Vapor Talks #27: luxury elite
A true originator of vaporwave tells her story
luxury elite might be a legitimate vaporwave icon, but she doesn’t really exist. That’s because she’s an entirely fictional, anonymous entity; an affluent, stylish, beautiful and independent woman that lives in a penthouse in an American metropolis – a character who could have stepped right out of a 1980s romantic comedy.
The human being behind that character never lived in a penthouse. When she started making music as luxury elite, she’d never really traveled much outside of her home state of Kentucky. In fact, she was broke, miserable and had few prospects in life. This was almost 15 years ago.
She’d started hanging out online with some new music friends, among them Ramona Vektroid (alias Macintosh Plus and a bunch of other aliases) and a booker from North Carolina who just went by her first name, Liz, and would soon start running the legendary SPF420 livestreams together with another teenager from Chicago, Chaz Allen alias Metallic Ghosts.
A few months later, Lux (as friends and fans lovingly call her) started making and releasing her own music which would go on to define a whole subgenre of vaporwave called Late Night Lofi. Many of her albums and tapes from the early to mid-2010s became canonical classics. In those days, she also ran one of the most important labels of the nascent vaporwave scene: Fortune 500.
Her output slowed down after 2016 due to personal issues, but Lux returned to produce more outstanding music – under her main moniker and aliases like 1-800-TONIGHT and creative zen – since the start of the pandemic. Her brilliant last full-length as luxury elite, talk soup, came out in 2024. Aside from making music, she’s been running her bi-weekly online radio show Neon Nights (named after a legendary K-Tel compilation from 1982), and she’s part of the Hot Takes podcast crew.
In one of her most personal interviews to date, she opens up about a childhood in front of the television set, her days as a Tumblr influencer, the proto-vaporwave scene, escaping from real-life struggles through engagement in internet culture, surviving ‘broporwave’-gate, coming back at the start of a global pandemic, losing her sister and finding her creative mojo again.
Please note that this interview was conducted in written form. The formatting in her answers is luxury elite’s – it’s part of her online personality, and I do think it conveys some sense of her character. I have barely edited anything here, because I really wanted to give a true vaporwave originator the space she deserves. For anyone just remotely interested in the genre, this should be an important history lesson.
*Airhorn noise*
Lux, I’ve heard that you were obsessed with watching TV as a kid and that you became a big pop culture nerd early on. Who were some of your favorite artists, musicians and TV personalities at the time?
I was practically raised by my television. My parents would have MTV playing in the background all the time, and one of my first memories was waking up with my parents at 6:00 a.m. one morning, my dad getting ready for work, and Sinead O’Connor’s music video for Nothing Compares 2 U came on. I guess four year old me was so moved that I started crying along with her. My parents scrambled to find the remote and changed it to Scooby Doo to get me to stop, haha.
Beavis and Butthead were hands down the biggest influences on me. I started watching the show when I was five years old, which sounds a bit scandalous I’m sure! I didn’t understand a lot of the dirty jokes, but I loved watching the music videos they chose to play. I remember when Beavis and Butthead watched Grace Jones’ Demolition Man video, and I had no clue why they were ragging on her so hard because I thought she looked cool as fuck! I fell in love with PJ Harvey as Beavis and Butthead ooh’d and ahh’d over her Down By The Water video, and I thought she looked so pretty! I developed an appreciation for pop culture commentary and comedy that was super referential because of them.
I also watched loads of 60s and 70s syndicated television; tons of Mary Tyler Moore, Dragnet, Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (my go-to as I was falling asleep). The Brady Bunch was a staple. I LOVED Get Smart, and I told my mom one morning that I was going to marry Maxwell Smart. I was fucking four years old. Mom was bewildered by that one, she was so thrown off! Going back to Beavis and Butthead for a moment, one of my favorite referential moments happened during their watch of Pizzicato Five’s Twiggy Twiggy video. Beavis and Butthead thought one of the members looked like the kid from the TV show My Three Sons. That’s another show I remember watching a ton, and little me was TICKLED TO DEATH!
And of course, I was also watching loads of Nickelodeon. I still remember watching Stick Stickly during the summer and seeing the Pure Moods commercial during the ad breaks, and thinking that compilation was so cool. Double Dare, Legends of the Hidden Temple, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, I loved it all.
This is getting to be super long, so in closing, s/o to the MTV VJs I was obsessed with: Kennedy, Bill Bellamy, Downtown Julie Brown, Martha Quinn, and Tabitha Soren. A special shoutout to the Sneak Prevue channel, which was a channel I stumbled upon around 8 or 9. I’d spend HOURS watching that channel, mesmerized by the movie trailers and the risqué Spice Channel commercials. One more shoutout to SNICK and TGIF, I ate up everything played during those blocks.
What kind of music did your parents play around the house?
Finances were a struggle for my parents. My dad would buy CDs up the wazoo, his CD collection was incredible, but most of the time his CD player was in the pawn shop. Dad’s only cars were drag race cars with “slicks”, tires that didn’t have any sort of grip, which weren’t street legal. He didn’t have a normal car, so we were always driving around in one of Dad’s work trucks, none of which had a CD player. He had two stations he stuck with, both rock-related. One was a classic rock station, which of course played lots of Led Zeppelin (fun fact: Immigration Song scared the shit out of me, it’d come on and I’d hide behind my mom), The Cars, Pat Benatar. But his main station played a mixture of classic and modern rock. Lots of Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, The Black Crowes, Aerosmith.
The lack of CD player at home is likely why Dad just kept it on MTV at all times, and he’d write down the artists he liked so he could grab their CDs on payday. Mom went along with what Dad listened to, basically. I have a core memory of being 11 or 12, and my aunt had stopped by the house. At that point, my parents’ finances had turned around, and the CD player was permanently in our living room. My mom played Metallica’s Fuel for my aunt because my mom LOVED that song, and all my aunt could really say after that was “Huh”. I am laughing so hard even recalling this memory, like why did my mom think my very reserved aunt was going to be into Metallica?! My mom’s so cute, I swear. Other standouts to Mom: Pink by Aerosmith and Crazy Bitch by Buckcherry.
Do you have siblings? Any musical inspirations that came from them?
I did, an older sister. She was six years older than me, too cool for me, but we shared a room and a bed so she had to deal with me. She liked music, but not as much as my parents did. When she was listening to music, however, she was finding things on BET. She loved Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac, mourned both when they passed away with the rest of my neighbors. I remember my sister coming home with an Xscape single once upon a time. I didn’t know their music, but I thought Tiny was really pretty.
More than anything, my sister inspired what else I enjoyed watching on TV. We’d spend our Saturday mornings watching Saved by the Bell and California Dreams, I’d sit and watch Ricki Lake with her after school during the week. I really enjoyed watching TGIF with her, especially Boy Meets World and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I was thrilled to see Clarissa become a witch with a cute talking cat by her side! And of course, watching the later seasons of Full House and seeing Steph and DJ navigate teenhood were super cool to me. My sister got me into watching the Real World, I’m unsure if I would have watched them if she didn’t have them on.
Sadly, my sister passed away a few years back due to health complications related to long COVID. The album talk soup was worked on after she passed with our childhood in mind, with tracks directly linked to core memories of watching certain shows and experiencing happier memories together. I miss her, but I hope she’s no longer in pain, wherever she is.
Did you ever learn an instrument or learn any music theory?
My dad wanted me to learn how to play the guitar so badly. He had a coworker who was more than happy to teach me, but I was extremely shy and fearful of making mistakes. I didn’t want to disappoint my dad if I failed, y’know? So I never actually took those lessons. Years later, my ex was given a keyboard by a former roommate, and on that, I learned a few songs by ear and navigated around the keys to find the right notes. This was 2010/2011, and I learned What Is Love by Haddaway, Spinal Meningitis by Ween, and Desire Lines by Deerhunter. It’s not like I was some sort of Regina Spektor type, it was just me with my pointer fingers and determination. I made little videos of myself playing these songs and kind of whisper singing… I was too shy to actually sing around anybody, years and years before karaoke emboldened me to belt like I knew I could. I can sing pretty decently!
I don’t remember how to play any of those songs anymore, my ex took the keyboard with him when we broke up. HE NEVER USED THE DAMN THING! That asshole. But that was about it on instruments. Never took any music theory, wasn’t in band class or orchestra. I would have wanted to be part of color guard had I chosen to participate in band class anyway; even if I wanted to learn an instrument, that fear of failure always loomed, and it cripped me from trying to learn.
Let’s go back to 2010/11 for a second. How did you originally get involved with that whole proto-/early vaporwave scene? You didn’t make music back then yet, did you?
Prepare yourself for a very long answer to this one!
I became a huge fan of Tobacco right as he was starting to hype up his second album, Maniac Meat. I’d known of Black Moth Super Rainbow, I actually remember hearing Forever Heavy through an FYE CD sampler years prior and thinking it sounded cool, but for some reason I never checked out the album. I’d heard tracks from Fucked Up Friends and thought they were cool, too, but it was the fanmade video for Heavy Makeup (shoutout FatherLongLegs) that really sunk its teeth into me. That was the first time I’d ever seen commercials used for a music video, some of which I remembered from my Nickelodeon days, and those commercials with that song were an unsettling pair. Tobacco’s vocoder usually sounded pretty, harmonic, psychedelic but in like… a Moon Safari kind of way? Complimentary to the songs, like the vocoder was its own instrument. Heavy Makeup, however, was crunchy, creepy, almost like the vocoder fucked around with a Ouija board and didn’t close the bridge quick enough. I became enamored. I wanted more.
I’m rambling here, I know, but ultimately that discovery was how I reached the BMSRfans forum, hoping to find more tracks from this upcoming album. At the point I found the forum, I’d say there were maybe 20 active users max? I lurked for a little bit until I hit the jackpot with a Beck stan on last.fm who had the Beck/Tobacco collab tracks from the yet-to-be-leaked Maniac Meat album, and privately sharing those tracks with the users basically cemented my “cred”, hahaha.
One of the folks I met there was Liz, now known as one half of SPF420. She used to do proto-SPF420 shows with the BMSRfans crew, since many of them were BMSR-inspired musicians themselves. We’d link up in a Tinychat one Friday night, there’d be 4 or 5 different artists playing, and the artists either did prerecorded sets with their own visuals or chose to do a live bedroom performance via webcam, and sometimes Tobacco would come through and surprise us with unreleased material that wouldn’t officially come to surface for years.
Vektroid appeared at one out of nowhere, she and Liz were super tight back then, and she eventually found me on Facebook and we got super chatty. This was a few months after her release, Telnet Erotika, which blew my fucking mind when she sent it my way. We chatted for a long while, but she was dealing with personal matters, I was dealing with matters of my own, and we kind of lost touch. We were still friends, of course, but I think our constant, paragraphs long chatter for a few months caused each of us to get burned out, looking back.
Through stalking Ramona’s last.fm page, I found something she’d scrobbled called “Laserdisc Visions”, and I went through the comments on the artist page and discovered it was Ramona’s new alias, and her album had gotten leaked because somebody didn’t realize she’d shared it in private, and it ended up being posted on a blog briefly before getting taken down. I was on the hunt for it from there. I eventually found the album in some random person’s last.fm comment section, but I felt bad for grabbing it knowing it was a version she didn’t want out there, so I immediately deleted it.
The blog was Moonlit TV Dinner, and Laserdisc Visions album was removed by the time I found it, but I downloaded everything else that got posted there. James Ferraro’s Night Dolls With Hairspray and the KGB Man/Oneohtrix Point Never split were two of the larger releases posted on there, but there were also two albums by an artist I’d never heard of called 骨架的, one labeled “Skeleton Disco Rock” (known now as simply Skeleton), Holograms being the other. The first version of Computer Dreams’ self-titled was also posted there, pre-officially releasing it as a split with Napolian (R.I.P.)
A few years ago, I found a /mu/ post from Ramona from 2012, where she stated that she also found 骨架的 because of this blog. I thought that was neat to have confirmed, because I never asked her about it. She didn’t even know at the time that I was also on the hunt for this stuff, I think she must have seen me post about it on Facebook or something and put two and two together. I’d long suspected that Moonlit TV Dinner was created by Computer Dreams/Midnight Television, but I never bothered asking anybody about it for whatever reason and just left it a years long mystery for myself. Around the time I found Ramona’s /mu/ post, I stumbled upon a blog post made by Scott Michael of Ailanthus, back when he was still working on Roberto Clemente Rookie Card, and Scott confirmed that it absolutely was Computer Dreams’ blog. Going back to 2011, I remember returning to Moonlit TV Dinner maybe a month or so later to download more of what was posted, and the entire Blogspot had been deleted. There aren’t any snapshots of it on Wayback Machine, either, I checked long ago. What a crazy short lived gem that was.
I didn’t know any of these people outside of Ramona and Liz. I got introduced to many of the artists involved some months later, when Ramona invited me into a private FB group called Xerox Fax Machine’s Superheroes. From there, these people I looked to as idols became my friends. I was not making music at the time, and I most certainly didn’t think that I myself would ever get involved musically when I was digging in. I just found it to be exciting and different!
Turntable.fm started in spring 2011, right? Was there an online circle of friends before that, maybe through Tumblr or other early social media?
2011, indeed! I remember hearing about the site through blogs. Writers were getting invite codes to explore the site for future write ups, and thankfully an old last.fm friend got an invite that he sent my way in May. I immediately sent my invite over to Liz because I knew she would love turntable.fm (and I wasn’t wrong!). I knew nobody on the site at the time, and it didn’t help that IRL events happened and I no longer had access to the internet by late May (too broke to pay the internet bill, don’t miss those days).
When I finally got full internet access again in August, the site had finally opened to everybody, so there were a ton of users and so many new rooms. At that time, you were able to upload and play whatever the fuck you wanted, as Turntable hadn’t gotten into trouble with DMCA shit yet. It was magical. Liz and Chaz met each other in a turntable.fm room, I don’t remember if it was in the Bloghaus room or in another one, and Liz had killer taste in music so everybody she met was following her around, which is how I met a lot of folks. I met a fair share of people on my own in the chillwave+ room, some of which were in a private FB group chat with me a year later as I discussed making Fortune 500 a reality.
There were some friends we knew that were coming through and hanging out in rooms with us. Ramona and I pissed someone off in one room when we were playing b2b smooth jazz one time! Nite Flyte really sent somebody over the edge. But for the most part, a lot of us were meeting for the first time and developing friendships from there, eventually friending each other on Facebook/Tumblr/wherever.
You’ve said that Midnight Television (May 2011) and Laserdisc Visions (July 2011) got you into vaporwave. Did people actually call it vaporwave then already? Can you remember when you first heard the term and when you started using it?
Fun fact: I actually did not like Laserdisc Visions at first. Searching for the leak led me down the path of discovering whatever this music was, but 骨架的’s albums confused the fuck out of me (I had my a-ha moment with the forever classic, Reflections), Computer Dreams was interesting but I still didn’t fully understand what was happening, and I was so disappointed when Beer on the Rug released New Dreams LTD. and it was not the Telnet Erotika sequel I hoped it would be. That said, I still downloaded other albums from Beer on the Rug to see if I’d like other albums, and I remember finally “getting” what Laserdisc Visions was shooting for when I heard Midnight Television, that was when everything felt like it clicked.
I’d never heard of the name “vaporwave” until the Dummy Mag article came out [in July 2012, ed. note]. I remember seeing the term “newbreed” getting thrown around, also saw it referred to as “gunk”. It made looking for similar artists so difficult to find because nobody had really classified it as anything official, and it made it even more exciting when I did stumble upon music that fit within the confines of whatever this music was. I have to give a quick shoutout here to the Chillwave/Glo-Fi/Hypnagogic Pop Facebook page, which was run once upon a time by a homie named Mr. Nonsense. He was also digging deep for artists to post on his page, and that was where I found Wasted Nights, Future Airwaves, and Skeleton Lipstick (which then led to my discovery of S U R F I N G’s Deep Fantasy). He later exposed people to Lux, too, which felt like a “pinch me, I’m dreaming” moment.
I created a compilation in mid-2012 called “Late Night Lofi”, a name I coined after a weird late night drive to my hometown with my ex that I used to evoke the weird late night drive/late night television vibe a lot of these releases had going for them, but I wasn’t out there publicly using it until I started releasing Lux stuff a few months later. I understood the vaporware background, it made sense to me, but I totally hated that genre name at first, LOL. I used it because it became official.
Had you actually heard Vektroid’s previous albums like Neo Cali? What did you think when you first heard Floral Shoppe? How has your perception of that record changed over the years?
I had listened to her previous work, yes! I used to jokingly call myself ***Vektroid’s #1 Fan*** once upon a time. I ate all of her material up, including her James Ferraro-inspired hypnagogic material she’d uploaded on her Tumblr, that album being called Starfleet Iguana, as well my all-time favorite, Planet Dudette Cassette. Those two got revisited and combined into the 2016 album, Big Danger. Another favorite Vek-related project is something that never fully saw the light of day, a project she did called DRVG CTRL. It would probably be seen as future funk-adjacent now, as it consisted of dancier versions of her material, with a track or two that were also originally sampled for Floral Shoppe. That used to be my go-to workout music around 2012-2013ish. You can find a demo called NEW LIFE on YouTube that she later condensed for one of the 2016 releases, it became Love U Better on Vektroid Texture Maps.
In 2013 or so, Ramona had sent me and Liz a folder of all of her unreleased material in case she lost her work, which actually sadly happened after some sort of hard drive failure. I had it all saved on my PC, as well as on a mp3 player that only worked as a larger flash drive at that point. Ramona reached out just before my infamous 2016 computer croak and asked if I still had it, and I happily sent everything her way. I think that’s actually why she’d revisited everything and retooled a lot of it for Big Danger/Vektroid Texture Maps, and if that’s truly the case, I’m happy to have been able to contribute to these releases in some way. In my opinion, the tracks didn’t need retooling, but I am a biased person who loved Gak Monster to death before it became a 15 second intro to Dial Giri on Big Danger. I say that with love, not attempting to be shady about her revisits!
Going back to 2012, we were keeping in touch again after she’d seen I was also going down the proto-vaporwave path, so I was able to listen to her albums before they officially got released, and I had the chance to hear albums that didn’t see the light of day for a while (unless you caught them on her FB or on her last.fm artist pages). I got Floral Shoppe two months early, and I was OBSESSED. I felt like Floral Shoppe was the perfect merging of her Laserdisc Visions material and what she was doing with Telnet Erotika. I loved how fleshed out the tracks were, and at the time, I didn’t fully realize how much of it was sampled. I remember hearing リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー like everyone else and feeling totally mindblown. That track was like an extended tropical paradise, something I wanted to live inside forever. I would replay it two or three times in a row on each listen before finally moving onto the next track.
One of my favorite online memories goes back to the BMSRfans Tinychat party days. It was one of the last Tinychat Tobacco-related parties Liz hosted before shifted her focus to SPF420, and Ramona was invited to perform. Ramona’s webcam was focused on her equipment, and somewhere in the middle of the set, she played ECCOと悪寒ダイビング . This was pre-Floral Shoppe’s official release, and I think only me and Liz knew what it was at the time, and I got way too emotional witnessing it. I knew I was watching something special, and I wish I could go back in time and record a lot of those proto-SPF420 shows so I could rewatch them all over again.
My adoration of Floral Shoppe has never wavered, and I’m thrilled that it was the album for many people who were discovering what vaporwave was. It’s a fabulous introduction! I will forever and always love that album.
Was Daniel Lopatin an influence on your early work at all?
I knew Daniel’s work existed as Sunset Corp. and as Oneohtrix Point Never, but I never listened to him, I can’t tell you why. It was Games’ That We Can Play that caused me to finally pay attention. That EP was EVERYTHING to me. I absolutely adored Replica when it came out, and I didn’t realize then that some of the tracks sampled 80s commercials. I used to run a screenshot blog on Tumblr in 2012, and I remember finding a Wrigley’s Spearmint gum commercial that had a specific melody and beep that I rewound like, ten times back to figure out why I knew that already. It eventually dawned on me that he’d sampled another version of the Spearmint ad for Sleep Dealer! I thought that was the coolest shit ever, that this artist who’d been seen as a God for the early vaporwavers was still out here sampling things that could be considered vaporwave.
I admit, I was super super late to the Eccojams game. I listened to bits and pieces of it around 2011-2013, but I didn’t listen to it in full until I was sent the original mp3s of all of the files that were put to tape by an olde friend. I’m kind of glad I waited to hear it, because I got the chance to listen to it with fresh ears, and the cassette rips were pitched a bit differently.
I will say that I met Dan in 2012, a few days into luxury elite’s existence, after he played a killer Replica-filled set at a local art gallery. I also chatted online with him briefly when I got a leak of Garden of Delete that somebody had sent me very fucking early (and I swore to him I’d keep it to myself), he was nothing but kind both times. He mentioned me in a G.O.D.-related interview, and I remember Daniel made a joke that it would lead to some romcom romance movie about us that would go to shit, which I thought was hilarious. It’s cool to know that there’s an article out there where he called me his angel of mercy. I need that on my tombstone!
Who else made interesting music at the time that might have influenced you? You’ve mentioned Tobacco, and I’ve heard the names 18 Carat Affair and Midnight Television/Computer Dreams being tossed around a lot.
18 Carat Affair’s 60/40 cover is why the name luxury elite exists. I saw that cover and thought, “If I were to ever make music happen, this would be what I would sound like.” In the shower, I was thinking of words I could use for an artist name. Luxury was the first thing I thought of, and I was tossing around various words that sounded equally luxurious or uppity, and elite appeared a few minutes later. A lightbulb went off in my head, so shoutout to Denys [Parker aka 18 Carat Affair, ed. note] always for that visual inspiration.
Vektroid was obviously an inspiration for me, Midnight Television for sure, and another artist that I don’t really say out loud for whatever reason is Lasership Stereo [aka Psychic LCD aka Diskette Romances, ed. note]. I love Lasership Stereo’s releases, Plastics is still one of my all-time faves. Sure, it’s a slowed down and looped intro of Guinnevere, but something about the specific pitch and that loop felt truly magical, and it was such an earworm. He’s not really participating in the scene anymore, but I feel like present day Lasership Stereo, if he chose to continue with the project, would have been next level.
Who else was part of the turntable.fm circle in 2011/12? Did those relationships all happen online, or did you meet IRL too?
As I mentioned earlier, Liz and Chaz met there! Vektroid was there also. Terrell Davis was on there (released briefly as VISAプリペイド, also brilliant graphic designer who was EXTREMELY ahead of his time, R.I.P.), the label owner of Night People used to come through occasionally and hang out, the owner of Kandahar Homedubs (who did the lovely 101.7 WAVE II gift box cassettes), Veracom, Transmuteo, Internet Club hopped in every now and then, Heather Palmer (another fabulous digital artist who did some really fantastic proto-vaporwave/adjacent videos and visual loops), Navigateur would come through and hang out for a bit, too. I believe Saint Pepsi would come through and say hello? Mux Mool and I got into an argument in a TT room once because he was trashing ESPRIT 空想 (and vaporwave in general), Teams (now known as Yves Tumor) appeared in a room once, we bonded over our August birthdays and they promised me a slice of birthday cake in the mail. Ricky Eat Acid said hello once upon a time. In a perfect full circle moment, Tobacco did a few TT parties; he was even given a special avatar with his basketball mask he wore for Maniac Meat-era photos. He played a song I’d been asking to hear in full for years at that point, and it was a dream come true. I’m sure there’s more that I am blanking on, and I’m sure somebody will be in my DMs saying “HEY, YOU FORGOT THIS PERSON!”
But otherwise, most of the folks we hung out with were music fans like we were, into hypnagogic pop or chillwave. There was one friend who would “play” fun., but it would devolve into power electronics for three minutes, the track titles definitely would not fly in present day. The person who did the SPF420 theme, they went by HD-ROM, but I believe he was also someone that was just hanging out in turntable.fm rooms with us before being asked to do the theme song. On an SPF420 note, I’m pretty sure the artists on the first ever SPF420 lineup were all people we’d met on TT.
The majority of the relationships were URL only, we were all bored in our bedrooms and seeking community. I met Liz IRL in 2014, our only IRL meeting. We went to a Black Moth Super Rainbow show together because we shared a mutual friend who lived an hour or so away from me who drove her to KY. That was a very lovely evening. I missed my chance on meeting Chaz a few years ago. I finally met Internet Club a few years ago at the first FlamingoFest, which was quite surreal. I played my first show ever with Navigateur back in… was it 2014? I’ve never talked about that publicly, but that was my first ever show. It was cool seeing him live! We saw each other again briefly at the last Electronicon, and I wanna say my partner met Navigateur again at a festival that George Clanton, Neggy Gemmy, Persona La Ave, and loads of other fab vapor-related artists played in South Carolina. I had to miss out on that one, and I was so bummed. I still chat with a few TT friends on Discord, and I’m still friends with some of the TT homies on Instagram. I lost touch with some friends, but I will never forget them.
The 80s nostalgia theme was a means of escapism for you at the time. You’ve talked about it becoming almost an addiction. Can you talk about the idea or image for luxury elite a bit more in detail? Who is this person, really? How much of yourself is in Lux?
I mentioned my screenshot Tumblr in an earlier answer, and that’s where we’ll begin. I don’t even remember how I found screenshot Tumblrs initially. I think a Tumblr friend must have reposted something from gentleconsideration, and I clicked to check out his page and became enamored with his content. He reposted screencaps from other screencap-related blogs, and I had no idea where to even begin, but I knew I wanted to do that sort of blog, too. A few months later, I got an invite to the private VHS torrent site I also mentioned in an earlier answer, and I went on a downloading SPREE. My blog was called familyshowcase, named after a block HBO used to do of family shows and movies. I went through hours and hours of TV shows with original commercials included, obsessively screenshotting what visually appealed to me and posting it immediately to my Tumblr. I made gifs sometimes, but my blog was primarily screencaps of whatever.
One night, I was sifting through an American Bandstand episode that was basically a Hall & Oates takeover, and I stumbled upon a commercial for a KTEL compilation called Neon Nights. It looked so typically 80s, very stylish. One of the characters that appeared was a woman in an all black ensemble, with a veil over her face. She looked at her compact mirror before looking deeply into the camera, pursing her lips like she was blowing the cameraman a kiss. She looked so fucking cool, and that was my favorite part of the ad. She later became the Lux avatar around early 2013ish? I didn’t use her right away for whatever reason. I’ll come back to talking about her shortly.
My personal life back then was in shambles. I was working part time, my then partner didn’t have a job during the summer since his job thrived on college students living nearby and buying fried food while inebriated. He had horrific money management to boot. I thought us sharing a bank account would make him hold himself accountable. Boy, was I naive! And whew, did we struggle. We lived paycheck to paycheck, neither of us had savings, and he used his mom as his ATM when things got really rough. I didn’t have a college degree and I feared I’d be stuck in retail for the rest of my life as a result. I was unhappy and feeling quite trapped.
Most of what I screenshot for familyshowcase were ads from 1984-1987, and those commercial blocks showed guys rollerskating down a hill with a Mountain Dew bottle waiting for them at the bottom, friends grinning from ear to ear as they ate pizza slices from Pizza Hut, couples embracing and kissing with Big Red gum in their mouths, slim women in bikinis with diet sodas in their hands, all of these people living joyous lives without any cares in the world in 30-45 second clips.
Meanwhile, I was in 2012, miserable and wondering if my bank account was going to overdraft again. I wanted this 1980s life. My then partner would get so angry because I’d spend so much time screencapping for familyshowcase or hanging out on turntable.fm that he felt like I never wanted to spend time with him, and looking back, with how rough things got, it makes sense that I was seeking an escape from the real world, even if was at the expense of being around my roommates or spending time with him.
When I started uploading tracks to the luxury elite Soundcloud page, I used familyshowcase screencaps to represent the tracks, and I used to say that Lux tracks were the soundtracks to the hundreds of thousands of screenshots I’d amassed on familyshowcase. I viewed Lux as the veiled woman from the Neon Nights commercial, a woman who lived lavishly, and money was never an issue. She lived in a penthouse, her walls were windows that highlighted her neighboring buildings, which were equally tall skyscrapers. Lux didn’t need a man, though a man was nice to court once in a while. She lived in VHS tapes, she’d play on a loop in your VCR, and she invited you into a world where sure, things felt lonely, but she understood you and she wanted to make you feel less so. She was the answer to the isolation I felt as I became more and more withdrawn from my unsatisfying and unstable reality.
To answer the last part of your question, I felt like Lux and IRL me were two different people, and I still sort of do. I perform as Lux, but I’ve never envisioned myself as the Lux character I created in 2012. I felt like she was the hand reaching out to save me more than anything. I do think her characteristics were things that I always wanted to be but had been too shy to show, and Lux has made me feel comfortable in showing those characteristics without any fucks to give about it, so that’s pretty cool. She gave me confidence that I severely lacked in my life. She really turned my life around.
Your first albums came out in late 2012, and by the time rose quartz and Late Night Delight came out in early 2013, you had basically nailed your style. How did you learn so quickly what you effectively wanted to do?
A core memory of early Lux happened one night in one of the Tinychats that usually consisted of folks Liz/Chaz/myself were friends with through Turntable. Ramona was on webcam, and she was listening to I&II, two “mixtapes” I did that were later released as a full album on Ailanthus. I look at that early period of working on my mixtapes and I cringe, which I know I shouldn’t do, but a lot of that material was me throwing things at the wall and seeing what would stick. It wasn’t great, but it was fun and I was new and I should be nicer to it. People seemed to really like it, though. Mr. Nonsense gave me a platform by posting Ooh on the Chillwave/Glo-Fi/Hypnagogic Pop page, and tracks I uploaded onto Soundcloud were getting support I never expected to receive.
I was extremely nervous for Ramona to hear it because I wanted to impress her, and sure enough, she fucking haaaaated it. She never said it outright, but her facial expressions and lack of commentary said it all. She did perk up at the track smoking lounge, asking why I cut it off so quickly. Back then, I thought short tracks were supreme, that you could get the point across in a short period of time and longer tracks were unnecessary. However, she wasn’t wrong, that song could have looped for at least a little bit longer. I told myself to hold onto that thought, to seek out songs more in the smoking lounge realm, let my tracks breathe and don’t end them so quickly, and rely a bit less on vocals, only using small vocal parts with intention.
I found a YouTube channel that had loads of 1980s funk and pop, primarily from Japan, and went to town ripping everything that appealed to me. If the track felt like something exciting I could work with, it was getting ripped and messed with. skyscraper was the first track I finished from rose quartz, and it reminded me of being 14-15 years old, staying up until 2:00 a.m. because I couldn’t stop scrolling online. My glowing monitor was the only light on in the house. I’d stand up and stretch or run to the bathroom or whatever, and then I’d sit in front of the windows that faced the second busiest street in my hometown for a few minutes. I’d watch the occasional car pass by and think, “Where are they going? Are they heading to a party? Are they heading home from work? Are they just bored and driving around to pass the time? I wonder what they’re thinking, what they’re listening to, how they’re feeling.” I imagined myself being in a car that I once watched from the dining room window, bored and lonely at the steering wheel, with vaporwave blaring as I drove through an empty downtown, wondering if anybody else felt equally as lonely at that moment. That was when I knew I was on the right track, because skyscraper stood out as something more personal to me, and something I’d fall in love with if I were still just an avid listener. I finished sparkling not too long after that, that track really amplified the “lonely night driving” vibe I’d accidentally stumbled upon. I decided to sift and find more tracks that would continue down that path. Some of the tracks like glamour and minx were made with the veiled Neon Nights woman in mind, because I realized at this point that she was the 60/40-esque vision I had of what I wanted luxury elite to be. To be funny about it, Lux tracks going forward were in two categories: “Look at me, I feel rich!” or “Look at me, I feel so fucking lonely!”
I’ve said it before, but I think my side of Late Night Delight was a bit inferior in comparison to how much fun Ryan’s side was. I was nervous as shit during the making of LND, but I don’t know that I ever told Ryan that. Saint Pepsi was really beginning to blow up; he dropped three releases in a very short time span, and the singles he put up on Soundcloud were getting a ton of eyes on him. There was some intense pressure to deliver something that felt like it was on Ryan’s level. Despite that, we had a lot of fun cheering each other on in DMs and sending tracks back and forth. I look at that time very fondly, even with the inferiority complex hitting me like a bomb. With the exception of schaumburg and cruising, I suppose nightlife also, I feel like my side of the split almost sounded morose? Maybe I sound crazy here, but I left that experience thinking that I needed to make something happier in the future, something less within the “rich/lonely” realm, which I eventually did with fantasy (and years later with my 2018 and onward material).
2013 was probably the most prolific year of your career. This was peak early vaporwave too – please talk about that time and how you experienced it, especially when it blew up on the internet. How did the scene evolve from your point of view?
Though I’d seen plenty of articles pop up about seapunk during its brief moment in the spotlight, it was very surreal to see somebody covering what was now officially known as vaporwave at the end of 2012. The genre was so personal to me and the scene as I knew it at that point was tiny, it felt so niche. I didn’t realize how it was spreading around to others. I mean, it makes sense looking back; I remember hearing that OPN found the music video for Laserdisc Visions’ track Tingri and he shared it in some form, so of course people were going to check out what he was sharing. But I definitely didn’t expect any coverage outside of promotion by friends or fellow artists, maybe a niche music blog like stolen lynx or somebody sharing it at most. I had no clue what the hell Dummy Mag was or what sort of audience vaporwave was about to receive from this sudden spotlight moment.
It was interesting reading how Ramona and Robin had described the genre, though I felt like an imposter for not viewing it in the same way. I remember trying to force myself to believe that; there’s an interview out there from early 2013 where I really tried my best to use the same key terms, and it likely read as embarrassing word salad, but I quickly dropped it because it wasn’t genuinely how I perceived vaporwave to be. I saw the scene as a group of people bringing their backgrounds and past and present influences to the table, who were messing around with music they either grew up hearing or were hearing for the first time and wanting to recontextualize it.
Nobody Here turned a part of the Lady in Red chorus into an isolation anthem simply by pitching it down and looping three words over and over again, which resulted in folks like 骨架的 and Computer Dreams experimenting with this idea in their own way, which then opened the eyes of Ramona and Robin and other early adopters/proto-vaporwavers to bring their own influences and backgrounds to the table, and so on. I only lived in the 80s for two years, my memories start around 1992, but I felt nostalgic for a world I didn’t fully experience because that world felt much more soothing than the world I was living in by the time 2013 hit. That’s why I was there, and I knew others felt similarly to me, and I no longer felt like I was imposing on something I thought I misjudged.
More vaporwave artists were following me on Soundcloud as 2013 continued, and Soundcloud was recommending new accounts left and right. People I discovered while I heavily listened to chillwave were now diving fully into making vaporwave, like Topaz Gang (fka Betamaxx, not synthwave Betamaxx) and VentureX (fka The Pillars of Creation). Of course, that also makes sense, since chillwave also utilized their fair share of 80s sampling for their own material. The most popular chillwave song of all time was built on a loop from a Gary Low song, for fuck’s sake! Washed Out was out here sampling DEVO and italo disco! I’d argue that vaporwave was the result of people who felt inspired by chillwave and hypnagogic pop, and people combined elements from each to create, for lack of a better term, a Monstro Elisasue. And now that monster was getting its moment in the sun, and nobody wanted to chop her head off in this version (yet).
I’m of the belief that 2013 wasn’t even the biggest year for the scene, though. In my opinion, it was 2014 that was the biggest year, when vaporwave was being seen as a meme and even more eyes were hitting vaporwave. It was easy once upon a time to catch up with the vaporwave Bandcamp tag; even with how prolific many of us were, it’d be like maybe five or so new releases at most per week. By 2014, there were multiple new releases daily, and you had to catch up a lot on what you missed. New labels began to appear, I believe r/vaporwave had been made at this point or maybe was about to be created? The word was really spreading around, and new people kept popping up left and right. It was like somebody threw Gizmo into the water or something, it was wild!
Going back to 2013 again, the new artists were either approaching the scene through a chillwave-adjacent, having fun kind of flair, or in a “we must follow the principles listed in this paragraph of this Adam Harper Definitive Vaporwave Article OR ELSE”. I really liked what folks like ショッピングワールドjp and Hairspray Heart were doing. ＤＯＮＴ/ BＥ/ 正方形 was another cool gem who disappeared way too soon. And of course, I loved Nmesh and 회사AUTO (R.I.P.). Some of these artists were even coming in as fans of Lux; Late Night Delight sold 25 copies of a tape in one day at a time when tapes barely existed and rarely sold out immediately, and neither Ryan nor myself anticipated the response Late Night Delight received. It was a boost to my then low self-esteem, that’s for damn sure.
Liz and Chaz joined forces to create SPF420. I was given the opportunity to play the second ever SPF show just after rose quartz’s release, and I performed by plugging my mp3 player into the microphone port and playing my prerecorded set “live” on Tinychat. In those days, it wasn’t the most common thing to send your set over to a host who would play it on your behalf (unless your internet was garbage or you were having some sort of technical difficulty with streaming it yourself). The performing artist was the one streaming the visuals and the audio in real time, or you were streaming your audio, and somebody else was livestreaming visuals “up on stage” with you. For that show, Chaz did my visuals, and he did such a good job!
That first URL set was simultaneously exciting and terrifying, and the response was absolutely incredible. Chaz also did a set of his own under his Metallic Ghosts alias, and filling out the rest of that lineup were Veracom, Transmuteo, Infinity Frequencies, coolmemoryz, and Ramona doing a Prism Corp. DJ set. SPF420 was gaining traction quickly; by the time SPF420 3.0 rolled around, the audience count ranged from 100 or so to 300+, depending on which artist was playing. There were friends from Turntable eagerly tuning in, artists within the scene as well, of course, but there were also quite a bit of new faces coming in who had heard about vaporwave and were curious to see what was going on.
By the end of 2013, SPF420 had gained enough attention between word of mouth and blogs like TinyMixTapes, who were now covering the scene and fully throwing their support behind what vaporwave and SPF420 were doing, that it caught the attention of fucking Anamanaguchi, who played the SPF420 Christmas party to around 250 people. Anamanaguchi was a big fucking deal, and it was cool that they were so into the concept and eagerly wanted to participate. Things were getting crazy for SPF420, and I felt so proud of Liz and Chaz for hosting these DIY online shows and giving people across the world a chance to connect with each other and with their favorite artists in chat. It felt like we were all on top of the world, never did I expect anything like this to happen to any of us. 420.
Floral Shoppe was getting a lot of attention, especially from the /mu/ crowd. As a lurker who had already witnessed their reactions to Tyler the Creator and Death Grips (“check out this cool underground thing I found” > “this is now /mu/’s obsession” > “/mu/ users are lashing out because of overexposure” > “/mu/ now fully hates this”), I knew that this was going to be bad. It didn’t help that Anthony Fantano reviewed Floral Shoppe out of nowhere. I never watched the review, but I recall hearing that he didn’t like it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that fueled /mu/’s annoyance even further.
There were two categories of /mu/tants who hated vaporwave: the people who hated vaporwave entirely and wanted it to die already, and the people who liked Floral Shoppe and what they read about in Dummy Mag, but despised the second wavers. The latter group called us broporwave, “the cancer that was killing vaporwave”, because we weren’t following the vision of vaporwave outlined in the Dummy Mag article. It’s funny because the majority of the first wave artists within the scene, to my knowledge, didn’t agree with that stance at all. We were all quite friendly and supportive of each others’ work.
Eventually, many of the second wavers were doxxed by /mu/, personal photos were shared, all of us were ridiculed and mocked, slurs thrown, the whole nine yards. I couldn’t trust some of the 2013-2014 artists who I knew promoted themselves on /mu/ because I feared becoming friends with somebody who mocked me and my friends. I even vaguely remember a /mu/ user or two creating vaporwave albums that were fully made to mock what was happening. Adam Harper chose to amplify and echo what /mu/ was saying about broporwave in his follow up article, which caused some controversy amongst our tight knit community. People were feeling insulted by what he had said, myself included. He eventually apologized for the outrage it caused on his personal blog. By the end of the year, Adam’s favorite albums of 2013 list was posted, and his #1 album was a tie between Late Night Delight and an album by Infinity Frequencies. Now that’s a full circle moment.
And on another full circle note, in the same /mu/ thread from 2012 where Ramona referenced Moonlit TV Dinner, she also said this about the Dummy Mag/TinyMixTapes coverage and her general outlook on the scene, and I hope she doesn’t mind me quoting her. I feel like it’s an interesting way to finish this question.
“i can appreciate the philosophy that the blog coverage has outlined in projects like my own in that they are meant to be a clear reflection of the human condition in this precise moment in history. blah blah blah i could talk about accelerationism and anti-capitalism and blah blah blah fukushima etc for hours but not because i’m a vaporwaver, i’m just really political like that. and perhaps fairly naive.
but in strict regard to vaporwave, i think that kind of coverage encourages people to over-intellectualize it, which in turn makes the people behind it appear unjustifiably pretentious (and in turn, completely moronic) given the type of music we specialize in. how much context can you really give to a doctored loop of a jazz instrumental? truly guys, we are sample curators at best.
we put into practice the art of commodifying art. new dreams ltd. was about taking ‘music’ and returning it to its most primordial state, ‘sound’.
and because of that, i sometimes worry the net audience has, since dummy and tinymixtapes brought us up, been given the idea that internet club and myself, for example, truly believe that our eccojams were in some way ‘transcendental’. perhaps it does transcend music. but it only does so because it is bred from samples so heavily commodified that it becomes, in itself, non-music. so you can view it as forward thinking, or just as easily, taking the piss. so i think it’s slightly disrespectful to electronic music when vaporwave is given serious regard. perhaps vaporwave’s legacy really will be decided by its audience. it’s hard to imagine what 2013 will be like.
i might speak only for myself, but new dreams ltd was a slightly derisive practical joke aimed at the witch house/seapunk/net music scene. it is bred from the hypothesis that the scene has such a backwards mentality of music that they will listen to anything, no matter how tragically unfashionable the music sounds, if it’s packaged fashionably. new dreams ltd was essentially built to exploit how heavily the perception of sound is affected by imagery”
“I looked at myself as a fan first, always. I love the artists, the community, the curation, the sample selections, the creativity, and how the scene has evolved beyond its origins to incorporate original compositions or different styles of sampling, different genre choices, etc. I still seek out vaporwave music to this day.” (luxury elite)
Many of the early pioneers including Lopatin and Ferraro, but even Vektroid and Internet Club moved on from vaporwave in that time. What made you want to stick around making it? How did you perceive other artists wanting to distance themselves from it at the time?
I don’t fully agree with your first statement. I know Eccojams was a massive inspiration for many artists within the scene, I know that I ooh’d and ahh’d earlier about Replica sampling 80s commercials, I know that my favorite track from Garden of Delete was looped and sampled from another artist… I never considered Daniel to be vaporwave. In that interview he did a few months ago with that podcast whose title I can’t remember, Daniel says it himself: he thinks it’s rad that it inspired people but he doesn’t link himself to that.
I don’t consider James Ferraro to be vaporwave at all, either. The Condo Pets EP and Far Side Virtual were far left turns from his previous hypnagogic pop material and felt weirdly parallel to vaporwave, but both of those came out nearly a year after the first vaporwave releases, and I think he wanted to take a break from the analog-y, tape splicing things he’d been doing for a long while and shift to experimenting with music that had more of a hi-fi, digital sheen. He’d hinted that he was shifting into a pop direction with On Air and Night Dolls. More than anything, James and Daniel were pioneers of hypnagogic pop, which was a significant influence on the first wavers of the scene.
Also, Internet Club is still around! Sure, they’re not as prolific as they once were, but they’re still around. Robin did two incredible IRL sets for FlamingoFest I and II in Los Angeles and NYC! Both times, Robin went on just before I did, and both sets calmed my super frazzled nerves because I still get super nervous about performing. Those IC sets were fabulous. I hope I get to see them live again soon! [ed. note: I wasn’t trying to imply that Internet Club stopped making music; I was referring to them moving away from vaporwave temporarily in 2013, as they confirmed in this interview from 2024]
When I returned in 2020, I’ll be honest: I came back thinking that people had long forgotten about me, and I accepted that fate. I had my chance to return after prism [from 2018, ed. note], insisting that I was back for good, and I failed everyone by leaving again. Not quite my decision, doing that. Between my PC still acting up after getting fixed and struggling with major back issues, I couldn’t return as I’d intended to. I did not anticipate being put on a pedestal like I was vapor royalty when I officially came back. Some people might think I’m full of shit here, but even with the insanity of 2013 and getting a shoutout in The Wire in 2014 (Thanks, Adam!) I never saw myself as a celebrity. I looked at myself as a fan first, always. I love the artists, the community, the curation, the sample selections, the creativity, and how the scene has evolved beyond its origins to incorporate original compositions or different styles of sampling, different genre choices, etc. I still seek out vaporwave music to this day, six years later.
I think people see 2013-2019 vaporwave as this time where artists made a lot of money and got loads of connections and had some sort of Cinderella story, when in actuality, we were part of a niche movement that got a lot of unexpected attention. That didn’t mean any of us were making money. Nobody fucking made any money! You’re talking about a time when it was seen as gauche to even ask for anything financially outside of artist tape copies, and some labels were pocketing money from the physicals and digitals they released. Many artists privately complained that their music was put up on streaming platforms by the labels who released it without consent, and they weren’t seeing a dime to boot.
On top of that, there was a very real fear with folks who heavily sampled that accepting money would result in massive troubles with copyright issues. Accepting money was seen as risky. There was also a time in the mid-2010s when physical labels were coming and going and selling tapes of vaporwave albums that were never actually created or shipped out, and again, money was pocketed by these label owners who eventually vanished into thin air. It took a long time for a conversation about how artists should get paid for their art to be accepted and validated, but bootleg labels releasing vaporwave vinyl presently make more money in a year than I’ve ever made from Lux in a decade. The artists that people perceive to be financially well-off… one would be sorely disappointed hearing the artists’ realities.
Finally getting to my point here, some people have inflated earlier vaporwave artists to some sort of bizarre 1% status where they believe we’re all financially fabulous and we’ve pulled up the ladder from other artists who seek to follow in our footsteps, it reads like fucking fanfiction. Those people need to log off and take a break from the internet. Other people see us as famous and treat us like we’re not peers. Some have gotten creepily parasocial with us.
A guy from the UK got hyperfixated on me and Nmesh big time around 2014; he mentioned us so much on his Twitter that it raised some red flags and I kept a close eye on him. He proved me right when he changed his artist name to match mine and used my Lux screenshots for his artwork. Meanwhile, he’d use his IRL account to go to my Lux FB page and tell me that this horrible artist (a.k.a. HIM!!!) was parading around as me. He really wanted attention from me. It was so fucking unhinged. After my comeback in 2020, someone appeared on the scene who would speculate about me in a shared Discord server like I didn’t exist, making inaccurate and frankly, strange connections about me that I’d never thought of myself. He eventually used tons of my album names and track titles for his discography and somehow, nobody ever caught on. He now likes tagging all of my samples for WhoSampled cred.
I can only imagine what sort of people Ramona and Robin have experienced over the last decade or so. It wouldn’t surprise me if extreme parasocial behaviors resulted in both of them choosing to create a wide berth and protecting themselves from further strange encounters. I can’t blame them if so.
But most of the first wavers disappeared because they simply moved on, they had their fun and they felt like their chapter within vaporwave was closed. They moved onto other genres or shifted their focus to IRL priorities. I don’t think anyone expected the vaporwave ride to last longer than a few years max; witch house and chillwave only truly lasted for like… four or five years? Seapunk only lasted for a few months. I don’t judge the artists who disappeared at all, I focus more on how thrilling it was to be in their presence and how much they inspired me.
You founded your label Fortune 500 in January 2013, closed it down in January 2014, but revived it twice since then. Talk about the vision for the label please, and what led to these decisions.
There were a handful of labels releasing vaporwave albums when I started, and those labels were Beer on the Rug, Ailanthus Recordings, and Sunup Recordings. Vaporbabes popped up sometime in late 2012, I believe, and I got the impression that a bunch of friends found vaporwave, felt similarly inspired by it, and created the label, and each friend had an alias and each alias released an album and participated in the sampler. Vaporbabes was, at the time, the first strictly vaporwave label to exist. I liked the discography, those albums were lovely! But they shifted into releasing seapunk and focusing on a genre called “pirateviolence”, and I was so disappointed. I felt hopeful that we’d eventually get a strictly vaporwave label, and I eventually decided to be the change I wanted to see.
Initially, Fortune 500’s concept was going to be like… Fortune 500 is getting artists together to do a side A/side B “singles”! Get artists together that work really well together! That’s actually why my split with DRIPZ exists. But then I thought the concept was silly, and at the time, I didn’t feel the most comfortable reaching out to people and asking. Probably a month, month-and-a-half later, I revisited the topic Fortune 500 to a group of homies and fellow mods of the chillwave+ Facebook page. I started thinking, “Why don’t I create a label for friends who just want their album to be hosted somewhere, or for friends having a hard time reaching out to labels?”
I called it a “last resort” label in the beginning. VentureX read the conversation and asked to participate, I didn’t even realize he was considering making vaporwave at all! That day, I created the MS Paint skyscraper images affiliated with the label, and the mods were super excited and extremely supportive, they really gave me the push I needed to say “fuck it” and see what would happen. I also told Ryan about Fortune 500, and he immediately got to work on making Empire Building with the intent of releasing it on the label.
At some point while working on tv party [from February 2013, ed. note], I got the courage to ask other vaporwave artists if they’d like to contribute to an official compilation I’d wanted to do for a year. I was shocked at how many people said yes, even folks I’d never spoken with like Computer Dreams and 骨架的 were down to be a part of it. A few weeks later, Empire Building became the first Fortune 500 release, followed a few days later by tv party, and my dream compilation, The Music of the Now Age, was released just a few days later. The rest is history.
By the time Fortune 500 had released マクロスMACROSS 82-99’s Sailorwave [in December 2013, ed. note], I was feeling so proud of the label, but very exhausted. Fortune 500 had been going for a year at that point, and I hadn’t really given myself a break. On top of that, I was given the opportunity to live out my radio broadcasting dreams, thanks to Pearl of Drifts.fm. She led me to her good friend, Spednar, and his part URL/part IRL community called Cosmic Sound. Spednar was looking for folks to do online radio shows on the Cosmic Sound website, and I immediately volunteered. Neon Nights aired every Wednesday night at 11:00 p.m. eastern, and back then it was weekly instead of the current bi-weekly episode setup I’ve done since my return.
Spending week after week on brainstorming setlists/recording the intros and outros/working on the episodes in Audacity to then export in wav to premiere “live”... it took a lot of time and attention that I originally had for Fortune 500, and I was realizing then that I had a choice I needed to make. 18 Carat Affair, who had promised to send an album over for a little while, finally appeared in my inbox with Adventures in Schizophrenia [released in February 2014, ed. note]. That was when I made my final decision: Fortune 500 was officially coming to an end, and an album from my peak vaporwave idol was the best way to say goodbye. I thought the label was done forever, the door was permanently closed. Wellllll…so much for that!
The third Music of the Now Age installment [from 2015, ed. note] happened because people were begging for Fortune 500’s return, and Dream Catalogue’s fabulous Eternal Dream System comp had just been released. I found myself really missing working on Fortune 500, so yeah, I stole David’s idea and created TMOTNA III out of it.
The fourth installment [from 2022, ed. note] came out when I was experiencing the joy of returning back online and being back in the vaporwave realm. I missed working on Fortune 500 again. Lockdown brought a few other artists back from the dead, and I decided that it’d be cool to bring the gang back together again for one final compilation that no one would expect. I reached out to everybody I could, including people who hadn’t released anything in years. I’m so proud of The Music of the Now Age IV, releasing that was exhilarating and so, so special.
A few more releases followed, but many folks I reached out to either didn’t have albums to send my way, or more bluntly, they wanted to release with labels that could do physicals. I couldn’t blame them! On top of that, I was constantly working on URL sets, both audio and visuals, and preparing sets for IRL shows I was getting asked to do. Combine that with getting busy again working on Neon Nights, and I didn’t have enough energy to dedicate to a label that didn’t seem to be on as many people’s radars anymore. I chose to quietly shutter the label for good and didn’t make any sort of flashy announcement about it. I don’t believe it’s coming back this time, but I know, I said the same thing after The Music of the Now Age III. But truly, I think Fortune 500 is done done.
In your live performances, you’ve always been wearing a mask. Why is it so important for you to keep that anonymity?
One of the things that drew me into this music was the world it transported me into. The people behind the aliases didn’t matter, even whenever I developed friendships with them. You were getting a glimpse into a world the artist curated in a 20-30 minute album, and I thought it was so fascinating concept-wise. I think that cracks began to form later when people seemingly viewed vaporwave as something that could platform them to bigger and better things, like it was becoming less about the music and more about the person behind it.
Egos were beginning to really show themselves on social media, and fighting was happening daily. The connected family sort of vibe was no longer there, things felt really splintered, and all of that to say: egos harmed the scene. I didn’t like seeing that unfold in a place where the music was once the primary focus, and most hid behind a veil of anonymity. Though I show a lot of my personality online, I never felt the need to identify myself, as it wasn’t an important part of the convo (Even though people wanted it to be; the immediate response to a woman making vaporwave was usually “What does she look like? Is she hot?”)
I stole the mask idea from Ramona. She was looking into buying a mask for an IRL show she was invited to play, and she’d linked to a bunch of different masks she’d been looking at in our Tinychat room. I recall the expressionless mask I use now being one of the types she linked to, and I remember she linked a few medical masks, too. I thought she had a really cool idea, and I liked that it provided a level of creepiness that wouldn’t have existed had she chosen to just perform as herself. I was looking around at a Spirit Halloween and found the expressionless mask in one of the aisles, and I bought it just because. It came in handy when I was asked to do my first show, and it became my staple.
Without the mask, I wouldn’t have the courage to do any of what I do live. I’d be so distracted by how my facial expressions looked, if I looked like a tomato onstage, etc. that I wouldn’t be able to have any fun. The mask gives me freedom, even if it’s torture to perform in it. It’s a fucking heat trap! I likely wouldn’t be doing shows at all if I didn’t have that mask.
What was the pandemic like for you? How did luxury elite experience it?
Lockdown started days after the end of a four year relationship, and my lockdown homie was encouraging me to get a computer and work on Lux again. Like I mentioned earlier, I feared people were going to hold my absence against me and hate me for it, so I was reluctant to come back. My friend told me I was crazy, that I wouldn’t know for sure unless I reappeared and found out for myself. Then I was asked to participate in a URL festival, I think it was called Waves, and I submitted a set extremely last second. Fast forward to the high society tape release. We met up before work so I could give him a tape as a thank you. The first thing he said upon receiving the tape was “I told you it would work out!”
I quit my public facing customer service job a few months into 2020, thank fuck. I was working from home, doing long 3-11 p.m. shifts, and I’d have my laptop on next to my work monitors so I could quietly listen to whatever URL show was happening live that night. The shows kept me from losing my mind because that job was so, so stressful. It was cool to see all of these URL events popping up left and right and watching sets from all of these new artists I’d never seen or heard of before, and the excitement in the chats was palpable. It felt like old SPF420 times. Of course, SPF420 also returned during this time, and they had already done a lockdown show or two.
The best way to answer how luxury elite experienced lockdown: luxury elite got to play a SPF420 URL show with TOBACCO. LUXURY ELITE GOT TO PLAY A SPF420 URL SHOW WITH TOBACCO. NEVER anticipated that happening in my life. Chaz showed me the screenshot of Tobacco asking if I could play (Tobacco and I were kinda chatty on Instagram and he definitely knew I was Lux), and that was one of the happiest moments of my entire life. The high society VHS was created because I knew I had to go all out for a Tobacco URL show, especially since I ripped off his Fucked Up Friends DVDs when I created the fantasy VHS years before. He really enjoyed what I did with the high society VHS when it premiered that night. Something he said to me at the end of my set got lost in the sea of excited chatter, but I remember him saying “I bequeath to thee” or something like that. The word bequeath was definitely used. That was cool.
Closer to the end of the lockdown era, I reconnected with a homie who I once knew as the person behind Tiannanmen Square Dance, a Tumblr blog that covered vaporwave/hypnagogic pop/chillwave/synthwave. I found him after he had kindly reviewed my Music of the Now Age track in 2013, and I’d since enjoyed reading his blog entries and checking out his recommendations. He was going by his new name, YUNG SHIRO 白, and he was freaking out in my DMs because the high society SPF420 party included an artist he liked named DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. I admittedly wasn’t familiar with Sabrina at that time. Sabrina was a SPF420 pick (along with desert sand feels warm at night, fun fact), and Chaz and Ryan reassured me that I’d love them. Chaz and Ryan were correct!
Cut to a few months later, this YUNG SHIRO 白 person and I fell for each other, and I visited Los Angeles and Las Vegas for the first time ever so we could spend time with each other again. I’d always wanted to visit the west coast, and that desire seeped into loads of Lux songs, especially tracks that appeared on fantasy. I saw an ocean for the first time, I saw palm trees in person, I got to experience a California to Nevada road trip with a scenic view of the desert, and I got to walk around the gorgeous Vegas strip at night. It was everything I imagined and more. If you told 2019 me what 2021 me would be accomplishing, 2019 me would think you were joking. 2019 me never flew on a plane or traveled much outside of Kentucky, and 2019 me definitely wouldn’t have expected to find love with a person I’d met six years before on Tumblr. Life changed so much within such a short time period, it’s strange how that works. What if I never chose to return as Lux, where would I be now? It’s weird to even think about that.
Lockdown wasn’t all lovely, of course. It was a truly terrifying time and the uncertainty of our future was extremely daunting. Would we be stuck in lockdown for another year? Would this ever go away? We lost Lindsheaven and his father to COVID in 2021, and COVID took my sister a few years later. 2021 also saw the loss of Terrell Davis. His last tweet was a link to the Caroline Polachek song Breathless. It still haunts me. It’s heartbreaking how many people we’ve lost in the last few years.
I absolutely LOVE the stuff you’ve been doing as creative zen – to finish this, please talk about the concept behind that more recent side project!
Thank you thank you! I was intrigued by the 2000s-themed albums that started popping up a few years ago, like “Slideshow” by crt paralysis and clubhouse by Mom and Dad’s Computer. I specifically remember hearing clubhouse and thinking, “If we’re revisiting the 2000s, then I want more music that sounds like this.”
I bought a Creative Zen Touch a few years ago, even though I have two other mp3 players I actively use. I blame DankPods for my purchase. I love that mp3 player so much. I never had an iPod, my family was too poor for that, and using the Touch made me feel like I was finally getting the cool mp3 player I wanted so badly as a teenager. It’s such a sick time capsule appearance-wise, and it still works great. I thought creative zen would be a really cool artist name if I chose to actually create a 2000s-inspired album, and I held onto that name for a few months before I began work on touch, the debut album.
mp3 players are unintentionally affiliated with major mile markers in my life. Around late 2005/early 2006, my friend gave me this cheap but charming 128MB mp3 player that you simply plugged into your USB port, it was nice to not have to install iTunes for it. He’d stolen a couple of them from Big Lots, I think my best friend got one and maybe his ex got one, too? I associate that mp3 player with mallrat hangs every Friday with my friend group. I’d use the $10 my parents would give me to buy CDs or Dairy Queen chicken tenders. We’d go across the street to Books-A-Million after the mall closed, and plop ourselves in the manga section. I’d flip through music trivia books while listening to CSS’ Alala or a People in Planes track, at most I’d have 15 tracks I’d loop through over and over. It was an exciting time of finally hanging out with people who I felt understood weird ol’ me, and it felt like a time of true potential for me. Despite my anxieties, I felt so happy.
The mp3 player I mentioned earlier, the one that preserved Vektroid’s unreleased material for a while, that one was used daily in 2011 and 2012 during my walks. There was a park nearby my house that I’d walk to, and I’d do a few laps around the trail before heading back home. Those walks were sacred, they were head clearing, and it was just me and whatever chillwave/hypnagogic pop/early vaporwave album I was discovering and enjoying. Lots of Deep Fantasy listens. Lots of Seahawks and Whitewoods on rotation. Sand Circles, LA Vampires, Greeen Linez, Midnight Runners. I’m stopping myself before I recite my entire listening history. The following year, I’d load upcoming Fortune 500 releases on the mp3 player and usually took extra time on those walks so I could enjoy the album in one sitting…standing, whatever. Lots of lovely memories and associations with that mp3 player. I was devastated when it stopped turning on one day, but it at least still connected to the computer when you plugged it in. That thing was a homie.
I also wanted to infuse my high school memories into this mp3 player tribute album; most of those memories involve being glued to my computer and listening to tons of CDs through Winamp, making sure to scrobble everything. My first desktop computer was a Dell my parents bought me for my 14th birthday back in 2002. It ran Windows XP, which I absolutely adored, and AOL was my portal to new and exciting territories via message boards and journaling sites. I was so fucking awkward, I barely knew how to talk to people, and the internet was intimidating, exciting, and educational. It helped me find my voice when I was too afraid to speak, and it gave me the chance to hear other perspectives outside of what I was hearing in my very conservative town or whatever I was hearing on TV. I digress, but all of that to say: I think I did an all right job of combining all of those concepts into the two albums that I’ve put out. creative zen ended up being far more personal than I meant for it to be, and I like that it worked out that way.
Listen to luxury elite on Bandcamp
luxury elite’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
INTERNET CLUB – UNDERWATER MIRAGE (2012)
S U R F I N G – Deep Fantasy (2012)
Lasership Stereo/18 Carat Affair – Pleasure Control (2012)
midnight television – midnight television (2011)
TOPAZ GANG – TUXEDO PRINCESS (2013)
Vektroid – Planet Dudette Cassette (2011)
Whitewoods – Spaceship Earth (2013)
DRIPZ’ entire Soundcloud collection that should have been an album (2012/13)
vcr-classique – atlantic memories (2020)
猫 シ Corp. – NEWS AT 11 (2016) [“Funny enough, I only listened to this for the first time a year and a half ago”]
from luxury elite: “I feel like a dick for putting primarily early vaporwave on this list, but these albums are significant to me! However, special shoutouts to the SΞCRΞ+ ΞXPLORΛ+ION PROGRΛM [Vol. 1] compilation, Mom and Dad’s Computer’s clubhouse, Ghost Enterprise’s Vistas, bootlegbby’s 2009grind, Groovy Kaiju’s Destroy All Monsters, Late Arcane’s Prestige, AURAGRAPH’s Tropics 1, luxury noise’s after everything, and christtt’s www for being major standouts I’ve heard in the last six years. I know I’m forgetting more great albums here. Please forgive me, friends!”