Vapor Talks #11: Room 208

The Bay Area-raised, Berlin-based producer creates atmospheric soundtracks for imaginary cyberpunk films

When I first heard Room 208’s brilliant debut Awakening, I felt reminded of early Dream Catalogue records and their romantic-dystopian mix of ambient and anime, cyberpunk and East Asian cinema.

The album is accompanied by a short story and a longform film, creating an intriguing mosaic of references – like the artist name, which comes from Haruki Murakami’s classic 1995 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where it describes a surreal, liminal space in the labyrinth of the subconscious.

The closest musical parallels could be found in the works of dreampunk artists such as 2814 (Telepath & HKE), Sangam or KAGAMI smile. It’s a style of vaporwave with a higher entrance barrier than other subgenres – less reliant on samples, it demands a certain amount of musical skill, vision and creativity from the get-go.

Since the release of his cinematic masterpiece in 2020, Room 208 has collaborated on projects with other producers from the scene, such as Zuwe, Sage Hardware and Tower of the Sun. He’s appeared live at the Slushwave/Naturewave festival in Belgium and the Vaporwave Paradise fest in Cologne. And he’s moved from the Bay Area to Berlin, the place where I dwell, so after a short email exchange, we arranged a premiere: The first IRL Vapor Talk.

We ended up at a bar in Room 208’s neighborhood, chatting about EDM festivals and film school, discovering vaporwave while delivering pizzas, being an outsider and finding community, his main influences and plans for the future.

all photos courtesy of the artist

I’ve heard that you grew up here in Germany, is that true?

Yeah, I was born in Southern Germany and lived there till I was six years old, then my family moved to California, to San Diego at the beginning but I spent most of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area. I went to school in San Francisco and then I lived in Oakland, until I moved to Berlin three and a half years ago. I’d visited Berlin when I was 18 to see my cousin who lived here, and I just thought, “What a cool city, I’d love to live here.” So I finished school in California, got a job, and then it turned out I could just work remotely from here.

What are some of your earliest musical memories?

My mom would play guitar and sing, she wrote songs and musicals, and she actually started a community theater production for kids. These musicals were performed locally to small audiences. That’s probably my first real introduction to music, and just hearing pop songs on the radio, being driven to school. I was really drawn to R&B in the early 2000s, probably because of the melodies. I didn’t even think that I wanted to do music. It was just happening and I liked what was happening.

When did you start making music on the computer?

I’ve always really liked computers. When I was younger, I actually found it really difficult to sleep in my own room or stay at sleepovers without calling my parents, because I often got scared at night. However, while at a sleepover at a friend’s house, I learned that he would put on video game music like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger and fall asleep that way. For the first time, it felt like I wasn’t alone going to bed. The music made that experience feel safe. Shortly after, I got my own computer, and from then on, I could sleep in my room. That’s been a thing throughout my life. I need some kind of noise, typically coming from a computer, to fall asleep. I still use white noise to sleep, but it was video game music at the beginning.

But to your question, when did I start realizing that music is something I might be interested in making? Probably in 2011, when I heard Skrillex for the first time. At the time I was about to graduate from high school, and my friend told me he was going to the EDC in the summer, the Electric Daisy Carnival, which is the big rave that took place in L.A., and he showed me a trailer, and in the trailer is a Skrillex song. I didn’t even know this kind of rave culture existed. I was just like, “Wow, that’s crazy.”

I’ve never been trained to play an instrument, and I knew Skrillex wasn’t playing an instrument. He was doing it on a computer, I liked computers, and I liked what I was hearing, so I was like, maybe I could write music too, you know?

What kind of music did you usually listen to at the time?

I’d listen to [Japanese hip-hop producer] Nujabes, Substantial, a lot of things on [Nujabes’ label] Hydeout Productions. Through Skrillex, I got really into the house and EDM thing, and I had a lot of fun with big stage music. My EDM festival phase lasted from 2012 to 2016. But I was also into Purity Ring and Shlohmo, these quieter things that aren’t really dancey. Those two artists really inspired me on my path to figure out the music I wanted to make. But not many people I was surrounded with wanted to listen to this, and that was kind of a barrier for me.

Around that time I met a friend, Daniel, who produces under the name ANGELFVCE, and he had a band called Vinyl Storm. They were doing shoegaze, post-punk, inspired by My Bloody Valentine, and his lyrics just made so much sense to me. I was messing around in Ableton and asked him if he’d be interested in doing stuff together. So we formed Joy Machine, the first group that I was part of, and that was really heavily Purity Ring-influenced on my part, production-wise. Daniel came at it from his shoegaze-y inspired realm, but he had wanted to do electronic music, so it was both of us figuring out what we sound like. That was my first experience producing.

“To me, vaporwave has always been about this outsider way of approaching music and just doing things differently – doing sampling differently, or doing ambient differently, or doing some other technique or genre in a way that feels nostalgic.” (Room 208)

Do you remember the specific moment when you heard vaporwave for the first time?

I do. At the time I found music through blogs. I don’t remember where exactly I found it, but at some point I downloaded this album 240p by Virtual-420, which came out on Business Casual in 2013. I burned it onto a CD, and I played it in my car while I was delivering pizzas. I have a super clear, vivid memory of one of the tracks playing while I’m driving next to the bay in my 1991 Honda Civic and hearing this weird music. It sounded like lo-fi hip-hop, but it’s weirdly screwed, and there’s all these strange vocal samples. That was my first real memory of listening to vaporwave.

It doesn’t get more vaporwave than listening to a burned CD in a ‘91 Honda Civic, delivering pizzas. How did the story unfold?

I was at Daniel’s house, because we had been working on Joy Machine. Then he had band practice in the garage, and I was sitting in his room. I was on YouTube, and I remember seeing the Macintosh Plus album get recommended. I sat there and listened to it, and I wasn’t really sure what I was experiencing, but I remember being like, “That’s weird. I want to come back to this and dig more into whatever this is.” Then it becomes a little hazy, but I think I bought my first cassette tape in 2014 and just started listening to more artists and buying more tapes. Eventually I had a collection, and I was familiar with some artists in the scene.

In 2014 I moved to San Francisco for film school. At this point I was already exploring vaporwave. I was DJing and trying to make house music, which was a big part of my life, but in those quieter moments when I was by myself, it was almost exclusively Shlohmo or vaporwave. Around the time I discovered 2814, which was really big for me. No one around me wanted to hear that, so I couldn’t really share it, but at one point, vaporwave just started to take over house music in my listening. I just felt that vaporwave was a better vessel to convey the emotions I wanted to convey, as opposed to house and dance music.

How and when did you start the Room 208 project?

Film school didn’t exactly pan out the way I expected it to. I spent most of my time not making films, but rather writing essays about films, which was really frustrating. I was listening to 2814, and I had this idea of this cyberpunk film, but as a student in film school, there’s no way I could have enough budget to do any of that. What set me on the path of music production was this inability to make a film, because the school wouldn’t give me time to do that.

I was really writing a film in my head, and then I thought, the film is actually an album. The concept is: You’re watching a film, but you’re not watching it – you’re just reading the synopsis on the back of the DVD, and you’re hearing the film play out, but you’re not actually seeing it. So I would add rain sounds and other ambience, and I would add camera movements in the form of panning sound and stuff like that. I just thought: I can’t make a film, but I can tell a story through experimental vaporwave. That is when I created the Room 208 project.

2814 is widely regarded as one of the first vaporwave projects to write completely original music. Most of your music is actually sample-free as well, right?

Well I do use samples, but I don’t sample songs necessarily, the way other famous vaporwave tracks and artists might do. I was definitely very inspired by 2814, and these other artists where I felt that even if they were sampling, it was so obscure or so manipulated that it wouldn’t matter because it’s just a texture. I’m actually thinking right now if anything on [my solo debut album] Awakening is sampled…

Awakening is definitely this crazy amalgamation of all the things that I like. I’ve made a full film for it too, and it’s made from sampled anime. I was really inspired by a lot of anime over the period of my life when I saw it. There’s references to Haruki Murakami, who’s my favorite author. There’s references to Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, the animated manga. There’s obviously a lot of cyberpunk influence. There’s an influence from Cyber City Oedo 808 and from [Park Chan-wook’s] Lady Vengeance. Because Awakening is kind of a revenge tale, and I always imagined it as part of a trilogy like Lady Vengeance, which forms a trilogy with Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy.

Even your artist name is a Murakami reference. What makes his novels such an inspiration for vaporwave and dreampunk producers?

Well, his novels dip into the otherworldly, and his characters often find themselves in these liminal spaces where there’s a lot of self-reflection and a lot of clarity coming from something you love having disappeared and reality shifting into this strange parallel universe. His characters are typically pretty lonely, and many people in the vaporwave community are, in a way, outsiders to some aspect of their life. So these characters who feel alone, trying to figure out what’s happening in their world, are just quite appealing [to us].

Did you ever feel like an outsider in your life?

Yeah, for sure. Right now, sometimes I feel like an outsider living in Berlin, but even before that, when I was around all my friends, I was having this solitary experience listening to vaporwave, but no one else was really interested in it. That sucks, you know? I want to share it with someone, but I can’t really find that person.

With my own music, I’ve actually given up on showing it to people in person, because they will just start talking over the music after a while, and each time I’m thinking like, “Why can’t you just listen to it in silence for a few minutes?” If the music doesn’t hit them with a hook right away because it’s maybe more of a slow ambient piece, people will just be distracted so quickly and then start talking about anything. I really can’t stand that, so at this point I’m very selective about who I show my music to, outside of the scene.

Did you seek out the online vaporwave community to find connection?

I did, and it’s ultimately where I found people who understood my musical taste and shared similar feelings. Being an outsider isn’t necessarily a negative or a sad thing. There’s just this urge to connect, and finding people online was fulfilling this in a very easy way. Especially if you’re shy, you don’t have to meet up in person, you don’t have to put in so much effort, but you can still be part of the community and meet people from all over the world. You can basically come to terms with it all.

Tell me more about the genesis of your opus magnum, Awakening.

I think I’d started working on it in 2015, unaware that it was going to become Awakening. I would write some tracks, and then I would write the story, and I would think about how that song would fit in. Around 2019, I had the album and I was writing a narrative to condense each song into one or two sentences, because I always wanted it to be on a cassette. It was only then that I started trying to interact with the community as well. Before I had been just listening [to vaporwave] by myself.

I sent the music to some labels who I think might be interested, and No Problema Tapes was the one who said, “Yeah, we could do it.” Then the pandemic hit, and the album was delayed for about eight months, so I spent that time actually making the film, now that I had all the time in the world. So we finally got the album on cassette, and we have the film on a VHS tape, and then VILL4IN’s [online live event] Enter The Void was coming up [in October 2020], which felt like a perfect place to premiere the album and the film, and just generally come out as an artist. Before that, I had maybe two or three songs out that were just my early experiments in vaporwave.

How were the reactions to the album in the community?

They were good, it was well-received. People were really interested in the narrative and the attention to detail that I put into it, the atmosphere and the world-building. I was really glad, because I felt validated in my experimental way of making music, this album that’s actually a film. I made a lot of contacts that I maybe wouldn’t have made before.

You’ve been collaborating a lot since then!

Yeah. Tower Of The Sun is the first one who reached out to me. He came to me also with a narrative idea for an album. I worked on this when I came to Berlin, and it’s also the time that I first reached out to Zuwe because I had nothing but time and no one to hang out with here, and I was really inspired by his music. I was just connecting with so many artists online that it felt natural to collaborate. COVID played into it too, because we couldn’t see each other and I was missing human interaction. I work in tech, and my job has been fully remote for five years. I don’t dislike it, but there is an element of collaboration that I do miss. Even when it’s online, it’s still this creative exchange, where there’s vulnerability in creating art.

What projects are you working on right now?

There are probably six songs already written for Awakening pt. 2. I’ve always imagined it as a trilogy. These songs are just on a hard drive, and they’ve kind of been on the backburner in a way. Right now I’m working on another album with Zuwe which is getting close to completion. I’m hoping it will be out this year, then that’ll be a trilogy too. My biggest interest is making a video game. That’s really what I want to do. Scoring a video game is also high up on my priority list, because I’m realizing that making a video game is very difficult, but it’s a goal that I would like to work towards. How long it’ll take me to get there, I’m not sure.

Do you think there’s currently a resurgence in vaporwave, or is the genre just growing up?

I feel like it’s constantly being redefined, and that almost dilutes it into these many different subgenres. Vaporwave is becoming this overarching term to categorize all these different things. I don’t know if that’s a product of growing up or expanding in different directions, but ultimately I don’t know if it matters so much, because to me, vaporwave has always been about this outsider way of approaching music and just doing things differently – doing sampling differently, or doing ambient differently, or doing some other technique or genre in a way that feels nostalgic. It doesn’t matter what direction the sound takes – at its heart, it’s still vaporwave.

Listen to Room 208 on Bandcamp

Room 208’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• 2814 – 2814 (Ailanthus, 2014)

• t e l e p a t h and HKE – 愛慕 ／ 悲哀 (BLCR Laboratories, 2016)

• Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – Rainforest Hill (self-released, 2018)

• 夢范例 – 围 (Forgot Imprint, 2021)

• ojeras de damita – withered roses for eternal lovers (Dreamshore, 2022)

• Light Blending In – Last Word (Downpour Spirit, 2018)

• Voyage Futur – Inner Sphere (VILL4IN, 2020)

• Polygon Dream – Zeldawave // 近藤 浩治 // OOT (Geometric Lullaby, 2018)

• Sangam – Your Forget This (Dream Catalogue, 2016)

• 猫 シ Corp. – Sandrawave (self-released, 2016)