Vapor Talks #1: Puderpolli

Kicking off a series of vaporwave-related interviews with this prolific German lo-fi producer and analog photographer

Wading through hundreds of vaporwave tapes over the holidays, one of the projects I kept returning to was this fascinating album constructed from Czech radio samples, created by the electronic music producer Puderpolli (stylized as P U D E R P O L L I) who’s based in Dresden, Germany.

A fellow Gen X’er raised on an eclectic diet of hip-hop, hardcore punk and electronic music, Sebastian Stehlik was born in Karlsruhe, in Germany’s deep Southwest, an area culturally shaped by the American occupation after World War II.

Stehlik produced house music as Scherbe for some years and has been dabbling in analog photography. His first vaporwave releases under the Puderpolli alias go all the way back to 2016.

Ten years later, the project’s Bandcamp page lists 44 releases in all sorts of styles from signalwave to slushwave. But Stehlik shows no signs of slowing down. His experimental, sample-based music resonates with a worldwide audience.

I spoke to the producer about his deep musical biography, his personal journey into the weird internet microgenre of vaporwave and how the scene changed since the pandemic.

P U D E R P O L L I

How did you discover electronic music as a kid in Germany’s formerly American-occupied sector?

Back then, in the late 1980s, the U.S. military was still there. I remember them playing amazing music on their car stereos – pop remixes, electronic stuff, early hip-hop. One day, a friend brought a record to school. It was “F*ck the Police” by N.W.A. – my first encounter with hip-hop culture. So I started listening to hip-hop, punk rock and metal, but even more important was that ‘94 to ‘96 era, when trip-hop came along. I was really into that eclectic sound that labels like Ninja Tune represented. Suddenly you had hip-hop, techno, drum’n’bass, downbeat and ambient on the same compilation.

How did you get into producing music from there?

At first I started DJing when I was 16. Then I got an old, exempted Atari ST from my parents. A friend had told me you could connect instruments over MIDI. In the late 1990s, I moved to Heidelberg to study at university. I got involved with community radio and started an experimental electronic music show with some friends. We produced our own sound collages, sourcing samples from the internet. We used Cubase or Logic, and I’d bought a sampler with some hard-earned money. We were quite prolific and made around 80 shows. We’re currently trying to restore that archive.

But then you pivoted towards house music…

Yeah, I started making more dance-oriented music in the mid-2000s, mainly house and dubstep, which was still quite new back then. That was the time when everyone was involved in netlabels. You do remember those, do you? There was an interesting electronic music scene back then in Heidelberg and Mannheim, with people like David Moufang alias Move D and his Source Records label at the center. Those were some really inspiring years.

At the end of that decade, you moved to Dresden, right?

Yes. Friends of mine started this community in Neustadt [a bohemian neighborhood of Northern Dresden] in 2005. 18 people lived in a shared space on five floors in a house with their own bar. I actually DJ’ed at the opening and spent a lot of time in Dresden in the following years. When I’d finished my history studies with a master’s degree – I wrote my master thesis on Marcus Garvey, by the way – I didn’t see much of a perspective in Heidelberg. Luckily I found a job in Dresden and moved here in 2009.

What did you like about Dresden initially?

Heidelberg was just an old city where subculture was dying, pushed aside by money. In Dresden, I met so many new people making experimental music and art. We started organizing house parties, and I launched a music project called Scherbe – an old nickname of mine I’d had since high school. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my musical role models, like Theo Parrish or J Dilla. I produced and DJ’ed house music for a number of years. I even lost my job because I was so involved with music. After a while I ran out of money, so I lived off welfare for some time, and then trained to become an IT systems operator and software developer.

When did you discover vaporwave?

In 2015. At the time, I listened to a lot of internet radio. One day, the English DJ Ruf Dug posted on Facebook about his friend who’d founded a label for a new style of music called vaporwave, where people would steal old tracks, pitch them down, apply some reverb and amplify the bass. He had a show on this online radio station, NTS, and made a whole episode about that label, which turned out to be Dream Catalogue. I found that quite interesting, because I loved pitched-down music. I even pitched down a lot of the house music that I played.

I listened to that show right away, and for the next six months I completely immersed myself in that world. Dream Catalogue already had 90 albums out at the time, and then I discovered the catalogues of Fortune 500, Business Casual and No Problema Tapes. For the first time since dubstep I’d found a style of music that really felt new and exciting.

After those six months of immersion, did you immediately start producing vaporwave?

I did start experimenting with similar techniques, but it took me another year until I launched the Puderpolli project. That year, fate dealt my family a heavy blow, which motivated me to start something new, something that had no connection to any of my previous projects. In September/October 2016, I set up the Bandcamp page.

P U D E R P O L L I (Bandcamp avatar)

But the peak of vaporwave’s second wave was already over by then.

Well, 2015 was kind of a boom year. I guess people lost interest after that, at least in the U.S. and the UK, as they had probably reached a point of saturation. At the time, many still saw vaporwave as a joke. But when I discovered the scene, many artists were using the template for really new creative ideas. The genre was in a process of becoming much deeper and more interesting. So while others thought vaporwave was over, we were like: “No, we’ve actually just started.”

Did you connect with other producers in the scene quickly?

At first I was just a fan. I was part of this legendary Facebook group, Vaporwave Cassette Club (VCC), where people would sell out-of-print Telepath tapes for like $50. It peaked at over 100,000 members. But I only started contacting people in the scene later, when I had some albums done that I wanted to release, so I sent messages to various labels that I hoped might be interested.

Was there such a thing as a German vaporwave scene?

The scene was very anonymous and artists were secretive about their identities. Their Bandcamp page would say they’re located in Tokyo or Fiji. But there were a few producers in Germany, like Karate King (空手王), Sport3000 and V@PYD. Oscob is American, but has been living in Germany for a long time as well. Then you had Stachy alias hofuku sochi [ed. note: a prolific vaporwave DJ, producer and former drummer of German hip-hop band Fischmob]. He’d heard a vaporwave radioshow I’d done for the Uncanny Valley label here in Dresden and immediately reached out to me like: “You’re in Dresden too? Let’s link up, I love that shit as well.” I got to know Kratzwerk a bit later, probably around 2018.

You mentioned anonymity being part of vaporwave lore. In the last few years, the scene seems to have changed its attitude in that regard.

Back then, you didn’t know who these people were, where they lived, what they did. That definitely fed into the aesthetic. But many artists have an urge to appear before the public as well. Suddenly you had someone like Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night who just came out like, “Here I am, I’m the artist, that’s how I look, are you disappointed now?” And now you have IRL festivals like Slushwave, which started online, but people have been meeting up in person in Belgium for the last two years. Vaporwave has more of an IRL foundation now, especially here in Europe, and it’s finally being recognized as actual music, not just an internet joke.

Slushwave was crazy, even if you were just following it online. All of a sudden, these mysterious internet entities turned into actual, real people on a stage, and you could even imagine having a beer with them.

Which we did! Even someone like Jornt alias Cat System Corp. came over from the Netherlands. He’s done so much for the scene – one of the few Europeans who were there from the start. Many label managers, distributors and other people from behind the scenes came as well. That gave it a certain authenticity and sincerity. People are still making fun of vaporwave, but being out there we realized that we’re part of a serious global scene. I don’t think it’s lost any of its appeal. It’s just morphed, and people have been connecting much more in person. It’s a different era now.

Look, many vaporwave producers have actually been making music for a long time. Take Stachy or Kratzwerk, they’re not 20-year old kids. They’re artists who’ve been occupying themselves with electronic music for decades – not just one style, but many different forms. They have really eclectic taste, and that’s where I feel at home too. Most people I’ve met in the scene are just very deeply into music. Like this guy Herr Kaufmann, who’s been running a local radio show in Frankfurt since 1996 – he’s this old, retired punk who discovered vaporwave and invited people like Kratzwerk, Stachy and me into his show. He’s really into the sound. How beautiful is that!

“So far I haven’t found anything that’s more fun than vaporwave. It’s still a relatively huge umbrella, which I can hide underneath from reality and just live in my own world.”

Some producers from the scene have been avoiding to associate themselves with vaporwave though, probably out of fear they won’t be taken seriously.

Not me though, I’m all in. It’s still a relatively huge umbrella, which I can hide underneath from reality and just live in my own world. For me, vaporwave isn’t a genre, it’s a feeling. If you feel it, then you’re vaporwave. I’m still feeling it, and the music I’m making is most certainly vaporwave. So far I haven’t found anything that’s more fun.

Your Bandcamp page hosts over 40 projects, and each one has a distinctive visual and musical identity. How do these things come to life?

Usually it starts with an idea that comes from a photo or a video. These first inspirations are often visual things from internet culture. I might watch a movie that inspires me. I’m still a fan of those hazy VHS style images as covers, because they represent my sound very well. The Puderpolli sound isn’t very clean, you know?

Vaporwave is conceptual music. To me, it’s about making coherent albums and creating them very quickly. I can spend a long time thinking about a concept, assembling images and samples, but I will create the project in a rather short time, and then I’ll either upload it to Bandcamp, or I’ll send it to one of the labels I’m working with, depending on if I see a fit with the rest of their discography.

You mentioned using bits of hardware now?

Yeah, I got a [Roland] SP-404 and this Japanese thing called [Sonicwire] Lofi-6, which can only sample in 6kHz. Just 500 of those machines were manufactured. I have no idea why I bought one – it seems I just needed it.

Your latest album came out in November 2025. This one creates quite a special atmosphere. What’s the concept behind it?

Well, the Japanese title translates to “We lived together in this abandoned place like in a dream”. The building on the cover is the TV tower in Ještěd, a mountainous area in Czech Republic that’s shrouded in legend. I live close to the Czech-German border, and my grandparents came from Czechia, so I do have a personal relationship to the area.

When I was DJing in Prague and digging for records there, I found some old Czech disco records, and then I’d find other samples through online radio. I put them into the SP-404, chopped them up and recorded the loops back into the computer, while I was editing them live. No post-production, just mastering. Listening to this album, I can almost smell the Czech mountain air, or taste the Pilsner Urquell beer in a local pub.

I finished the album in 2023 and sent it to Global Pattern, which is one of my favorite labels. I didn’t hear back initially, but then I met Tim, who’s running the label, at last year’s Slushwave festival, and he was like: “Sorry dude, I had to relocate my family from St. Petersburg to Paris because of the war in Ukraine, so I basically had to rebuild my entire life.” He got back to me a month later though and said he still wants to put it out. I was really happy because I’d lost the original files in a computer crash, so Tim was the only person that actually had the album.

Will your music ever be available on streaming services?

I don’t think so. I’m not a fan of these services, Bandcamp being an exception. In an ideal world, I’d just sell my music through my own website. I do earn a bit of money through Bandcamp, but fame is more important than money anyway. I want my music to travel, so that people around the world will listen to it. Making money isn’t a priority. [Legendary Detroit house producer] Omar S. said in an interview that he still works at the conveyor belt in a Ford factory.

Listen to Puderpolli’s music on Bandcamp

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P U D E R P O L L I’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Nouveau Life™ – New World™ (Dream Catalogue, 2014)

• 猫 シ Corp. – OASYS ♁ 博物館 (self-released, 2016)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – 星間性交 (Dream Catalogue, 2015)

• b o d y l i n e – INSTANT IMAGES (Adhesive Sounds, 2015)

• Infinity Frequencies – Closer Than Ever (self-released, 2016)

• Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – NTSC Memories (Allanthus, 2013)

• Ｓｐｏｒｔ３０００ – ＴＥＸＴ (DMT Tapes FL, 2017)

• Webinar™ – w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m (Dream.Corp, 2021)

• TVVIN_PINEZ_M4LL – R E M I N I S C E (tapewurm.fm, 2019)

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