Vapor Talks #20: TV2

An interview with the enigmatic New Zealand-based signalwave producer

Despite not having released any new music in over a year (an eternity in vaporwave time), TV2 remains a central figure of signalwave’s second generation. In typical genre fashion, the New Zealand-based producer never publishes any pictures of herself and is notoriously tight-lipped about her real life and true identity.

Signalwave, a vaporwave subgenre focused on loops from vintage broadcast recordings, started in the first half of the 2010s, but lived through a second wave of popularity during the pandemic. At the time, TV2 – or Caroline, as she’s known to friends, fans and followers – was part of a group of younger producers inspired by the innovations of artists like Infinity Frequencies, Sport3000 and 天気予報 [Asutenki].

Discovering this strangely nostalgic, melancholic music as a teenager, Caroline started assembling samples from the local New Zealand TV channels she’d watched as a kid. “If I didn’t start making music through signalwave I don’t know if I would’ve made it at all”, she said in a 2025 conversation with fellow vaporwave producer victory over death.

Besides her main artistic persona, Caroline created several other aliases to expand beyond the original concept of New Zealand-themed sample collages: From thrift store vibes as carpet dust to creating a mysterious style she once dubbed ‘satellitesoft’ (a reference to the popular mallsoft subgenre) as ESIAFI 1.

Some of her early albums released in 2020 and 2021 blew up on YouTube and gathered cult status in the scene, but it wasn’t until 2024 that the reclusive producer released her masterpiece 1450Khz at Broken Grove, a collection of haunting, warped and distorted music made from static textures and muted melodies.

Caroline’s Bandcamp page has gone quiet since December ‘24, when her last ESIAFI 1 project dropped, but in our conversation she mentions that she’s currently working on a new album. Don’t expect it to drop very soon though – it will still “take ages” to finish, she adds half-jokingly.

all images courtesy of the artist

Hey Caroline, how’s the weather in New Zealand today?

It was a really nice day today. The sun was out consistently, which almost never happens. I live in Wellington, the windiest city in the world. I’m originally from the South Island, but I moved up here a few years ago.

Your artist name refers to a local television channel, right?

Yeah, it’s the New Zealand state broadcasting company. The name of the channel is actually TVNZ 2, but TV2 is just what we call it. Pretty much any New Zealander watched it during their childhood. When I grew up, we had this thing called free view, for people who couldn’t afford Sky [pay TV]. TVNZ 2 was mostly where the kids shows ran; it had Spongebob, Teletubbies and stuff like that. It also had a few New Zealand-specific shows and game shows as well, but I remember it being targeted towards kids more than anything else.

What kind of music did your family play around the house?

My dad was really into weird indie music, a lot of local New Zealand bands, some shoegaze and art punk. He had a pretty eclectic music taste, which definitely rubbed off on me. I didn’t get much music taste from my mom, except for maybe a bit of Johnny Cash.

Did you learn any instruments?

Yep, I played the trumpet when I was a kid, and then as a teenager, I tried to get into guitar a million times, but that’s pretty much it.

When you first started seeking out music for yourself, what kind of music was it?

I just compiled random songs that I found catchy into a huge playlist. That was when I was around 12 years old. A year later or so, I found vaporwave. It was probably the first actual genre that I got into. Floral Shoppe was a pretty big thing on the internet, so it was kind of hard not to come across it. I definitely had a huge Whitewoods phase that lasted a very long time and was very influential. I was into synthwave as well, but that obviously didn’t really stick as much as vaporwave did.

What did you like about it?

I always liked sentimental songs – songs that take you to a place, or that make you nostalgic for a place that doesn’t really exist. I found that through vaporwave more than anything else. I was just trying to seek out that feeling more than anything.

Did you start making stuff around that time too, or was that later?

No, that was ages later. I was way too lazy to do anything. I started off trying to make future funk when I was about 16. If you look really hard, you can find my old future funk alias. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do that, because it’s really bad. Later that year was when I made my first signalwave album. I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I was just pulling shit off YouTube and making it into a sound collage. I didn’t know how to use FL Studio, but for what I had at the time, I think it came out not so bad.

Which formative artists inspired you at the time?

Sport3000 is the main one by far, without a doubt. Especially Eternal Intermission, that album basically inspires everything I make in signalwave. That and Signals were hugely influential to me, and I guess video forum and Asutenki influenced me in a certain way too. Not so much as in rubbed off on my musical style, because I don’t really make signalwave that’s very similar to them, but just the aesthetic packaging of an album, I definitely learned from people like that.

All of these artists kept their identity a secret. You never revealed much about yourself either – why actually?

I never really thought about it. It’s just so disconnected from my real life that it doesn’t make sense for the two things to even be linked. I mean, I’m not even as anonymous as some other people in the signalwave scene. A lot of people know that my name is Caroline, and that I’m from New Zealand, but I don’t like to attach a face or a voice or any kind of image to it. I guess I just don’t like to attach myself to it, if that makes sense, because that ruins the image that I’ve created.

Whenever I think back to the early signalwave scene, people were so anonymous – they would have their Bandcamp page, and that was basically it. They wouldn’t have profiles on Discord or Twitter or anything like that. They would just exist behind an alias. I think that was quite effective in putting all the focus on the work that they put out and making it less about [their identity]. I feel like [attaching your identity to it] takes away from it and ruins the illusion that it’s just this mysterious broadcast.

Would you agree that the attitude in the scene has changed in the last couple of years?

Totally, and I would honestly take some responsibility, because I created the Signalwave Discord server. Ever since that became a thing, everyone has become way less anonymous. People work with each other, are friends with each other, and give each other feedback on their work. It’s a really exciting and cool thing that I totally wish I’d had when I started out making signalwave, because it was so niche that there weren’t even tutorials on YouTube on how to make it. There probably aren’t now either, to be fair. But yeah, Discord especially has definitely killed the anonymity of signalwave artists.

How did you learn how to make it without any tutorials or mentors?

Literally just by a process of elimination – trying different effects on different samples and seeing how they sounded. For my first three albums, I really had no idea what I was doing. I was just testing random effects on stuff and keeping the ones that sounded listenable.

Were you already working with samples from New Zealand TV back then?

No, that was an idea I got when I decided I wanted to try and make signalwave. A lot of the signalwave I’d heard was either American or Japanese, and I was like, “No one’s made New Zealand signalwave. What if I did that? Wouldn’t it be crazy?” I just started pulling samples I recognized from my childhood and looking that stuff up.

You mentioned working in FL Studio. Have you changed your setup over the years?

I still basically only use FL Studio. I just know how to use it properly now. I definitely have a more refined production process, but it’s not complex by any means. The samples are a lot more important for my work than my production style. That’s not to say that none of my albums have a unique production style, because some of them definitely do, but it’s not a very sophisticated or complicated one that I spend ages perfecting. It’s just a few effects that I know how to use quite well by now.

Do you ever think about philosophical aspects of working with samples?

Not really, to be honest. I’m not a very intellectual person. But I try to sample ethically, if that makes sense. I usually make sure that what I’m sampling is really old TV library music from a major broadcasting company or something like that. I wouldn’t sample a soundtrack of a niche indie game, because that’s probably someone’s passion project that they’ve put a lot of effort into and didn’t get paid too well for. So that is definitely something I think about.

This is sort of a tangent, but another big thing is that if I find a sample that I recognize from another signalwave album, I tend not to use it – not for any ethical reasons, but just because I feel that when too many people use the same sample over and over again, it ruins the immersion of the album.

Like many other signalwave producers, you have quite some aliases. One of the more consistent ones is carpet dust; you’ve released four albums under that name between 2020 and 2023. What’s that about?

Yeah, so that one was definitely inspired by Eternal Intermission by Sport3000. I used to listen to the song “Artifact” from that album a lot while I was going secondhand shopping. There was an op shop right by the school I used to go to. A fun fact is that the first carpet dust album cover is a picture from that op shop. By the way, op shop means secondhand shop in New Zealand. I don’t know if you guys have a different way of saying it.

I’d probably say thrift store, but I do know the term secondhand shop too. I’ve never heard op shop before though.

Yeah, secondhand stores are very signalwave, and the sample for that Sport3000 song was this really old Spanish song from the 70s, so I was looking for other samples that sounded like that. I found a bunch of old Spanish karaoke videos, and when I slowed them down, they sounded exactly how I wanted them to. The carpet dust samples are basically all Spanish karaoke videos, and that’s what gives [the project] a cool unique sound.

There’s also ESIAFI 1, a name under which you’ve released five albums so far, among them your most recent one,月 (month), from December 2024.

I basically started it when I wanted to make signalwave that wasn’t just New Zealand related. For some reason at the time, I wanted TV2 to be specifically about New Zealand, which eventually changed. But ESIAFI 1 was a way to branch out from that. I’ve also always been really obsessed with satellite signalwave. It was ages ago when I first made the alias. I can’t really even remember my full thought process behind starting it. I think I just wanted to make something a bit more ethereal and weird.

In 2022 and 2023, you made four albums as SKY SPORTS, a project inspired by sports-themed pay TV. Is that one done, or is it still active?

None of my projects are really done, because I like to keep my options open. But I haven’t made anything for SKY SPORTS in a really long time. This was just so I could make Y2K-inspired signalwave basically.

You’ve previously mentioned that cortonwood colliery was inspired by Conflux Condwell’s noise album AM (2017). How did that one come about?

I just had this huge YouTube playlist that’s full of different kinds of TV static from samples. I was experimenting with slowing the static down heaps and layering it with a bunch of different stuff and adding weird effects to it. I got so caught up in that, I just forgot about the music entirely and decided I just wanted to make an album that was just that. So that was pretty much what I did.

I was going less for a super fruitful, intriguing listening experience, and more for something nice texturally to have on in the background. That’s why the songs on that album are all so long. I partly regret that because some of those seven minute songs probably don’t have enough variation in them to justify that length. But the reason was less because I thought they were crazy, awesome, interesting songs that need to be seven minutes. It was just my attempt at creating an ambience with just signalwave noise. I wasn’t even going for a noise album, even though it totally is a noise album. I was really trying to make an ambient album.

1450Khz at Broken Grove is one of a bunch of projects from the last few years, where the ambient layer is mixed unusually loud in relation to the music and the songs, similar to what’s done in mallsoft. Is there a name for that style of music actually?

To me, that’s just signalwave. This is gonna seem really hypocritical coming from me, because I used to name my stuff under heaps of random microgenres – I think I was actually the person who coined the term ‘satellitesoft’. And I look back at that with some regret, because it’s kind of a silly genre. I don’t know, it’s all just signalwave to me.

You mentioned in the liner notes that its inspiration was Narvon Nights by GlenOAX from 2017 – a signalwave release consisting of just two very long songs that featured a constant ambience layer of cicada noises.

For the record, I totally just ripped that album off like that. That is why I felt obligated to put my inspiration in the description of that album. I mean, the samples are different, but structurally, it’s basically the same album.

It’s great though, it’s actually one of my favorite albums from your catalog.

Thanks, man. Well, I won’t reveal too much, but that is also going to be the formula for my next album, which I’m working on currently.

That’s amazing to hear, because you haven’t released anything since December 2024. Didn’t you find any inspiration?

I’ve been incredibly lazy. That’s pretty much the only reason.

You mentioned that your normal life is quite different.

I mean, I do also make music in real life, but it’s totally disconnected from anything signalwave or vaporwave, and not many people in real life know about this stuff either. Over the past year or so, I’ve definitely had inspiration; I just haven’t really found the right samples. For me to get an album off the ground, I really need to have a few solid tracks that I can base the rest of the album around, or a really good album cover. That’s been really hard to come by, but recently I’ve gotten stuck into making this new album, and I’m very excited about it.

Are you still tuned into the signalwave scene though?

Maybe not super. I don’t really participate in the community that much. I still listen to signalwave every now and then. I definitely have a few albums that I still listen to quite a lot, but I just stopped keeping up at a certain point. I still check on the Signalwave server sometimes and say hi, but I guess I just lost track. A lot of the artists I used to listen to moved on from signalwave and a lot of the new artists I haven’t really given a proper listen yet. I don’t know who’s making the good stuff. It seems like I I still hold some sort of presence in the community though.

What are you listening to right now? Back when you spoke to VOD, you answered that question with the link to an old Disorder EP. Are you still into punk rock?

I play in a punk band in real life, and that’s what most of my music taste is – crust punk and that kind of stuff.

Where would you send listeners to start in your discography?

Probably Broken Grove first, then 电 [Electricity], and then maybe Pre-Love. Those are the albums that I’m most proud of, but they’re also just my best albums. I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone [to] listen to my stuff before 2022, even though I know a lot of people like those albums, but I made that stuff when I was a teenager and I’m kind of embarrassed by it now.

Well, some of the greatest vaporwave albums of all time were made by teenagers.

No shit, that is true. And I do hold a very soft spot for junk, the first carpet dust album [from 2020]. That’s the one album I made when I was a teenager that I’m still proud of.

I assume you won’t tell me the name of your punk band?

Nice try. (laughs)

Listen to TV2 on Bandcamp

TV2’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Sport3000 – Eternal intermission (self-released, 2016)

• Saint Pepsi – Hit Vibes (self-released, 2013)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki]・空気系・Kanal Vier – 成層圏・Guide・Nachtmusik (Night Coverage, 2019)

• video interface – Satellite Frequencies (Internet-Stories, 2019)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki] – 巡 (self-released, 2017)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki] – 1986 Earth Guide (self-released, 2019)

• CYBER CLUB – SENSUAL LOOPS (self-released, 2018)

• Infinity Frequencies – Shrines (self-released, 2013)

• INTERNET CLUB – FORMAT BLUE (self-released, 2022)

• 放射性Hi5 [Radioactive Hi5] – ⓢⓐⓕⓔⓣⓨⓦⓞⓡⓚⓢⓗⓞⓟ (self-released, 2015)