Vapor Talks #25: Nmesh

A career-spanning talk with the plunderphonics legend

Louisville, Kentucky-based producer Alex Koenig alias Nmesh is electronic music royalty. After dedicating the first decade of his career to Warp-inspired IDM, he produced at least three classic albums of the burgeoning vaporwave genre between 2013 and 2015, one of them a split with the mighty Telepath at the height of his early fame.

In those years, Nmesh made a lasting impact on the scene that continues to this day, as new generations of vaporwave producers stumble across Dream Sequins, The Path to Lost Eden or his massive multitrack DJ mix Welcome To Warp Zone.

Alex’ output slowed down in the latter half of the decade, especially after his experimental post-vapor-album Pharma (2017). An unplanned hiatus was prolonged by the COVID lockdowns and a personal loss, but he finally released a new full-length album, The Molokai Compendium, in 2025 – a hugely entertaining and humorous plunderphonics record inspired by The Black Dog records and 1980s B-movies.

For this Vapor Talk, Alex and I spent a good hour talking about his impressive music career of 25 years, from his start in metal bands and making weird Weezer edits, to bringing his IDM production chops into the early vaporwave scene, to losing inspiration during the pandemic and finding it back through stumbling across a ridiculous Triple B film in a hotel room after an Aphex Twin show.

all photos courtesy of the artist

Alex, what are some of your early musical memories from childhood?

Dancing around in the basement to Beach Boys and Michael Jackson records. When I was six or seven years old, there was a lot of New Jack Swing on the radio – that was my jam. I was born in ‘84, so I’m kind of split between the 80s and 90s.

What kind of music did you gravitate towards as a teenager?

As an early teen, I was getting into industrial music and metal. I started playing in bands when I was 14 years old. We used to play shows around town, and we were all just huge into Metallica. Throughout high school, I was listening to a lot of death metal, and I got really immersed in the New York hardcore scene. Then my taste changed a little bit and my interests were leaning more and more towards experimental electronic and dance music.

This is the late 90s, so we’re probably talking Warp stuff?

For sure, Warp was the gateway drug for me, all their 90s artists, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada… but The Future Sound of London in particular – when I was 14, 15 years old, that was a complete game-changer for me.

Were you a club kid, or was electronic music more of a home listening thing for you?

Definitely more of a home listening thing. It’s funny, because as much rave music as I was ingesting, I never went to any legit raves back in the day. In Louisville, there just wasn’t a lot of electronic shows going on, and if there was, I just probably wasn’t privy to them. But I was very aware of all the metal shows that were going on, and I was still playing shows at the time as well.

You started releasing music long before getting into vaporwave, right?

Yep, in the early 2000s I started making my own weird electronic music, and I just became obsessed and it fully took over. I was putting out music for a solid ten years before vaporwave was a thing.

Your early music was already sample-based though – a form of plunderphonics-informed IDM, would that be an accurate description?

Absolutely. The first thing I ever did was this four-track EP of remixed Weezer songs off The Blue Album. My girlfriend at the time was big into Weezer. It was just these weird, nightmarish edits that I did just for fun. Shortly thereafter, I started working on my first big project, a two-hour DJ mix called Peel Blue Equinox [2002]. It was very much inspired by all the [BBC] Essential Mixes and Kiss FM transmissions that The Future Sound of London did in the early to mid-90s. That was just a huge influence on me, and I wanted to do something in that vein.

Moving on to the late 2000s, were you into what we’re now calling proto-vaporwave, the music that Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro made at the time?

No, I wasn’t really aware of what they were doing. I was going through a phase at that time listening to a lot of chillout music. It wasn’t until 2011 or 2012 that I got tipped off on Macintosh Plus, Oneohtrix Point Never and some of the other early vaporwave artists. My introduction to Ferraro was Far Side Virtual [2011]. I wasn’t even aware of The Skaters, and all of his early stuff that he put out on CD-Rs. As far as OPN, my introduction was his sunsetcorp YouTube channel. That was before I even was aware he was putting out music under OPN. I’m pretty sure I was watching Boards of Canada videos when I stumbled across this amazing YouTube channel putting out weird edits of 80s songs. Eventually I started digging deeper and it opened a huge can of worms for me.

Did you ever attend one of those turntable.fm / SPF420 chatroom parties in 2011/12, those mythical meetings of the first vaporwave generation?

No, I was considered second generation. Never attended those turntable.fm parties, but I know Vektroid, Luxury Elite and Chaz and Liz from SPF420. They all became friends, and I was listening to a lot of that music at the time. Internet Club was another huge one, MediaFired, Midnight Television… I was deeply immersed in all of that. But it wasn’t until December of 2012 that I started poking around with making my own vaporwave edits. Though at the time I referred to them as eccojams. I don’t even think the vaporwave [genre] name had taken off yet. [Eventually] I did an SPF420 show in June of 2013, that was a huge deal for me. That was also my first URL event.

Who were some of the artists in the community that you were connecting with in the beginning?

One of my earliest friends was Zach Mason alias 회사AUTO – rest in peace. We started talking on Facebook and eventually started collaborating. Luxury Elite was one of my earliest friends on Facebook. She didn’t live very far away, so we ended up meeting up, going to a Death Grips show together. We’d go to a couple of Tobacco shows together as well. So it wasn’t long before I was making friends left and right and became part of that community.

Coming from classic IDM, what drew you into vaporwave initially?

I’d been obsessed with sampling, but I always worried about copyright strikes. Once I saw everybody else was just doing these very blatant edits in vaporwave, I got very comfortable. I figured that with my ten years of experience in IDM, I could put my own spin on it and bring some good production techniques to the genre. That was my game plan from the beginning, to start making these eccojams, but adding an extra layer of detail.

What was your setup at the time? All software?

Yeah, for the most part. Never been much of a hardware guy. I respect those who are, but I’ve always just been at the computer plugging away. I am still using a 20 year old version of what is now Adobe Audition – at the time it was Cool Edit Pro 2. I even assembled that massive multi-track DJ mix I mentioned, Peel Blue Equinox, all in there. I still use it to this day – it’s a very important part of my production. It’s kind of laughable, but it works for me. Everybody is using Ableton these days, but I’ve just been too lazy to learn it. I’m sure though if I actually got to know the program and started using it, it would grow on me.

Nu.wav Hallucinations came out in April 2013. That was your first vaporwave record, right?

Yeah, Nu.wav Hallucinations was definitely my vaporwave debut. That was the first full length record where I was tackling that genre and that style of music. Again, the whole plan was to put out a plunderphonic, eccojam type release, but with using my production chops from the last ten years. I think I managed to work that out.

Around that time, I was getting asked to do a lot of guest mixes for radio programs, and I happily obliged. I got asked by a number of radio stations overseas, and even here in Louisville, I did a few guest mixes for some local radio shows. I’m digging through the archives at the moment and pulling out all these mixes I did that were only available on Mixcloud. [Find them on Nmesh’s Bandcamp.]

Vaporwave was an online culture from the beginning. You mentioned meeting up with Lux, but that seems to have been the exception at the time, right?

Yes, for the most part, it was all online. Most of the friendships I made through vaporwave were born out of the online scene and not anything local. It’s funny though – years later, I got to meet a lot of these friends at the [100%] ElectronICON festival [in 2019]. And I went to a work conference in Seattle once, where I got to hang out with Zach Mason all day. That was pretty cool, but that was a long time ago.

Let’s talk about Dream Sequins (2014). Many vaporwave producers I’ve spoken to have called this one of their favorite albums of all time and a huge inspiration. Can you share some stories of its genesis?

It was originally just going to be a follow-up EP to Nu.wav Hallucinations. But as with a lot of my projects, things kind of snowball and get out of hand, and it ended up turning into a full-length and AMDISCS agreed to put it out. I don’t know if it was just the timing or maybe the thematic elements to Dream Sequins that caught on, but I took that album way more seriously. Nu.wav Hallucinations was just an exercise in reimagining 80s and 90s pop songs, a lot of which were mainstream radio tracks. With Dream Sequins, I wanted to have this consistent theme about dreams and just in general make a more ethereal vaporwave album.

It was a slow burner in the scene, but within a year or two, it started catching on. I think “Climbing The Corporate Ladder” was the track that took off and still to this day… I understand why, it is a banger in a way, but it’s so unlike anything else off that album, which is also the odd thing. It’s a standout track there, it doesn’t really fit in. Maybe that one just hit the algorithm, and a lot of people started listening to it and resonating with it, so it has grown this cult following in years.

On the last track, you screwed and chopped that Anthony Fantano review of Floral Shoppe. The scene loved that.

It was just a prank. I was having fun, I wasn’t trying to take myself too seriously. I thought it would be hilarious if I took his review of Floral Shoppe and actually gave it the vaporwave treatment.

The album was essentially done after “The Unconscious Connection” ends, which is actually just the first three minutes of that last track, and the Fantano bit was supposed to be a secret track. I grew up with that on CDs back in the day, where there was a little bit of silence, and then something else comes in. However, that album was so bloated and just filled to the max already, that there wasn’t an opportunity to have any silence between “The Unconscious Connection” and the Fantano bit. So a lot of people lump that in as being the same song, whereas it’s actually a completely separate track that I called “therecordwarp”, which is an obvious pun on [Fantano’s channel] theneedledrop.

I was also secretly hoping that it would get his attention, which it did, because I later discovered he did an AMA on 4chan, and somebody asked him if he had heard it, and he said, “Yeah, I got tipped off on it. I listened to it and I didn’t really care for it.” Which is fine, of course.

Parts of the scene took offense to that original review. Your version would have been seen as a humorous clap back at him.

Back then, people were gatekeeping vaporwave to a certain degree, which I also understand, because it was such a niche genre. We were a small community and felt like this was our own thing. Then you’ve got Fantano coming out here talking about Floral Shoppe to his millions of followers. Some people just didn’t like that.

But that review was also where many people first heard of vaporwave in general, so he actually did a service for the community in a way. He was a little late to Floral Shoppe – that review didn’t even come out until a year later. I guess he thought he had to tackle it, because it was such a cult album at that time that he had to give his take on it. At the same time, I think people get offended by Fantano reviewing any album. He’s just got a lot of haters out there, and I’m sure he’s very aware of that.

Chaz of SPF420 was quoted in an article back then, saying that Fantano’s review was the death of vaporwave.

(laughs) Oh, there’s been so many deaths of vaporwave. That was just one of many.

2015 comes along and you’re putting out this SAINT PIZZA vs. スポーツのLACROSSE 82-99 album, another inside joke for the scene which was actually quite controversial at the time.

It was really just meant to be a joke. Again, it was just Zach [Mason alias 회사AUTO] and I having fun. He put out the first Saint Pizza parody album, which I thought was hilarious, and once I discovered that was his work, we talked about doing a collab. So he once again reprised his Saint Pizza role, and my alias was a take on Macross[82-99].

Macross thought it was hilarious by the way. He thought it was funny as hell. But a few people in the scene didn’t find it so funny, in particular the Saint Pizza portion, because it was poking fun at Saint Pepsi, who was actually a good friend of mine and a friend of Zach’s. But the folks in SPF420 thought there was something nefarious about it, so we caught a lot of flack for it early on. I didn’t let it upset me too much though.

You did the split with Telepath in the same year, another super influential album for many producers.

Yeah, it’s funny because The Path To Lost Eden was my most played album on Spotify this past year. It’s doing surprisingly well ten years after the fact.

How did you come up with the idea of doing something together? What was the concept behind it?

I think I reached out to Telepath first. I had been talking to David [HKE], who ran Dream Catalogue, and he thought it would be a good idea. I thought I could do something in a similar vein as the slushwave music Telepath was putting out at the time. I had all these cassette recordings from high school, from this show called Echoes on NPR, which came on late at night, from midnight till six in the morning. It was just a lot of new age music, but I listened to it almost every night, and every time I heard something I liked, I’d hit record. So I had all these cassettes of new age tracks in my arsenal, and I went back and gave it the plunderphonic treatment. Because of the stylings of these tracks, I managed to come up with something that would vibe with Telepath’s side.

At the time we made the split album, Telepath was really taking off. When I’d started listening to his music, I already knew it was something special. He really knew what he was doing and he was putting out some quality ambient vaporwave music. If I had waited a couple years, it would have been a lot less likely that we would have linked up and put out an album. It was just the right moment where we both had some time to tackle this project. At the same time, even though it was a collaborative project, it was just a split album, so he did his own thing, and I did my own thing. It’s actually been years since I even talked to him.

I remember the years 2015 and 2016 as being quite turbulent in the scene: With the media hype came a lot of infighting. Dream Catalogue was huge but then came the whole hardvapour thing and HKE’s public meltdowns on Twitter…

It was a mess, wasn’t it?

It really was. I even stopped following the scene for a while. When Pharma came out in 2017, it felt like you were leaving the vaporwave days behind you too. It obviously still had that influence, but it just went beyond that. Was that the plan, or did it just happen?

That was exactly part of the plan at that point. I’d done the vaporwave thing, and I wanted to go back to my roots. At the same time, Orange Milk had approached me a couple of years before that, wanting to do an album. When I’m asked by a label to put out something, I want to do something in the vein of what they’re known for, and Orange Milk has some pretty batshit insane music on their label. So the game plan was to do another plunderphonic record, but just go all out. It was completely spastic and all over the place. I took from a variety of genres and just tried to make a really crazy record that didn’t exactly follow suit with the previous full-length. It was just very manic-sounding, it changed every few seconds.

It surely is a bit of an ADHD album.

Definitely, very much. Which is a good reflection of me.

Looking back today, how important is vaporwave still to you?

It completely changed my life, honestly, the trajectory of the music I make, and everything else as a result of it. If I had never stumbled across Macintosh Plus or that sunsetcorp channel and if I just didn’t follow that path, I imagine how different would things be for me now. It changed everything for me. It’s what popped off, it’s what got [online magazine] Tiny Mix Tapes’ attention back in the day. I could have just carried on with the IDM stuff, and who knows if anybody ever would have even heard me?

Do you still feel like you’re part of the vaporwave community? Do you still engage with it?

Not as much as I used to. The vaporwave community is attracting a lot of new faces, a lot of young kids. A lot of my peers have gone on to either do other things, or they gained a lot of success and don’t partake in community stuff anymore. I’m also just not online as I was back then. I got a little burnt out being online all the time. And by being online, I mean talking to everybody constantly. I’m kind of over it, and with that, you become a little detached from the scene. Which is fine, it’s just how things are.

Are you still following the developments in the scene though, especially what’s happening in slushwave and signalwave on Discord?

I can’t say I really am. I mean, I love signalwave, or broken transmission as it used to be called back in the day, and I know there are communities for those subgenres that work together a lot and put out a lot of music on specific labels. But I’m just kind of doing my own thing at this point. I’m very much behind the scenes.

In 2022, you put out a mix called VAPORWAVE: Not Quite Dead Yet.

That was an April Fool’s prank. I was poking fun at the scene, for sure. I had been collecting various reworks of this one song for years, because I noticed a lot of people were sampling the same song [52nd Street’s “Tell Me (How It Feels)” from 1985], and I was just gonna put it all together and do something fun with it. When I actually sat down to put that mix together, I had 12 or 13 tracks where people had all sampled that song, so I thought it would be a little funny commentary on how the scene’s not dead, but then use the same song for the entire mix.

You weren’t inactive in the years between Pharma [2017] and The Molokai Compendium [2025], because you did release stuff on compilations, mixes, remixes, but not an actual full-length album. Why?

Honestly, I was working on The Molokai Compendium for years before it was finally released. A lot of things got in the way of its initial release, Covid being one of them. It was a period where some people felt extra productive, but it had the opposite effect on me. There was a lot of political uproar at that time, a lot of protests going on, and it really hit me hard. I wasn’t feeling the creativity at that time. There was also a death in my family that took a toll on me, and I ended up taking a break for a year. Eventually I sucked it up, got back to it and finished it up, but then there was some more delays because of things going on with the label.

In the liner notes, it’s mentioned that you stumbled across some weird Andy Sedaris movies from the 80s and got inspired. What’s the actual story?

I forget the exact year, but some years ago I saw Aphex Twin in New York, and we were staying in this Airbnb, channel surfing and Hard Ticket to Hawaii [1987] was on. My buddy was just like, “Oh, you’ve never seen this movie?” And I was like, “No.” And he mentioned, “Well, this is where that frisbee scene comes from, and the blow up doll.” I was very aware of those, because those clips have been circulating on the internet for years, and those are all sourced from this movie. So I watched it for a little bit, and I just loved it. It was so over the top.

I started watching Sedaris’ other movies, ended up buying several DVD collection box sets. Actually, they came just at a time when I was feeling down. Those movies really uplifted me, and I wanted to do something fun that pays tribute to those movies. Molokai was my fun record, because I didn’t want to go any darker than Pharma. I wanted to keep things light and those schlocky 80s action movies are just a perfect area to sample and plunder.

Now that Molokai is out of the system, do you have any immediate musical plans for the future?

I have been trying to take a real break for months now. It just hasn’t exactly panned out the way I wanted. I worked the entirety of last month on a compilation track. I just work incredibly slow these days. It’s a matter of not having a lot of time, so when I am working on something, I want to make sure it’s something worthwhile.

As I said, I’ve been going through the archives and putting out these old mixes from the heydays of vaporwave, just for posterity’s sake. I do have some projects on the horizon, but it’s nothing I’m in a huge hurry to put out. I’m just going to leisurely tackle it. I have a few concepts in mind for what the new album should be, but at the moment, I’ll keep it hush. There is a remix album for Molokai on the horizon with some pretty big names on there though, which I’m pretty excited about.

What are you listening to right now?

Oh boy, loaded question here. I’ve got a spreadsheet up in front of me. I’m listening to new music every day. I tend to consume six or seven albums on a daily basis at the office. I’m just addicted to acquiring music and listening to it.

So I’ve been listening to Oneohtrix Point Never’s new album Tranquilizer. And I’ve been getting into Butthole Surfers a lot lately. All I ever knew growing up was [their Top 40 hit] “Pepper”, but I had this realization that they are incredible, and I want to dig into everything they’ve ever done, so I’m planning on doing a chronological deep dive of their music soon.

One of my favorite artists as of the past few years is SEEKERSINTERNATIONAL. They’re kind of a dub slash plunderphonic group, they’ve dabbled in vaporwave, but it’s just truly incredible stuff in the production chops. Other than that, I’m huge into Lord Tusk, and one of my favorite groups now is Moon Wiring Club, they’re kind of a hauntology group, very underappreciated.

Are you still into metal at all?

I don’t listen to metal near as much as I used to, but there are certain groups that I still appreciate. My all time favorite is Candiria, a hardcore band out of Brooklyn who dabbled in jazz and hip hop and electronic music... They were a huge influence going back since I was a teenager. I even got the chance to do a couple remixes for them. Over the past couple years, I got more into Neurosis. Type O Negative has always been one of my favorite metal bands. I’m still rocking some Deftones too.

Listen to Nmesh on Bandcamp

Nmesh’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica (Software, 2011)

• Laserdisc Visions – New Dreams Ltd. (Beer On The Rug, 2011)

• 情報デスクVIRTUAL [Vektroid] – 札幌コンテンポラリー (Beer On The Rug, 2012)

• 骨架的 [Skeleton] – Reflections (self-released, 2012)

• INTERNET CLUB – UNDERWATER MIRAGE (self-released, 2012)

• luxury elite – III (Ailanthus, 2012)

• Topaz Gang – Tuxedo Princess (Fortune 500, 2013)

• トリニティー無限大 [t e l e p a t h] – 二二二七 (self-released, 2015)

• Phono Ghosts – Solar Dream Reel (Fonolith, 2016)

• Late Arcane – Extravagance (Business Casual, 2023)