tune was written by British-Canadian twin brothers and musicians Christopher Saint and Philip Adrian Booth. Also turns out the line being sung is actually “Everyone Knows It.” Even the Booth brothers didn’t have the tracks from the original recordings anymore though, so they reacted to the online hype in 2024 by re-recording and re-releasing the song on an album under the name Who’s Who.

What’s interesting is that the brothers are also filmmakers – they’ve made documentaries on supernatural topics like haunted houses, ghosts and exorcisms, as well as fictional horror movies. It’s not surprising that Kane Parsons included this song, considering the strong thematic overlaps with his own work which is rooted in internet lore, creepypasta, hauntology and lost media. Definitely a beautiful Easter egg for all the Lostwave nerds on Reddit.

3. The Caretaker – All That Follows Is True (2016)

The English electronic musician James Leyland Kirby created some of his most lauded albums by slowing down and manipulating samples of ballroom big band music, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, which he’d found on old shellac records from the flea market.

Like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2002) and the music of Burial or Boards Of Canada, Kirby’s works are often quoted as examples for the concept of ‘hauntology’, an idea launched by British pop culture theorists Simon Reynolds and the late Mark Fisher. The artist name is a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s film rendition of Stephen King’s The Shining, particularly the infamous ‘haunted ballroom scene’.

This sad and ghostly tune is from Stage 1 of The Caretaker’s six-part album Everywhere at the End of Time, often considered his magnum opus and released in six-month intervals between 2016 and 2019. The album portrays the different stages of Alzheimer’s disease, mirroring the irreversible cognitive decline of a dementia patient. Representing the first signs of memory deterioration, the music on Stage 1 still sounds more like “a beautiful daydream” (Kirby) than the dark ambient and noise music prevalent in later stages. The main sample in this particular song is a medley by English musician and dance band leader Maurice Winnick.

This album became part of internet culture in the early 2020s, both as a listening challenge on social media (it’s 6.5 hours long) and as a meme connected to analog horror and liminal spaces content. If you want to know more about this album and Kirby’s other work, the music YouTuber Pad Chennington, whom I’ve interviewed earlier this week, published a two-hour-plus video breakdown.

4. Boards Of Canada – The Word Becomes Flesh (2026)

The Backrooms end credits tune. It’s from Boards of Canada’s brand new album Inferno, which arrived on the same day that Backrooms hit U.S. theaters. In a recent interview with GQ, Parsons confirmed that the Scottish duo’s music was a key inspiration for the whole soundtrack.

While the Trump administration previously used the Inferno tune “Deep Time” without consent from the label and the artists in a social media video, the appearance of “The Word Becomes Flesh” in Backrooms feels like a respectful nod from a purveyor of hauntology to its originators. I also really like the fact that Parsons used a fresh song from the new album as opposed to something more well-known from one of their canonical classics.

I’ve kept Inferno on steady rotation since release, but I haven’t written at length about it here just because I feel there are enough ‘takes’ out there already, and I don’t have anything substantial to add to the better reviews that have been published.

Just one little thing: A phrase I've read quite often recently, even in positive reviews like Philip Sherburne’s write-up for Pitchfork, is that it's their “best since Geogaddi” – but I’ve actually enjoyed both The Campfire Headphase and Tomorrow’s Harvest more than Geogaddi, so that ranking somehow doesn’t work for me at all.

For the record, I’ve enjoyed Geogaddi as well, and Inferno is brilliant, and hopefully, Backrooms will be too. Now I’ll just have to wait another full week until I can finally go watch it.

Enter Pad Chennington: The content creator from New Jersey filled this gap when he started his vaporwave-dedicated YouTube channel in 2017. With a solid 170,000 subscribers, it has since become one of the most important and trusted sources on everything that’s happening and being discussed within the culture. He’s explained the main themes and subgenres, reported on scandals and controversies, reviewed the classic albums and interviewed the scene’s biggest artists. His videos even became a gateway into the scene for many new producers too.

Pad Chennington – and no, that’s not his real name but a pun on a legendary American football quarterback – is not exactly what you’d call a music journalist. He’s not your standard influencer type either – for years he stayed as anonymous as many vaporwave artists, never showing his face, letting only his distinctive voice be heard in his videos. He’s more of a knowledgeable fan and collector, someone who’s active and respected within the scene but reporting on it at the same time.

Besides creating content, he’s a DJ, he’s released two albums of his own music and he’s founded an independent record label. Even if he’s started covering other forms of weird fringe sounds like experimental and noise music in his channel, he’s still a passionate fan of vaporwave music and culture first. Through his videos, he’s found a way of meaningfully supporting this fringe subgenre of experimental electronic music that legacy media continue to ignore.

Growing up in New Jersey, what style of music did your family play around the house when you were a kid?

My dad’s favorite band was Queen. Some of the earliest memories I have of music as a child is remembering these VHS tapes [of Queen’s live shows] being played over and over. My mom was a mix of everything – she loved Michael Jackson, classic rock, disco…

In my pre-teen years, I got really into the Beatles and became obsessed with their discography. That opened up the door for being a little more tasteful in music, listening to The White Album and hearing how music could be so experimental. I wanted to discover more, and that’s what led me down to electronic music and eventually to the point of where I am.

What was your first entry point into electronic music?

There’s a specific one: I loved the [Daft Punk] song “One More Time”, but for the longest time, I thought that was an organically made song; I didn’t know that they were sampling Eddie Johns. When I first saw a video breaking down how it was made, I was mind-blown. This was just the coolest thing, taking an old disco track and making something new out of it. It just piqued my curiosity of wanting to discover more about electronic music.

When did you hear about vaporwave for the first time then?

This was much later, I don’t remember exactly when but around late 2015, maybe early 2016. I’d just graduated from college, and I was working my first job. I would always have YouTube playing on the side. One day, the algorithm sent me Floral Shoppe in the related section. Because it was all in Japanese and it was so out of nowhere, something about it was interesting, so I was like, “What the hell is that? I gotta click this.”

It was the “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing” track. Obviously, that’s the big one. The first 10 seconds immediately sounded like booting up an old encyclopedia CD-ROM in my grandparents’ basement as a kid. It just felt so nostalgic. In the related section from there, I saw albums like 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open by 식료품groceries and a couple others, all the heavy hitters basically.

Can you try to explain more in detail what you liked about it?

Well, I’d just graduated from art and design school, and going to school for that is very exciting and creative, but then you get an actual job in the business world, and it’s often not as creative, so you fall into this career trap where you’re making decent money just doing the same specific thing over and over every day.

Life was getting tedious so quick for me, but these vaporwave albums became this comforting thing – there was always another album waiting for me in the Related section, and I would just keep clicking and clicking. There’s a disposability to it that I fell in love with, how there’s just tens of thousands of these albums, and some of them were made with absolutely no production value at all.

I don’t know, there’s just this weird feeling of romanticized nostalgia about consumerism and all of that stuff. There was something just so comforting about the genre, and this is why I’m still so attached to it. I could put it on any time of day – if I need to focus, clean the house, try to put my baby to sleep, whatever. These albums have played such a crucial part of my life for the last decade.

Did you try to find out more about the music and the artists initially?

At the time when I first discovered it, I don’t think I looked too deep into it. I wouldn’t even know how to look for those people, as everything was in Japanese. Of course, since creating the channel, I’ve learned so much about the identities behind these albums, but there was such an interesting time where it was truly anonymous to me as a listener. I knew nothing about these people, it was just the sounds that provided comfort for me. It’s fascinating to look back on.

Did you have any friends who were into the music as well, or did you seek out the vaporwave online communities?

Not before I decided to create the channel. In my real-life friend group, everybody had such a different taste in music. I remember I showed a couple of tracks to everyone, and they thought it was cool and interesting, but no one really latched onto it, so it was just this personal connection I had. Especially that first year, I was just going to work, sitting at an office desk, basically doing the same thing every day, but at least I had these albums as comfort material. It was a really personal thing, until I started making videos and reaching out to artists and labels.

You started your YouTube channel in October 2017. Were you still working that first dreadful job then?

Yeah. I remember telling myself that I have to do something more creative, something that’s beyond making the same shipping labels in Adobe every single day. Eventually I realized there wasn’t much video essays or just general discussion on these [vaporwave] albums on YouTube. Getting home from work and having discovered these sounds, I thought it’d be cool to talk about them.

I was always on YouTube at the time, and I knew how to do basic video editing. I went to school for graphic design, so I already worked in Premiere Pro. One day I thought, why don’t I just make videos about these albums that I have these feelings for? It’d be a nice creative outlet. That’s how it started. I would have never imagined that it would grow to where it is now.

Did you have any previous experience in music journalism?

No, absolutely not. I’ve just always listened to Anthony Fantano, and I thought he had such a great, thorough way of talking about music, which I cannot do. So I thought it would be cool to talk about it in a more conversational tone. I’m introducing these albums to many people for the first time. They don’t even know about the genre. I like to give off this idea that it’s just a friendly conversation, nothing intimidating or gatekeeping. I don’t care too much about how good it sounds. I’m just trying to be myself, as organic as possible.

I just wanted to talk more about the feelings or the places that these albums brought me to and the settings they would conjure up in my mind. I always thought that was such a fun thing to discuss. I don’t know any music theory, I really have no idea. I’m just trying to convey how I feel when I listen to these things. It’s as simple as that. That’s what drives me to write scripts for videos. I don’t think too much into it. That’s what made vaporwave so fascinating for me in the first place, beyond looking at it through a critical lens.

Like many vaporwave artists at the time, you never showed your face at first. That changed with your DJ gigs, right?

Yeah. In the beginning, I just loved the idea of having this detached thing where I could just create and not put a face to it. It existed purely for the discussion of it. But after a while, I wanted to get into DJing. I used to DJ in high school, nothing too serious, but I remember at the time realizing that if I want to DJ in public and live settings, eventually I’d have to show my face unless I want to go Daft Punk mode, which I didn’t really want to do.

We live in such a time where there has to be a face connected to everything, right? As a YouTuber, you will inherently look up ways to grow your channel or get more reach, and it’s always like, “put a face in the thumbnail,” because people like to see a personality attached to it. But even nowadays, when I’m making a video, it’s really just my voice over the album imagery. There’s something freeing about it that I can just create for the sake of talking about this one piece of music that I really like and having that the main focus.

For the first couple years, your channel was also very focused on future funk, but that has changed as well, and it’s been much more about classic vapor and signalwave in recent years.

For the first couple of years, I was definitely very much into future funk. I actually heard [Saint Pepsi’s] Hit Vibes in college, even before I heard Floral Shoppe, but I heard it in a different context. It was just a French house release for me. Now that I’m older, I’m way more into signalwave and slushwave and just classic vapor, things that are really relaxing.

Almost every other weekend I’ll DJ these themed raves, like the Shrek Raves. So I’m already experiencing this heavy, loud music in the club, and when I’m home, I like to listen to more soothing stuff. I don’t even know if there’s really future funk being made anymore. It was heavy back in the mid- to late 2010s, but maybe people got bored of it. I’m not even sure, but that sugar-rush-inducing song structure is definitely too much for me.

At the time, you even put out a couple of solo albums and ran your own independent label, Kats Kill Records. Are these musical projects dormant right now?

They’re pretty dormant. When I made the music, the reason was I wanted to have something of my own when I was DJing, and the label was just an extension of how much I loved physical releases and all the little things that went into the packaging of vinyl records. I wanted to give artists that I loved an opportunity and a platform, but after a while, I realized I’d taken on too many projects at once. When I was younger, I had an addiction to just taking on new things all the time.

Around 2019 and early 2020, between the channel and DJing and the label, there was just so much going on. I realized that I’m not able to put the amount of time I want to into everything. I had to cut out some things, and the label was definitely one of them. It was also saving so much space in my house. People do not realize that when it comes to these vaporwave labels, 99% of the time it’s just regular people with regular jobs who are running them out of their bedrooms. They don’t have a warehouse where they’re storing all their inventory.

Most of the time, it’s just some dude who has a love for the game, trying to get these sounds out to other people. There’s no real profit to be made. It’s just the love of getting something that you like onto a physical release, and it’s such a beautiful and cool thing to see it still happening. Maybe it’s also a way of giving back to the community.

At a certain point you started looking beyond vaporwave. You made videos on noise and experimental music, and a successful deep dive on The Caretaker.

For the first couple years of the channel, my number one thing in my life was putting out videos. Over time I got to a point where I was like, “Damn, what else I could really talk about?” I know there’s so many different vaporwave albums, but I already talked about most of the classics, and I’ve made a good amount of videos on different subtopics of vaporwave. I was like, “Maybe I could think of some other cool, interesting sounds throughout the internet.” And I branched out from there.

The Caretaker video was one I wanted to make for a very long time, but it always felt kind of intimidating, because there were so many videos out there about it already. Most of my videos are very conversational and just exploring my subjective feelings on the albums, but I thought it would be cool to take the time to really dive into an informative historical breakdown of that one album. It took me a year and a half to make that video – writing the script, researching it, learning new things. That ended up being one of the bigger videos on the channel, which is cool to see.

Nowadays I do not make videos as frequently as I did in the past. My mindset going forward is maybe once a year I’ll make one big video. I just got a desire to be a little more informative in terms of providing context or history. I made one really big video last year, the big signalwave deep dive.

Some younger signalwave producers have told me that both videos have provided entry points into the genre. For example, your first signalwave video from 2019 inspired the highly influential New Zealand artist TV2, and the newer one from 2025 inspired one of this season’s most interesting and lauded newcomers, Strmi from Serbia.

That’s so crazy. (laughs)

In that video, you’re talking about how you were listening to this music in a dark period after losing your father, and having these signalwave albums as a comfort zone.

Yeah, it’s the most humane thing in a way, so beautifully simple. These people are creating sounds and providing such a background to your life, and you inherently want to give back and just further share those sounds. That’s what the channel was always. I get the most joy with that feeling of creating a video, and then that artist reaches out and tells me their listener count is going up. It’s so cool to see my stuff being discussed online as well. That makes it all worth it.

As someone who also DJs a lot, how do you think live events have changed the vaporwave scene?

I think the main realization was that in real life, for the most part everybody’s really, really chill. Everybody just wants to have a good time, party and listen to some good music, and these shows are such a reminder of that. There could be so much [controversial] discussion online, but then you come together in person and none of it really matters.

There’s this joint, universally agreed nostalgia and comfort, so you’re just with like-minded people and everything just flows so naturally. Every time there’s a big show, whether it was one of the Econs [the 100% ElectronICON festivals, ed. note] or Flamingo Fest, everyone always goes back home inspired and re-energized to create. It just reignites this passion for creativity, which is the most important thing about these live shows, beyond just the human connection.

Next year you will be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of your channel. How do you see your role as a part of the vaporwave community moving forward?

At the end of the day, I’m just a fan more than anything. It’s really all I am. As a DJ, I’m playing other people’s music, and in my YouTube videos, I’m talking about other people’s music. I hope that’s what I represent in the scene, someone’s who’s just remained a fan wanting to talk about these things. That’s also what enables me to just turn off being a content creator and go live my life and enjoy time with my friends and family – and all of that has nothing to do with the vaporwave scene.

You know, me and my wife have been together for 15 years, and when I first started making the channel, she’s like, you know, “Oh, the music with the statues and stuff.” (laughs) We both thought it was just this little creative outlet for me – and that’s still how it is. I’ll make videos whenever I’m in the mood to. I don’t follow a schedule. In a way, there’s still this same feeling as when it first started ten years ago.

Did labels or brands ever reach out to you to collaborate on projects or even pay your for promotion of their projects?

I’ve been doing a lot of vinyl shorts and reels, just little mini-reviews, and for the most part, labels will send me the records. But I was never approached for any sponsorships, companies or brands weren’t trying to get involved. That just never really happened. Maybe I’m doing it all wrong though. It would have been nice to make some more money, you know? (laughs) But it never really got to that point. Again, maybe that’s because I don’t have so much of a identity tied to the channel. Most of my videos are literally just an album cover with a little design in the background and me talking over it.

I enjoyed how you spun up a bunch of videos around the mysterious Begotten project, playing into that lore that Dennis [Mikula of the Geometric Lullaby label] created around it.

There’s a popular subreddit that I’ve always loved called nosleep. Do you know that one?

Yes, it’s about user-written short horror stories, right?

Yeah, and there’s a universal agreement that we’re always gonna play into the story as if it’s real. It’s very fun. With that video, I definitely tried to play into that narrative in a way, because I like to have the story in the back of my mind as I’m listening to the albums. It’s really over the top, but I find it kind of fun and cute.

What’s your next big video project going to be?

Right now I’m actually working on a giant Floral Shoppe deep dive. It’s an album that just always lingers over the entire vaporwave space. Still to this day, there’s just this universal agreement that this piece, it’s just looking over everything, and that’s what I try to cover in this video, how it inspired everything. More than just surface level discussion of it, I will be going through Vektroid’s previous albums, what inspired it, and breaking down every track individually. I’ve already made a few videos about it, but besides talking about the album and its significance, the second main goal is to say that there is so much more to Vektroid’s larger catalog than just Floral Shoppe, and I really hope I can get people to listen to those other things as well.

Watch Pad Chennington’s videos on YouTube

Pad Chennington’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• crt paralysis – “slideshow” (self-released, 2022)

• 식료품groceries – 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open (Consumer Electronics, 2014)

• EPSON – GOODEVENING (self-released, 2018)

• INTERNET CLUB – SOUND CANVAS (self-released, 2019)

• death’s dynamic shroud – I’ll Try Living Like This (Ghost Diamond, 2015)

• Infinity Frequencies – Between two worlds (self-released, 2018)

• national network – night-time television service (Frequency Sub-Zero, 2021)

• SAINT PEPSI – Hit Vibes (self-released, 2013)

• 猫 シ Corp. – NEWS AT 11 (self-released, 2016)

• vcr-classique – exotics (self-released, 2024)

“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.

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.

Read on:

The human being behind that character never lived in a penthouse. When she started making music as luxury elite, she’d never really traveled much outside of her home state of Kentucky. In fact, she was broke, miserable and had few prospects in life. This was almost 15 years ago.

She’d started hanging out online with some new music friends, among them Ramona Vektroid (alias Macintosh Plus and a bunch of other aliases) and a booker from North Carolina who just went by her first name, Liz, and would soon start running the legendary SPF420 livestreams together with another teenager from Chicago, Chaz Allen alias Metallic Ghosts.

A few months later, Lux (as friends and fans lovingly call her) started making and releasing her own music which would go on to define a whole subgenre of vaporwave called Late Night Lofi. Many of her albums and tapes from the early to mid-2010s became canonical classics. In those days, she also ran one of the most important labels of the nascent vaporwave scene: Fortune 500.

Her output slowed down after 2016 due to personal issues, but Lux returned to produce more outstanding music – under her main moniker and aliases like 1-800-TONIGHT and creative zen – since the start of the pandemic. Her brilliant last full-length as luxury elite, talk soup, came out in 2024. She’s been running her bi-weekly online radio show Neon Nights (named after a legendary K-Tel compilation from 1982), and she’s part of the Hot Takes podcast crew.

In one of her most personal interviews to date, she opens up about a childhood in front of the television set, her days as a Tumblr influencer, the proto-vaporwave scene, escaping from real-life struggles through engagement in internet culture, surviving ‘broporwave’-gate, coming back at the start of a global pandemic, losing her sister and finding her creative mojo again.

Please note that this interview was conducted in written form. The formatting in her answers is luxury elite’s – it’s part of her online personality, and I do think it conveys some sense of her character. I have barely edited anything here, because I really wanted to give a true vaporwave originator the space she deserves. For anyone just remotely interested in the genre, this should be an important history lesson.

*Airhorn noise*

Lux, I’ve heard that you were obsessed with watching TV as a kid and that you became a big pop culture nerd early on. Who were some of your favorite artists, musicians and TV personalities at the time?

I was practically raised by my television. My parents would have MTV playing in the background all the time, and one of my first memories was waking up with my parents at 6:00 a.m. one morning, my dad getting ready for work, and Sinead O’Connor’s music video for Nothing Compares 2 U came on. I guess four year old me was so moved that I started crying along with her. My parents scrambled to find the remote and changed it to Scooby Doo to get me to stop, haha.

Beavis and Butthead were hands down the biggest influences on me. I started watching the show when I was five years old, which sounds a bit scandalous I’m sure! I didn’t understand a lot of the dirty jokes, but I loved watching the music videos they chose to play. I remember when Beavis and Butthead watched Grace Jones’ Demolition Man video, and I had no clue why they were ragging on her so hard because I thought she looked cool as fuck! I fell in love with PJ Harvey as Beavis and Butthead ooh’d and ahh’d over her Down By The Water video, and I thought she looked so pretty! I developed an appreciation for pop culture commentary and comedy that was super referential because of them.

I also watched loads of 60s and 70s syndicated television; tons of Mary Tyler Moore, Dragnet, Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (my go-to as I was falling asleep). The Brady Bunch was a staple. I LOVED Get Smart, and I told my mom one morning that I was going to marry Maxwell Smart. I was fucking four years old. Mom was bewildered by that one, she was so thrown off! Going back to Beavis and Butthead for a moment, one of my favorite referential moments happened during their watch of Pizzicato Five’s Twiggy Twiggy video. Beavis and Butthead thought one of the members looked like the kid from the TV show My Three Sons. That’s another show I remember watching a ton, and little me was TICKLED TO DEATH!

And of course, I was also watching loads of Nickelodeon. I still remember watching Stick Stickly during the summer and seeing the Pure Moods commercial during the ad breaks, and thinking that compilation was so cool. Double Dare, Legends of the Hidden Temple, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, I loved it all.

This is getting to be super long, so in closing, s/o to the MTV VJs I was obsessed with: Kennedy, Bill Bellamy, Downtown Julie Brown, Martha Quinn, and Tabitha Soren. A special shoutout to the Sneak Prevue channel, which was a channel I stumbled upon around 8 or 9. I’d spend HOURS watching that channel, mesmerized by the movie trailers and the risqué Spice Channel commercials. One more shoutout to SNICK and TGIF, I ate up everything played during those blocks.

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

Finances were a struggle for my parents. My dad would buy CDs up the wazoo, his CD collection was incredible, but most of the time his CD player was in the pawn shop. Dad’s only cars were drag race cars with “slicks”, tires that didn’t have any sort of grip, which weren’t street legal. He didn’t have a normal car, so we were always driving around in one of Dad’s work trucks, none of which had a CD player. He had two stations he stuck with, both rock-related. One was a classic rock station, which of course played lots of Led Zeppelin (fun fact: Immigration Song scared the shit out of me, it’d come on and I’d hide behind my mom), The Cars, Pat Benatar. But his main station played a mixture of classic and modern rock. Lots of Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, The Black Crowes, Aerosmith.

The lack of CD player at home is likely why Dad just kept it on MTV at all times, and he’d write down the artists he liked so he could grab their CDs on payday. Mom went along with what Dad listened to, basically. I have a core memory of being 11 or 12, and my aunt had stopped by the house. At that point, my parents’ finances had turned around, and the CD player was permanently in our living room. My mom played Metallica’s Fuel for my aunt because my mom LOVED that song, and all my aunt could really say after that was “Huh”. I am laughing so hard even recalling this memory, like why did my mom think my very reserved aunt was going to be into Metallica?! My mom’s so cute, I swear. Other standouts to Mom: Pink by Aerosmith and Crazy Bitch by Buckcherry.

Do you have siblings? Any musical inspirations that came from them?

I did, an older sister. She was six years older than me, too cool for me, but we shared a room and a bed so she had to deal with me. She liked music, but not as much as my parents did. When she was listening to music, however, she was finding things on BET. She loved Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac, mourned both when they passed away with the rest of my neighbors. I remember my sister coming home with an Xscape single once upon a time. I didn’t know their music, but I thought Tiny was really pretty.

More than anything, my sister inspired what else I enjoyed watching on TV. We’d spend our Saturday mornings watching Saved by the Bell and California Dreams, I’d sit and watch Ricki Lake with her after school during the week. I really enjoyed watching TGIF with her, especially Boy Meets World and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I was thrilled to see Clarissa become a witch with a cute talking cat by her side! And of course, watching the later seasons of Full House and seeing Steph and DJ navigate teenhood were super cool to me. My sister got me into watching the Real World, I’m unsure if I would have watched them if she didn’t have them on.

Sadly, my sister passed away a few years back due to health complications related to long COVID. The album talk soup was worked on after she passed with our childhood in mind, with tracks directly linked to core memories of watching certain shows and experiencing happier memories together. I miss her, but I hope she’s no longer in pain, wherever she is.

Did you ever learn an instrument or learn any music theory?

My dad wanted me to learn how to play the guitar so badly. He had a coworker who was more than happy to teach me, but I was extremely shy and fearful of making mistakes. I didn’t want to disappoint my dad if I failed, y’know? So I never actually took those lessons. Years later, my ex was given a keyboard by a former roommate, and on that, I learned a few songs by ear and navigated around the keys to find the right notes. This was 2010/2011, and I learned What Is Love by Haddaway, Spinal Meningitis by Ween, and Desire Lines by Deerhunter. It’s not like I was some sort of Regina Spektor type, it was just me with my pointer fingers and determination. I made little videos of myself playing these songs and kind of whisper singing… I was too shy to actually sing around anybody, years and years before karaoke emboldened me to belt like I knew I could. I can sing pretty decently!

I don’t remember how to play any of those songs anymore, my ex took the keyboard with him when we broke up. HE NEVER USED THE DAMN THING! That asshole. But that was about it on instruments. Never took any music theory, wasn’t in band class or orchestra. I would have wanted to be part of color guard had I chosen to participate in band class anyway; even if I wanted to learn an instrument, that fear of failure always loomed, and it cripped me from trying to learn.

Let’s go back to 2010/11 for a second. How did you originally get involved with that whole proto-/early vaporwave scene? You didn’t make music back then yet, did you?

Prepare yourself for a very long answer to this one!

I became a huge fan of Tobacco right as he was starting to hype up his second album, Maniac Meat. I’d known of Black Moth Super Rainbow, I actually remember hearing Forever Heavy through an FYE CD sampler years prior and thinking it sounded cool, but for some reason I never checked out the album. I’d heard tracks from Fucked Up Friends and thought they were cool, too, but it was the fanmade video for Heavy Makeup (shoutout FatherLongLegs) that really sunk its teeth into me. That was the first time I’d ever seen commercials used for a music video, some of which I remembered from my Nickelodeon days, and those commercials with that song were an unsettling pair. Tobacco’s vocoder usually sounded pretty, harmonic, psychedelic but in like… a Moon Safari kind of way? Complimentary to the songs, like the vocoder was its own instrument. Heavy Makeup, however, was crunchy, creepy, almost like the vocoder fucked around with a Ouija board and didn’t close the bridge quick enough. I became enamored. I wanted more.

I’m rambling here, I know, but ultimately that discovery was how I reached the BMSRfans forum, hoping to find more tracks from this upcoming album. At the point I found the forum, I’d say there were maybe 20 active users max? I lurked for a little bit until I hit the jackpot with a Beck stan on last.fm who had the Beck/Tobacco collab tracks from the yet-to-be-leaked Maniac Meat album, and privately sharing those tracks with the users basically cemented my “cred”, hahaha.

One of the folks I met there was Liz, now known as one half of SPF420. She used to do proto-SPF420 shows with the BMSRfans crew, since many of them were BMSR-inspired musicians themselves. We’d link up in a Tinychat one Friday night, there’d be 4 or 5 different artists playing, and the artists either did prerecorded sets with their own visuals or chose to do a live bedroom performance via webcam, and sometimes Tobacco would come through and surprise us with unreleased material that wouldn’t officially come to surface for years.

Vektroid appeared at one out of nowhere, she and Liz were super tight back then, and she eventually found me on Facebook and we got super chatty. This was a few months after her release, Telnet Erotika, which blew my fucking mind when she sent it my way. We chatted for a long while, but she was dealing with personal matters, I was dealing with matters of my own, and we kind of lost touch. We were still friends, of course, but I think our constant, paragraphs long chatter for a few months caused each of us to get burned out, looking back.

Through stalking Ramona’s last.fm page, I found something she’d scrobbled called “Laserdisc Visions”, and I went through the comments on the artist page and discovered it was Ramona’s new alias, and her album had gotten leaked because somebody didn’t realize she’d shared it in private, and it ended up being posted on a blog briefly before getting taken down. I was on the hunt for it from there. I eventually found the album in some random person’s last.fm comment section, but I felt bad for grabbing it knowing it was a version she didn’t want out there, so I immediately deleted it.

The blog was Moonlit TV Dinner, and Laserdisc Visions album was removed by the time I found it, but I downloaded everything else that got posted there. James Ferraro’s Night Dolls With Hairspray and the KGB Man/Oneohtrix Point Never split were two of the larger releases posted on there, but there were also two albums by an artist I’d never heard of called 骨架的, one labeled “Skeleton Disco Rock” (known now as simply Skeleton), Holograms being the other. The first version of Computer Dreams’ self-titled was also posted there, pre-officially releasing it as a split with Napolian (R.I.P.)

A few years ago, I found a /mu/ post from Ramona from 2012, where she stated that she also found 骨架的 because of this blog. I thought that was neat to have confirmed, because I never asked her about it. She didn’t even know at the time that I was also on the hunt for this stuff, I think she must have seen me post about it on Facebook or something and put two and two together. I’d long suspected that Moonlit TV Dinner was created by Computer Dreams/Midnight Television, but I never bothered asking anybody about it for whatever reason and just left it a years long mystery for myself. Around the time I found Ramona’s /mu/ post, I stumbled upon a blog post made by Scott Michael of Ailanthus, back when he was still working on Roberto Clemente Rookie Card, and Scott confirmed that it absolutely was Computer Dreams’ blog. Going back to 2011, I remember returning to Moonlit TV Dinner maybe a month or so later to download more of what was posted, and the entire Blogspot had been deleted. There aren’t any snapshots of it on Wayback Machine, either, I checked long ago. What a crazy short lived gem that was.

I didn’t know any of these people outside of Ramona and Liz. I got introduced to many of the artists involved some months later, when Ramona invited me into a private FB group called Xerox Fax Machine’s Superheroes. From there, these people I looked to as idols became my friends. I was not making music at the time, and I most certainly didn’t think that I myself would ever get involved musically when I was digging in. I just found it to be exciting and different!

Turntable.fm started in spring 2011, right? Was there an online circle of friends before that, maybe through Tumblr or other early social media?

2011, indeed! I remember hearing about the site through blogs. Writers were getting invite codes to explore the site for future write ups, and thankfully an old last.fm friend got an invite that he sent my way in May. I immediately sent my invite over to Liz because I knew she would love turntable.fm (and I wasn’t wrong!). I knew nobody on the site at the time, and it didn’t help that IRL events happened and I no longer had access to the internet by late May (too broke to pay the internet bill, don’t miss those days).

When I finally got full internet access again in August, the site had finally opened to everybody, so there were a ton of users and so many new rooms. At that time, you were able to upload and play whatever the fuck you wanted, as Turntable hadn’t gotten into trouble with DMCA shit yet. It was magical. Liz and Chaz met each other in a turntable.fm room, I don’t remember if it was in the Bloghaus room or in another one, and Liz had killer taste in music so everybody she met was following her around, which is how I met a lot of folks. I met a fair share of people on my own in the chillwave+ room, some of which were in a private FB group chat with me a year later as I discussed making Fortune 500 a reality.

There were some friends we knew that were coming through and hanging out in rooms with us. Ramona and I pissed someone off in one room when we were playing b2b smooth jazz one time! Nite Flyte really sent somebody over the edge. But for the most part, a lot of us were meeting for the first time and developing friendships from there, eventually friending each other on Facebook/Tumblr/wherever.

You’ve said that Midnight Television (May 2011) and Laserdisc Visions (July 2011) got you into vaporwave. Did people actually call it vaporwave then already? Can you remember when you first heard the term and when you started using it?

Fun fact: I actually did not like Laserdisc Visions at first. Searching for the leak led me down the path of discovering whatever this music was, but 骨架的’s albums confused the fuck out of me (I had my a-ha moment with the forever classic, Reflections), Computer Dreams was interesting but I still didn’t fully understand what was happening, and I was so disappointed when Beer on the Rug released New Dreams LTD. and it was not the Telnet Erotika sequel I hoped it would be. That said, I still downloaded other albums from Beer on the Rug to see if I’d like other albums, and I remember finally “getting” what Laserdisc Visions was shooting for when I heard Midnight Television, that was when everything felt like it clicked.

I’d never heard of the name “vaporwave” until the Dummy Mag article came out [in July 2012, ed. note]. I remember seeing the term “newbreed” getting thrown around, also saw it referred to as “gunk”. It made looking for similar artists so difficult to find because nobody had really classified it as anything official, and it made it even more exciting when I did stumble upon music that fit within the confines of whatever this music was. I have to give a quick shoutout here to the Chillwave/Glo-Fi/Hypnagogic Pop Facebook page, which was run once upon a time by a homie named Mr. Nonsense. He was also digging deep for artists to post on his page, and that was where I found Wasted Nights, Future Airwaves, and Skeleton Lipstick (which then led to my discovery of S U R F I N G’s Deep Fantasy). He later exposed people to Lux, too, which felt like a “pinch me, I’m dreaming” moment.

I created a compilation in mid-2012 called “Late Night Lofi”, a name I coined after a weird late night drive to my hometown with my ex that I used to evoke the weird late night drive/late night television vibe a lot of these releases had going for them, but I wasn’t out there publicly using it until I started releasing Lux stuff a few months later. I understood the vaporware background, it made sense to me, but I totally hated that genre name at first, LOL. I used it because it became official.

Had you actually heard Vektroid’s previous albums like Neo Cali? What did you think when you first heard Floral Shoppe? How has your perception of that record changed over the years?

I had listened to her previous work, yes! I used to jokingly call myself ***Vektroid’s #1 Fan*** once upon a time. I ate all of her material up, including her James Ferraro-inspired hypnagogic material she’d uploaded on her Tumblr, that album being called Starfleet Iguana, as well my all-time favorite, Planet Dudette Cassette. Those two got revisited and combined into the 2016 album, Big Danger. Another favorite Vek-related project is something that never fully saw the light of day, a project she did called DRVG CTRL. It would probably be seen as future funk-adjacent now, as it consisted of dancier versions of her material, with a track or two that were also originally sampled for Floral Shoppe. That used to be my go-to workout music around 2012-2013ish. You can find a demo called NEW LIFE on YouTube that she later condensed for one of the 2016 releases, it became Love U Better on Vektroid Texture Maps.

In 2013 or so, Ramona had sent me and Liz a folder of all of her unreleased material in case she lost her work, which actually sadly happened after some sort of hard drive failure. I had it all saved on my PC, as well as on a mp3 player that only worked as a larger flash drive at that point. Ramona reached out just before my infamous 2016 computer croak and asked if I still had it, and I happily sent everything her way. I think that’s actually why she’d revisited everything and retooled a lot of it for Big Danger/Vektroid Texture Maps, and if that’s truly the case, I’m happy to have been able to contribute to these releases in some way. In my opinion, the tracks didn’t need retooling, but I am a biased person who loved Gak Monster to death before it became a 15 second intro to Dial Giri on Big Danger. I say that with love, not attempting to be shady about her revisits!

Going back to 2012, we were keeping in touch again after she’d seen I was also going down the proto-vaporwave path, so I was able to listen to her albums before they officially got released, and I had the chance to hear albums that didn’t see the light of day for a while (unless you caught them on her FB or on her last.fm artist pages). I got Floral Shoppe two months early, and I was OBSESSED. I felt like Floral Shoppe was the perfect merging of her Laserdisc Visions material and what she was doing with Telnet Erotika. I loved how fleshed out the tracks were, and at the time, I didn’t fully realize how much of it was sampled. I remember hearing リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー like everyone else and feeling totally mindblown. That track was like an extended tropical paradise, something I wanted to live inside forever. I would replay it two or three times in a row on each listen before finally moving onto the next track.

One of my favorite online memories goes back to the BMSRfans Tinychat party days. It was one of the last Tinychat Tobacco-related parties Liz hosted before shifted her focus to SPF420, and Ramona was invited to perform. Ramona’s webcam was focused on her equipment, and somewhere in the middle of the set, she played ECCOと悪寒ダイビング . This was pre-Floral Shoppe’s official release, and I think only me and Liz knew what it was at the time, and I got way too emotional witnessing it. I knew I was watching something special, and I wish I could go back in time and record a lot of those proto-SPF420 shows so I could rewatch them all over again.

My adoration of Floral Shoppe has never wavered, and I’m thrilled that it was the album for many people who were discovering what vaporwave was. It’s a fabulous introduction! I will forever and always love that album.

Was Daniel Lopatin an influence on your early work at all?

I knew Daniel’s work existed as Sunset Corp. and as Oneohtrix Point Never, but I never listened to him, I can’t tell you why. It was Games’ That We Can Play that caused me to finally pay attention. That EP was EVERYTHING to me. I absolutely adored Replica when it came out, and I didn’t realize then that some of the tracks sampled 80s commercials. I used to run a screenshot blog on Tumblr in 2012, and I remember finding a Wrigley’s Spearmint gum commercial that had a specific melody and beep that I rewound like, ten times back to figure out why I knew that already. It eventually dawned on me that he’d sampled another version of the Spearmint ad for Sleep Dealer! I thought that was the coolest shit ever, that this artist who’d been seen as a God for the early vaporwavers was still out here sampling things that could be considered vaporwave.

I admit, I was super super late to the Eccojams game. I listened to bits and pieces of it around 2011-2013, but I didn’t listen to it in full until I was sent the original mp3s of all of the files that were put to tape by an olde friend. I’m kind of glad I waited to hear it, because I got the chance to listen to it with fresh ears, and the cassette rips were pitched a bit differently.

I will say that I met Dan in 2012, a few days into luxury elite’s existence, after he played a killer Replica-filled set at a local art gallery. I also chatted online with him briefly when I got a leak of Garden of Delete that somebody had sent me very fucking early (and I swore to him I’d keep it to myself), he was nothing but kind both times. He mentioned me in a G.O.D.-related interview, and I remember Daniel made a joke that it would lead to some romcom romance movie about us that would go to shit, which I thought was hilarious. It’s cool to know that there’s an article out there where he called me his angel of mercy. I need that on my tombstone!

Who else made interesting music at the time that might have influenced you? You’ve mentioned Tobacco, and I’ve heard the names 18 Carat Affair and Midnight Television/Computer Dreams being tossed around a lot.

18 Carat Affair’s 60/40 cover is why the name luxury elite exists. I saw that cover and thought, “If I were to ever make music happen, this would be what I would sound like.” In the shower, I was thinking of words I could use for an artist name. Luxury was the first thing I thought of, and I was tossing around various words that sounded equally luxurious or uppity, and elite appeared a few minutes later. A lightbulb went off in my head, so shoutout to Denys [Parker aka 18 Carat Affair, ed. note] always for that visual inspiration.

Vektroid was obviously an inspiration for me, Midnight Television for sure, and another artist that I don’t really say out loud for whatever reason is Lasership Stereo [aka Psychic LCD aka Diskette Romances, ed. note]. I love Lasership Stereo’s releases, Plastics is still one of my all-time faves. Sure, it’s a slowed down and looped intro of Guinnevere, but something about the specific pitch and that loop felt truly magical, and it was such an earworm. He’s not really participating in the scene anymore, but I feel like present day Lasership Stereo, if he chose to continue with the project, would have been next level.

Who else was part of the turntable.fm circle in 2011/12? Did those relationships all happen online, or did you meet IRL too?

As I mentioned earlier, Liz and Chaz met there! Vektroid was there also. Terrell Davis was on there (released briefly as VISAプリペイド, also brilliant graphic designer who was EXTREMELY ahead of his time, R.I.P.), the label owner of Night People used to come through occasionally and hang out, the owner of Kandahar Homedubs (who did the lovely 101.7 WAVE II gift box cassettes), Veracom, Transmuteo, Internet Club hopped in every now and then, Heather Palmer (another fabulous digital artist who did some really fantastic proto-vaporwave/adjacent videos and visual loops), Navigateur would come through and hang out for a bit, too. I believe Saint Pepsi would come through and say hello? Mux Mool and I got into an argument in a TT room once because he was trashing ESPRIT 空想 (and vaporwave in general), Teams (now known as Yves Tumor) appeared in a room once, we bonded over our August birthdays and they promised me a slice of birthday cake in the mail. Ricky Eat Acid said hello once upon a time. In a perfect full circle moment, Tobacco did a few TT parties; he was even given a special avatar with his basketball mask he wore for Maniac Meat-era photos. He played a song I’d been asking to hear in full for years at that point, and it was a dream come true. I’m sure there’s more that I am blanking on, and I’m sure somebody will be in my DMs saying “HEY, YOU FORGOT THIS PERSON!”

But otherwise, most of the folks we hung out with were music fans like we were, into hypnagogic pop or chillwave. There was one friend who would “play” fun., but it would devolve into power electronics for three minutes, the track titles definitely would not fly in present day. The person who did the SPF420 theme, they went by HD-ROM, but I believe he was also someone that was just hanging out in turntable.fm rooms with us before being asked to do the theme song. On an SPF420 note, I’m pretty sure the artists on the first ever SPF420 lineup were all people we’d met on TT.

The majority of the relationships were URL only, we were all bored in our bedrooms and seeking community. I met Liz IRL in 2014, our only IRL meeting. We went to a Black Moth Super Rainbow show together because we shared a mutual friend who lived an hour or so away from me who drove her to KY. That was a very lovely evening. I missed my chance on meeting Chaz a few years ago. I finally met Internet Club a few years ago at the first FlamingoFest, which was quite surreal. I played my first show ever with Navigateur back in… was it 2014? I’ve never talked about that publicly, but that was my first ever show. It was cool seeing him live! We saw each other again briefly at the last Electronicon, and I wanna say my partner met Navigateur again at a festival that George Clanton, Neggy Gemmy, Persona La Ave, and loads of other fab vapor-related artists played in South Carolina. I had to miss out on that one, and I was so bummed. I still chat with a few TT friends on Discord, and I’m still friends with some of the TT homies on Instagram. I lost touch with some friends, but I will never forget them.

The 80s nostalgia theme was a means of escapism for you at the time. You’ve talked about it becoming almost an addiction. Can you talk about the idea or image for luxury elite a bit more in detail? Who is this person, really? How much of yourself is in Lux?

I mentioned my screenshot Tumblr in an earlier answer, and that’s where we’ll begin. I don’t even remember how I found screenshot Tumblrs initially. I think a Tumblr friend must have reposted something from gentleconsideration, and I clicked to check out his page and became enamored with his content. He reposted screencaps from other screencap-related blogs, and I had no idea where to even begin, but I knew I wanted to do that sort of blog, too. A few months later, I got an invite to the private VHS torrent site I also mentioned in an earlier answer, and I went on a downloading SPREE. My blog was called familyshowcase, named after a block HBO used to do of family shows and movies. I went through hours and hours of TV shows with original commercials included, obsessively screenshotting what visually appealed to me and posting it immediately to my Tumblr. I made gifs sometimes, but my blog was primarily screencaps of whatever.

One night, I was sifting through an American Bandstand episode that was basically a Hall & Oates takeover, and I stumbled upon a commercial for a KTEL compilation called Neon Nights. It looked so typically 80s, very stylish. One of the characters that appeared was a woman in an all black ensemble, with a veil over her face. She looked at her compact mirror before looking deeply into the camera, pursing her lips like she was blowing the cameraman a kiss. She looked so fucking cool, and that was my favorite part of the ad. She later became the Lux avatar around early 2013ish? I didn’t use her right away for whatever reason. I’ll come back to talking about her shortly.

My personal life back then was in shambles. I was working part time, my then partner didn’t have a job during the summer since his job thrived on college students living nearby and buying fried food while inebriated. He had horrific money management to boot. I thought us sharing a bank account would make him hold himself accountable. Boy, was I naive! And whew, did we struggle. We lived paycheck to paycheck, neither of us had savings, and he used his mom as his ATM when things got really rough. I didn’t have a college degree and I feared I’d be stuck in retail for the rest of my life as a result. I was unhappy and feeling quite trapped.

Most of what I screenshot for familyshowcase were ads from 1984-1987, and those commercial blocks showed guys rollerskating down a hill with a Mountain Dew bottle waiting for them at the bottom, friends grinning from ear to ear as they ate pizza slices from Pizza Hut, couples embracing and kissing with Big Red gum in their mouths, slim women in bikinis with diet sodas in their hands, all of these people living joyous lives without any cares in the world in 30-45 second clips.

Meanwhile, I was in 2012, miserable and wondering if my bank account was going to overdraft again. I wanted this 1980s life. My then partner would get so angry because I’d spend so much time screencapping for familyshowcase or hanging out on turntable.fm that he felt like I never wanted to spend time with him, and looking back, with how rough things got, it makes sense that I was seeking an escape from the real world, even if was at the expense of being around my roommates or spending time with him.

When I started uploading tracks to the luxury elite Soundcloud page, I used familyshowcase screencaps to represent the tracks, and I used to say that Lux tracks were the soundtracks to the hundreds of thousands of screenshots I’d amassed on familyshowcase. I viewed Lux as the veiled woman from the Neon Nights commercial, a woman who lived lavishly, and money was never an issue. She lived in a penthouse, her walls were windows that highlighted her neighboring buildings, which were equally tall skyscrapers. Lux didn’t need a man, though a man was nice to court once in a while. She lived in VHS tapes, she’d play on a loop in your VCR, and she invited you into a world where sure, things felt lonely, but she understood you and she wanted to make you feel less so. She was the answer to the isolation I felt as I became more and more withdrawn from my unsatisfying and unstable reality.

To answer the last part of your question, I felt like Lux and IRL me were two different people, and I still sort of do. I perform as Lux, but I’ve never envisioned myself as the Lux character I created in 2012. I felt like she was the hand reaching out to save me more than anything. I do think her characteristics were things that I always wanted to be but had been too shy to show, and Lux has made me feel comfortable in showing those characteristics without any fucks to give about it, so that’s pretty cool. She gave me confidence that I severely lacked in my life. She really turned my life around.

Your first albums came out in late 2012, and by the time rose quartz and Late Night Delight came out in early 2013, you had basically nailed your style. How did you learn so quickly what you effectively wanted to do?

A core memory of early Lux happened one night in one of the Tinychats that usually consisted of folks Liz/Chaz/myself were friends with through Turntable. Ramona was on webcam, and she was listening to I&II, two “mixtapes” I did that were later released as a full album on Ailanthus. I look at that early period of working on my mixtapes and I cringe, which I know I shouldn’t do, but a lot of that material was me throwing things at the wall and seeing what would stick. It wasn’t great, but it was fun and I was new and I should be nicer to it. People seemed to really like it, though. Mr. Nonsense gave me a platform by posting Ooh on the Chillwave/Glo-Fi/Hypnagogic Pop page, and tracks I uploaded onto Soundcloud were getting support I never expected to receive.

I was extremely nervous for Ramona to hear it because I wanted to impress her, and sure enough, she fucking haaaaated it. She never said it outright, but her facial expressions and lack of commentary said it all. She did perk up at the track smoking lounge, asking why I cut it off so quickly. Back then, I thought short tracks were supreme, that you could get the point across in a short period of time and longer tracks were unnecessary. However, she wasn’t wrong, that song could have looped for at least a little bit longer. I told myself to hold onto that thought, to seek out songs more in the smoking lounge realm, let my tracks breathe and don’t end them so quickly, and rely a bit less on vocals, only using small vocal parts with intention.

I found a YouTube channel that had loads of 1980s funk and pop, primarily from Japan, and went to town ripping everything that appealed to me. If the track felt like something exciting I could work with, it was getting ripped and messed with. skyscraper was the first track I finished from rose quartz, and it reminded me of being 14-15 years old, staying up until 2:00 a.m. because I couldn’t stop scrolling online. My glowing monitor was the only light on in the house. I’d stand up and stretch or run to the bathroom or whatever, and then I’d sit in front of the windows that faced the second busiest street in my hometown for a few minutes. I’d watch the occasional car pass by and think, “Where are they going? Are they heading to a party? Are they heading home from work? Are they just bored and driving around to pass the time? I wonder what they’re thinking, what they’re listening to, how they’re feeling.” I imagined myself being in a car that I once watched from the dining room window, bored and lonely at the steering wheel, with vaporwave blaring as I drove through an empty downtown, wondering if anybody else felt equally as lonely at that moment. That was when I knew I was on the right track, because skyscraper stood out as something more personal to me, and something I’d fall in love with if I were still just an avid listener. I finished sparkling not too long after that, that track really amplified the “lonely night driving” vibe I’d accidentally stumbled upon. I decided to sift and find more tracks that would continue down that path. Some of the tracks like glamour and minx were made with the veiled Neon Nights woman in mind, because I realized at this point that she was the 60/40-esque vision I had of what I wanted luxury elite to be. To be funny about it, Lux tracks going forward were in two categories: “Look at me, I feel rich!” or “Look at me, I feel so fucking lonely!”

I’ve said it before, but I think my side of Late Night Delight was a bit inferior in comparison to how much fun Ryan’s side was. I was nervous as shit during the making of LND, but I don’t know that I ever told Ryan that. Saint Pepsi was really beginning to blow up; he dropped three releases in a very short time span, and the singles he put up on Soundcloud were getting a ton of eyes on him. There was some intense pressure to deliver something that felt like it was on Ryan’s level. Despite that, we had a lot of fun cheering each other on in DMs and sending tracks back and forth. I look at that time very fondly, even with the inferiority complex hitting me like a bomb. With the exception of schaumburg and cruising, I suppose nightlife also, I feel like my side of the split almost sounded morose? Maybe I sound crazy here, but I left that experience thinking that I needed to make something happier in the future, something less within the “rich/lonely” realm, which I eventually did with fantasy (and years later with my 2018 and onward material).

2013 was probably the most prolific year of your career. This was peak early vaporwave too – please talk about that time and how you experienced it, especially when it blew up on the internet. How did the scene evolve from your point of view?

Though I’d seen plenty of articles pop up about seapunk during its brief moment in the spotlight, it was very surreal to see somebody covering what was now officially known as vaporwave at the end of 2012. The genre was so personal to me and the scene as I knew it at that point was tiny, it felt so niche. I didn’t realize how it was spreading around to others. I mean, it makes sense looking back; I remember hearing that OPN found the music video for Laserdisc Visions’ track Tingri and he shared it in some form, so of course people were going to check out what he was sharing. But I definitely didn’t expect any coverage outside of promotion by friends or fellow artists, maybe a niche music blog like stolen lynx or somebody sharing it at most. I had no clue what the hell Dummy Mag was or what sort of audience vaporwave was about to receive from this sudden spotlight moment.

It was interesting reading how Ramona and Robin had described the genre, though I felt like an imposter for not viewing it in the same way. I remember trying to force myself to believe that; there’s an interview out there from early 2013 where I really tried my best to use the same key terms, and it likely read as embarrassing word salad, but I quickly dropped it because it wasn’t genuinely how I perceived vaporwave to be. I saw the scene as a group of people bringing their backgrounds and past and present influences to the table, who were messing around with music they either grew up hearing or were hearing for the first time and wanting to recontextualize it.

Nobody Here turned a part of the Lady in Red chorus into an isolation anthem simply by pitching it down and looping three words over and over again, which resulted in folks like 骨架的 and Computer Dreams experimenting with this idea in their own way, which then opened the eyes of Ramona and Robin and other early adopters/proto-vaporwavers to bring their own influences and backgrounds to the table, and so on. I only lived in the 80s for two years, my memories start around 1992, but I felt nostalgic for a world I didn’t fully experience because that world felt much more soothing than the world I was living in by the time 2013 hit. That’s why I was there, and I knew others felt similarly to me, and I no longer felt like I was imposing on something I thought I misjudged.

More vaporwave artists were following me on Soundcloud as 2013 continued, and Soundcloud was recommending new accounts left and right. People I discovered while I heavily listened to chillwave were now diving fully into making vaporwave, like Topaz Gang (fka Betamaxx, not synthwave Betamaxx) and VentureX (fka The Pillars of Creation). Of course, that also makes sense, since chillwave also utilized their fair share of 80s sampling for their own material. The most popular chillwave song of all time was built on a loop from a Gary Low song, for fuck’s sake! Washed Out was out here sampling DEVO and italo disco! I’d argue that vaporwave was the result of people who felt inspired by chillwave and hypnagogic pop, and people combined elements from each to create, for lack of a better term, a Monstro Elisasue. And now that monster was getting its moment in the sun, and nobody wanted to chop her head off in this version (yet).

I’m of the belief that 2013 wasn’t even the biggest year for the scene, though. In my opinion, it was 2014 that was the biggest year, when vaporwave was being seen as a meme and even more eyes were hitting vaporwave. It was easy once upon a time to catch up with the vaporwave Bandcamp tag; even with how prolific many of us were, it’d be like maybe five or so new releases at most per week. By 2014, there were multiple new releases daily, and you had to catch up a lot on what you missed. New labels began to appear, I believe r/vaporwave had been made at this point or maybe was about to be created? The word was really spreading around, and new people kept popping up left and right. It was like somebody threw Gizmo into the water or something, it was wild!

Going back to 2013 again, the new artists were either approaching the scene through a chillwave-adjacent, having fun kind of flair, or in a “we must follow the principles listed in this paragraph of this Adam Harper Definitive Vaporwave Article OR ELSE”. I really liked what folks like ショッピングワールドjp and Hairspray Heart were doing. ＤＯＮＴ/ BＥ/ 正方形 was another cool gem who disappeared way too soon. And of course, I loved Nmesh and 회사AUTO (R.I.P.). Some of these artists were even coming in as fans of Lux; Late Night Delight sold 25 copies of a tape in one day at a time when tapes barely existed and rarely sold out immediately, and neither Ryan nor myself anticipated the response Late Night Delight received. It was a boost to my then low self-esteem, that’s for damn sure.

Liz and Chaz joined forces to create SPF420. I was given the opportunity to play the second ever SPF show just after rose quartz’s release, and I performed by plugging my mp3 player into the microphone port and playing my prerecorded set “live” on Tinychat. In those days, it wasn’t the most common thing to send your set over to a host who would play it on your behalf (unless your internet was garbage or you were having some sort of technical difficulty with streaming it yourself). The performing artist was the one streaming the visuals and the audio in real time, or you were streaming your audio, and somebody else was livestreaming visuals “up on stage” with you. For that show, Chaz did my visuals, and he did such a good job!

That first URL set was simultaneously exciting and terrifying, and the response was absolutely incredible. Chaz also did a set of his own under his Metallic Ghosts alias, and filling out the rest of that lineup were Veracom, Transmuteo, Infinity Frequencies, coolmemoryz, and Ramona doing a Prism Corp. DJ set. SPF420 was gaining traction quickly; by the time SPF420 3.0 rolled around, the audience count ranged from 100 or so to 300+, depending on which artist was playing. There were friends from Turntable eagerly tuning in, artists within the scene as well, of course, but there were also quite a bit of new faces coming in who had heard about vaporwave and were curious to see what was going on.

By the end of 2013, SPF420 had gained enough attention between word of mouth and blogs like TinyMixTapes, who were now covering the scene and fully throwing their support behind what vaporwave and SPF420 were doing, that it caught the attention of fucking Anamanaguchi, who played the SPF420 Christmas party to around 250 people. Anamanaguchi was a big fucking deal, and it was cool that they were so into the concept and eagerly wanted to participate. Things were getting crazy for SPF420, and I felt so proud of Liz and Chaz for hosting these DIY online shows and giving people across the world a chance to connect with each other and with their favorite artists in chat. It felt like we were all on top of the world, never did I expect anything like this to happen to any of us. 420.

Floral Shoppe was getting a lot of attention, especially from the /mu/ crowd. As a lurker who had already witnessed their reactions to Tyler the Creator and Death Grips (“check out this cool underground thing I found” > “this is now /mu/’s obsession” > “/mu/ users are lashing out because of overexposure” > “/mu/ now fully hates this”), I knew that this was going to be bad. It didn’t help that Anthony Fantano reviewed Floral Shoppe out of nowhere. I never watched the review, but I recall hearing that he didn’t like it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that fueled /mu/’s annoyance even further.

There were two categories of /mu/tants who hated vaporwave: the people who hated vaporwave entirely and wanted it to die already, and the people who liked Floral Shoppe and what they read about in Dummy Mag, but despised the second wavers. The latter group called us broporwave, “the cancer that was killing vaporwave”, because we weren’t following the vision of vaporwave outlined in the Dummy Mag article. It’s funny because the majority of the first wave artists within the scene, to my knowledge, didn’t agree with that stance at all. We were all quite friendly and supportive of each others’ work.

Eventually, many of the second wavers were doxxed by /mu/, personal photos were shared, all of us were ridiculed and mocked, slurs thrown, the whole nine yards. I couldn’t trust some of the 2013-2014 artists who I knew promoted themselves on /mu/ because I feared becoming friends with somebody who mocked me and my friends. I even vaguely remember a /mu/ user or two creating vaporwave albums that were fully made to mock what was happening. Adam Harper chose to amplify and echo what /mu/ was saying about broporwave in his follow up article, which caused some controversy amongst our tight knit community. People were feeling insulted by what he had said, myself included. He eventually apologized for the outrage it caused on his personal blog. By the end of the year, Adam’s favorite albums of 2013 list was posted, and his #1 album was a tie between Late Night Delight and an album by Infinity Frequencies. Now that’s a full circle moment.

And on another full circle note, in the same /mu/ thread from 2012 where Ramona referenced Moonlit TV Dinner, she also said this about the Dummy Mag/TinyMixTapes coverage and her general outlook on the scene, and I hope she doesn’t mind me quoting her. I feel like it’s an interesting way to finish this question.

“i can appreciate the philosophy that the blog coverage has outlined in projects like my own in that they are meant to be a clear reflection of the human condition in this precise moment in history. blah blah blah i could talk about accelerationism and anti-capitalism and blah blah blah fukushima etc for hours but not because i’m a vaporwaver, i’m just really political like that. and perhaps fairly naive.

but in strict regard to vaporwave, i think that kind of coverage encourages people to over-intellectualize it, which in turn makes the people behind it appear unjustifiably pretentious (and in turn, completely moronic) given the type of music we specialize in. how much context can you really give to a doctored loop of a jazz instrumental? truly guys, we are sample curators at best.

we put into practice the art of commodifying art. new dreams ltd. was about taking ‘music’ and returning it to its most primordial state, ‘sound’.

and because of that, i sometimes worry the net audience has, since dummy and tinymixtapes brought us up, been given the idea that internet club and myself, for example, truly believe that our eccojams were in some way ‘transcendental’. perhaps it does transcend music. but it only does so because it is bred from samples so heavily commodified that it becomes, in itself, non-music. so you can view it as forward thinking, or just as easily, taking the piss. so i think it’s slightly disrespectful to electronic music when vaporwave is given serious regard. perhaps vaporwave’s legacy really will be decided by its audience. it’s hard to imagine what 2013 will be like.

i might speak only for myself, but new dreams ltd was a slightly derisive practical joke aimed at the witch house/seapunk/net music scene. it is bred from the hypothesis that the scene has such a backwards mentality of music that they will listen to anything, no matter how tragically unfashionable the music sounds, if it’s packaged fashionably. new dreams ltd was essentially built to exploit how heavily the perception of sound is affected by imagery”

Many of the early pioneers including Lopatin and Ferraro, but even Vektroid and Internet Club moved on from vaporwave in that time. What made you want to stick around making it? How did you perceive other artists wanting to distance themselves from it at the time?

I don’t fully agree with your first statement. I know Eccojams was a massive inspiration for many artists within the scene, I know that I ooh’d and ahh’d earlier about Replica sampling 80s commercials, I know that my favorite track from Garden of Delete was looped and sampled from another artist… I never considered Daniel to be vaporwave. In that interview he did a few months ago with that podcast whose title I can’t remember, Daniel says it himself: he thinks it’s rad that it inspired people but he doesn’t link himself to that.

I don’t consider James Ferraro to be vaporwave at all, either. The Condo Pets EP and Far Side Virtual were far left turns from his previous hypnagogic pop material and felt weirdly parallel to vaporwave, but both of those came out nearly a year after the first vaporwave releases, and I think he wanted to take a break from the analog-y, tape splicing things he’d been doing for a long while and shift to experimenting with music that had more of a hi-fi, digital sheen. He’d hinted that he was shifting into a pop direction with On Air and Night Dolls. More than anything, James and Daniel were pioneers of hypnagogic pop, which was a significant influence on the first wavers of the scene.

Also, Internet Club is still around! Sure, they’re not as prolific as they once were, but they’re still around. Robin did two incredible IRL sets for FlamingoFest I and II in Los Angeles and NYC! Both times, Robin went on just before I did, and both sets calmed my super frazzled nerves because I still get super nervous about performing. Those IC sets were fabulous. I hope I get to see them live again soon! [ed. note: I wasn’t trying to imply that Internet Club stopped making music; I was referring to them moving away from vaporwave temporarily in 2013, as they confirmed in this interview from 2024]

When I returned in 2020, I’ll be honest: I came back thinking that people had long forgotten about me, and I accepted that fate. I had my chance to return after prism [from 2018, ed. note], insisting that I was back for good, and I failed everyone by leaving again. Not quite my decision, doing that. Between my PC still acting up after getting fixed and struggling with major back issues, I couldn’t return as I’d intended to. I did not anticipate being put on a pedestal like I was vapor royalty when I officially came back. Some people might think I’m full of shit here, but even with the insanity of 2013 and getting a shoutout in The Wire in 2014 (Thanks, Adam!) I never saw myself as a celebrity. I looked at myself as a fan first, always. I love the artists, the community, the curation, the sample selections, the creativity, and how the scene has evolved beyond its origins to incorporate original compositions or different styles of sampling, different genre choices, etc. I still seek out vaporwave music to this day, six years later.

I think people see 2013-2019 vaporwave as this time where artists made a lot of money and got loads of connections and had some sort of Cinderella story, when in actuality, we were part of a niche movement that got a lot of unexpected attention. That didn’t mean any of us were making money. Nobody fucking made any money! You’re talking about a time when it was seen as gauche to even ask for anything financially outside of artist tape copies, and some labels were pocketing money from the physicals and digitals they released. Many artists privately complained that their music was put up on streaming platforms by the labels who released it without consent, and they weren’t seeing a dime to boot.

On top of that, there was a very real fear with folks who heavily sampled that accepting money would result in massive troubles with copyright issues. Accepting money was seen as risky. There was also a time in the mid-2010s when physical labels were coming and going and selling tapes of vaporwave albums that were never actually created or shipped out, and again, money was pocketed by these label owners who eventually vanished into thin air. It took a long time for a conversation about how artists should get paid for their art to be accepted and validated, but bootleg labels releasing vaporwave vinyl presently make more money in a year than I’ve ever made from Lux in a decade. The artists that people perceive to be financially well-off… one would be sorely disappointed hearing the artists’ realities.

Finally getting to my point here, some people have inflated earlier vaporwave artists to some sort of bizarre 1% status where they believe we’re all financially fabulous and we’ve pulled up the ladder from other artists who seek to follow in our footsteps, it reads like fucking fanfiction. Those people need to log off and take a break from the internet. Other people see us as famous and treat us like we’re not peers. Some have gotten creepily parasocial with us.

A guy from the UK got hyperfixated on me and Nmesh big time around 2014; he mentioned us so much on his Twitter that it raised some red flags and I kept a close eye on him. He proved me right when he changed his artist name to match mine and used my Lux screenshots for his artwork. Meanwhile, he’d use his IRL account to go to my Lux FB page and tell me that this horrible artist (a.k.a. HIM!!!) was parading around as me. He really wanted attention from me. It was so fucking unhinged. After my comeback in 2020, someone appeared on the scene who would speculate about me in a shared Discord server like I didn’t exist, making inaccurate and frankly, strange connections about me that I’d never thought of myself. He eventually used tons of my album names and track titles for his discography and somehow, nobody ever caught on. He now likes tagging all of my samples for WhoSampled cred.

I can only imagine what sort of people Ramona and Robin have experienced over the last decade or so. It wouldn’t surprise me if extreme parasocial behaviors resulted in both of them choosing to create a wide berth and protecting themselves from further strange encounters. I can’t blame them if so.

But most of the first wavers disappeared because they simply moved on, they had their fun and they felt like their chapter within vaporwave was closed. They moved onto other genres or shifted their focus to IRL priorities. I don’t think anyone expected the vaporwave ride to last longer than a few years max; witch house and chillwave only truly lasted for like… four or five years? Seapunk only lasted for a few months. I don’t judge the artists who disappeared at all, I focus more on how thrilling it was to be in their presence and how much they inspired me.

You founded your label Fortune 500 in January 2013, closed it down in January 2014, but revived it twice since then. Talk about the vision for the label please, and what led to these decisions.

There were a handful of labels releasing vaporwave albums when I started, and those labels were Beer on the Rug, Ailanthus Recordings, and Sunup Recordings. Vaporbabes popped up sometime in late 2012, I believe, and I got the impression that a bunch of friends found vaporwave, felt similarly inspired by it, and created the label, and each friend had an alias and each alias released an album and participated in the sampler. Vaporbabes was, at the time, the first strictly vaporwave label to exist. I liked the discography, those albums were lovely! But they shifted into releasing seapunk and focusing on a genre called “pirateviolence”, and I was so disappointed. I felt hopeful that we’d eventually get a strictly vaporwave label, and I eventually decided to be the change I wanted to see.

Initially, Fortune 500’s concept was going to be like… Fortune 500 is getting artists together to do a side A/side B “singles”! Get artists together that work really well together! That’s actually why my split with DRIPZ exists. But then I thought the concept was silly, and at the time, I didn’t feel the most comfortable reaching out to people and asking. Probably a month, month-and-a-half later, I revisited the topic Fortune 500 to a group of homies and fellow mods of the chillwave+ Facebook page. I started thinking, “Why don’t I create a label for friends who just want their album to be hosted somewhere, or for friends having a hard time reaching out to labels?”

I called it a “last resort” label in the beginning. VentureX read the conversation and asked to participate, I didn’t even realize he was considering making vaporwave at all! That day, I created the MS Paint skyscraper images affiliated with the label, and the mods were super excited and extremely supportive, they really gave me the push I needed to say “fuck it” and see what would happen. I also told Ryan about Fortune 500, and he immediately got to work on making Empire Building with the intent of releasing it on the label.

At some point while working on tv party [from February 2013, ed. note], I got the courage to ask other vaporwave artists if they’d like to contribute to an official compilation I’d wanted to do for a year. I was shocked at how many people said yes, even folks I’d never spoken with like Computer Dreams and 骨架的 were down to be a part of it. A few weeks later, Empire Building became the first Fortune 500 release, followed a few days later by tv party, and my dream compilation, The Music of the Now Age, was released just a few days later. The rest is history.

By the time Fortune 500 had released マクロスMACROSS 82-99’s Sailorwave [in December 2013, ed. note], I was feeling so proud of the label, but very exhausted. Fortune 500 had been going for a year at that point, and I hadn’t really given myself a break. On top of that, I was given the opportunity to live out my radio broadcasting dreams, thanks to Pearl of Drifts.fm. She led me to her good friend, Spednar, and his part URL/part IRL community called Cosmic Sound. Spednar was looking for folks to do online radio shows on the Cosmic Sound website, and I immediately volunteered. Neon Nights aired every Wednesday night at 11:00 p.m. eastern, and back then it was weekly instead of the current bi-weekly episode setup I’ve done since my return.

Spending week after week on brainstorming setlists/recording the intros and outros/working on the episodes in Audacity to then export in wav to premiere “live”... it took a lot of time and attention that I originally had for Fortune 500, and I was realizing then that I had a choice I needed to make. 18 Carat Affair, who had promised to send an album over for a little while, finally appeared in my inbox with Adventures in Schizophrenia [released in February 2014, ed. note]. That was when I made my final decision: Fortune 500 was officially coming to an end, and an album from my peak vaporwave idol was the best way to say goodbye. I thought the label was done forever, the door was permanently closed. Wellllll…so much for that!

The third Music of the Now Age installment [from 2015, ed. note] happened because people were begging for Fortune 500’s return, and Dream Catalogue’s fabulous Eternal Dream System comp had just been released. I found myself really missing working on Fortune 500, so yeah, I stole David’s idea and created TMOTNA III out of it.

The fourth installment [from 2022, ed. note] came out when I was experiencing the joy of returning back online and being back in the vaporwave realm. I missed working on Fortune 500 again. Lockdown brought a few other artists back from the dead, and I decided that it’d be cool to bring the gang back together again for one final compilation that no one would expect. I reached out to everybody I could, including people who hadn’t released anything in years. I’m so proud of The Music of the Now Age IV, releasing that was exhilarating and so, so special.

A few more releases followed, but many folks I reached out to either didn’t have albums to send my way, or more bluntly, they wanted to release with labels that could do physicals. I couldn’t blame them! On top of that, I was constantly working on URL sets, both audio and visuals, and preparing sets for IRL shows I was getting asked to do. Combine that with getting busy again working on Neon Nights, and I didn’t have enough energy to dedicate to a label that didn’t seem to be on as many people’s radars anymore. I chose to quietly shutter the label for good and didn’t make any sort of flashy announcement about it. I don’t believe it’s coming back this time, but I know, I said the same thing after The Music of the Now Age III. But truly, I think Fortune 500 is done done.

In your live performances, you’ve always been wearing a mask. Why is it so important for you to keep that anonymity?

One of the things that drew me into this music was the world it transported me into. The people behind the aliases didn’t matter, even whenever I developed friendships with them. You were getting a glimpse into a world the artist curated in a 20-30 minute album, and I thought it was so fascinating concept-wise. I think that cracks began to form later when people seemingly viewed vaporwave as something that could platform them to bigger and better things, like it was becoming less about the music and more about the person behind it.

Egos were beginning to really show themselves on social media, and fighting was happening daily. The connected family sort of vibe was no longer there, things felt really splintered, and all of that to say: egos harmed the scene. I didn’t like seeing that unfold in a place where the music was once the primary focus, and most hid behind a veil of anonymity. Though I show a lot of my personality online, I never felt the need to identify myself, as it wasn’t an important part of the convo (Even though people wanted it to be; the immediate response to a woman making vaporwave was usually “What does she look like? Is she hot?”)

I stole the mask idea from Ramona. She was looking into buying a mask for an IRL show she was invited to play, and she’d linked to a bunch of different masks she’d been looking at in our Tinychat room. I recall the expressionless mask I use now being one of the types she linked to, and I remember she linked a few medical masks, too. I thought she had a really cool idea, and I liked that it provided a level of creepiness that wouldn’t have existed had she chosen to just perform as herself. I was looking around at a Spirit Halloween and found the expressionless mask in one of the aisles, and I bought it just because. It came in handy when I was asked to do my first show, and it became my staple.

Without the mask, I wouldn’t have the courage to do any of what I do live. I’d be so distracted by how my facial expressions looked, if I looked like a tomato onstage, etc. that I wouldn’t be able to have any fun. The mask gives me freedom, even if it’s torture to perform in it. It’s a fucking heat trap! I likely wouldn’t be doing shows at all if I didn’t have that mask.

What was the pandemic like for you? How did luxury elite experience it?

Lockdown started days after the end of a four year relationship, and my lockdown homie was encouraging me to get a computer and work on Lux again. Like I mentioned earlier, I feared people were going to hold my absence against me and hate me for it, so I was reluctant to come back. My friend told me I was crazy, that I wouldn’t know for sure unless I reappeared and found out for myself. Then I was asked to participate in a URL festival, I think it was called Waves, and I submitted a set extremely last second. Fast forward to the high society tape release. We met up before work so I could give him a tape as a thank you. The first thing he said upon receiving the tape was “I told you it would work out!”

I quit my public facing customer service job a few months into 2020, thank fuck. I was working from home, doing long 3-11 p.m. shifts, and I’d have my laptop on next to my work monitors so I could quietly listen to whatever URL show was happening live that night. The shows kept me from losing my mind because that job was so, so stressful. It was cool to see all of these URL events popping up left and right and watching sets from all of these new artists I’d never seen or heard of before, and the excitement in the chats was palpable. It felt like old SPF420 times. Of course, SPF420 also returned during this time, and they had already done a lockdown show or two.

The best way to answer how luxury elite experienced lockdown: luxury elite got to play a SPF420 URL show with TOBACCO. LUXURY ELITE GOT TO PLAY A SPF420 URL SHOW WITH TOBACCO. NEVER anticipated that happening in my life. Chaz showed me the screenshot of Tobacco asking if I could play (Tobacco and I were kinda chatty on Instagram and he definitely knew I was Lux), and that was one of the happiest moments of my entire life. The high society VHS was created because I knew I had to go all out for a Tobacco URL show, especially since I ripped off his Fucked Up Friends DVDs when I created the fantasy VHS years before. He really enjoyed what I did with the high society VHS when it premiered that night. Something he said to me at the end of my set got lost in the sea of excited chatter, but I remember him saying “I bequeath to thee” or something like that. The word bequeath was definitely used. That was cool.

Closer to the end of the lockdown era, I reconnected with a homie who I once knew as the person behind Tiannanmen Square Dance, a Tumblr blog that covered vaporwave/hypnagogic pop/chillwave/synthwave. I found him after he had kindly reviewed my Music of the Now Age track in 2013, and I’d since enjoyed reading his blog entries and checking out his recommendations. He was going by his new name, YUNG SHIRO 白, and he was freaking out in my DMs because the high society SPF420 party included an artist he liked named DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. I admittedly wasn’t familiar with Sabrina at that time. Sabrina was a SPF420 pick (along with desert sand feels warm at night, fun fact), and Chaz and Ryan reassured me that I’d love them. Chaz and Ryan were correct!

Cut to a few months later, this YUNG SHIRO 白 person and I fell for each other, and I visited Los Angeles and Las Vegas for the first time ever so we could spend time with each other again. I’d always wanted to visit the west coast, and that desire seeped into loads of Lux songs, especially tracks that appeared on fantasy. I saw an ocean for the first time, I saw palm trees in person, I got to experience a California to Nevada road trip with a scenic view of the desert, and I got to walk around the gorgeous Vegas strip at night. It was everything I imagined and more. If you told 2019 me what 2021 me would be accomplishing, 2019 me would think you were joking. 2019 me never flew on a plane or traveled much outside of Kentucky, and 2019 me definitely wouldn’t have expected to find love with a person I’d met six years before on Tumblr. Life changed so much within such a short time period, it’s strange how that works. What if I never chose to return as Lux, where would I be now? It’s weird to even think about that.

Lockdown wasn’t all lovely, of course. It was a truly terrifying time and the uncertainty of our future was extremely daunting. Would we be stuck in lockdown for another year? Would this ever go away? We lost Lindsheaven and his father to COVID in 2021, and COVID took my sister a few years later. 2021 also saw the loss of Terrell Davis. His last tweet was a link to the Caroline Polachek song Breathless. It still haunts me. It’s heartbreaking how many people we’ve lost in the last few years.

I absolutely LOVE the stuff you’ve been doing as creative zen – to finish this, please talk about the concept behind that more recent side project!

Thank you thank you! I was intrigued by the 2000s-themed albums that started popping up a few years ago, like “Slideshow” by crt paralysis and clubhouse by Mom and Dad’s Computer. I specifically remember hearing clubhouse and thinking, “If we’re revisiting the 2000s, then I want more music that sounds like this.”

I bought a Creative Zen Touch a few years ago, even though I have two other mp3 players I actively use. I blame DankPods for my purchase. I love that mp3 player so much. I never had an iPod, my family was too poor for that, and using the Touch made me feel like I was finally getting the cool mp3 player I wanted so badly as a teenager. It’s such a sick time capsule appearance-wise, and it still works great. I thought creative zen would be a really cool artist name if I chose to actually create a 2000s-inspired album, and I held onto that name for a few months before I began work on touch, the debut album.

mp3 players are unintentionally affiliated with major mile markers in my life. Around late 2005/early 2006, my friend gave me this cheap but charming 128MB mp3 player that you simply plugged into your USB port, it was nice to not have to install iTunes for it. He’d stolen a couple of them from Big Lots, I think my best friend got one and maybe his ex got one, too? I associate that mp3 player with mallrat hangs every Friday with my friend group. I’d use the $10 my parents would give me to buy CDs or Dairy Queen chicken tenders. We’d go across the street to Books-A-Million after the mall closed, and plop ourselves in the manga section. I’d flip through music trivia books while listening to CSS’ Alala or a People in Planes track, at most I’d have 15 tracks I’d loop through over and over. It was an exciting time of finally hanging out with people who I felt understood weird ol’ me, and it felt like a time of true potential for me. Despite my anxieties, I felt so happy.

The mp3 player I mentioned earlier, the one that preserved Vektroid’s unreleased material for a while, that one was used daily in 2011 and 2012 during my walks. There was a park nearby my house that I’d walk to, and I’d do a few laps around the trail before heading back home. Those walks were sacred, they were head clearing, and it was just me and whatever chillwave/hypnagogic pop/early vaporwave album I was discovering and enjoying. Lots of Deep Fantasy listens. Lots of Seahawks and Whitewoods on rotation. Sand Circles, LA Vampires, Greeen Linez, Midnight Runners. I’m stopping myself before I recite my entire listening history. The following year, I’d load upcoming Fortune 500 releases on the mp3 player and usually took extra time on those walks so I could enjoy the album in one sitting…standing, whatever. Lots of lovely memories and associations with that mp3 player. I was devastated when it stopped turning on one day, but it at least still connected to the computer when you plugged it in. That thing was a homie.

I also wanted to infuse my high school memories into this mp3 player tribute album; most of those memories involve being glued to my computer and listening to tons of CDs through Winamp, making sure to scrobble everything. My first desktop computer was a Dell my parents bought me for my 14th birthday back in 2002. It ran Windows XP, which I absolutely adored, and AOL was my portal to new and exciting territories via message boards and journaling sites. I was so fucking awkward, I barely knew how to talk to people, and the internet was intimidating, exciting, and educational. It helped me find my voice when I was too afraid to speak, and it gave me the chance to hear other perspectives outside of what I was hearing in my very conservative town or whatever I was hearing on TV. I digress, but all of that to say: I think I did an all right job of combining all of those concepts into the two albums that I’ve put out. creative zen ended up being far more personal than I meant for it to be, and I like that it worked out that way.

Listen to luxury elite on Bandcamp

luxury elite’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• INTERNET CLUB – UNDERWATER MIRAGE (2012)

• S U R F I N G – Deep Fantasy (2012)

• Lasership Stereo/18 Carat Affair – Pleasure Control (2012)

• midnight television – midnight television (2011)

• TOPAZ GANG – TUXEDO PRINCESS (2013)

• Vektroid – Planet Dudette Cassette (2011)

• Whitewoods – Spaceship Earth (2013)

• DRIPZ’ entire Soundcloud collection that should have been an album (2012/13)

• vcr-classique – atlantic memories (2020)

• 猫 シ Corp. – NEWS AT 11 (2016) [“Funny enough, I only listened to this for the first time a year and a half ago”]

from luxury elite: “I feel like a dick for putting primarily early vaporwave on this list, but these albums are significant to me! However, special shoutouts to the S​Ξ​CR​Ξ​+ ΞXPLOR​Λ​+​ION PROGR​Λ​M [Vol. 1] compilation, Mom and Dad’s Computer’s clubhouse, Ghost Enterprise’s Vistas, bootlegbby’s 2009grind, Groovy Kaiju’s Destroy All Monsters, Late Arcane’s Prestige, AURAGRAPH’s Tropics 1, luxury noise’s after everything, and christtt’s www for being major standouts I’ve heard in the last six years. I know I’m forgetting more great albums here. Please forgive me, friends!”

The Italian ambient composer had already given up on making music professionally when his career was suddenly revived in the 2010s.

At over 60 years of age, Masin finally quit his day job – since then, he’s been releasing acclaimed albums and working on film and TV scores. His newest long-form solo work Movement is out today.

Like many people, I first encountered Gigi Masin’s work through the archival reissues on the brilliant Dutch independent label Music From Memory, especially the 2014 compilation Talk To The Sea.

One of the first releases on the new label founded by Abel Nagengast, Tako Reyenga and the late Jamie Tiller, it eventually led to a resurgence of Masin’s stalled career.

In 2015, Music From Memory followed the compilation up with Clouds, an album of mostly improvised studio jams by the trio Gaussian Curve.

This was a newly formed group of Gigi Masin, ambient guitarist Jonny Nash and the outsider house producer “Young” Marco Sterk. It was Tako Reyenga who first brought the trio together for a weekend in Amsterdam.

“In two and a half days we recorded the first album”, Gigi remembers. “One of the most pleasant and easy experiences I remember.”

My favorite tune on this gorgeous record was called “Broken Clouds”, a rework of Masin’s 1989 song “Clouds”, which had already been used and remixed by Berlin post-rockers To Rococo Rot for “Die Dinge des Lebens” (“The Things of Life”) on their seminal 1999 album The Amateur View.

Some people with notoriously good taste in music had apparently discovered the song, as “Clouds” had also been sampled by Björk and Nujabes.

“I have heard many very good versions”, Gigi says when I ask him about his favorite sample flip of his most famous composition, “but I must admit that I was struck by the version made by Otto Taimela and Olli Aarni, a breath not to be forgotten.”

Later in 2015, Music From Memory finally reissued the full version of Wind. Self-released in 1986, it was exclusively sold and given away at small concerts at the time, with many leftover copies later destroyed by a flood in Masin’s house.

The album remained a well-kept secret for decades, appreciated only in a tiny bubble of nerdy collectors – to which the founders of Music From Memory luckily belonged.

To learn that the Italian ambient maestro had released his early work to a largely indifferent public at the time baffled me. This was such breathtakingly beautiful music, for sure there must have been an audience for it in a time when labels like Windham Hill were flooding the market with acoustic New Age records, many of them of lesser compositional finesse and musical quality?

Today, Wind is widely regarded as a lost ambient classic, but its creator isn’t even so sure about this genre tag. At the time of recording it, Masin knew Brian Eno only as the keyboard player from Roxy Music; when asked what he was listening to back then, he mentions songwriters and musicians such as John Martyn, Nick Drake and John Coltrane – and playing loads of Motown soul tapes in the car.

“I thought I was paying homage to jazz”, he tells me about his main influences for Wind. “A lot of it was improvised. There were no scores. I was just exploring sounds that came from the heart. I certainly had no idea of creating an ‘ambient’ project, I didn’t know it existed at that time.”

Even if Wind didn’t land commercially, Masin would go on to release another album in 1989, a collaboration with Charles Hayward of This Heat – this one included the original version of “Clouds”. It didn’t really go anywhere either though.

By the time that the global collector scene rediscovered his music two and a half decades later, he’d long since moved on from his ambitions, working as a postal manager and living life as a regular family man in his native Venice.

Gigi Masin had kept writing music as a hobby, working for small theatre productions and local poetry readings, but when Music From Memory approached him with the request to release a compilation in the early 2010s, his 1980s records were virtually forgotten.

Talk To The Sea changed everything – that lauded compilation of his work led to a renewed interest in Masin’s melancholic compositions.

It was a different music world now, with the 1980s revival in full effect and the ambient boom just around the corner. Obscure old records were suddenly gaining traction on streaming services because some of their tracks were included in playlists for background and focus music catering to people working on their laptops in open-plan offices, or decompressing from their stressful environments.

Masin quit his postal manager job in 2017 to focus solely on music, and in 2020, he released the solo album Calypso. Three years later, he followed it up with the celebrated collaborative LP Dolphin with jazz luminaries Greg Foat and Moses Boyd.

Now Sacred Bones releases Gigi Masin’s newest long-form solo work Movement, a double album of electronic compositions too upbeat and rhythmic to be called ambient, and too romantic and melodic to be called techno.

“Masin strived to make ambient music for movement”, the press text says, “not in the standard dance music sense, but ‘dynamic music, with a beating heart full of love’.”

Movement indeed lands somewhere halfway between Carl Craig and Manuel Göttsching – but with a distinct Mediterranean sensibility. The album consists mainly of long, immersive tunes, and most of them feature massive, reverbed drums. Beatless ambient music isn’t for Gigi Masin anymore, he admits.

When I ask him about the production process, his answers turn slightly towards the esoteric, but in essence, the record seems to be based on loops, drones and samples of his own studio experiments with synthesizers and other instruments.

“My way of working resembles the use of reel recorders, like in the good old days. It’s like putting a few pieces of fabric together to create a bigger and better fabric”, he says. “I let myself be captured by the sound, by the emotions I feel, by the vision of what I am creating and that appears to me, without me being able to do anything but marvel at how much beauty is hidden in the human soul.”

“Music is my favorite language, a [form of] magic that has very few remedies for our hearts in love”, he continues. “It is in the depths of our soul that we should look for that light that gives life to poetry.”

Asked what type of art has been inspiring him lately, he starts enthusiastically reminiscing about a recent trip to Japan, “a place of peace and beauty, from where I like to bring home old books and drawings, which speak of distant places and voices”, going on about getting “lost looking at the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean, waiting for it to tell me about even more distant islands one day”, and of “lying on the grass in one of Tokyo’s magnificent parks, [looking] at the clouds.”

“We live in a world that runs, runs, runs”, Gigi Masin says when asked about the need for making yet another album of calm, introspective music. “But speed is sometimes [just] a way of hiding the emptiness in the things around us.”

Gigi Masin’s new album Movement is out now.

Read on:

Her meticulously crafted and edited albums evoke a bittersweet sense of nostalgia, transcending cultural barriers and boundaries rather than appropriating, othering or fetishizing foreign – especially East Asian – cultures (as vaporwave is quite often, and sometimes rightfully, accused of).

Since her debut in 2023, Naoko immediately became a highly active member of the signalwave scene. She’s been running and hosting the Signalcon online festival on her YouTube channel, an effort to bring signalwave producers and listeners together for a yearly URL event, with the next one taking place in July. She’s also just taken over admin duties of the Signalwave Discord server from its former owner, TV2.

When I messaged Naoko there to gauge her interest in a Vapor Talk, she pointed out that she had to maintain absolute discretion about her identity for professional reasons. The only information she’s ready to give away is that she’s 27 years old, half Japanese and half Irish, goes by she/her pronouns and is currently based in Nagoya, Japan (as stated on her Bandcamp page).

But even in a written conversation like the one you’ll find below, the bubbly and cheerful personality of the signalwave producer quite clearly shines through. She also made sure to give loads of supportive shoutouts to other artists from the community (the ‘homies’). Please note that I barely edited anything here – except for some formatting and the fact that I changed many of her exclamation marks into regular full stops. (You’ll still notice that Naoko is really fond of exclamation marks!)

Naoko, where did you grow up, and what role did music play for you as a child?

I grew up in a pretty isolated place, with mainly my dad for company. He was always busy with work stuff, so he used to give me all these VHS tapes and leave me in front of the TV. I have very special memories of watching old school anime and tokusatsu shows late at night. The songs from those shows have a very special place in my heart, especially the 80s and 90s idol songs.

My mom used to have a big collection of kayōkyoku and city pop vinyls too. Though she wasn’t around that much, Chisato Moritaka, Eriko Tamura and Michiru Kojima were always there for me.

When I was a teenager, things got interesting. I was given internet access. This helped me discover K-pop, black metal, noise and this genre called vaporwave. I especially liked vaporwave that sounded like a broadcast or a TV playing at night. It gave me a mysterious, exciting feeling and reminded me of watching those VHS tapes as a kid. I’ve always been a night owl, so I am normally awake at night time.

Did you get musical training and learn any instruments?

I used to love singing a lot. I was very inspired, especially after seeing as a kid the anime Legendary Idol Eriko. It showed how, as an idol, you can really spread joy and make people happy!

I wanted to be either a K-pop singer or a singer in a metal band, so I used to practice scream vocals and rapping and singing pop when my parents were not around. I had a big accident though, and one of the effects is that I essentially lost my voice. I was still determined to do music, so I decided to get into producing and promoting.

When and how did you start producing music on a computer?

In 2023, I first got the idea for the 直子coed project. By that time, I had seen a lot of crazy things and had a lot of crazy experiences, so I wanted to return to simpler, happier times. I wanted to recreate special memories from my childhood.

I remember looking up many shows and movies that I used to watch, and downloading them all into a big folder on my computer, so I had a big digital library of my childhood memories. I recorded the audio from my favourite parts and put them together as songs. Each song could bring me back to a happy memory from my childhood. With a few small adjustments, this has been my production process ever since. There is some special sauce that goes into my music too, but that’s a secret!

Did you make music previously to starting the 直子coed project? If so, what style of music was it?

When I was a teenager, I would download pop songs from YouTube and then record myself singing over them. This is how I first learned to use the software Audacity, which I use now for 直子coed.

How and when did you discover vaporwave and signalwave? What did you like about it, and who were some of the formative artists or releases that influenced you?

I remember reading somewhere that the music you listen to as a teenager is the music that will shape you and connect with you the most. It’s a good thing that I’m Gen Z because as a teenager, I discovered vapor and it became the genre that I most connected with. I first heard vaporwave on YouTube, but really started getting into it on Bandcamp. There are so many different styles within the genre, but right away, I most felt a connection with signalwave!

My first signalwave album was LANGUAGE SELECT by CH 03 [from 2018]. The album has a strong feeling of watching VHS tapes on a CRT TV, a memory I strongly connect with. CH 03 is now a good homie of mine and continues to make beautiful analog atmospheres with the project Toadofsky.

An album that was very formative for me was 巡 by 天気予報 [Asutenki]. It is very different from homie’s other albums, because it simulates the experience of flipping through TV channels. It is also very happy and uplifting!

Another one was night-time television service by national network. This album has a very comforting night-time feeling. As someone who’s always been a night owl, I really connect with this feeling. I would later find out that national network is actually TV2, the founder of the Signalwave Discord server and one of the biggest artists in our community!

Those are my biggest influences. My music is a combination of happy channel flipping and night-time comfort.

What does good signalwave accomplish? What are you trying to convey with your sound collages?

I remember having a discussion in the signalwave Discord with computer dreams, also known as midnight television! We were talking about the appeal of signalwave. Homie was a pioneer of the genre – a good homie to discuss this with.

Looking back at our conversation, we agreed that the goal of signalwave is ‘to try and recapture an unreachable memory, usually of comfort or childhood’. By recapturing a happy memory, you can find comfort in it. By recapturing a painful memory, you can find a way to process and accept it. I think this is why signalwave can be fun and whimsical like 天気予報 [Asutenki], but can also be dark and introspective like CT57.

I also had a more recent discussion with my homies channel 71 and טסרקט. We agreed that signalwave is ‘a celebration of the human’, ‘the music generated by human minds, human voices, human hands’. In a world that is becoming more and more digital, signalwave samples the more human media of radio and television. In the times of analog television, the world was more grounded and people were more authentic. So, broadcasts from these times have in them a more authentic feeling of human connection. Signalwave is a celebration of that connection!

What’s your process when producing a new album? Where do you find all those old Japanese TV recordings, is it mostly YouTube or also analog sources like old VHS tapes?

It always starts with a memory! A certain moment in my past gives me a warm, comforting feeling, and so I try to recreate that moment. The memory normally contains a song or a TV show, so I go to find it on YouTube. Almost every time, it’s there. I download the video and add it to my big memories folder. Once I’ve collected enough memories, I find ones that feel connected or that come from the same time in my life. Then I combine them into an album. For example, summer station started with a memory from summer 2006 and is made of memories from around that time.

I still have many of the VHS tapes I used to watch as a kid, but I don’t have the technical skill to record the audio from them. However, some of my homies, like 衛星テレビ, record all their music directly from VHS tapes! 衛星テレビ even edits his songs using VHS equipment.

You’ve only been active since 2023, you’re an integral part of the signalwave community and quite active on the Signalwave Discord. Do you feel signalwave is basically now its own community? What’s your relation to other vaporwave subgenres as an artist and a listener?

I feel that the signalwave community is more connected than ever! The Signalcon festival really makes us more visible in the vapor world. Also, big signal artists like CT57 and International Telecom are inspiring lots of homies to join the genre. So, more homies than ever are finding out about signalwave and are adding their personal touches.

For example, my homies ｔｅｐｈ　ｃｏ. 愛 and itachi ツクヨミ come from the slushwave genre. However, when they combine their slush talents with signalwave samples, they are pioneering a new subgenre of ‘signalslush’. Slush effects on vintage commercials sound very cool!

Through my signalslush homies, I am getting more into slushwave. Also, I enjoy mallsoft and future funk. Future funk that samples city pop is very inspiring for me, especially the Showa Idol’s Groove series by Night Tempo!

Tell me about signalcon. What was the idea, and how did it evolve until now?

When I joined the signalwave server, I saw how active and passionate the community was. I wanted to share that passion and excitement with the wider vaporwave world, and show everybody how amazing signalwave is!

Looking back at discussions from that time, I was really encouraging everybody to get on board and get the festival going. My health was not good at the time, so I wanted to make sure that the signalwave festival happened before anything happened to me. Fortunately, many homies were on board! My homies ｔｅｐｈ　ｃｏ. 愛, Kratzwerk, CT57, 衛星テレビ, CRTskies and I.C.M.A.S.A. really helped things come together. Thanks to them, we launched the first ever signalcon! Now, it’s an annual event that all the signalhomies look forward to.

signalcon has always been a showcase of all the amazing artists and concepts in the signalwave genre. Increasingly, it’s becoming a showcase for our new and upcoming artists! My homies S u i t e B, LAPA and Nahuelsat debuted around the time of signalcon 2025. Now, these homies are very successful and beloved in the signalwave community!

By the way, the name signalcon was coined by my homie CRTskies!

The community was really anonymous in the early days, pre-Discord, but it seems that it’s slowly changing. What’s your take on that development?

Signalwave is more quiet and introspective than most kinds of music. It is also more mysterious, so it makes sense that signalwave producers are generally chill, anonymous homies.

My personality is way more hyper and outgoing! I like making things happen and bringing the homies together. Around the time I joined the signalwave community, there were many newer artists like CT57,ｔｅｐｈ　ｃｏ. 愛, 衛星テレビ and CRTskies who were bringing renewed enthusiasm to the genre. Together, we brought a lot of hype to the signalwave community and expanded the definition of what signalwave can be. For example, CT57 takes signal in a more liminal, soundscape direction, while ｔｅｐｈ　ｃｏ. 愛 introduces more slushy textures. I feel we opened up many new possibilities for signalwave, and that encouraged many more homies to join the community!

Homies like International Telecom and טסרקט are still creating traditional loop-based signal, which I love so much! Homies like victory over death and PREMIUM CHANNELS are creating beautiful fusions of signalwave and ambient. channel 71, Nahuelsat and LAPA are making signalwave that is more upbeat, catchy and accessible. Homies like Pool Plants and УВБ-76 are taking signal in amazing experimental directions, creating sounds unlike anything I’ve heard before!

I downloaded your albums from Bandcamp, and each folder contains a bunch of strange files, videos and memes in addition to the actual music. What’s that about?

I love memes. They are very fun! The randomness and incomprehensibility of those files give you a good idea of my personality. Homies tell me that they enjoy those files a lot!

Where should someone start in your discography? Which album are you the most proud of?

I feel that any album is a good place to start! Each album tells a fun little story and takes you to a comforting, happy place.

vcr recordings seems to be a very popular album with the homies, so definitely give that one a listen! vhs collection is also very epic and nostalgic, especially if you watched anime growing up. If you want a fun, feel-good album, march of the video girls is a good choice.

The album I’m most proud of is summer station. I feel it is the most magical and comforting!

You’ve just released a new project, march of the video girls. Tell me about the concept.

The album is based around a very precious memory for me: finding my place in the world! My childhood was a fun, peaceful time in my life. However, I did not have much purpose or goals to strive for. When I finally realized that my dream was to help people and make people happy, I had a big feeling of inspiration. I really wanted to accomplish this dream and spread joy through being a singer!

Though I wasn’t able to make this happen (because of the big accident), I still feel strongly in my heart that I want to bring joy to people and make their world a better place. I am very happy that I can do this now with my 直子coed music and by supporting my homies in the signalwave community!

Who are some of the most interesting producers in signalwave right now?

There are so many talented homies producing amazing signalwave right now! Here are 8 of them:

• CT57 is making visionary, high-concept signalwave that is taking the genre to a new level.

• ｔｅｐｈ　ｃｏ. 愛 takes listeners to another world with his imaginative storytelling, ethereal effects and top-tier mixing.

• LAPA makes some of the most fun, diverse signalwave ever, ranging from upbeat bangers to amazing ambient pieces.

• victory over death makes some of the most powerful and moving signalwave ever, as beautiful ambient pieces or fascinating noise collages.

• Pool Plants will make you feel emotions you’ve never experienced before, blending sounds together in super delightful and unexpected ways.

• S u i t e B releases are consistently of excellent quality, displaying his impressive mastery of static textures, classy vibes and nostalgic melodies.

• טסרקט makes deeply mysterious signalwave, choosing the most intriguing samples imaginable and looping them to perfection.

• channel 71 combines super fun samples and top-tier mastering, creating some of the most entertaining albums in signalwave.

What are you listening to outside of vaporwave?

I love K-pop and black metal, especially from the early 2000s!

Girls’ Generation and Manierisme are lots of fun.

Listen to 直子coed on Bandcamp

直子coed’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

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

• national network – night-time television service (Frequency SubZero, 2021)

• CH 03 – LANGUAGE SELECT (Bogus Collective, 2018)

• 猫 シ Corp. – Palm Mall (self-released, 2014)

• 送電塔 – 切断再接続 (Disconnect, 2021)

• Video Interface, 天気予報 [Asutenki] & 送電塔 – 白色の人型 (The Expanding Earth, 2023)

• CRTオペラ – nothing good on (Evening Disclosure, 2019)

• Disconscious – Hologram Plaza (self-released, 2013)

• Night Tempo – Showa Idol’s Groove (self-released, 2019)

• ░計◈画░ [Glaciology] – ♥♥♥テレビ√接続✈ (Net Century, 2018)

Shakar cites the example of coffee, a product that is coveted not in spite of, but precisely because of having multiple effects: it’s both stimulating and relaxing – a contradiction at the “schismatic core” (Shakar) of its desirability.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying things here, but isn’t life in the 2020s just one big paradessence? All these conflicting emotions – nothing is black or white, right or wrong anymore, whether in political discussions or individual lifestyle decisions.

Complex problems require nuanced thinking, rather than jumping to quick conclusions, yet people seem to retain this natural tendency to seek simple solutions. “Both can be true” is a phrase that can actually drive people on social media mad.

Visible Cloaks’ music is a product of its time, as it explores how one can be different, seemingly conflicting things at the same time: sound and silence, presence and absence, energy and void, movement and stillness.

In the mid-2010s, the Portland, Oregon-based duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile released two albums – their self-titled debut and their lauded sophomore album Reassemblage – which defined their sound as a unique interpretation of ambient music, a mix of influences from Japanese environmental music and Italian minimalism.

Doran also curated the most important compilation of Kankyō Ongaku, the ambient and New Age music of 1980s Japan, which became popular in the West around a decade ago, when streaming algorithms started marketing it to insular laptop workers.

The term “environmental music” was largely misunderstood in the West, or at least reduced to another simplification, often disregarding the architectural dimension of the music itself. At the same time, the pejorative use of the “background music” category suggested that this was, by its very nature, music of lesser value and artistic merit.

However, those Japanese composers did not see their craft in this light. It was certainly not intended for the mass market upon creation, but decades later, it suddenly became popular among a large group of people due to a shift in technology and lifestyle – namely, the ubiquity of streaming and Wi-Fi combined with the music tech industry’s push to “soundtrack your life.”

Visible Cloaks’ new album seems to actively reject the idea of being used as background music, perhaps even as a reaction to how ambient and New Age have been exploited as “capitalist productivity music” (Huerco S.) in the streaming era. It is fair to say that while Paradessence is probably not the most accessible, it is definitely one of the most alluring works of experimental electronic music released so far this year.

Two tracks on the record were created in collaboration with environmental music pioneers Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano. Visible Cloaks had previously released a joint album with them as part of the FRKWYS series on RVNG. The album features a spoken-word poem written by Ojima, recited in Japanese by Shibano and in French by composer and longtime friend Félicia Atkinson, as well as a contribution by Romanian composer and violinist Ioana Șelaru.

After listening to Paradessence many times, mostly at night and on noise-canceling headphones, a number of questions for the artists arose, and Spencer from the group tried to answer some of them for me. Find our emailed exchange below.

I tend to listen to the tracks on Paradessence not as narrative songs, but more as sound sculptures – organisms that come into being, morph and then float or fade away… Is there a visual element to the sound design? Do you regularly have landscapes or objects in mind when creating these tracks?

Spencer Doran: There is certainly a sculptural approach to the way that we work with sound, but it never really comes from a place of trying to capture or recreate an external object… it has more to do with molding and contouring shapes as they arise – usually through some sort of external process –, as opposed to having a mental model of something that you are trying to capture the essence of. I find that having this distinctly non-representational approach allows the listener to draw their own associations more freely, to imagine them as impossible shapes.

There’s a Alexandre Kojève essay where he talks about this in relation to abstract painting – that it can be possible to create beauty in a way that isn’t just replicating what is seen in the world, and that this beauty is perhaps more absolute in form because it exists outside of reality. I find this idea very inspiring, even if it seems beyond my ability to achieve. Music – especially electronic music – is able to work non-representationally with much greater ease than painting, and one of the things that draws me to something like FM synthesis is that in its purest form it doesn’t really point clearly to sounds that exist in reality. Certainly you can try to shape it to resemble, say, a flute or a piano, but at its core it feels deeply unnatural and distinctly digital, in a way that feels liberating.

Do you ever work with samples, or is every sound generated through synthesis? Is it a mix of both?

Certainly a mix of both, although I suppose it depends what you mean by samples. We do use consumer-grade virtual instruments that work by stitching together detailed recordings of actual instrumental performance, which are often framed as being “sample-based” (although not in the, say, Bomb Squad sense of the term). But we also use “physically modeled” instruments that work using synthesis (digital waveguide, karplus-strong, etc.) and thus all of their different properties are much more deeply malleable.

Sample-based instruments can have a much more direct, comfortable realism to them, but they don’t offer the same kind of “extended technique” possibilities that physically modeled instruments do. It’s a bit like the differences between photographic collage and CGI graphics, each has its own set of artistic potency, each can be bent in a different direction.

One technique which appears in a few points on the new record involves placing all of the different parameters of a physically modeled instrument in flux so the tonality is continuously contouring and morphing while being played – imagine a piano whose strings, soundboard and hammers are all shrinking and growing at different rates. This isn’t possible with sample-based instruments in the same way, let alone instruments in reality.

The music on Paradessence has a dream-like quality to it – do you follow a practice of capturing dreams, similar to the dreamwork in Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening practice?

Lately I’ve been keeping a log of my dreams with the note-taking software Obsidian, which allows you to connect different fragments and concepts as nodes that can be connected to one another rhizomatically. It isn’t very useful at the moment but I’m hoping with enough dreams logged I can start to connect different recurring themes and objects/spaces that arise frequently in different dreams to try to better analyse them.

I don’t really have a deep enough relationship with dreamwork to pretend like I can usefully draw direct creative impulses from dreams and I don’t have a dream connection to a listening practice like Oliveros, but I do find adjacent Theta brainwave states to be a very potent idea source, and we do work within a highly abstract musical space that is probably closer to the dream world than waking life.

You took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander’s concept of ‘positive space’, the idea that the same degree of care can be given to the shape of the void around an object as the construction of the object itself. Is this a counterproposal to the idea of negative space in dub? Can you explain how you actually shape the void, that silence around sounds?

The idea is that when you are creating an object, you are not just shaping the object itself but you are also in turn shaping the contours of the space around it, that this space can become beautiful in the same way the object does, or even that both become beautiful because of each other in a way that is deeply linked.

For example, looking at Giambattista Nolli’s map of Rome, you can see that the public interior spaces are created by the buildings themselves, these spaces arise from the organic growth of the city and they are not simply negative inversions of the built structures. These spaces feel alive and beautiful because they hold such a deeply causal relationship with the buildings… one shapes the other.

In relation to dub, if you think of Ruddy Redwood going into Duke Reid’s studio and coming out with a vocalless mix of “On the Beach”, the musical space that would normally be occupied by the vocals is suddenly freed up. In dub this also became a possibility space, that this openness allowed a space for the DJ to talk over the track and toasting to emerge, for reverb and delay trails to decay within, all the living potential that a dub mix affords. Suddenly, a very different musical structure becomes possible.

So when you start thinking about this in terms of creating a potentiality in a piece of music, you can actually apply something very similar when you think about it existing within a space - an “environmental” way of listening. Satoshi Ashikawa had a very similar idea in regards to what he thought of as the “figure and ground” relationship between a composition and the environment it is experienced in. The notion of what would usually be considered “empty” space in a piece radically changes when you listen to the environment in the same way that you do the composition – he was coming from this very post-Cagian mode of thinking about silence, what is and isn’t music, et cetera. The relationship between the composition and the environment around it becomes ambiguous, it just as easily becomes inverted in the same way that the two faces become a candlestick in a Rubin vase. For me, this was a really profound and useful insight.

I am also interested in the inherent Utopianism of the music. The press text says that what “hovers at the edges” of this music is “a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naive, cynical, nor nostalgic”. Instead of describing what it isn’t, could you try to explain what it actually is – that relationship, how you are thinking about imagined futures, and how this is reflected in the music?

Reassemblage was in part an album dealing more directly with this, especially in relation to the unrealized potential of the concept of “fourth world” music, something that at the time was being revived in relation to a bunch of aesthetic signifiers that had more to do with it as an ex post facto categorization by record collectors and music writers. There is a real sense of utopian thinking at the core of the idea that I was interested in playing around with conceptually, given that historically it wasn’t really successful and became this very homogenized notion in the 1990s. I’m very interested in the borders of that transition, especially in places outside of my own country… I didn’t write the press text but I do still feel that at the edges of our music.

Also, it is an increasingly difficult position to hold but I am still very open to the radical potentiality of technology (in spite of the general trajectory of the “big tech” sphere) which itself holds some relationship to the future.

What are you currently reading, listening to, and watching?

Well, speaking of technology, I’m currently working my way through Summa Technologiae, which is a book of more philosophical texts that Polish author Stanisław Lem wrote. It was written in the 1960s but it touches on a lot of debates that are currently happening, especially around artificial intelligence, much like his more sci-fi texts like Imaginary Magnitude.

Thanks to a friend in Estonia I’ve been getting more familiar with Baltic post-minimalist composers like Bronius Kutavičius, Lepo Sumera, etc. I also really have been enjoying Giorgi Koberidze’s record from last year, which is connected to his brother Alexandre Koberidze’s film Dry Leaf.

Visible Cloaks’ new album Paradessence is out now.

Back then, surfing the web felt exciting and full of possibilities, especially for a neurodivergent young man who was really into weird music and speculative fiction.

For someone like me, the internet held so much promise – a far cry from that cesspit of hate and slop, ads and scams that we’re left with today.

It might just be a romantic distortion caused by nostalgia. I was young and probably way more naive. But the more I think about it, I come to believe a bunch of things were just better about those pre-wifi, pre-social-media and pre-smartphone days.

At the time, we weren’t spending our entire lives online. Every once in a while, we were dialing up to the internet with a modem – just for half an hour per day, or maybe slightly more, but it could get expensive soon, like calling a friend abroad.

The great thing was that you’d usually get a bunch of free hours from your internet service provider. I’d regularly use those to jump into nerdy online forums, surf random GeoCities sites or chat with my new online friends in other cities over AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). I’ll admit that I might have downloaded a song or two from Kazaa as well.

Looking back, that Y2K internet felt like a place to learn and share and play, a place where outsiders could find connection over shared niche interests.

Obviously I’m not alone with these misty-eyed thoughts. The Swedish music producer Stevia Sphere hit a similar note with a recent Bluesky post:

“The more I interact with technology, the more I start thinking that technology was a mistake. Like, I'm not saying we should return to monkey, but maybe let's return to web 1.0 dial-up, no smartphones, no AI, screens are thick heavy things, the postal service still works for sending letters, etc. I'm doing my part by buying a printer and a filing cabinet lol. It's time to have physical synth manuals, game guides, etc again.”

This might sound like a joke, but I do think she’s on to something here.

I’ve previously written about my experiences and experiments with

• going back to physical records,

• switching from an e-reader to paper books and

• buying an analog watch (one of the best decisions ever).

More recently, we’ve canceled all our movie streaming subscriptions and returned to watching DVDs, which we’ve been buying used for cheap off the internet. Sometimes we’re not even watching anything at night but playing a board game, or taking a walk outside now that the days are longer. Next level luddism, right?

The final frontier would of course mean to ditch my smartphone, but even to someone like me, it seems almost impossible to do. The smartphone is just so central to life in the 2020s that deciding to go without one would mean to experience extreme inconveniences, and I’m not sure if I’m committed enough to do that.

What I’m pondering right now is a different approach. I’m thinking about getting a good old MP3 player and using that instead of my iPhone to listen to music on the go. That way, I could leave my phone at home when I’m just leaving the house for a walk or to run some errands.

I could just go outside and listen to music without being connected to the internet all the time. I wouldn’t be lured into checking emails or messages, or looking up random stuff, or chasing little dopamine hits by checking news headlines while standing in a checkout line or waiting at the train station.

Instead, I imagine I’d be much more present and mindful of my surroundings. Sometimes I’d be bored and fiend for some distraction. Funny as that sounds – I don’t even think that’s such a bad thing. After all, I could still lose myself in music and daydreams.

I remember when I got my first portable media player in the early 2000s, one of those small oval USB sticks with a tiny display that almost looked like a pager. Soon I’d barely even leave the house without it. At one point, I would switch it for a 16 GB version of the iPod classic. It had a bigger display and a jogwheel, but it still had real buttons, not a touchscreen, and most of all, it couldn’t go online.

That was pre-wifi, pre-streaming, so you didn’t have access to every song ever recorded through your device. You were limited to a bunch of albums you’d actively decided to transfer to your player – a hand-picked, intentional selection. I remember how I enjoyed the ritual of cleaning up my iPod every few weeks and filling it up with my most recent musical obsessions.

I got an iPhone a year into my first real job as the editor of a magazine. I’d already been using a BlackBerry for communication, but merging the BlackBerry and the iPod (and the Digicam) into a small pocket computer still felt like a revolution at the time.

In retrospect, that is also when things started going horribly wrong. That’s a story for another time though – or rather one that I’ve already written about extensively.

These days, I’ve essentially turned my smartphone into something resembling a dumbphone. Then a few months ago, I read a fascinating article that wrote about the iPod’s unlikely comeback among Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

By getting an old school MP3 player, I thought, I might be able to carve out even more quality offline time in my everyday life.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find my old portable media players anymore – I probably purged them in my hardcore minimalist days.

Currently I’m seeing two options: Either I’ll jump on that trendy bandwagon and hunt down a rare iPod Nano on eBay or a Creative Zen Touch or something cool like that, or I’ll just get an affordable, simple new MP3 player with a little display and a jogwheel and some analog buttons.

Sure, you could also go real caveman and just get an old tape or CD walkman. In fact, that might have an even bigger nostalgia factor. I think I appreciate it more as an aesthetic than a practical choice though.

Those early offline MP3 players hit some kind of sweet spot for me: They’re light and shock-resistant, and they might offer just enough variety without triggering choice fatigue. I’m not sure I want to bring my Walkman and a bunch of tapes on my next train ride. There’s still too much of a minimalist in me.

Credit is due: Thanks to luxury elite for recommending the first two albums linked in this post (Mom and Dad’s Computer and crt paralysis) and making the third one (creative zen is one of her aliases)!

In those years, Nmesh made a lasting impact on the scene that continues to this day, as new generations of vaporwave producers stumble across Dream Sequins, The Path to Lost Eden or his massive multitrack DJ mix Welcome To Warp Zone.

Alex’ output slowed down in the latter half of the decade, especially after his experimental post-vapor-album Pharma (2017). An unplanned hiatus was prolonged by the COVID lockdowns and a personal loss, but he finally released a new full-length album, The Molokai Compendium, in 2025 – a hugely entertaining and humorous plunderphonics record inspired by The Black Dog and 1980s B-movies.

For this Vapor Talk, Alex and I spent a good hour talking about his impressive music career of 25 years, from his start in metal bands and making weird Weezer edits, to bringing his IDM production chops into the early vaporwave scene, to losing inspiration during the pandemic and finding it back through stumbling across a ridiculous Triple B film in a hotel room after an Aphex Twin show.

Alex, what are some of your early musical memories from childhood?

Dancing around in the basement to Beach Boys and Michael Jackson records. When I was six or seven years old, there was a lot of New Jack Swing on the radio – that was my jam. I was born in ‘84, so I’m kind of split between the 80s and 90s.

What kind of music did you gravitate towards as a teenager?

As an early teen, I was getting into industrial music and metal. I started playing in bands when I was 14 years old. We used to play shows around town, and we were all just huge into Metallica. Throughout high school, I was listening to a lot of death metal, and I got really immersed in the New York hardcore scene. Then my taste changed a little bit and my interests were leaning more and more towards experimental electronic and dance music.

This is the late 90s, so we’re probably talking Warp stuff?

For sure, Warp was the gateway drug for me, all their 90s artists, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada… but The Future Sound of London in particular – when I was 14, 15 years old, that was a complete game-changer for me.

Were you a club kid, or was electronic music more of a home listening thing for you?

Definitely more of a home listening thing. It’s funny, because as much rave music as I was ingesting, I never went to any legit raves back in the day. In Louisville, there just wasn’t a lot of electronic shows going on, and if there was, I just probably wasn’t privy to them. But I was very aware of all the metal shows that were going on, and I was still playing shows at the time as well.

You started releasing music long before getting into vaporwave, right?

Yep, in the early 2000s I started making my own weird electronic music, and I just became obsessed and it fully took over. I was putting out music for a solid ten years before vaporwave was a thing.

Your early music was already sample-based though – a form of plunderphonics-informed IDM, would that be an accurate description?

Absolutely. The first thing I ever did was this four-track EP of remixed Weezer songs off The Blue Album. My girlfriend at the time was big into Weezer. It was just these weird, nightmarish edits that I did just for fun. Shortly thereafter, I started working on my first big project, a two-hour DJ mix called Peel Blue Equinox [2002]. It was very much inspired by all the [BBC] Essential Mixes and Kiss FM transmissions that The Future Sound of London did in the early to mid-90s. That was just a huge influence on me, and I wanted to do something in that vein.

Moving on to the late 2000s, were you into what we’re now calling proto-vaporwave, the music that Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro made at the time?

No, I wasn’t really aware of what they were doing. I was going through a phase at that time listening to a lot of chillout music. It wasn’t until 2011 or 2012 that I got tipped off on Macintosh Plus, Oneohtrix Point Never and some of the other early vaporwave artists. My introduction to Ferraro was Far Side Virtual [2011]. I wasn’t even aware of The Skaters, and all of his early stuff that he put out on CD-Rs. As far as OPN, my introduction was his sunsetcorp YouTube channel. That was before I even was aware he was putting out music under OPN. I’m pretty sure I was watching Boards of Canada videos when I stumbled across this amazing YouTube channel putting out weird edits of 80s songs. Eventually I started digging deeper and it opened a huge can of worms for me.

Did you ever attend one of those turntable.fm / SPF420 chatroom parties in 2011/12, those mythical meetings of the first vaporwave generation?

No, I was considered second generation. Never attended those turntable.fm parties, but I know Vektroid, Luxury Elite and Chaz and Liz from SPF420. They all became friends, and I was listening to a lot of that music at the time. Internet Club was another huge one, MediaFired, Midnight Television… I was deeply immersed in all of that. But it wasn’t until December of 2012 that I started poking around with making my own vaporwave edits. Though at the time I referred to them as eccojams. I don’t even think the vaporwave [genre] name had taken off yet. [Eventually] I did an SPF420 show in June of 2013, that was a huge deal for me. That was also my first URL event.

Who were some of the artists in the community that you were connecting with in the beginning?

One of my earliest friends was Zach Mason alias 회사AUTO – rest in peace. We started talking on Facebook and eventually started collaborating. Luxury Elite was one of my earliest friends on Facebook. She didn’t live very far away, so we ended up meeting up, going to a Death Grips show together. We’d go to a couple of Tobacco shows together as well. So it wasn’t long before I was making friends left and right and became part of that community.

Coming from classic IDM, what drew you into vaporwave initially?

I’d been obsessed with sampling, but I always worried about copyright strikes. Once I saw everybody else was just doing these very blatant edits in vaporwave, I got very comfortable. I figured that with my ten years of experience in IDM, I could put my own spin on it and bring some good production techniques to the genre. That was my game plan from the beginning, to start making these eccojams, but adding an extra layer of detail.

What was your setup at the time? All software?

Yeah, for the most part. Never been much of a hardware guy. I respect those who are, but I’ve always just been at the computer plugging away. I am still using a 20 year old version of what is now Adobe Audition – at the time it was Cool Edit Pro 2. I even assembled that massive multi-track DJ mix I mentioned, Peel Blue Equinox, all in there. I still use it to this day – it’s a very important part of my production. It’s kind of laughable, but it works for me. Everybody is using Ableton these days, but I’ve just been too lazy to learn it. I’m sure though if I actually got to know the program and started using it, it would grow on me.

Nu.wav Hallucinations came out in April 2013. That was your first vaporwave record, right?

Yeah, Nu.wav Hallucinations was definitely my vaporwave debut. That was the first full length record where I was tackling that genre and that style of music. Again, the whole plan was to put out a plunderphonic, eccojam type release, but with using my production chops from the last ten years. I think I managed to work that out.

Around that time, I was getting asked to do a lot of guest mixes for radio programs, and I happily obliged. I got asked by a number of radio stations overseas, and even here in Louisville, I did a few guest mixes for some local radio shows. I’m digging through the archives at the moment and pulling out all these mixes I did that were only available on Mixcloud. [Find them on Nmesh’s Bandcamp.]

Vaporwave was an online culture from the beginning. You mentioned meeting up with Lux, but that seems to have been the exception at the time, right?

Yes, for the most part, it was all online. Most of the friendships I made through vaporwave were born out of the online scene and not anything local. It’s funny though – years later, I got to meet a lot of these friends at the [100%] ElectronICON festival [in 2019]. And I went to a work conference in Seattle once, where I got to hang out with Zach Mason all day. That was pretty cool, but that was a long time ago.

Let’s talk about Dream Sequins (2014). Many vaporwave producers I’ve spoken to have called this one of their favorite albums of all time and a huge inspiration. Can you share some stories of its genesis?

It was originally just going to be a follow-up EP to Nu.wav Hallucinations. But as with a lot of my projects, things kind of snowball and get out of hand, and it ended up turning into a full-length and AMDISCS agreed to put it out. I don’t know if it was just the timing or maybe the thematic elements to Dream Sequins that caught on, but I took that album way more seriously. Nu.wav Hallucinations was just an exercise in reimagining 80s and 90s pop songs, a lot of which were mainstream radio tracks. With Dream Sequins, I wanted to have this consistent theme about dreams and just in general make a more ethereal vaporwave album.

It was a slow burner in the scene, but within a year or two, it started catching on. I think “Climbing The Corporate Ladder” was the track that took off and still to this day… I understand why, it is a banger in a way, but it’s so unlike anything else off that album, which is also the odd thing. It’s a standout track there, it doesn’t really fit in. Maybe that one just hit the algorithm, and a lot of people started listening to it and resonating with it, so it has grown this cult following in years.

On the last track, you screwed and chopped that Anthony Fantano review of Floral Shoppe. The scene loved that.

It was just a prank. I was having fun, I wasn’t trying to take myself too seriously. I thought it would be hilarious if I took his review of Floral Shoppe and actually gave it the vaporwave treatment.

The album was essentially done after “The Unconscious Connection” ends, which is actually just the first three minutes of that last track, and the Fantano bit was supposed to be a secret track. I grew up with that on CDs back in the day, where there was a little bit of silence, and then something else comes in. However, that album was so bloated and just filled to the max already, that there wasn’t an opportunity to have any silence between “The Unconscious Connection” and the Fantano bit. So a lot of people lump that in as being the same song, whereas it’s actually a completely separate track that I called “therecordwarp”, which is an obvious pun on [Fantano’s channel] theneedledrop.

I was also secretly hoping that it would get his attention, which it did, because I later discovered he did an AMA on 4chan, and somebody asked him if he had heard it, and he said, “Yeah, I got tipped off on it. I listened to it and I didn’t really care for it.” Which is fine, of course.

Parts of the scene took offense to that original review. Your version would have been seen as a humorous clap back at him.

Back then, people were gatekeeping vaporwave to a certain degree, which I also understand, because it was such a niche genre. We were a small community and felt like this was our own thing. Then you’ve got Fantano coming out here talking about Floral Shoppe to his millions of followers. Some people just didn’t like that.

But that review was also where many people first heard of vaporwave in general, so he actually did a service for the community in a way. He was a little late to Floral Shoppe – that review didn’t even come out until a year later. I guess he thought he had to tackle it, because it was such a cult album at that time that he had to give his take on it. At the same time, I think people get offended by Fantano reviewing any album. He’s just got a lot of haters out there, and I’m sure he’s very aware of that.

Chaz of SPF420 was quoted in an article back then, saying that Fantano’s review was the death of vaporwave.

(laughs) Oh, there’s been so many deaths of vaporwave. That was just one of many.

2015 comes along and you’re putting out this SAINT PIZZA vs. スポーツのLACROSSE 82-99 album, another inside joke for the scene which was actually quite controversial at the time.

It was really just meant to be a joke. Again, it was just Zach [Mason alias 회사AUTO] and I having fun. He put out the first Saint Pizza parody album, which I thought was hilarious, and once I discovered that was his work, we talked about doing a collab. So he once again reprised his Saint Pizza role, and my alias was a take on Macross[82-99].

Macross thought it was hilarious by the way. He thought it was funny as hell. But a few people in the scene didn’t find it so funny, in particular the Saint Pizza portion, because it was poking fun at Saint Pepsi, who was actually a good friend of mine and a friend of Zach’s. But the folks in SPF420 thought there was something nefarious about it, so we caught a lot of flack for it early on. I didn’t let it upset me too much though.

You did the split with Telepath in the same year, another super influential album for many producers.

Yeah, it’s funny because The Path To Lost Eden was my most played album on Spotify this past year. It’s doing surprisingly well ten years after the fact.

How did you come up with the idea of doing something together? What was the concept behind it?

I think I reached out to Telepath first. I had been talking to David [HKE], who ran Dream Catalogue, and he thought it would be a good idea. I thought I could do something in a similar vein as the slushwave music Telepath was putting out at the time. I had all these cassette recordings from high school, from this show called Echoes on NPR, which came on late at night, from midnight till six in the morning. It was just a lot of new age music, but I listened to it almost every night, and every time I heard something I liked, I’d hit record. So I had all these cassettes of new age tracks in my arsenal, and I went back and gave it the plunderphonic treatment. Because of the stylings of these tracks, I managed to come up with something that would vibe with Telepath’s side.

At the time we made the split album, Telepath was really taking off. When I’d started listening to his music, I already knew it was something special. He really knew what he was doing and he was putting out some quality ambient vaporwave music. If I had waited a couple years, it would have been a lot less likely that we would have linked up and put out an album. It was just the right moment where we both had some time to tackle this project. At the same time, even though it was a collaborative project, it was just a split album, so he did his own thing, and I did my own thing. It’s actually been years since I even talked to him.

I remember the years 2015 and 2016 as being quite turbulent in the scene: With the media hype came a lot of infighting. Dream Catalogue was huge but then came the whole hardvapour thing and HKE’s public meltdowns on Twitter…

It was a mess, wasn’t it?

It really was. I even stopped following the scene for a while. When Pharma came out in 2017, it felt like you were leaving the vaporwave days behind you too. It obviously still had that influence, but it just went beyond that. Was that the plan, or did it just happen?

That was exactly part of the plan at that point. I’d done the vaporwave thing, and I wanted to go back to my roots. At the same time, Orange Milk had approached me a couple of years before that, wanting to do an album. When I’m asked by a label to put out something, I want to do something in the vein of what they’re known for, and Orange Milk has some pretty batshit insane music on their label. So the game plan was to do another plunderphonic record, but just go all out. It was completely spastic and all over the place. I took from a variety of genres and just tried to make a really crazy record that didn’t exactly follow suit with the previous full-length. It was just very manic-sounding, it changed every few seconds.

It surely is a bit of an ADHD album.

Definitely, very much. Which is a good reflection of me.

Looking back today, how important is vaporwave still to you?

It completely changed my life, honestly, the trajectory of the music I make, and everything else as a result of it. If I had never stumbled across Macintosh Plus or that sunsetcorp channel and if I just didn’t follow that path, I imagine how different would things be for me now. It changed everything for me. It’s what popped off, it’s what got [online magazine] Tiny Mix Tapes’ attention back in the day. I could have just carried on with the IDM stuff, and who knows if anybody ever would have even heard me?

Do you still feel like you’re part of the vaporwave community? Do you still engage with it?

Not as much as I used to. The vaporwave community is attracting a lot of new faces, a lot of young kids. A lot of my peers have gone on to either do other things, or they gained a lot of success and don’t partake in community stuff anymore. I’m also just not online as I was back then. I got a little burnt out being online all the time. And by being online, I mean talking to everybody constantly. I’m kind of over it, and with that, you become a little detached from the scene. Which is fine, it’s just how things are.

Are you still following the developments in the scene though, especially what’s happening in slushwave and signalwave on Discord?

I can’t say I really am. I mean, I love signalwave, or broken transmission as it used to be called back in the day, and I know there are communities for those subgenres that work together a lot and put out a lot of music on specific labels. But I’m just kind of doing my own thing at this point. I’m very much behind the scenes.

In 2022, you put out a mix called VAPORWAVE: Not Quite Dead Yet.

That was an April Fool’s prank. I was poking fun at the scene, for sure. I had been collecting various reworks of this one song for years, because I noticed a lot of people were sampling the same song [52nd Street’s “Tell Me (How It Feels)” from 1985], and I was just gonna put it all together and do something fun with it. When I actually sat down to put that mix together, I had 12 or 13 tracks where people had all sampled that song, so I thought it would be a little funny commentary on how the scene’s not dead, but then use the same song for the entire mix.

You weren’t inactive in the years between Pharma [2017] and The Molokai Compendium [2025], because you did release stuff on compilations, mixes, remixes, but not an actual full-length album. Why?

Honestly, I was working on The Molokai Compendium for years before it was finally released. A lot of things got in the way of its initial release, Covid being one of them. It was a period where some people felt extra productive, but it had the opposite effect on me. There was a lot of political uproar at that time, a lot of protests going on, and it really hit me hard. I wasn’t feeling the creativity at that time. There was also a death in my family that took a toll on me, and I ended up taking a break for a year. Eventually I sucked it up, got back to it and finished it up, but then there was some more delays because of things going on with the label.

In the liner notes, it’s mentioned that you stumbled across some weird Andy Sedaris movies from the 80s and got inspired. What’s the actual story?

I forget the exact year, but some years ago I saw Aphex Twin in New York, and we were staying in this Airbnb, channel surfing and Hard Ticket to Hawaii [1987] was on. My buddy was just like, “Oh, you’ve never seen this movie?” And I was like, “No.” And he mentioned, “Well, this is where that frisbee scene comes from, and the blow up doll.” I was very aware of those, because those clips have been circulating on the internet for years, and those are all sourced from this movie. So I watched it for a little bit, and I just loved it. It was so over the top.

I started watching Sedaris’ other movies, ended up buying several DVD collection box sets. Actually, they came just at a time when I was feeling down. Those movies really uplifted me, and I wanted to do something fun that pays tribute to those movies. Molokai was my fun record, because I didn’t want to go any darker than Pharma. I wanted to keep things light and those schlocky 80s action movies are just a perfect area to sample and plunder.

Now that Molokai is out of the system, do you have any immediate musical plans for the future?

I have been trying to take a real break for months now. It just hasn’t exactly panned out the way I wanted. I worked the entirety of last month on a compilation track. I just work incredibly slow these days. It’s a matter of not having a lot of time, so when I am working on something, I want to make sure it’s something worthwhile.

As I said, I’ve been going through the archives and putting out these old mixes from the heydays of vaporwave, just for posterity’s sake. I do have some projects on the horizon, but it’s nothing I’m in a huge hurry to put out. I’m just going to leisurely tackle it. I have a few concepts in mind for what the new album should be, but at the moment, I’ll keep it hush. There is a remix album for Molokai on the horizon with some pretty big names on there though, which I’m pretty excited about.

What are you listening to right now?

Oh boy, loaded question here. I’ve got a spreadsheet up in front of me. I’m listening to new music every day. I tend to consume six or seven albums on a daily basis at the office. I’m just addicted to acquiring music and listening to it.

So I’ve been listening to Oneohtrix Point Never’s new album Tranquilizer. And I’ve been getting into Butthole Surfers a lot lately. All I ever knew growing up was [their Top 40 hit] “Pepper”, but I had this realization that they are incredible, and I want to dig into everything they’ve ever done, so I’m planning on doing a chronological deep dive of their music soon.

One of my favorite artists as of the past few years is SEEKERSINTERNATIONAL. They’re kind of a dub slash plunderphonic group, they’ve dabbled in vaporwave, but it’s just truly incredible stuff in the production chops. Other than that, I’m huge into Lord Tusk, and one of my favorite groups now is Moon Wiring Club, they’re kind of a hauntology group, very underappreciated.

Are you still into metal at all?

I don’t listen to metal near as much as I used to, but there are certain groups that I still appreciate. My all time favorite is Candiria, a hardcore band out of Brooklyn who dabbled in jazz and hip hop and electronic music... They were a huge influence going back since I was a teenager. I even got the chance to do a couple remixes for them. Over the past couple years, I got more into Neurosis. Type O Negative has always been one of my favorite metal bands. I’m still rocking some Deftones too.

Listen to Nmesh on Bandcamp

Nmesh’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica (Software, 2011)

• Laserdisc Visions – New Dreams Ltd. (Beer On The Rug, 2011)

• 情報デスクVIRTUAL [Vektroid] – 札幌コンテンポラリー (Beer On The Rug, 2012)

• 骨架的 [Skeleton] – Reflections (self-released, 2012)

• INTERNET CLUB – UNDERWATER MIRAGE (self-released, 2012)

• luxury elite – III (Ailanthus, 2012)

• Topaz Gang – Tuxedo Princess (Fortune 500, 2013)

• トリニティー無限大 [t e l e p a t h] – 二二二七 (self-released, 2015)

• Phono Ghosts – Solar Dream Reel (Fonolith, 2016)

• Late Arcane – Extravagance (Business Casual, 2023)

Music and the arts are exclaves where, theoretically, magic moments could still happen, but these days, a lot of music is actually part of the machine. I’m not just talking about ‘functional’ capitalist productivity music. All artists are pressured to overcommunicate and feed our voyeurism with constant social media presence and hyper-specific, literal lyrics to inject that ‘first-person energy’ into our lives.

On the other end of the spectrum, you will find the spellbinding, mystical, enigmatic music that Polish artist-composer Martyna Basta has been making and releasing throughout the last five years. In that time frame, her style morphed organically from ambient collages of samples, field recordings and wordless vocalizations, to a unique vision of art pop influenced by chamber folk and electroacoustic composition.

On her stunning new album Winged in Collapse, Martyna draws from auto-tuned pop as much as from baroque harpsichord music; she’s also invited contributions from artists as diverse as medieval folk duo LEYA, UK drill experimentalist Rainy Miller, sound explorer Felisha Ledesma and trip-hop magician james K.

In our conversation below, Martyna quickly jumps from references to early music and renaissance paintings to her love of Addison Rae to memories of her family’s garden in the Polish countryside. Her ephemeral answers seem to mirror her instinctive approach to music-making. Breaking free from the machine, this music refuses to spell things out and instead turns towards the elusive, the ambiguous and the unknown, capturing transitory in-between states and drawing strength from uncertainty.

After formative releases on small DIY labels like Warm Winters or Stroom, the new record comes out on 7K, a slightly bigger but still an independent operation. “I was excited that they contacted me, as they seemed interested in building a new direction for the label, which was first marked by Lyra Pramuk’s Hymnal”, Martyna says. “It felt nice to think we could enter this new territory together.”

What kind of music did you grow up on, Martyna?

Given that I was in music school from the age of 7, I think the daily sound of people practising all around me was something I associate very strongly with that time. These repetitive passages, often played clumsily when work on a piece had only just started. Even now, when I walk through a city and pass a music school and hear it, it still touches me somehow.

My mom always played classical music at home, and my dad introduced me to psychedelic and indie rock when we were in the car together. Outside of music school I also attended a girls’ choir from the age of 10 until 18. It’s nice to think that I often catch myself somewhere in the middle of all of this.

Did you actually grow up in Kraków? I remember that you spoke about a family home in the countryside that you were going back to a few months ago.

I was born and grew up in Tarnów, a smaller town nearby, but it’s Kraków that I associate with home. My mother and father studied there too. It’s also closer to where my family lives right now. Basically, they built a house in the countryside, right next to the one my mother grew up in. There is a big, now abandoned garden that once was so full of life…

As a child I used to spend my whole holidays there. My mother and her siblings used to play there when they were children as well. I think coming back there, and seeing this place now overgrown, feels so important, especially in times when everything feels so replaceable and disposable. Even observing this place vanishing lifts my heart up in a strange way. Like I know this house stood there for 150 years and will collapse sometime soon, and I’m grateful it will return to nature. The house is surrounded by trees that almost form a natural fence around it.

I always liked how you can enter the garden freely, between the trees. Not so long ago I wrote down the line: “between the trees I am and I dissolve”, and I think that holds the feeling a lot.

When I spoke to Maya Shenfeld, another classically trained guitarist who’s moved towards experimental composition, she told me that she was the only woman in most of her classes and in all guitar ensembles. Did you have a similar experience?

Luckily, I found myself in a pretty egalitarian environment. Maybe after the rigidity of a music school upbringing you don’t have too many expectations? (laughs)

Honestly, I find that pattern more in sound engineering. I’ve gone through some soundchecks where I felt completely disrespected… And once it happened at a pretty renowned festival, so maybe don’t hire ten sound guys because they’re worse than one… (laughs)

But honestly, talking to fellow musicians I realize it’s a pretty common experience. Every time there is a woman doing my soundcheck, my heart is full and the experience is usually the best.

In 2021, you released Making Eye Contact With Solitude – the first time I encountered and got enchanted by your music. Can you describe the circumstances in which this music was made and the concept behind it?

I love being asked that question! When I go back to the time of making this record, I get pretty nostalgic about how beautifully naive my approach to music-making was. I had the instrumental skills but basically zero knowledge of DAWs and how to compose music.

I was so tired of relying on my skills, it felt like a burden I wanted to lift off myself, and all that was left was intuition. So I started extensively gathering field recordings, because that felt like the kind of material I craved to work with, taken just from the life itself.

The production side of this album is quite simple: stretching, warping, pitching, sample cutting, and a few core effects. Composing it felt very organic and linear, originally it was a 30-minute long form piece that was later cut into six tracks. I really like this way of composing, where the ending of one track naturally evolves into the beginning of another.

I remember being consumed by loneliness and frustration at the time, and I found comfort in domesticity, rituals, and repetitive patterns. The draft of this composition reflects that. The recordings are multiplied, creating a piece that feels like a collection of loops. The overwhelming feeling of constantly moving in circles eventually led me back to the starting point, until I realized that this can also be a place of continuous return, and, following that line of thought, a point of perpetual beginning.

Leaving your classical training behind, how did you find your way back to a different, maybe more intuitive way of using your instrument?

I wanted to play electric guitar forever… but when I finally got one, I struggled to give it a role in my compositions. So I decided to approach it very gently at first, as if it was my first time. I wanted to move away from the virtuosity and perfection I was used to. The result of my first attempts is the track “Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering”. It’s such a simple riff that I initially thought it wasn’t even worth releasing.

I really wanted to keep the guitar just as a layer, not something dominant, more like a cloud wrapping around the other elements. Once, after a concert, a man told me my guitar should be louder and more present… he had no idea it was intentional. People are used to reading the guitar as something that should take over the room.

The standalone single “Flame After Flame” foreshadowed the artistic direction of the new album. Was it a kind of barrier to break through in your development to sing actual lyrics?

Previously there was a lot of vocalization in my work, or sometimes single words. But I wanted to try opening up a bit more and see what would happen. I never wanted to force it, so I guess I waited for a moment when I felt bold enough to put something like that out there.

I feel like over time I expand the boundaries I find myself within, but I also think those boundaries were important. People often tell you “don’t limit yourself”, but my experience is the opposite: limitation is good. It helps you focus and make more conscious choices. Too many possibilities can be overwhelming.

I like to let things happen and let life dictate what I gather and what I use. It’s similar with instruments: I often record samples and treat them as a library of sound. For example, I have around 30 violin sounds, which are pretty ugly, since I can’t play violin. But in post-production I can create this kind of strange orchestra of strings that goes beyond the instrument’s acoustic limitations.

Was there an actual difference in the writing and recording process for Winged in Collapse compared to previous works?

I felt inspired by a wider range of music, and influences seemed to come from everywhere, even from something like a random track played in a gym. I think it’s quite an eclectic record, but that’s because I often found myself at the edge of what’s known and what isn’t. Sometimes I stepped into territory that didn’t feel familiar, and those were moments where I initially felt vulnerable.

From the beginning of making music, I’ve appreciated following intuition and gut feeling. It’s hard to explain in a way that doesn’t sound vague, but for me it’s essential that the music feels authentic when it’s released. That’s also why I often don’t fully remember the recording process of certain tracks, or what exactly led to specific layers. Most of it is intuitive and comes from unconscious places. Maybe that’s why I sometimes feel quite detached from my own work.

It’s the first time that you’ve worked with guest features rather than just musical collaborators. How were they actually chosen?

The main motivation was curiosity, what would happen if I worked in a slightly different way than usual. Echoing the spirit of the album, I wanted to create some kind of clash or contrast. There were moments when I felt I was stepping into unfamiliar terrain, and in those moments it felt natural that someone else could help carry the narrative forward.

The most surprising feature to me was Rainy Miller, a UK rapper and producer who’s been making waves with a very experimental mix of drill and noise. How did you meet him and how did you learn of his work?

We still haven’t met in person! I first discovered his music through his collaborative album with Space Afrika. There was something in his work that deeply resonated with me at the time, especially in relation to the album’s themes, a vulnerability he’s not afraid to show, but also a certain strength that comes with it.

I worked on a sketch, and as it started to take shape I realized it needed his voice to feel complete. I reached out, and Rainy sent me a recording of a poem that had been sitting around for some time, waiting for the right moment. It attached itself to the draft like a missing puzzle piece.

Explain the idea of attaching the “echoed version” of the james K song please. It feels reminiscent of the current slowed + reverb trend but maybe there’s another idea.

Ah, that’s a nice question! The track was originally longer, but due to vinyl constraints I had to shorten it. I couldn’t let go of the longer version, so we decided to make it a bonus track.

The shorter version works well, the longer one is basically a doubled verse. But I really like how repetition in the original makes it feel wider and more immersive.

I love the slowed + reverb trend though. Have you heard the Justin Bieber one? Obsessed!

Would you get very angry if someone called this your pop album?

Oh, absolutely not! I’d be like… you got the inspiration! I love pop music, can’t get Addison Rae out of my head lately. (laughs) I draw a lot of influence from pop, and it had quite a big impact on the album’s creation. I’d never call it a pop album though. Maybe… pop-adjacent?

You know that great website Every Noise at Once? There are 516 kinds of pop music, so maybe I fit somewhere in there…

I’d be curious to learn about works of art that influenced the new album on an artistic level.

Following what I said before, the influences were very broad, not only musical, but artistic in general. A lot of them only fully revealed themselves once I started building the visual layer of the project, which opened up a different way of thinking about structure and symbolism. The sound and imagery constantly fed into each other, almost as if they were shaping the same emotional language from different angles.

There was a fascination with earlier forms of notation and visual language, like medieval neumes, where music exists as gesture and contour rather than precise notation. I was also drawn to the idea of ornament as expressive rather than purely decorative. Baroque music, especially its intricate ornamentation and melodic excess. Renaissance painting, in contrast, felt like a study in attention and precision, obsessive care for detail, where every element is held with equal intensity.

Musically, inspiration came from both baroque harpsichord and new forms of auto-tune experimentation. I find it fascinating how structures from past eras reappear in modern sound, for example, heavily ornamented auto-tuned vocals like Babyxsosa uses.

Generally, I feel very drawn to Aby Warburg and his idea that symbols and images are not fixed in time but travel through history, resurfacing in new contexts while carrying traces of their previous lives. I see my own fascinations in a similar way: ornament, fragmentation, repetition, and distortion as something that accumulates over time.

These poems seems to be talking about loss and grief. What was the general mindstate in which you wrote and recorded the album?

I think the album came from a place of trying to hold two emotional realities at once. A lot of the writing circled around the tension between tenderness and devastation, wanting to comfort something while also mourning it. The title itself reflects that duality as well.

There was definitely a sense of grief throughout the process, a feeling of watching parts of the world become unfamiliar or slowly disappear, and trying to make sense of that emotionally. Sonically and lyrically, I was drawn to contrasts: sharp, abrasive textures folding into softer moments.

A big part of the record was exploring vulnerability not as weakness, but as its own kind of quiet strength. Fragility can still carry resilience. Even in the heavier moments, I never wanted the album to feel hopeless. There are still glimpses of warmth and possibility. Songs like “Come With Me” lean toward imagining something beyond collapse, while “Say It Closely” feels much more intimate, almost like speaking softly to someone you love in the middle of noise. The album exists in those spaces where opposites meet: softness and sharpness, fragility and resilience, collapse and flight.

Do you think that a general feeling of overwhelm and anxiety played a role too, maybe in regards to world politics?

Definitely, even if it was never something I wanted to address directly or literally. There was a constant underlying feeling of instability during the writing process, like the world was becoming harder to recognise or emotionally process in real time.

A lot of the anxiety on the record comes from that atmosphere, from feeling emotionally overloaded by everything happening around us, and trying to exist inside that without becoming completely numb.

Was there a certain aesthetic world you had in mind in terms of the overall sound design and instrumentation? Could you try to describe it?

I was drawn to a sonic world built on contrast and tension, where things coexist in a fragile balance. I wanted the sound design to feel tactile and almost physical, as if it could be touched, with a constant pull between softness and sharpness.

A lot of the record lives in that in-between space: fragile vocal lines and chamber-like arrangements sit alongside sharper, more industrial edges that cut through unexpectedly. I was especially interested in how intimate, lullaby-like moments can quietly shift into something more uneasy.

There’s also a dialogue between old and new forms – classical sensibilities and ornamented details interacting with more contemporary, sometimes distorted or synthetic elements. I kept returning to the idea of beauty carrying traces of decay or disruption too.

I’m a subscriber and a fan of your diaristic writings on Substack. I was deeply moved by this passage for example: “Too often it seems a better option to contribute silence to this world, or to keep something a secret in times of such voyeurism and exposure.” Can you expand on this thought, which seems so counterintuitive for an artist, especially in the attention economy?

Oh, I have such a hard time being online lately… There was a period not too long ago when I was able to cut down my screen time and only rarely visit social media, but not anymore since the album campaign started. I just want to reach people with my work, and apparently there’s no other way than being online and present, trying to please algorithms so you get visibility. You even have to fight for your friends to see your content, it’s really wild where we are right now.

I think it was around ten years ago when I set up a Tumblr account and used it as a kind of online secret diary. It sounds silly, trying to stay a secret in the internet, but it was really appealing to me as a concept. Funnily enough, I came back to it recently because I felt I can’t share too freely on Substack…

Tumblr has something that can’t really be replicated elsewhere. There are people there I’ve been observing and reading for years. Recently I read that blogging should be considered a kind of literature, and honestly, I absolutely agree!

In another post you wrote: “I still think it’s always a good day to hide and it’s still my favorite thing. Quietly observing things from afar.” I can relate to this feeling so much. How does it reflect in your work?

I often find myself in two opposite states: one where I’m outside, physically and emotionally – traveling, being busy – and another where I’m inside, both in space and within myself. I think it’s quite natural in the rhythm of my work, but it also depends on the seasons. I tend to fall deeply into isolation, and sometimes it’s hard to leave that state once I’ve fully settled into it.

Sometimes it becomes too difficult to confront the world, so you create your own, slightly illusionary one. It can be comforting, but it also makes communication harder afterwards. That’s partly why I started making music in the first place. There was something in my chest I wanted to release, and I felt it could only be done through sound.

Between sharing and oversharing, hiding and observing, there’s also the aspect of mystery and enigma that a lot of contemporary music lacks. Searching for that is a process which I want to call the re-enchantment of the world – is this a thought you can relate to?

That’s a lovely term! I used to overshare on social media when I was younger. Sometimes it felt like being present only mattered if I could share it online. When I saw something beautiful, I had to post it immediately, almost as if it wouldn’t matter otherwise.

Only a few years ago I started treating my privacy as something sacred, and now it’s almost the opposite. I want to keep things for myself, or for the person I share the moment with. In current times that feels like such a luxury. I really love when I meet someone and we spend hours together with no phones, and what we experience belongs only to us.

Martyna Basta’s new album Winged in Collapse is out now.

Just press play – and read on while listening.

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

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

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

Case closed.

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

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

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

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

Here are 10 solid arguments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to read more about vaporwave?

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

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

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