Vapor Talks #12: Magnum Innominandum

Prog-rock musician gone barber beats: Jim Miles in conversation

Within the vaporwave scene, barber beats is regularly dismissed as a low-effort slop genre that doesn’t require much musical skill or technical prowess.

Enter Jim Miles alias Magnum Innominandum – the St. Louis based artist, multi-instrumentalist and barber beats producer will never just throw a slowed + reverb filter on some 90s trip-hop tune and call it a day.

His albums are carefully constructed mosaics of samples that create a cinematic feel, with added breakbeats and rich overdubs on live analog instruments. His unique sound is inspired by prog rock, deep funk and classic science fiction novels.

Miles’ musical background is in the Midwest’s indie and progressive rock scenes – he’s been playing keyboards and other instruments in the prog-jam band Harpo Jarvi. Under the Magnum Innominandum moniker, he’s released multiple albums over the past three years, including his most popular work Empire of Necromancers (2023), a mix of mystical Arabic house samples and thick funk breakbeats, and The Malygris Suite (2025), a 40-minute tour de force through psychedelic uptempo grooves.

I spoke to Jim about his musical background and his artistic process, how he discovered vaporwave and barber beats as an analog rock musician and under which circumstances generative AI could play a role in his music in the future.

Jim Miles alias Magnum Innominandum

How’s the music and arts scene in St. Louis, Missouri?

They take their arts seriously here. There’s an awesome underground music scene. Even the city funds a bunch of art stuff throughout the year. We have this thing called the City Museum – it’s a giant playground constructed from scrap metal and junk, just a bunch of found objects and stuff. It’s really weird. St. Louis has got a rich art scene, but there’s a little bit of weirdness to it, which I like.

What kind of music did you grow up on?

My mom is into 60s and 70s soft rock – Crosby Stills & Nash, James Taylor, that sort of thing. My dad’s taste is more eclectic. Still, definitely a rock guy. He was into what you’d call power pop or garage rock, a lot of The Kinks and The Who. There was a lot of Beatles playing around the house too. That might have been what I gravitated towards as a kid, and maybe my parents were playing that more because they noticed that I liked it.

What did you gravitate towards as a teenager, when you started seeking out music yourself?

The first genre of music that I fell in love with was nu metal. Linkin Park’s Meteora was the first CD I ever bought. It was what my friends were listening to, and something about it really attracted me, especially lyrically. That stuff tends to appeal to angry teenagers, so I got into that for a bit. I eventually grew out of it and recently, a few years ago, rediscovered it and was surprised how much of an influence it still is for me, without even realizing it. But the progression went from that to classic rock and from there into progressive rock. That’s been my obsession since then.

Are you classically trained as a musician?

Kinda, sorta. I haven’t been too rigorous about practicing the instruments, but I started playing piano when I was really young. My parents acquired a piano from their friends that were trying to get rid of one, so they got it for free. Originally, I was not pegged to be the musician in the family – that was my sister, so they decided to get her lessons, and I complained about it and really wanted to do it. They thought I was going to quit after four weeks, but they eventually relented and allowed us to split a one-hour piano lesson. It was my sister who quit after four weeks, and I have continued to this day.

So yes, I’ve had a bit of classical piano training, but it’s been on and off over the years. I see myself more as a composer or songwriter, as opposed to a performing musician. I’ve never been that good at trying to develop my skills at particular instruments.

When did you start producing music on a computer?

I was 14, and I was using Audacity to record and overdub stuff, releasing it on MySpace. That was when I started getting into Radiohead and, weirdly enough, John Frusciante’s solo work. I was making rock music with a bit of an electronic layer over the top – electronic indie rock, that’s how you could describe it. At that point, it wasn’t super progressive. The progressive influences came a couple of years later.

How did your prog rock band Harpo Jarvi get together?

I knew the bass player from a previous band, which dissolved. He had this other band, and at the time, they were just playing as a drums and bass duo, so I joined them. They had a couple of songs that they had already written and performed, and I came on and added my own keyboard parts. Eventually I started being more active in the songwriting aspect of the band. It evolved into a different thing, and we decided to change our name to Harpo Jarvi.

2017 was when I first started playing with those guys. We’ve been on a hiatus lately, but we’re just starting to get back together. We’ve had some line-up changes. We have a new drummer, and we’re going to be getting out there and starting to play shows again soon.

How and when did you discover vaporwave?

When it first started becoming a thing. I was thinking about this the other day, my experience with vaporwave was very similar to [Anthony] Fantano’s experience, you know, that little album review he did of the Macintosh Plus album that’s been immortalized in the Nmesh track. I wrote it off – I thought it was just a silly meme genre. At the time, there was witch house, there was seapunk, and I just thought it was going to be the same thing. I didn’t pay any attention to it.

It was only a few years ago when I realized that it was something worth checking out, just because I like a lot of the music that serves as the sample source for so much vaporwave. I love smooth jazz, AOR, R&B, 80s soft rock, yacht rock and all that kind of stuff, so I decided it was worth checking out again, and it clicked in a way that it didn’t 10 years prior.

Do you remember some of the artists and albums that drew you back in?

One of the first things I revisited was actually Floral Shoppe. It was still maybe not my favorite vaporwave album, but it was more interesting than I thought it was when I originally heard it. I remember being very impressed with desert sand [feels warm at night] when I first discovered his stuff. At some point, I got really into Haircuts For Men. The bass player from Harpo Jarvi actually turned me on to that. Something about it really resonated with me, and that led to the whole barber beats obsession for me. I stumbled across Macroblank by accident on YouTube. The artwork drew me in, just because it looked similar to Haircuts For Men’s artwork. I found out that there’s a genre called barber beats, and I got into DΛRKNΣSS and GODSPEED 音 and those other early artists.

“I love barber beats, but it’s mostly background music, right? It has awesome vibes and atmosphere, but it doesn’t grab your attention. I wanted to make music that had those soundscapes, but demanded closer active listening.” (Jim Miles)

What did you like about it, what kind of emotions did the music evoke?

I’d just never heard anything quite like it. A lot of HFM stuff comes from modern lounge music and downtempo stuff – music that you hear in the background when you’re at a cafe or a cocktail bar, but that you don’t really pay attention to. Something about slowing that stuff down and reverbing it just gives it so much life that it doesn’t have on its own when you’re listening to it in those sorts of places. There’s something about the vibes of that music – just that chill, dreamy, jazzy sound – that I love.

Did you realize at the time that most of it was actually just slowed down older tracks?

No, I didn’t realize that at first. I think a lot of people had this experience when they first discovered barber beats, thinking it’s maybe more involved. I knew it was vaporwave, but I figured that they’re sampling jazz and then adding breakbeats over it. It was a little disappointing to find out that’s not the case. But you know, I love the music, and I’ve gone and listened to just lounge compilations, which is not quite the same, so eventually I decided I don’t care. I really like it, so I’m gonna keep listening to it.

You’re in a progressive rock band, you’re rediscovering vaporwave, getting into barber beats. How did the idea for this solo project arise?

Actually, it started with the artwork for my first album. Around the time I started Magnum Innominandum, that was when generative AI was having its its time in the light. I downloaded [open source text-to-image generator] Stable Diffusion and just was hooked on it. I thought it was so much fun. I loved all the weird glitches, I guess people call them hallucinations. I thought I could make some cool barber beats album art with it, have it generate some weird, distorted marble statues and stuff. So I just put that cover together without really having any intention of making music to go with it, but I was happy with the final result, so I was going to try to make some music for this. That’s how the project was birthed. Originally I was not going to make as many albums as I did. I was thinking, “Okay, I’ve made this one album. Maybe a year from now, I’ll make another.”

Except for some drum breaks, that first album that was mostly sample-less, right?

Yeah, I initially started trying to find samples and couldn’t find anything that sounded quite right. I wanted it to have a darker and weirder sound than what was typical for barber beats, so I gave up finding samples. I knew what I wanted, so I just recorded it myself. With the exception of the drums, I play everything on that album.

The project name comes from HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos, and many of the album and track titles revolve around classic horror literature like the books by Clark Ashton Smith. Is that a special interest of yours?

Maybe this is apparent from the big old bookshelf behind me, but I do read a lot. I like the weird fiction, just older speculative fiction in general. The 1960s and 70s were a real golden age for this type of literature, sci-fi and fantasy. Nearly every Magnum Innominandum album has some sort of literary inspiration behind it. I’ve done six or seven albums inspired by Clark Ashton Smith, so he’s a big favorite of mine.

Is the music always directly inspired by the book or the story?

It depends. Sometimes the theme comes first, sometimes it’s the music and I try to find a book that matches the vibe of what I’m making. With Brass Orchids, I just got done reading Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney and was totally enamored by it. The book is cyclical, it ends with the same sentence that begins with, so I wanted to try to make a piece of music that does that too. But Empire of Necromancers started just because I wanted to experiment with sampling Arabic house tunes, and then I was thinking what story would go well with this. Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique stories always had an Arabic flair to them, so I matched up that story to the music after the fact.

You were saying that you couldn’t find the right samples for the first album. So what happened on the second album?

Well, I decided I wanted to try doing barber beats for real and actually try sampling again. It originally was not going to be Magnum Innominandum. I was going to come up with a new alias, new Bandcamp page and start from scratch. Magnum Innominandum was going to be sample-free stuff, and this other thing was going to include samples. But I released it as Magnum Innominandum in the end, because I was getting to a point where I had too many different projects and aliases, and I didn’t want to be annoying. It seemed just easier to combine them in the end.

The album that really got me into your music was The Malygris Suite. It’s such an epic work, a far cry from your typical barber beats album.

That one is almost entirely samples, but it’s a lot of different sources. I usually list all of my samples on the Bandcamp and what instruments I play on a track-by-track basis. Malygris is essentially one continuous piece. It’s a lot of samples woven together. Some samples reoccur later on in the piece. I always replace the bass guitar, so I’m playing bass on my own. I added a little bit of saxophone at one point, and there’s a bit of flute at two different points. That might be it. I don’t remember if I even overdubbed any keyboards for that.

How do you actually find the right samples?

I have a hard drive that just has a whole ton of lounge compilations on it. Every now and then I’ll go and download some more. I search through those compilations, find a track I like, and then I’ll try to find stuff that’s in the same BPM and key, bring it all together in the DAW. It’s not too important to me that thing I’m sampling is all that amazing on its own. I’m looking for cool textures, cool rhythms. A lot of the stuff I do is so transformative, at least compared to other barber beats stuff. I’m doing more than just slowing it down and reverbing it. I’ll give it a new bassline, put some drumbreaks over it, add keyboard layers…but it usually just starts as a big pile of samples.

Your tracks are often quite uptempo, not as chill and relaxed as most barber beats, but more groovy and psychedelic.

That’s just the stuff I like. I mean, I like the chill vibes and all that too. I love barber beats, I still listen to it today, but it’s mostly background music, right? It’s not something I will put on and actively listen to all that often. It has awesome vibes and atmosphere, but it doesn’t grab your attention. One of my goals in starting the project was that I wanted to make music that had those kind of soundscapes, but still demanded closer active listening.

Your music does remind me of 1990s trip-hop a lot – like DJ Shadow’s music, or the stuff he did with James Lavelle as UNKLE. They sampled a lot of progressive and psychedelic rock too. Is that music an influence at all?

Not initially, though I’ve always liked DJ Shadow, and Massive Attack and Portishead too. I think I end up at the same place just because I like funky, groovy music, and I love drumbreaks and breakbeats. I knew I wanted my music to have that strong rhythmic element that’s at a similar feel and tempo to a lot of that old trip-hop stuff. So it’s more a matter of my influences meeting in the same place, rather than taking inspiration from that directly. But since starting Magnum, I’ve gone back and started listening to more trip-hop and early plunderphonics stuff.

Are you still using that generative AI software for your artworks?

All of my album covers have some element of AI art in them. If there’s ever something that looks like a painting or a photograph or anything, that’s usually AI. But the design work is all me, and my album covers tend to be pretty design-heavy. The artwork itself isn’t always the focus, which is maybe how I can get away with using it so much.

What’s your stance towards using AI in music?

I haven’t played around too much with it on the music side of things. I do have one album – Year Of The Albatross – that is based around AI-generated loops that I’ve overdubbed my own instrumentation on top of. But it’s disappointing to me how generative AI in music is being discussed, and I’m disappointed by the recent Bandcamp ban, because I think there’s a lot of creative potential in the synthesis of generative AI and the human element. It’s just that not a lot of people have really explored that all that much. A lot of the AI stuff you see is lazily generated from Suno and then uploaded straight to Bandcamp.

I can understand why people don’t like the lazy stuff and don’t want it on their platform, but what level of AI is acceptable? I’m just worried it’s gonna disincentivize musicians from integrating it into a more human-based workflow. There’s a lot of creative potential with the glitches and hallucinations as well. But experimental music is actually hard to do with newer AI models – these days it’s usually geared to minimize those glitches.

A lot of musicians have this deep-seated disgust for AI and want nothing to do with it. That’s fine, but I’ve never looked at it as a replacement for actually doing the work by generating a song with a click of a button. What’s always excited me about it is the ability to streamline. I have a lot of music projects that I want to do and a lot of song ideas that are just here in my head that I simply don’t have the time to turn into something. If I could streamline some of the least important elements of a song that are still time-consuming, then maybe I will be able to turn music around faster. That’s still maybe a few years away though.

I’ve repeatedly heard the opinion that barber beats is hurting the vaporwave scene because it’s such low-effort music, so when labels are picking it up, that takes away opportunities from ‘real’ musicians. What do you think about that argument?

I get it, and I sympathize with it. That was one of the things that turned me off of vaporwave when I first discovered it. I remember back in the early days, there was equally low-effort stuff out there. What’s different about barber beats is that it’s more popular than any of that stuff ever was. I mentioned it earlier, that initial disappointment in finding that the stuff I was listening to is just slowed and reverbed without too much chopping up the original sample. So I get the distaste with that. It does kind of feel like you’ve been tricked. A lot of barber beats artists have the “everything is plundered” disclaimer in their Bandcamp bio, but most people aren’t going to read that. Nearly everybody who gets introduced to this stuff thinks it’s higher effort to make than it really is, so I do understand why it’s controversial.

At the same time I think it’s good that the genre does have such a low barrier to entry. It does allow for a lot of creativity for people who don’t really have a whole lot of musical skill, even though it does seem that a lot of barber beats artists are actual musicians on the side, like me, and have non-sample projects that they work on. I still think it’s cool to have a genre of music that does have this low barrier to entry. Plus there’s a lot of stuff out there that is a lot more involved. They’re not the artists that most people pay attention to, but there is a lot of interesting stuff out there.

Name some of the innovative barber beats producers that make genuinely interesting stuff and that inspire you.

MICROMECHA has been doing more jungle and drum’n’bass stuff lately, but their earlier stuff was a lot of overdubbing drums, adding breaks on top of the sample.

Blank Entourage does a similar sort of thing, where he’s taking the samples, slowing them down, adding different drum grooves and a couple of ambient layers on top, but still keeping the sample relatively unchanged. That stuff is really interesting and still true to the spirit of barber beats.

Heaven Silhouettes does just really crazy, psychedelic sample manipulation.

Professional Hairdresser is another one that will take several different sample sources and sound really weird, cavernous and reverby. It’s more aggressive than a lot of barber beats tends to be. He’s taking these samples to some whole other plane and really changing up what this music was originally supposed to sound like.

Are you in contact with a lot of other producers?

A little bit. I’m a shy person, definitely an introvert. I don’t always feel driven to interact with people. But something that keeps me motivated with music and is very fulfilling to me is just the community around it. Magnum started as a very personal project. I didn’t expect to become a part of the scene, and I never really sought it out either. But over time, I’ve definitely interacted with a lot of other producers in the scene, and a lot of labels as well. The Rabbithole Club label was very supportive from the beginning, and it’s been awesome working with them. I’ve been able to interact with some of the barber beats artists that I admire a lot too. I’m definitely a little less involved in the scene than some other people are, but I guess I am part of it now.

If a reader wanted to start listening to Magnum Innominandum, where would you point them initially?

I’d say the one that got you into my stuff, The Malygris Suite. It’s worth mentioning that Empire of Necromancers is my most well-known album, but it’s not very representative of what most of my music sounds like.

Your albums often follow a certain structure – about four long, 10-minute songs. That would be two for each vinyl side. Is that how you think about it?

Yeah, a lot of the music that I love came from the 70s or the 80s, the vinyl era. I just think that 40 minutes is the perfect length for an album, and I don’t want to push it any more than that. I do try to gear my stuff towards eventual tape releases that have a Side A and Side B too. Now that I think about it, most of the music I’ve made outside of vaporwave does follow that too. My medium of choice is just a 40-minute piece of music that you can roughly divide into two parts. It’s a structure that I think works really well.

Any new albums you’re working on right now?

With Magnum Innominandum, I do keep to a pretty strict release schedule. I try to do an album every other month, six albums a year. I have a separate project with a separate Bandcamp page called Famine Tapes for my miscellaneous vaporwave and plunderphonics projects. I’m always working on and releasing music, it’s an obsession for me, so there’ll generally always be something on the horizon.

Listen to Magnum Innominandum on Bandcamp

Magnum Innominandum’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Blank Entourage – Prince with a Thousand Enemies (self-released, 2024)

• Channel of Dreams – 單調的幻想 (self-released, 2023)

• death’s dynamic shroud.wmv – No Tomorrow (self-released, 2023)

• desert sand feels warm at night – 夢の砂漠 (self-released, 2022)

• Haircuts for Men – 大理石のファンタジー (Business Casual, 2016)

• Heaven Silhouettes – when I was casually lost I found myself into a bright disguise (self-released, 2025)

• known artiste – ブレーキ作業 拍数 “Brake Work Beats” (self-released, 2025)

• Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – Transversal Worldwide Shopping (self-released, 2013)

• MICROMECHA – Time Flows Constantly (self-released, 2024)

• Professional Hairdresser – This Album Is Haunted (self-released, 2024)