Vapor Talks #14: days of blue skies

Slushwave's golden child speaks

Two of the biggest artists in slushwave – MindSpring Memories and desert sand feels warm at night – namedropped the same producer when asked about the most innovative forces in the scene right now: days of blue skies, formerly days of blue [天], has been turning heads with a progressive take on classic slush.

In 2025, days of blue skies released two extremely well-received album projects on Bandcamp which have positioned the New York-based artist at the cutting edge of slushwave, whether it’s sample-based or original music.

Since the pandemic, the ambient-adjacent vaporwave subgenre has morphed into its own internet community, spawning a close-knit scene with dozens of protagonists all over the world. days of blue skies is an active member of that community, playing at the yearly Slushwave/Naturewave festival and regularly sharing new music on the Slushwave Social Club Discord server.

I’ve closely followed days of blue’s impressive development over the last couple of years, so I was happy to be able to speak to the ambitious producer about the project’s progression since starting just a little more than five years ago by making music on a mobile phone – and going even further back into the artist’s musical upbringing.

all images courtesy of the artist

You’re based in New York City, but you’re originally from California, right?

Yeah, I grew up in the Central Valley, in a city called Modesto. Lots of farms and cows. Very rural, kind of suburban, American big box store lifestyle. A lot of whitespace design and all of that nonsense.

When you think back to your childhood, what kind of music do you hear playing around the house?

My family is of Latin descent – they’re immigrants from Mexico, so I grew up listening to traditional Latin and Hispanic music. My mom also loves merengue, which is mostly Caribbean, and my dad listened to a lot of nu metal and gangster rap, so I grew up listening to Biggie and Tech N9ne, back when I was in high school. But I don’t listen to much hip-hop anymore these days.

What kind of music did you seek out when developing your own taste?

That would have been the early 2010s, when lofi hip-hop became a bit of a worldwide phenomenon. I was finding videos with 500 views that had these hip-hop beats over classical samples, and that’s what exposed me to the world of underground music. Obviously, lofi is the most mainstream it could possibly be these days, in comparison to back then. But that’s when I really started to find music that I emotionally connected with. I used to listen to people like Tomppabeats, Jinsang or Eevee. That carried over up until I started to discover some other artists that were more trip-hop, like Bonobo for example. Obviously it was still very hip-hop and beats oriented.

Oh, and there is a Russian film I saw called The Return [2003]. I don’t remember who directed it [Andrei Swjaginzew, ed. note], but I do remember the composer, Andrei Dergatschow. That soundtrack I used to listen to all the time. It really formed my love for atmospheric music.

How did you stumble across that rather obscure film?

I used to be a big history buff, especially when it came to the World Wars, and a track from that movie was used in a documentary about the atrocities of war. I remember hearing that a lot as a middle school kid, and as I was growing into high school, I found the track on my own and then watched the film.

Did you receive any musical training?

As a kid, I wasn’t particularly interested in learning an instrument. My grandma paid for piano classes for me, but I would find every excuse to get away. I had a really crappy, cheap plastic Casio keyboard that had no velocity variation and only really bad sounds. Whenever she took me to practice, I would remove the batteries and put in old dead ones, and then I’d be like, “Oh my god, the batteries don’t work. I can’t practice.” (laughs)

I just never wanted to learn as a kid, which is interesting, seeing where I am now. I never received training in theory either. I never was really into the academic aspect of these things. As I got into high school, I did want to learn piano, but my family was not in the economic position to put me into those trainings, because it’s expensive. Where I come from, these things are privileges. You need to earn money and have the luxury of free time, which I did not have. It wasn’t until I became an adult where I finally had the free time and the money, because I didn’t have to pay for an apartment, or children, or every other responsibility an adult would [usually] have.

How did you discover vaporwave and slushwave, coming from the lofi hip-hop and trip hop stuff you’d listened to?

When I started going into college, I was still listening to a lot of lofi hip-hop that I’d grown accustomed to, and quite a bit of ambient music. Then Spotify recommended me a couple of vaporwave-adjacent tracks. I’m not exactly sure why, but I listened to them repeatedly. I’m sure you’re familiar with Golden Living Room; 2814 was a really big one as well. I discovered that around December 2018, so four years after it was released – I remember that because I have a screenshot of the track name, but my Prius at the time could not display Japanese characters, so it was just a bunch of asterisks.

I kept listening to 2814, not knowing exactly what it was or the history behind it, not even knowing what vaporwave was. To me, it was just really cool sounding ambient music. Eventually it recommended a Telepath track. Of course, that’s everyone’s gateway towards slushwave. At the time, in summer 2019, I don’t think anyone else was really doing it, it was really just him and maybe a few copycats…

… well, MindSpring Memories was already around.

Of course, but I didn’t know MindSpring until a few years later. But regardless, it recommended me a Telepath track, and at first I thought it was really weird. I was in a different headspace back then. I especially thought the vocals were incredibly jarring, almost whaleish. But I was heavily intrigued, because I had never in my life heard anything similar to whatever that music was. To me, it was very unique. I thought it was just some very enigmatic Japanese artist. And to my disappointment…

…it was just a very enigmatic dude from Ohio.

(laughs) Yeah. But that year, I listened to exclusively nothing but Telepath. I eventually got tired of it, not of the genre, just of him as an artist, especially after finding out it wasn’t a dude from Japan making his own music. At the time, that was a little disappointing to me, but I didn’t mind it too much, because it still sounded cool.

Can you describe what the music did for you?

I’m a very sentimental person. I like emotional music. Like ambient music, it provided me space and time to be more introspective, and the atmospheres were so unique that I was able to imagine myself in a realm where I could let myself get into deep thought. I didn’t even know there was a scene. Back then, people were more enigmatic and secretive about who or what they were. It was just music that sounded really emotional and cool, so I listened to it, and it was transformative.

Days Of Blue (album cover, 2021)

When did you start producing music yourself?

I got my first own computer in February 2021, but I’d started making music a few months prior on my phone. Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t begin with audio engineering capabilities, nor did I begin with music theory knowledge. It was just completely from scratch. All I had at the time was my phone, and that’s how I made my first album, Days Of Blue, I made that entirely with FL Studio Mobile.

You’re kidding me!

I’m not. I don’t have the files because my phone that I made it with, it was the Samsung [Galaxy] S10, I left that back in California, so I can’t access that anymore. The piano sounded like crap without processing, and I had very limited knowledge of functional harmony and music theory, even just how tempo works. I would just play to the metronome at a random tempo and time signature, and then I would slow that down and export that with reverb and everything on it. It was very crude.

At the time, I was in a difficult spot in terms of wanting to call a place home, because I’d been moving many times over the [previous] couple of years, up until I moved to New York three years ago. The album was made as a way to express this longing for a new home. Despite my limited knowledge, people still tell me it was a very emotionally resonant album, which feels nice.

So that album wasn’t sample-based at all.

No, it was completely original.

How did you get involved in the slushwave scene then?

Eventually I discovered Vapor Memory, the music archive. They were more active back then and posted a lot of albums. An album that stuck out to me was 常夏 (Eternal Summer) by desert sands feels warm at night. I remember listening to that and realizing there’s actually more people that make this kind of music. I found out it was sample-free, and I found that really impressive. I’d never seen anyone do this before. Eventually I found out that there’s a community.

I had started making music with my phone at this time for a few months, so I made a Twitter, made the artist name, started following people and that’s when I really started figuring out that there was actually people involved and participating in the scene. At the time, desert sand started the Slushwave yearly events, and that’s when I really started to involve myself. I wanted to be a part of a community, and I felt like I fit there. As rudimentary as what I was doing, it felt like a place of home to me.

So you’d just been making music for a few months when you first performed at Slushwave 2021?

Yeah. I really had zero clue what I was doing. (laughs)

Luckily, slushwave is a very welcoming community. When I started attending the online festival, I was overwhelmed by all that positivity in the audience chat.

I think the particular genre attracts people who are a little more sentimental, so they tend to be more supportive of everyone else. It’s a very closely knit group, and a lot of the music is very open to interpretation. People bring in positive experiences they had with the music. It also has to do with the feelings of nostalgia. We tend to link nostalgia with positive memories that we’ve had growing up. As a result, we want to express the positivity onto the people as well. Listening to slushwave, you won’t get angry and want to beat someone up. It’s not aggressive or angsty music, like breakcore for example.

How did you progress musically from making music on your phone to where you are now, just five years later?

I originally just began doing what everyone else did, slowing down the music, adding effects, reverb and doing minimal editing, calling it a day. I didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to be, because I’d just started making music. I just threw things against the wall and see if it stuck. I found myself going into more New Age electronic stuff, because that’s what was easy for me to make.

I wasn’t employed at the time, so I had no money to buy new gear or instruments to develop my sound. All I had was my computer. I would make the piano chords or melodies on the computer keyboard and then manually edit the velocity so it didn’t sound like it was a robot slamming the keys. As time went on, I started to solidify a style. My effects chain became more refined. To be fair, there’s a lot of space between my releases. A lot of it was just mostly me procrastinating or going through mental health issues.

It all started to develop more in 2023, after I moved to New York City. I came in with a new perspective, and I was able to refine this idea of what I wanted to be as an artist. But a lot of my time was occupied by a full-time job that I worked back then, so the progress was really incremental, and it was still following the more New Age ambient style that I found myself getting decently good at.

Lower East Empire from that year was a special and unique album. Can you talk about its genesis?

I made that album as a love letter to New York, a few months after moving into the city. I live in the Lower East Side, so that’s my empire. I used a lot of jazz samples because that’s how New York sounded to me. It’s a location-centric album. Will [desert sand feels warm at night] and I have done it another time with Urban Unity, where he takes London and makes that a soundscape, and I do the same for New York.

Essentially, I just wanted to make an album about the city, and Will had just bought me a bitcrushing plug-in for my birthday because he noticed how much I love to reduce the sample rate on some of my older albums. I thought it could be cool if I make this the central theme of the album. It was a very fun album to make. I just really wanted to explore and expand upon that idea of home to me.

Angel Marcloid told me that you were at one point experimenting with fusing Tool-style progressive metal or even sludge with slushwave.

Yeah, I tried my hand at that – my set at Slushwave 2024 was the result of that effort. But ultimately I ended up abandoning that idea because I just did not have the technical gravitas to execute the idea as well, not in the sense of mixing nor in the sense of composition. I was also using digital drums and digital guitars, and that just doesn’t sound realistic enough for me to get the ideas out that I wanted to, so I just didn’t really progress there anymore.

What got everything together was when Will introduced to me to this idea of stem-splitting tracks, and that fundamentally transformed what I thought was possible, especially in the sense of manipulating separate elements of a track instead of manipulating a track as a whole. There’s only so much you can do with one track as a whole. It just showed me the capabilities of what slushwave could be.

That led to the Greek album I released last year. At the time, I was teaching myself the piano, and I picked up a guitar and started teaching myself, and I could feel the knowledge slowly grow and accumulate in my head. As a result, it made me a better artist, and I better understood what was in front of me, and the fundamentals of how to make it work. That album received a lot of positive attention, so I thought to myself, why don’t I just continue this even further?

I’m now able to play piano better than before, and that’s because I actually have the incentive to learn, because I’m doing something that I’m actually enjoying in comparison to before, where I felt like I lacked this identity, especially when it came to the bitcrushing stuff. People tell me that is something that is unique to my work, because they haven’t seen that done before in the genre, so I might as well double down on what makes it unique. But I’m full-time in school and work currently, so it’s been really hard to fill this time in.

What’s your personal take on AI music?

I don’t think it has a place in the scene. I fundamentally believe all art has to have basis in the creation of an idea in someone’s brain. It has to come from effort. It has to come from time. It has to come from discipline. Removing those three essentially just makes an imitation of what art should be. I don’t think it is a very good example of what we want from art.

As a society, we have come to expect things instantaneously. Generative music satisfies this need for immediate gratification. People don’t want to put in the effort to make music or learn the basics of harmony and theory. They just want immediate results, because they want to post that out into the world and say “I made this” when in reality it’s been taken from someone who did put in the effort and they put a plaster over it, with their own name scribbled on top of it.

Who are some of your fellow slushwave producers that are pushing the boundaries right now?

you still feel them out there, don’t you is a close friend of mine, and what he’s doing is severely underrated. A lot of the music that he does is hardware-based, and that is very unique in the scene. He comes from a drumming background, so he has a lot of musicality behind him. To me, his music has always been very impressive.

Another person who I think is a little more progressive is yourdiscovery. I feel no one talks about him enough, especially in the scene as a whole. I believe he deserves a lot more recognition. I tend to gravitate more towards artists who push against the grain, like Will did with his most recent album, which I’ve been obsessed with. I can recommend 818181 and memorykeeper7 as well.

Listen to days of blue skies on Bandcamp

days of blue skies’ Top 10 Slushwave Albums

(unranked)

• desert sand feels warm at night – Vjaġġ tal-Qalb (self-released, 2025)

• ｙｏｕ　ｓｔｉｌｌ　ｆｅｅｌ　ｔｈｅｍ　ｏｕｔ　ｔｈｅｒｅ，　ｄｏｎ＇ｔ　ｙｏｕ – 自 然 | 恋 | 絶 望 (Geometric Lullaby, 2025)

• memorykeeper7 & 818181 – .𖥔 🌙 ݁ ˖ ⭒˚𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓃𝑔𝑒 ᨒ ོ ⋅☀️ ˚ ⊹ ݁ ˖ (self-released, 2025)

• MindSpring Memories – The Binary Ocean (Needlejuice, 2017)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – 断線 (self-released, 2015)

• Psicadence – FASHiON (Ephemeral Eternal, 2025)

• 沙漠鱿鱼 (Desert Squid) – 上海／香港 (Hiraeth, 2020)

• h º r ¡ z º n щ ¡ r e l e s s – ངལ་གསོའི་དོན་ལུ་ དཔེ་རིས། (self-released, 2024)

• 发光的 e c h o e s – 如 果 沒 有 你 (Ephemeral Eternal, 2025)

• y o u r d i s c o v e r y & Cyber Surfer 3D – Ξ X O F O R Ξ S T (self-released, 2023)