The Return of Slushwave Legend Telepath
After an almost decade-long break, the legendary vaporwave producer released three new albums in 2025
In a small niche of the music internet, Luke Laurila is a bonafide legend, though he never had a hit record, never gave an interview to the press, never had his picture taken for publicity purposes and avoided live-performing for years.1
The semi-anonymous producer rose to fame in the vaporwave scene through a string of releases under the alias t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 from 2013 until 2016 – plus the work he did around the same time as one half of ‘dreampunk’ duo 2814. In this short period of time, Laurila acquired a cult-like following that eagerly waited almost a decade for him to return.
To their delight, he unleashed three new Telepath albums over a period of just four months between April and August 2025, taking up just where he left off with the last album under the moniker, 星間性交 (Interstellar Intercourse), at the end of 2015.
There’s not much I can tell you about the person Luke Laurila, apart from him apparently being of Finnish descent and growing up in a small village on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio. People that have worked with him describe him as a shy recluse but an avid online collaborator. Some of his best works are recordings in duo constellations, for example with David Russo alias HKE (as 2814), or with Jornt Elzinga alias Cat System Corp.2
While Laurila deeply values his privacy, at least his birth year seems to be confirmed: Born in 1997, he’s 27 or 28 now, and he was a mere 15 or 16 years old when he started his winning streak in the early vaporwave scene. It’s been assumed he’s a neurodivergent savant, but maybe he’s just a shy Gen Z kid from the rural Midwest that spent most of his youth on the internet, bingeing cyberpunk movies and toying with software plug-ins.
Whatever the case, the style dubbed ‘slushwave’ that Laurila once established and now returned to has become one of the most popular vaporwave subgenres. It’s essentially a form of ambient music, typically based on slowed-down samples of kitschy J-pop, R&B and smooth jazz songs – all sluggish beats, swirling synths and gargling voices, tranquil but uncanny.
Here’s an example of Laurila’s idiosyncratic style of sample manipulation, a track from his recently re-released 2015 album あなたの愛 (Your Love). The original source is Cameo’s funk tune “Hangin Downtown” from 1984, which hip-hop heads will recognize as the main sample in a classic DJ Premier production – Group Home’s “Supa Star” from 1995. It’s still recognizable, but edited, looped, slowed and heavily treated with effects, creating a Lynch-ean, almost dystopian vibe.
As lauded and revered as he’d been, Laurila alienated parts of his fanbase starting in 2016 by expressing the urge to keep developing his sound further into new directions and repeatedly making condescending remarks about the vaporwave community.3
It’s not like he disappeared completely. In fact, he still released a ton of music through his label Virtual Dream Plaza and under other aliases like Tianhuojian. This music felt different though – instead of his sample-based, effect-laden tracks as Telepath, he’d pivoted towards original longform ambient compositions that didn’t fit the vaporwave template anymore.
A new generation started shaping the slushwave scene in that time: Deeply inspired by Laurila’s work, new producers such as Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night, MindSpring Memories and others took the baton and ran with it. The Slushwave online festival, started during the pandemic as a place for producers to showcase music and video art, has been growing ever since, with the contributing artists branching out into all sorts of interesting experimental directions.4
In 2025, slushwave still has a robust fanbase. It felt like the right moment for Laurila to relaunch his Telepath moniker earlier this year. But it’s interesting to note that the three albums he unleashed between April and August, while received rather positively among die-hard fans, were largely ignored outside of that circle.
That didn’t really surprise me, because the (post-)vaporwave scene rarely gets represented in traditional music media. There was a short period when it was seen as the weird online trend du jour and mainstream outlets were running quizzical, bewildered stories about the A E S T H E T I C. That moment went by, and as early as the mid-2010s, vaporwave is dead became a popular meme. Since then, coverage of and discourse around (post-)vaporwave has largely been happening outside of established media – on Reddit forum threads and Discord servers, in YouTube comments and on platforms like Rate Your Music (RYM).
The meme was wrong though. Vaporwave is still a young genre, and a quite influential one. While the scene did feel a bit stagnant at the time and loads of uninspired music was coming out under that genre tag, some of the former vaporwave producers would go on to make some of the most innovative electronic music of the past decade. Laurila was one of them, even if he disassociated himself from the genre and scene he once helped shape.
Arriving in early April 2025, his new record 夜明けが訪れる (Dawn Arrives) was promoted by the Geometric Lullaby label as “the first new classic-style slushwave album by Telepath since 2015.” And while it does feature a slushwave track, a 14-minute long one even, it feels more like a showcase of Laurila’s skills as a producer of synth-based instrumental music with a deeply cinematic, dreamy feel to it.
Starting with 19 minutes of otherworldly ambience like straight out of a Wong Kar-Wai film, Dawn Arrives also has dark, almost industrial-sounding interludes, new age-y tracks with digital flutes and drum machines, heavily reverbed sax samples and what sounds like a processed zither, plus a lot of beatless, floating, melodic synth pieces. That slushwave tribute (it’s track #6) works so exceptionally well because it’s really the only excursion in that style on the album.
Released just a month later, the second album, 君のいない世界でまた一日が過ぎた (Another Day Has Passed in a World Without You), is actually much more classic-sounding Telepath. If you’d played this to me, introducing it as a lost album from his 2014/15 run, I’d have believed you. The tracks are all based on looped obscure samples, which Laurila fed through his patented chain of effects. Clocking in at between 10 and 20 minutes, they stretch out these blissful slowed melody loops with tons of reverb and delay on the drums and vocals.
The third album, 真実はいつもあなたの中にある (The Truth Is Always Within You), came out another three months later, and feels more heterogenous in style, mood and production methods again, more like Dawn Arrives. It doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel either, but it does seem as if Laurila is allowing for more influence from his recent works on Virtual Dream Plaza and his Tianhuojian alias here, while still including enough slush to make this an actual Telepath album.
Together these three releases make up over four hours of new music. Laurila also seems to have other things in the works. Through his channels he’s introduced a new alias, ᖚᓷᓺᓺᕿᔍᕣᒔᖍ, departing from the traditional Japanese characters and making use of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. He’s still not even close to 30 at this point, so it will be exciting to follow his further artistic journey.
Here are the Bandcamp links to all three new Telepath albums (they’re all name-your-price):
夜明けが訪れる (Dawn Arrives) [April 2025]
君のいない世界でまた一日が過ぎた (Another Day Has Passed in a World Without You) [May 2025]
真実はいつもあなたの中にある (The Truth Is Always Within You) [August 2025]
And when he did so for the first time at a festival in 2019, he wore a costume that made him look like a mix of Darth Vader and one of the Nazgûl.
He’s also repeatedly worked with the anonymous musician Agia Mishazawa as Lovers Entwined, though it’s unclear whether Agia actually exists – or if it’s just another alias of Laurila himself.
Laurila also made a big mistake by producing and releasing a since-deleted EP based on rap samples under an alias that included the n-word. While there’s no actual excuse for that misfire, let’s still acknowledge that it came out at a time when internet edgelord culture peaked, and he was 17 at the time. It’s quite comparable to the recent Ethel Cain controversy. We tend to hold young people to these high moral standards now, but you won’t find the stupid things my 17-year old self said to my friends to be ‘edgy’ on Wayback Machine or as screenshots on all my foes’ hard drives.
One of my most beloved discoveries at Slushwave was Kagoshima Tangerine’s ritualistic doom jazz, which my friend Jan likened to a vapor version of Einstürzende Neubauten.