Vapor Talks #22: Bathroom Plants
Solarpunk-inspired vaporwave for a better future
Earlier this week, I published an interview with vaporwave icon John Zobele alias christtt. In his understanding of the genre, “vaporwave has always been sample-based”, he explained. “If it’s not sampled, it just is what it is – like 2814, it’s just ambient music.”
I reckon some other first and second generation producers in the scene share this narrow definition. A bunch of others would heartily disagree though, among them Bathroom Plants, an anonymous Philly-based producer who has been making original synthesizer-based vaporwave since releasing his debut album in 2019.
Of course you could also just call it ambient music, but Bathroom Plants’ music is deeply influenced by vaporwave aesthetics. It’s also inspired by solarpunk, an activist art and literary movement that counters the dystopian visions of cyberpunk with a hopeful, optimistic but decidedly anti-capitalist idea of sustainable societies and a better future through a peaceful coexistence of nature and technology.
There’s a brand new Bathroom Plants album out today – a collaboration with the Swedish vaporwave producer Paradise of Yesterday, released on the Geometric Lullaby label. Blossoming Tranquility is a project which was several years in the making and combines sample-based instrumentals with original overdubs on digital synthesizers.
I spoke to Bathroom Plants for this issue of Vapor Talks; a separate interview with Paradise of Yesterday will follow soon.
You’re in Philadelphia, right? Did you grow up there?
I live in Philadelphia now, but I grew up in New Jersey. I went to college here, and then I just stayed. I was like, “It’s cheap here, this is fine.” (smiles)
What styles of music did you grow up on?
My mom was a young parent. She’s Gen X, so it was a lot of early 90s alternative and grunge on the radio. Another big influence was video game music. I have so many soundtracks burned into my brain, whether it’s some level in Sonic or Mario or something like that. It didn’t click until I was older that video game music is a legitimate form of music. That’s another thing that interested me in vaporwave initially, that it’s taking music from video games, commercials, jingles or elevator music, all these things that the average person wouldn’t even perceive as actual music.
As I grew into discovering my own taste, it went all over the place. I got into free-form jazz towards the end of high school, as well as there was a pretty active experimental and noise basement scene near me in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the late 2000s, early 2010s, that was a lot of my music exposure – going to and playing a lot of really cool, stinky, dirty basements, just standing in front of a speaker with a wall of static hitting me.
Did you get any musical training or learn any instruments as a kid?
Very little. I played saxophone when I was nine or 10 for maybe two or three years, but then I got bored of it. Around 2005 I picked it up again, because me and my friends were making a band, and since the saxophone was the only thing I had experience with, I was like, “Okay, I’ll pick that up.” That project initially was me on saxophone, my one friend on bass, and my other friend on a Casio keyboard. We had a shitty tape boom box with a built-in microphone, and we just set that up in the center of the room and hit record and banged on all our instruments.
How and when did you first discover vaporwave?
Probably around 2012, 2013. I forget exactly how I found out about it. I had a general curiosity in how a genre is formed and becomes a movement, because it’s a lot of different people and things coalescing and then branching out. I was just searching music blogs and Reddit threads, looking for something new that piques my interest, and vaporwave jumped out at me. It was interesting, both from the idea of the anonymity of the artists and this weird repurposing of older incidental music, so that drew me in. I started finding certain artists or labels that were putting out stuff that appealed to me.
Which artists and producers were really inspiring you at the time and when you started making this kind of music yourself?
Initially, a big one was Macintosh Plus with Floral Shoppe. A lot of the early Dream Catalogue releases were a jumping off point for me; Golden Living Room, who I later got a chance to do a collab album with, was a big one to begin with. MindSpring Memories too, and a lot of the other early ones are hard to remember, because they were just Japanese characters that I never learned how to pronounce.
In addition to vaporwave, I was also discovering a lot of 80s and 90s Japanese new age music. Those just out of nowhere started popping up on my YouTube. Stuff like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green was a big influence. They were what really kicked off Bathroom Plants. I liked these very new agey digital, but still soft and warm sounding vibes. In addition with what I was listening to in vaporwave, these connected in a way.
You’re working mostly hardware-based, right? Have you ever made music on the computer?
I’ve always been mostly hardware. I use my computer basically as a glorified tape recorder. Everything you can see back there [points to a bunch of rackmount synthesizers] – all the actual production and playing is done on those. The software side is very basic for me: I use Adobe Audition for editing and iZotope Ozone for mastering.
I’ve tried a handful of times to get into making music on the computer. I don’t know if it’s just how my brain’s wired, but nothing zaps the creative energy from me faster than that. It’s just not tactile enough for me, not immediate enough. Something about having physical buttons and little screens and menus feels so much more inspiring to me than moving a mouse around and clicking on things.
Can you talk about the evolution of your setup?
For the longest time, it was just an MPC 1000 and a MicroKorg. Shortly before starting Bathroom Plants, I had a job where I had a decent amount of disposable income for the first time as an adult, and I wanted to buy some cool synths that were going to feel inspirational, but I also wanted to be smart about my money. So rather than going out and just buying new, flashy, expensive synths, I was looking at vintage stuff.
Prices for your vintage 70s analog stuff were just through the roof at the time, but I started noticing a lot of digital synths from the 80s and 90s were still sleepers, so I just very gradually was diving into researching 80s synthesizers. A big part of it too was recognizing preset sounds. Like, that sound in The X-Files, that’s from a Korg Wavestation. No wonder this has so much appeal to me, I used to watch this all the time. For Bathroom Plants, I wanted to have this 80s, 90s sound to it. What better way to do that than get a bunch of synths that were used or made at that time? Bit by bit, if I saw something on eBay had a good price, I went for it.
My main setup now is the Korg M1, the Wavestation, the Yamaha TG 33 and the TG 77. The TG 77 and the Wavestation are my favorites. Both are very deep and very weird synthesizers. For Bathroom Plants, I like keeping that specific sound palette. The only thing I added to it is a Roland R-8 drum machine. On my first albums, I didn’t want any percussion but on my last one, NewMind Solidarity, I wanted drums. The R-8 is still really cheap to get, especially the rackmount version. The brain of my setup is still the MPC 1000 that I use for sending MIDI and programming everything, so even the composition is all on the hardware itself. I just love coming in here, sitting down, turning everything on and having the nice little glow of the screens and just tapping on some keys.
From the beginning of the genre, most vaporwave was sample-based, and some would argue that it’s a key element to it. How did vaporwave influence the Bathroom Plants sound?
Even though it was original music I was making, the inspiration came from thinking of composing in the style of something you would hear in an elevator or in a mall or in a nature documentary from the early 90s, finding inspiration from the same sources that vaporwave was pulling from, as well as the tongue-in-cheek nature of how it was being presented. When I chose the name Bathroom Plants, I was trying to think of that artificial, insincere, corporate aesthetic. Around that time I had a job where I was going to a lot of law offices and doctors offices, so I was encountering a lot of that atmosphere in the wild, these really fake environments made to appeal to a vague sense of comfort, even though you’re not supposed to stay there. I started noticing that a frequent thing I was encountering was plants in the bathroom. The more I worked on the music, the more it shifted away into a more sincere approach to the sounds that I was making, but I still loved the name.
Going through your discography, I found some references to the literary and art movement of solarpunk. What’s that about?
It’s basically the opposite of that dystopian cyberpunk future. I didn’t realize solarpunk was a thing until well after I released the first album. When I found out about the ideas behind it, I felt this is exactly what I was trying to do, without even realizing that there was already somewhat of a movement and aesthetic of people doing this stuff for I don’t know how long. Once I found that out, I was leaning into it, because it’s 100% my vibe and intention with this music. But I’ve always approached it more as a general mindset than a specific set of rules or aesthetics. When I’m making an album, I have an idea in my head that would fall into solarpunk, but I’m thinking mainly about the sounds and feelings and less so about if I’m telling a certain narrative that fits within this specific framework.
Solarpunk – A brief primer
Solarpunk is an activist movement across speculative fiction, art and architecture that creates utopian worlds where society is shaped by values of social justice and ecological sustainability.
The movement’s roots can be traced back to the late 2000s and early 2010s blogosphere. The second half of the 2010s saw the publishing of various manifestos and fiction anthologies, as well as a more widespread use of the term in cultural discussions. It’s thought of as a reaction to cyberpunk, which describes a dystopian world as a consequence of unhinged capitalism and global warming.
Solarpunk themes and settings can be found in sci-fi classics like Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), as well as in works by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home) and Kim Stanley Robinson (Pacific Edge, Mars Trilogy, Ministry Of The Future).
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, a new generation of (often queer) authors set out to write solarpunk fiction, among them Becky Chambers (Monk & Robot, 2022), Ruthanna Emrys (A Half-Built Garden, 2022), Cory Doctorow (The Lost Cause, 2023) and Susan Kaye Quinn (Nothing is Promised, 2020-23). There’s also a number of underground solarpunk zines and independently published anthologies.
Find some of the best solarpunk books on Goodreads.
Musically, I think there’s a fine line between solarpunk and utopian virtual, that post-James Ferraro sound. The latter is more tongue-in-cheek because it’s referencing a time when hopes in a better future through technology weren’t yet dismissed as failed and naive, so it’s more of a hauntology thing. Solarpunk hasn’t actually abandoned these beliefs and hopes yet.
Yeah, so I initially was taking inspiration from the utopian virtual vibe. But while I was making my first album, it’s shifted into more sincerity, almost like an antidote for the abundance of cyberpunk sounds and aesthetics. Growing up, we were exposed to a lot of these false promises, but now that we’re kind of already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, I wanted to create something in response to that. I still want a better, greener, more accepting future and I’m trying to do my little part of making art to hopefully inspire people with this idea – because these things are still possible to do, and if you don’t have something positive to dream for, how are you going to make any change?
As Bathroom Plants, I want to create something that is a vision for a positive future, not just false hope but an open end. It’s not like all we need to do is cover skyscrapers in trees, and it’ll be fine. The future is what you make it, but that’s gonna require change of not just individual attitudes, but whole societal shifting. We need massive change at a very high level, and it’s not going to be accomplished just by buying the right things or buying carbon offsets or whatever. We can’t just buy our way out of global warming.
I really like this YouTuber Andrewism – he talks about solarpunk in a way that makes sense to me, not that kind of co-opted liberal environmentalism. His approach is more radical, where he ties in the reason the planet is getting destroyed, which is of course capitalism. We’re using too many resources too loosely, not necessarily at an individual level, but at the corporate and governmental level. The big lie told to myself as a kid was that we’re going to fix climate change by recycling and remembering to turn off the lights when we leave the room. Meanwhile, huge corporations are just dumping gallons of garbage into the oceans.
How would you describe the evolution of the project since you started it in 2019?
It’s been a gradual refining of my sound and an expansion of the musical and compositional techniques as I learn more through trial and error and through watching YouTube videos about music theory, which I don’t fully understand. I’d previously just done these improvisational jams with my friends; my first album as Bathroom Plants, Installing Symbiotopia, was the first time where it was just me sitting down, coming up with something. So the first one was very much feeling things out, and from there, it was just an increasing refinement and expansion of what I was interested in musically.
The second album I did was 9 Reflections, the collab with Golden Living Room. He does have a musical background, I believe he even teaches music, so having a back and forth with him took my musical approach in a different direction and up a level that maybe would have taken me longer to get to if I was just doing another one by myself and feeling it out on my own.
My third one, Garden of Accrescent Vistas, is an interesting one, because I made it during the pandemic. I got laid off and then was just living on the pandemic money for a good year. That was the first time that I could literally wake up and dedicate the entire day to just working on music. It was fucking amazing, so that one too, I feel like it was a really big jump musically, compositionally, the way I layered different things and came up with melodies, because I was able to give so much attention to it.
Then real world struck, and I had to get a day job again, and that was difficult to deal with for a good while. I had a lot of stuff going on in my life, which was a real creative block for a while. So the album after that was just a collection of compilation tracks, Virtual Herbarium, and NewMind Solidarity really took me a while to finish. Each track on there at some point during its production felt like an absolute struggle. At times I thought, “None of this is coming together, I’m gonna have to just abandon this.” I’d probably burnt myself out a little bit. After Garden, I didn’t give myself a second to breathe and enjoy what I had created. So I put it down for a while and then came back to it and eventually finished it.
After NewMind Solidarity, I stepped back a bit. I needed to get my head in the right place before I went any further. The last year or two, I’ve been pretty busy on a couple different projects, and one of them is the collab with Paradise Of Yesterday that’s coming out now, and then I’ve got two more really big ones that are finally coming together. But I have that creative spark and energy again. It feels really good. I’ve been putting my effort into these projects while also making sure I’m taking time off, just doing nothing, taking a walk in nature, or interacting with people.
Tell me about the collab with Paradise of Yesterday. How did you hook up, what was the general concept and process for the album?
I have a little list of artists that I like, artists that I should reach out to at some point and see if they want to collab. They were on that list for a while. I really liked one of their albums called Sentimental. I liked it enough that I bought the cassette of it, and then later on bought the vinyl as well, which I rarely do. I’d been thinking of wanting to collab with them for a while, and then I had this idea of a remix album of my first album, and Paradise of Yesterday was one of the people who made a track for that one. This was unpropped, like I didn’t reach out to anyone directly. I just put out this post like, “Whoever wants to do this, here’s the music, send it to me if you make something.” So they did that and sent it to me, and we started talking back and forth via email and just gradually started making stuff.
This album happened over several years. Maybe it was 2023 when we first started. Their project is all sample-based so they would make a track, send it to me, and I’d add my stuff to it. Honestly, working on this album with them was one of the things that helped me get out of the creative slump. They would give me something to add to, to complement or expand on, which is a lot less daunting than starting from zero. It’s also just nice to have another person bouncing ideas off of. Working on this really helped me get back into the creative flow that I’m in now.
Does the wider vaporwave community motivate you as well?
Oh yeah, definitely. Listening to new artists and what everyone else is putting out is always a huge influence and inspiration. I have a constant queue of releases to download and listen to. One good thing about the job that I’m working now is, depending on what I’m doing, a lot of times I can listen to music. There’s only so many hours of the day, but the amount of amazing music coming out from everyone is great and I feel it’s very much an active and supportive genre.
I’ve never performed live as Bathroom Plants, but I’ve been doing some of those virtual shows during the pandemic, and I’ve just been getting that itch again, to do live stuff. I just try to let stuff happen naturally, which can be difficult because I’m also very much an introvert and a shy person.
Blossoming Tranquility by Paradise of Yesterday and Bathroom Plants is out now on Geometric Lullaby.
Listen to Bathroom Plants on Bandcamp
Bathroom Plants’ Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
Darksleep – Obviate (Business Casual, 2015)
Kappa – Forsaken (Sunset Recordings, 2019)
Golden Living Room – Welcome Home (self-released, 2014)
Windows 98のご紹介 – これは魂のために (self-released, 2015)
Zer0 Rei – NYX (Aquablanca 音楽レーベル, 2021)
天気予報 [Asutenki] – Final Transmission (self-released, 2019)
Ghost Particles & ⦓🍊⦔ タンジェリン [Kagoshima Tangerine] – 🌕 (The Expanding Earth, 2021)
desert sand feels warm at night – 我思う、ゆえに我あり (Midwest Collective, 2021)
™CENTURY – Sun Shining Optimism (Dream Catalogue, 2014)
MindSpring Memories – Soul Visioning (self-released, 2021)