Scott Lawlor: The Ambient Hermit

Meet the blind keyboardist who has released 800 albums – and counting

It was the ‘slushwave priestess’ 818181 who first made me aware of Scott Lawlor. Astrid had just collaborated with the blind ambient artist on the album Velvet Dream City, an utopian cyberpunk album which came out earlier in 2026 and stayed in heavy rotation ever since.

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

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

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

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

Scott Lawlor, photo courtesy of the artist

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

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

Did you grow up in a musical household?

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

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

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

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

What kind of music did you grow up on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Theotokos [2019],

• Life Passes Slowly Unto Death [2020] and

• Journey of a Dying Girl [2021].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I love collaborating with people so I’m always up for improvising over anything that anyone might want to send me.” (Scott Lawlor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

818181 & The Ambient Hermit – Velvet Dream City (artwork: experience solitude)

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

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

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

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

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

Would you say you have hermit tendencies in real life?

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

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

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

Scott Lawlor – Shortwave Nostalgia, Volume 1 (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to Scott Lawlor on Bandcamp

Scott Lawlor’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• 818181 – SLUSHWAVE 2024

• 818181 – SLUSHWAVE 2025

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

• International Telecom – ＨｏｌｉｄａｙＴｒａｎｓｍｉｓｓｉｏｎ (2022)

• Lost Colossus – Insomnia (2023)

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

• Kid Mania – COLLATERAL MURDER (2020)

• Local News – Ghost Broadcast (2013)

• Stefan Dowsing – Beyond the Radiant Horizon (2026)

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