Vapor Talks #21: christtt
A journey into the 2010s with internet artist and vaporwave musician John Zobele
These days, John Zobele alias christtt (often stylized as chris†††) is referring to himself as an ‘internet artist’ rather than a vaporwave musician. In his early 30s now, he’s a renowned visual artist and graphic designer whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. He’s based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
2016 was an especially important year in John’s career, as he not only released his classic album no lives matter, but also reflection, the second album in the lauded 아버지 (father2006) trilogy. Aside from making music, John established Business Casual, a prolific independent label for electronic internet music, building a catalog of over 500 projects by dropping weekly releases for over a decade.
I spoke to John about his beginnings in vaporwave, key influences and the genesis of some of his landmark albums. Along the way, we also touched upon topics like why only sample-based vaporwave is the actual vaporwave to him, and why he hasn’t been feeling like making dark, depressing, angry or sad music anymore.
You’re based in Pittsburgh, but you grew up in New Jersey, right?
Yeah, Central Jersey, in the middle of nowhere at the time. I moved out to Pittsburgh for film school. It’s just a relatively clean, cheap city still to live in. I probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t as affordable as it is. For what you get, it’s great.
I’ve always been a wannabe city boy. My father grew up in the Bronx. He always wanted to have a garden and this big open area of forests, so he moved us out. I was born into that world, and yet I still yearned for the city – the opposite of my father.
What kind of music did you grow up on?
My mother was into 80s pop, 70s prog and disco. My father was into classical music, film scores and soundtracks. My aunt worked in theater for 30 years, and my mother also worked in theater to a lesser extent. There was always music playing in the house, on the boom box or the TV radio.
One of my favorite albums is Genesis’ We Can’t Dance from ‘91. Everybody apparently hates that album, and I don’t get it. It is a 10 out 10, flawless album. That was a car staple in our six-CD changer for a decade. For me, peak Genesis is after Peter Gabriel left. I don’t want to listen to fucking Foxtrot. That’s bullshit. Give me Duke. Give me Invisible Touch. Give me We Can’t Dance. That’s my peak Genesis.
You actually sampled it on no end, didn’t you?
Yeah, I pulled a lot from my personal music library. What I always say to any vaporwave artist starting out: Sample- or inspiration-wise, it’s good to start with and tell stories about what you know. Then you can go out and do bigger stories or more expansive things. But yes, I did sample some tracks from Genesis and Peter Gabriel, all the artists I grew up with, from my brother’s and father’s libraries.
Did you get any musical training and learn an instrument as a kid?
I originally wanted to learn the piano, so my mom would get me lessons, but I got chubby little fingers, and I don’t feel like practicing. Although I did play piano for probably about five years, I retained none of that. I can kind of read music but I’m not as confident or competent of a musician, so I focus on samples. Samples are easy.
Do you remember how you started seeking out music for yourself?
It was about getting online early on and discovering Limewire, YouTube and DeviantArt. That’s where I started finding things. Around the time, I got an MP3 player too, and every week, there’d be a new song of the week on iTunes, a free download, and I discovered a bunch of new music that way.
I think it was around 2007 that they cut off analog broadcasting for the US, so you had to switch to digital. Because I hadn’t had cable up to that point, I don’t necessarily have the same nostalgia for a lot the stuff that other people were growing up on. Once we got cable, I was watching Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, and I heard those bumps in between each of the shows, these experimental little things. Flying Lotus, Prefuse 73, those names came up. Prefuse 73 was a huge early influence.
Along with that, my local library had CDs that you could rent out for free. I would go based on cover, until I learned that you go by label. But that’s how I found LCD Soundsystem, and I liked this combination of rock and electronic music. That was my early exposure to these things.
Your site bio says you’ve been making content for the internet since 2006. You were 12 or 13 at that point, so what kind of content are we talking?
One of the first sites I joined was YouTube, and I would make these little skits with my friends. Around that same time, I discovered DeviantArt, where I would upload my crude drawings of edgy little characters. I loved Gorillaz at the time. Thankfully, I deactivated that account years ago, so a lot of it isn’t online anymore.
My first label was based around that early era where I had this username, MrHappyFace. I don’t know how I came across that moniker, but it just sounded pretty cool to a 13 year old. I was uploading YouTube videos, just taking my mom’s digital camera and recording my friends. I didn’t start making music till around 2010.
So you had another label before Business Casual?
Yes. Business Casual is technically my third label. The first one was MrHappyFace Records. I rebranded that to Dead Pixel Records [in 2012, ed. note], which I consider that my second label. In the early days, I was infatuated with this other net label called ROFLtrax, which later turned into Breakbit Music. This guy, MrSimon, had built out this site, because he’s a web developer, I think he now works in video games. This is before Bandcamp was a big thing. He realized there’s a bunch of people who are making funny YouTube videos and actually also making music.
I really wanted to be on that label. It inspired a lot of my own YouTube music, which was about chopping up weird samples, mishing and mashing them together into something different. Being a label head now, I see exactly how I was with MrSimon back in the day, because I have fans that are just like how I was to him to me today. Oh my God, it’s karma. (laughs) Because I was that person back then, I can give it a pass. I know that they’ll grow up. But MrSimon – cool guy, cool musician at the time, he could take much of it.
From 2010 until 2013, you released music as Bye-Product and under other aliases. How did you actually start making music?
I was already doing video and visual art, and I’m thinking the next best thing is music. I’m good at these other things, so I should be great at music, right? Because I’m stupid and young, you know? (laughs) So I downloaded a demo of Fruity Loops, but I had no way to export or record anything from there. I would plan and build out the entire song and then record it with a headphone cable into Audacity. It sounded terrible, unlistenable, but that was how I made those first couple of releases, just testing the waters.
Around the time I discovered Breakbit Music, and these people were using samples. I thought, “Why try to make original music when I could just chop something up?” I ditched FL Studio for a while and used this program Virtual DJ. You could speed a track up, slow it down, loop it, chop it, record it. I got pretty good at this way, and then went back to FL Studio. Not knowing what I’m doing, I found the most obscene ways of getting these programs to do what I wanted them to do. I’m still like that today. I brute force things. I’m not someone who looks up tutorials, I just figure it out. I’m not a technical musician. I’m stupid. (laughs)
This is where I still am today. I still use FL Studio for almost everything, but I’ll use Virtual DJ every once a while as a nostalgia trip.
“Vaporwave is just nostalgia music for millennials, you know?” (christtt)
Did you have some sort of community to make and share music with, either locally or online?
No one locally. It wasn’t until I got to college and started making stuff under christtt that anybody from my high school showed any interest. A year after I left, a couple friends from high school were like, “Well, this christtt stuff is pretty good!” And I’m like, “Where were you guys the four years prior? Okay, whatever.”
I was part of the Breakbit online fan club, but I got kicked off because I was annoying, just doing stupid things. But I had made some friends on there, and then my mentality was like, “Fuck these guys. I’m gonna make my own label.” I made this label basically for me. Around that time I was discovering other artists through DeviantArt. That’s where I found a couple of my early artist friends and people who I released music with in the early days. There was also people on SoundCloud and YouTube.
Back then I worked with Jamie Paige as a collaborator on a side project called stab something. We had an album and then a couple of small releases. It kind of fizzled out, because I moved on to vaporwave, and they moved on to what they were doing. They’re wildly successful at this point, and I’m happy for them. I don’t talk to them very often. They were in high school, I was a freshman in college, so we were pretty young, and at that age, you just tend to drift apart.
I didn’t really have a whole lot of friends, maybe one or two that I would consider pretty close with, but a lot were just acquaintances because I was just too annoying and unbearable to be around. I’ve grown up a lot since I went to college. It reflects in my early music, because it’s just terrible and stupid and dumb and poorly put together. There’s a little jewel in the pile of shit, but I’m so far removed from it at this point that listening to it outside of a handful of particular tracks, it just hurts.
You adapted the moniker christtt and pivoted to vaporwave in early 2013. Can you remember how you learned about the genre?
My first interaction with vaporwave was that an artist on my label sent me a link to the music video for Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Sleep Dealer” [from Replica, 2011], and I listened to that quite a bit. At the time, I wasn’t somebody who would dig deeper though. I just listened to the songs I liked.
It wasn’t until the winter of 2012/13 that I heard Macintosh Plus, which was interesting to me. After that, it was really a visual mix from Smash TV, Memorex, that was foundational. It was all 80s and 90s commercials chopped up, and it had music by VHS Head, Hype Williams, Boards Of Canada, LA Vampires, Ford & Lopatin… I was in film school then, and I saw it on Vimeo the week it came out [in February 2013, ed. note]. I was like, “Oh my god, this is so fucking good.”
It really sold me on not only the sound, but just a different area of the internet that I wasn’t in. To this day, every time I start watching it, I just end up watching the whole thing.
So at that point, I went back to Macintosh Plus, and to [Oneohtrix Point Never’s] Replica. I love that album to death, but I wouldn’t consider it vaporwave personally. It’s probably proto. Those were the things I first heard and really got into, and in March 2013, I started working on what would be the first christtt EP, 266.
Up until then, I was on a completely different side of the plunderphonics sphere. I was coming from YouTube, and I wasn’t privy to vaporwave. The first time I heard of it might have been in Anthony Fantano’s review of Floral Shoppe. That’s one of the things I remember watching because I had previously sent him a couple albums. I even got a message back one time. He said, “I’m just not a fan of your album. Sorry, man. Sad face.” I have it on my website now as “praise”. I wear it as a badge of honor.
What was it about the music on Replica, Memorex and Floral Shoppe that drew you in?
Honestly, I think it was the repetition, because it reminded me of a lot of the electronic and house music I was listening to, but it was all samples. I was coming from this more glitchy, more condensed sort of thing, like really dense sampling, and here was this other world that’s just more minimal with it. I gravitated towards it because it was just different from what I was used to. It felt more classical in a way, more structured. The 80s and 90s sounds were just reminiscent of that stuff I grew up with, and it was nostalgic, which is part of what vaporwave has ultimately become. It’s just nostalgia music for millennials, you know?
In May 2013, you started Business Casual 87, which later got shortened to just Business Casual. Why another label?
I’d sent an early version of Frasierwave to [Luxury Elite’s label] Fortune 500. I did not know Luxury Elite then. I do now of course, and she’s the sweetest person ever, but at that time I didn’t hear anything back and took it as rejection. It didn’t sit right with me, so just like I did in the past, I said, “Fuck you, I’m gonna build my own label.” That’s where Business Casual came from – it came out of spite.
I knew a handful of artists previously from my Dead Pixel Records days and they came on for the first record, which was Digital Office One. I’d learned from Breakbit that it’s good to start off with a compilation, get everybody a little bit of a taste, and then you can come out with releases. I did some digging on SoundCloud and YouTube, that’s where I found artists like Whitewoods or Windows96. I just reached out to them and asked them if they wanted to release on my label.
I don’t want to sound like I’m super important, but I’ve basically given them a platform, and that platform has helped them go on to do bigger and better things. I really do try to sound as modest as I can, because it’s hard to have an ego when you’re just slowing down Diana Ross, right? (laughs) Seriously though, I can’t take all the credit that I’d like to take sometimes, and that’s partially just because it’s better to be heard but not seen. I don’t even release christtt albums on Business Casual anymore. It’s my label, but I don’t want to give myself better treatment than my other artists, so I just do my stuff separately.
“I really do try to sound as modest as I can, because it’s hard to have an ego when you’re just slowing down Diana Ross, right?” (christtt)
A lot of artists went on to be quite influential in the vaporwave space, from Architecture in Tokyo to Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza. How did you connect with them?
A lot of it was just cold calling on SoundCloud or even Reddit. It was definitely more difficult because it was still a new label, and there was some speculation, like, “Who is this christtt guy?” In retrospect, I got lucky that some artists took a chance on the label. It was this combination of cold calling and luck. Then again, when I think about it, what did they really have to lose? They were all sampling heavily so they couldn’t really do much with it outside of YouTube or Bandcamp.
Did you start meeting the artists you worked with in real life too?
No, I didn’t really meet anybody in the vaporwave scene until Econ 1 [the first 100% ElectronICON festival in 2019, ed. note]. Vaporwave is such an online genre, and it’s so spread out – it really has no singular home in the real world, so 2019 was the first time I met anybody in person. It was magical to go there and meet all these people, some of who you’d talked to and have known for years online, so you’re shaking hands, you’re giving out hugs. It was a great time.
Aside from classic vaporwave, Business Casual was pushing a lot of future funk in the early days. Was that due to your personal taste?
I’d say 85% of all the music that goes out on Business Casual is solely because I like it and I think it’s worthy of the platform. Some releases you just put out because if you don’t do it, someone else is going to put it out and they’re going to make bank on it. In the early days, I would release a lot of things I probably wouldn’t release today, just because I needed to fill a release.
I always look for three things in a release, and at least it has to have one or two of these things. One: Is it different? It doesn’t even have to be that good, it just has to sound interesting. Two: Is it marketable? Am I gonna make my money back on it? If I’m buying CDs or tapes especially, I have to think about that. Three is talent. It may not be the most interesting or original thing, but it’s really well-done technically. If I find something with all three, that’s great, but as long as I get one or two, I’m happy.
There was definitely a time where future funk was really a big thing of Business Casual. But future funk’s fucking boring now. I get to hear a lot of the same things. Sometimes you just want to have your classic vaporwave, or your classic future funk, so I’ll put those out from time to time, but I want to hear something that’s interesting, like a mish-mash of two different things, or a different take on a staple genre.
What was the rebrand in 2014 about, when you dropped the 87 part?
It was just because I finally got the URL businesscasual.biz. I’d only named it Business Casual 87 because I couldn’t get the URL. 87 was a nebulous number I came up with because it’s vaporwave, it’s the 80s, but then I’m thinking that could be holding back a little bit. Business Casual 87 was a vaporwave label, but Business Casual is just an internet music label. I don’t intentionally market it as a vaporwave label anymore, but as an all-encompassing thing for electronic online music. The original website was bright pink, teal logo and orange confetti things. It was very loud. Since 2014, it’s been black, white, teal, and just little accent colors. That’s the Business Casual brand.
In 2016, you put out the Haircuts For Men album Marble Fantasy. It’s a classic of the barber beats genre now, even though nobody even called it that back then. Did you realize how different it was?
Well, I listened to it and it wasn’t quite the sort of sound that I heard before. And honestly, with him being a designer – you’ve seen some of his covers, they’re just great –, I immediately gravitated towards it. The artwork alone was a big selling point for me. Certain people say that 90% of what gets people to actually listen to the music in vaporwave is the album cover. If the cover is shit, no one’s gonna listen to it. I’ll get demos sometimes from artists who make great music, but the cover is terrible, so I will ask them, “Can we change the cover?” I don’t step in very often, because when I’m releasing an artist, I want their entire vision to be recognized, and usually the artwork is part of that.
With Haircuts For Men, the visual matched the sound. It just sounded like vaporwave to me. I don’t know that I would have seen it as a different genre, because to me, vaporwave has alwas been sample-based. In my head, I called it post-plunderphonics. If it’s not sampled, it just is what it is – like 2814, it’s just ambient music. It’s not really doing anything different. It wasn’t the sound I was going for. I like stuff that’s got some punch to it.
You’ve opened up Business Casual towards other kinds of internet music, while the vaporwave space has been fragmented into subgenres and micro-communities.
It’s all just vaporwave to me. Can we all just stop calling it something different? Sure, there’s subgenres within the genre, and it’s been like that since the beginning. But can we all just come together and be happy together? We all know the weird uncle who comes over, but you still got to deal with him. You’re not gonna love everybody in your family the same way, but let’s just be nice to each other.
Look, I’m not a slushwave guy. Honestly, I don’t get it most of the time. It’s why you don’t see a lot of it on Business Casual, just because a lot of it doesn’t speak to me. And even barber beats – Haircuts For Men was doing his own thing for a while, but then AI music started to creep up and people were like, “Let’s just click export on this and upload it.” Even just for general vaporwave – there’s all these 10-hour mixes on YouTube, and it’s just AI-generated stuff. It’s why I still say that sample-based music is the actual vaporwave, because that really can’t be recreated by a computer authentically. They’re not taking something that already exists; they’re not taking a sample and slowing it down, speeding it up or chopping it up. It’s always interpolating it, and it’s much more easy to do that with the ambient type stuff.
Let’s talk about no lives matter, your 2016 album that brought you a much bigger audience within vaporwave. Did you experience it that way too?
Yeah, that one was the first peak, and the second peak would have been deep dark trench. I don’t think I’ve quite reached that since. I’ve had some albums that have gotten notoriety, but it’s a lot from my current fan base, and while that fan base is still growing and I’m still gaining new listeners, it was really no lives matter that put me on the map.
That album came out of work stress and a lack of sleep. At the time, I was working hard in college. We’re doing our senior thesis film, and I’m just tired. It was a very turbulent time in my life. For a lot of people, the music on that album didn’t really speak as vaporwave, because its sample choices were definitely more recent, but it was pulling from a certain time in my life and that music was representing it.
There’s a track on it called “I Can’t Remember His Voice”. I had an episode earlier in college where I realized that I couldn’t remember the voice of my father, who’d died in 2006. It had been so long since I’d heard it, and I broke down crying thinking about that. I wanted to document that feeling I had at the time, going through life without that father figure. It was a huge, cathartic thing for me, and I think it comes through in the music well enough.
It was after a two-year break from releasing new music, so I didn’t want to do it by myself. Oscob was starting up a label, so I sent it to him, and we released it on his label [Bedlam Tapes, ed. note]. The rest is history. Has it aged amazingly? I don’t know. I think it still holds up in some ways, unless so in other ways. In retrospect, I wish I called it something different, but I can’t think of any other title that would have worked as well. It’s a loud, poignant title. That’s how I felt like at the time, just super angry and sad. I don’t regret calling it that, but there is a part of me that’s like, “That was really fucking stupid.”
Well, your next album was called social justice whatever…
That’s one album title that I really do regret. It came out of the era when Trump first got into office and the internet was in this turmoil, so part of me was just missing the old internet and throwing aside these tantrums going on online. The thing is, when you make an album like no lives matter, where do you go from there? That one was a very personal album, so I wanted to make something that was fun and stupid and silly. It still had some moments of levity in there, but all in all, it’s just me being nostalgic for my childhood on YouTube and the internet at large.
In the mid-2010s, you were one of several artists with new visions of how vaporwave could sound, alongside people like Nmesh and death’s dynamic shroud. I would be interested in your musical inspirations at the time.
In general I’d say anything I’d sample. For a lot of my stuff, Oneohtrix Point Never was definitely up there as a huge influence. At the time I made no lives matter, he’d just released Garden Of Delete. That album is super rough and raw and edgy, so I definitely pulled from that. I’m sure a lot of artists in the vaporwave scene, maybe even Nmesh and DDS, would have pulled from that.
How did you approach deep dark trench?
After social justice whatever, I felt confident enough to make a little more conceptual, poignant albums again. deep dark trench was my American take on 9/11 – as opposed to [Cat System Corp.’s] News At 11, which was more about, you know, “What if 9/11 hadn’t happened?” To me, deep dark trench feels like ultimately a very American album. I was shocked when people around the world gravitated towards it.
Working on that album, I made a trip out to the museum in New York. Honestly, after going there, I was like, “Do I even make this album?” Originally I had TV clips throughout the album, but I took a lot of them out because it just felt wrong. As much as people joke – even for me, it was a punchline for a part of my childhood on the internet –, it really is a terrifying and terrible thing when you hear those audio clips.
I’m probably one of the last generation to really remember it as it happened. I was in first or second grade, and I lived in Central New Jersey. We got to school early in the morning, and two hours later, we’re on busses heading home, and we don’t know what’s going on. My father came home from work early. He used to work for MetLife – some weeks he’d be in New York at the MetLife building, some weeks he’d be in a New Jersey office. Thankfully, he wasn’t in New York that week.
Speaking of your father – in the second half of the 2010s, you released three hugely influential dark vaporwave albums as father2006. Tell me about how you came up with the concept.
I made the first one, White Death, in a day. It was at the end of the semester before I was going home for the holidays. All my schoolwork was done, so I basically had a week off, and I sat down and cranked it out. I was very inspired by what Bloody Carpet [BLCR Laboratories] was doing at the time.
I made it around the same time as no lives matter, like a companion album. I wanted White Death to be my deceased father’s perspective, going into the afterlife. It would start after “Offline” ends on no lives matter. That’s how I had it in my head. I don’t think I’ve really said it out loud to anyone. It’s a very personal album to me.
I released it, and I didn’t really think much about it. Then after no lives matter did very well, I was thinking, “What if I added more to the story on the father’s side?” That’s where reflection came from. It was meant to be before White Death, and that was probably made over the course of a couple months in 2016.
Years later, during the pandemic, I was home and felt a bit sad and scared, so I was thinking it’s time for another one. That one, residue, is meant to go before reflection. You know, my father got cancer, was cured of cancer, and then got cancer again. That album is like that first taste of it. Honestly, it feels like a complete story, those three albums, and I don’t think I will add anything onto that. If I do release more father2006 stuff, I’m not going to necessarily focus on a concept as much, because that story is done.
Right now I am not really sad about anything else that I could pull from emotionally, which is why it’s just been so hard to make something. I just couldn’t force myself to do something like that. Again, it’s a very personal trilogy. But I don’t feel like I did anything different than what I’ve done before, just a slightly different tone – a bit darker.
One thing I really like about vaporwave is that the idea of the album as a conceptual body of work is kept alive in the genre.
Yeah, since no lives matter, I’ve done mostly concept albums. From a technical standpoint, I’m not the best at making music, and that gives me a way to express myself in a way that doesn’t require me to be the most technically proficient. Some of my music doesn’t sound that great, but it works towards the concept of the entire story I’m telling, and some stories are more obvious or blatant than others.
It gets harder as I get older, because you just strive to have higher standards. My last album soft rock wasn’t really a concept album. I just started making songs just because I was feeling good. I don’t know, my life’s been pretty good the past couple years. I’ve just been happy, so it’s hard to make a sad album or try to work on a father2006 record. I mean sure, I get seasonal depression as well, I get stuck inside because it’s snowing outside, and I just want to stay in bed and doomscroll all day. But it’s not really a sadness that relates to I don’t know… Well, let’s just say I’ve always been kind of a happy person.
Listen to christtt on Bandcamp
christtt’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
Careless Messenger Recordings – Suddenly Mega (CMR, 2014)
George Clanton – 100% Electronica (100% Electronica, 2015)
James Ferraro – Human Story 3 (self-released, 2016)
Sacred Tapestry – Shader (PrismCorp, 2012)
Nmesh – Dream Sequins (AMDiscs, 2014)
Giant Claw – DARK WEB (self-released, 2014)
eyeclick – 01-999-6363 拨号上网 sexxxline (self-released, 2021)
.CASTING – HEATWAVE EP (Stratford Ct., 2014)
trndytrndy – Virtua (self-released, 2024)
toolgun – KILLCAM (self-released, 2024)