Vapor Talks #28: Pad Chennington
A conversation with vaporwave's #1 video content creator
From its very beginnings, the vaporwave scene has had a difficult relationship with the music media – from the controversial reception of Adam Harper’s Dummy Mag articles to Anthony Fantano trashing Floral Shoppe a year too late, to Rolling Stone suddenly hyping up the 2814 album without any context, to Pitchfork ignoring the whole movement for 15 years (except for the odd George Clanton album). Few outlets actually seemed to care about the music and the scene, among them the blog Tiny Mix Tapes (rip) and then later, the Bandcamp Daily magazine.
Enter Pad Chennington: The content creator from New Jersey filled this gap when he started his vaporwave-dedicated YouTube channel in 2017. With a solid 170,000 subscribers, it has since become one of the most important and trusted sources on everything that’s happening and being discussed within the culture. He’s explained the main themes and subgenres, reported on scandals and controversies, reviewed the classic albums and interviewed the scene’s biggest artists. His videos even became a gateway into the scene for many new producers too.
Pad Chennington – and no, that’s not his real name but a pun on a legendary American football quarterback – is not exactly what you’d call a music journalist. He’s not your standard influencer type either – for years he stayed as anonymous as many vaporwave artists, never showing his face, letting only his distinctive voice be heard in his videos. He’s more of a knowledgeable fan and collector, someone who’s active and respected within the scene but reporting on it at the same time.
Besides creating content, he’s a DJ, he’s released two albums of his own music and he’s founded an independent record label. Even if he’s started covering other forms of weird fringe sounds like experimental and noise music in his channel, he’s still a passionate fan of vaporwave music and culture first. Through his videos, he’s found a way of meaningfully supporting this fringe subgenre of experimental electronic music that legacy media continue to ignore.
Growing up in New Jersey, what style of music did your family play around the house when you were a kid?
My dad’s favorite band was Queen. Some of the earliest memories I have of music as a child is remembering these VHS tapes [of Queen’s live shows] being played over and over. My mom was a mix of everything – she loved Michael Jackson, classic rock, disco…
In my pre-teen years, I got really into the Beatles and became obsessed with their discography. That opened up the door for being a little more tasteful in music, listening to The White Album and hearing how music could be so experimental. I wanted to discover more, and that’s what led me down to electronic music and eventually to the point of where I am.
What was your first entry point into electronic music?
There’s a specific one: I loved the [Daft Punk] song “One More Time”, but for the longest time, I thought that was an organically made song; I didn’t know that they were sampling Eddie Johns. When I first saw a video breaking down how it was made, I was mind-blown. This was just the coolest thing, taking an old disco track and making something new out of it. It just piqued my curiosity of wanting to discover more about electronic music.
When did you hear about vaporwave for the first time then?
This was much later, I don’t remember exactly when but around late 2015, maybe early 2016. I’d just graduated from college, and I was working my first job. I would always have YouTube playing on the side. One day, the algorithm sent me Floral Shoppe in the related section. Because it was all in Japanese and it was so out of nowhere, something about it was interesting, so I was like, “What the hell is that? I gotta click this.”
It was the “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing” track. Obviously, that’s the big one. The first 10 seconds immediately sounded like booting up an old encyclopedia CD-ROM in my grandparents’ basement as a kid. It just felt so nostalgic. In the related section from there, I saw albums like 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open by 식료품groceries and a couple others, all the heavy hitters basically.
Can you try to explain more in detail what you liked about it?
Well, I’d just graduated from art and design school, and going to school for that is very exciting and creative, but then you get an actual job in the business world, and it’s often not as creative, so you fall into this career trap where you’re making decent money just doing the same specific thing over and over every day.
Life was getting tedious so quick for me, but these vaporwave albums became this comforting thing – there was always another album waiting for me in the Related section, and I would just keep clicking and clicking. There’s a disposability to it that I fell in love with, how there’s just tens of thousands of these albums, and some of them were made with absolutely no production value at all.
I don’t know, there’s just this weird feeling of romanticized nostalgia about consumerism and all of that stuff. There was something just so comforting about the genre, and this is why I’m still so attached to it. I could put it on any time of day – if I need to focus, clean the house, try to put my baby to sleep, whatever. These albums have played such a crucial part of my life for the last decade.
Did you try to find out more about the music and the artists initially?
At the time when I first discovered it, I don’t think I looked too deep into it. I wouldn’t even know how to look for those people, as everything was in Japanese. Of course, since creating the channel, I’ve learned so much about the identities behind these albums, but there was such an interesting time where it was truly anonymous to me as a listener. I knew nothing about these people, it was just the sounds that provided comfort for me. It’s fascinating to look back on.
Did you have any friends who were into the music as well, or did you seek out the vaporwave online communities?
Not before I decided to create the channel. In my real-life friend group, everybody had such a different taste in music. I remember I showed a couple of tracks to everyone, and they thought it was cool and interesting, but no one really latched onto it, so it was just this personal connection I had. Especially that first year, I was just going to work, sitting at an office desk, basically doing the same thing every day, but at least I had these albums as comfort material. It was a really personal thing, until I started making videos and reaching out to artists and labels.
You started your YouTube channel in October 2017. Were you still working that first dreadful job then?
Yeah. I remember telling myself that I have to do something more creative, something that’s beyond making the same shipping labels in Adobe every single day. Eventually I realized there wasn’t much video essays or just general discussion on these [vaporwave] albums on YouTube. Getting home from work and having discovered these sounds, I thought it’d be cool to talk about them.
I was always on YouTube at the time, and I knew how to do basic video editing. I went to school for graphic design, so I already worked in Premiere Pro. One day I thought, why don’t I just make videos about these albums that I have these feelings for? It’d be a nice creative outlet. That’s how it started. I would have never imagined that it would grow to where it is now.
Did you have any previous experience in music journalism?
No, absolutely not. I’ve just always listened to Anthony Fantano, and I thought he had such a great, thorough way of talking about music, which I cannot do. So I thought it would be cool to talk about it in a more conversational tone. I’m introducing these albums to many people for the first time. They don’t even know about the genre. I like to give off this idea that it’s just a friendly conversation, nothing intimidating or gatekeeping. I don’t care too much about how good it sounds. I’m just trying to be myself, as organic as possible.
I just wanted to talk more about the feelings or the places that these albums brought me to and the settings they would conjure up in my mind. I always thought that was such a fun thing to discuss. I don’t know any music theory, I really have no idea. I’m just trying to convey how I feel when I listen to these things. It’s as simple as that. That’s what drives me to write scripts for videos. I don’t think too much into it. That’s what made vaporwave so fascinating for me in the first place, beyond looking at it through a critical lens.
Like many vaporwave artists at the time, you never showed your face at first. That changed with your DJ gigs, right?
Yeah. In the beginning, I just loved the idea of having this detached thing where I could just create and not put a face to it. It existed purely for the discussion of it. But after a while, I wanted to get into DJing. I used to DJ in high school, nothing too serious, but I remember at the time realizing that if I want to DJ in public and live settings, eventually I’d have to show my face unless I want to go Daft Punk mode, which I didn’t really want to do.
We live in such a time where there has to be a face connected to everything, right? As a YouTuber, you will inherently look up ways to grow your channel or get more reach, and it’s always like, “put a face in the thumbnail,” because people like to see a personality attached to it. But even nowadays, when I’m making a video, it’s really just my voice over the album imagery. There’s something freeing about it that I can just create for the sake of talking about this one piece of music that I really like and having that the main focus.
For the first couple years, your channel was also very focused on future funk, but that has changed as well, and it’s been much more about classic vapor and signalwave in recent years.
For the first couple of years, I was definitely very much into future funk. I actually heard [Saint Pepsi’s] Hit Vibes in college, even before I heard Floral Shoppe, but I heard it in a different context. It was just a French house release for me. Now that I’m older, I’m way more into signalwave and slushwave and just classic vapor, things that are really relaxing.
Almost every other weekend I’ll DJ these themed raves, like the Shrek Raves. So I’m already experiencing this heavy, loud music in the club, and when I’m home, I like to listen to more soothing stuff. I don’t even know if there’s really future funk being made anymore. It was heavy back in the mid- to late 2010s, but maybe people got bored of it. I’m not even sure, but that sugar-rush-inducing song structure is definitely too much for me.
At the time, you even put out a couple of solo albums and ran your own independent label, Kats Kill Records. Are these musical projects dormant right now?
They’re pretty dormant. When I made the music, the reason was I wanted to have something of my own when I was DJing, and the label was just an extension of how much I loved physical releases and all the little things that went into the packaging of vinyl records. I wanted to give artists that I loved an opportunity and a platform, but after a while, I realized I’d taken on too many projects at once. When I was younger, I had an addiction to just taking on new things all the time.
Around 2019 and early 2020, between the channel and DJing and the label, there was just so much going on. I realized that I’m not able to put the amount of time I want to into everything. I had to cut out some things, and the label was definitely one of them. It was also saving so much space in my house. People do not realize that when it comes to these vaporwave labels, 99% of the time it’s just regular people with regular jobs who are running them out of their bedrooms. They don’t have a warehouse where they’re storing all their inventory.
Most of the time, it’s just some dude who has a love for the game, trying to get these sounds out to other people. There’s no real profit to be made. It’s just the love of getting something that you like onto a physical release, and it’s such a beautiful and cool thing to see it still happening. Maybe it’s also a way of giving back to the community.
At a certain point you started looking beyond vaporwave. You made videos on noise and experimental music, and a successful deep dive on The Caretaker.
For the first couple years of the channel, my number one thing in my life was putting out videos. Over time I got to a point where I was like, “Damn, what else I could really talk about?” I know there’s so many different vaporwave albums, but I already talked about most of the classics, and I’ve made a good amount of videos on different subtopics of vaporwave. I was like, “Maybe I could think of some other cool, interesting sounds throughout the internet.” And I branched out from there.
The Caretaker video was one I wanted to make for a very long time, but it always felt kind of intimidating, because there were so many videos out there about it already. Most of my videos are very conversational and just exploring my subjective feelings on the albums, but I thought it would be cool to take the time to really dive into an informative historical breakdown of that one album. It took me a year and a half to make that video – writing the script, researching it, learning new things. That ended up being one of the bigger videos on the channel, which is cool to see.
Nowadays I do not make videos as frequently as I did in the past. My mindset going forward is maybe once a year I’ll make one big video. I just got a desire to be a little more informative in terms of providing context or history. I made one really big video last year, the big signalwave deep dive.
Some younger signalwave producers have told me that both videos have provided entry points into the genre. For example, your first signalwave video from 2019 inspired the highly influential New Zealand artist TV2, and the newer one from 2025 inspired one of this season’s most interesting and lauded newcomers, Strmi from Serbia.
That’s so crazy. (laughs)
In that video, you’re talking about how you were listening to this music in a dark period after losing your father, and having these signalwave albums as a comfort zone.
Yeah, it’s the most humane thing in a way, so beautifully simple. These people are creating sounds and providing such a background to your life, and you inherently want to give back and just further share those sounds. That’s what the channel was always. I get the most joy with that feeling of creating a video, and then that artist reaches out and tells me their listener count is going up. It’s so cool to see my stuff being discussed online as well. That makes it all worth it.
As someone who also DJs a lot, how do you think live events have changed the vaporwave scene?
I think the main realization was that in real life, for the most part everybody’s really, really chill. Everybody just wants to have a good time, party and listen to some good music, and these shows are such a reminder of that. There could be so much [controversial] discussion online, but then you come together in person and none of it really matters.
There’s this joint, universally agreed nostalgia and comfort, so you’re just with like-minded people and everything just flows so naturally. Every time there’s a big show, whether it was one of the Econs [the 100% ElectronICON festivals, ed. note] or Flamingo Fest, everyone always goes back home inspired and re-energized to create. It just reignites this passion for creativity, which is the most important thing about these live shows, beyond just the human connection.
Next year you will be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of your channel. How do you see your role as a part of the vaporwave community moving forward?
At the end of the day, I’m just a fan more than anything. It’s really all I am. As a DJ, I’m playing other people’s music, and in my YouTube videos, I’m talking about other people’s music. I hope that’s what I represent in the scene, someone’s who’s just remained a fan wanting to talk about these things. That’s also what enables me to just turn off being a content creator and go live my life and enjoy time with my friends and family – and all of that has nothing to do with the vaporwave scene.
You know, me and my wife have been together for 15 years, and when I first started making the channel, she’s like, you know, “Oh, the music with the statues and stuff.” (laughs) We both thought it was just this little creative outlet for me – and that’s still how it is. I’ll make videos whenever I’m in the mood to. I don’t follow a schedule. In a way, there’s still this same feeling as when it first started ten years ago.
Did labels or brands ever reach out to you to collaborate on projects or even pay your for promotion of their projects?
I’ve been doing a lot of vinyl shorts and reels, just little mini-reviews, and for the most part, labels will send me the records. But I was never approached for any sponsorships, companies or brands weren’t trying to get involved. That just never really happened. Maybe I’m doing it all wrong though. It would have been nice to make some more money, you know? (laughs) But it never really got to that point. Again, maybe that’s because I don’t have so much of a identity tied to the channel. Most of my videos are literally just an album cover with a little design in the background and me talking over it.
I enjoyed how you spun up a bunch of videos around the mysterious Begotten project, playing into that lore that Dennis [Mikula of the Geometric Lullaby label] created around it.
There’s a popular subreddit that I’ve always loved called nosleep. Do you know that one?
Yes, it’s about user-written short horror stories, right?
Yeah, and there’s a universal agreement that we’re always gonna play into the story as if it’s real. It’s very fun. With that video, I definitely tried to play into that narrative in a way, because I like to have the story in the back of my mind as I’m listening to the albums. It’s really over the top, but I find it kind of fun and cute.
What’s your next big video project going to be?
Right now I’m actually working on a giant Floral Shoppe deep dive. It’s an album that just always lingers over the entire vaporwave space. Still to this day, there’s just this universal agreement that this piece, it’s just looking over everything, and that’s what I try to cover in this video, how it inspired everything. More than just surface level discussion of it, I will be going through Vektroid’s previous albums, what inspired it, and breaking down every track individually. I’ve already made a few videos about it, but besides talking about the album and its significance, the second main goal is to say that there is so much more to Vektroid’s larger catalog than just Floral Shoppe, and I really hope I can get people to listen to those other things as well.
Watch Pad Chennington’s videos on YouTube
Pad Chennington’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
crt paralysis – “slideshow” (self-released, 2022)
식료품groceries – 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open (Consumer Electronics, 2014)
EPSON – GOODEVENING (self-released, 2018)
INTERNET CLUB – SOUND CANVAS (self-released, 2019)
death’s dynamic shroud – I’ll Try Living Like This (Ghost Diamond, 2015)
Infinity Frequencies – Between two worlds (self-released, 2018)
national network – night-time television service (Frequency Sub-Zero, 2021)
SAINT PEPSI – Hit Vibes (self-released, 2013)
猫 シ Corp. – NEWS AT 11 (self-released, 2016)
vcr-classique – exotics (self-released, 2024)