Vapor Talks #29: Dan Mason
The vaporwave and future funk producer from Florida discusses his artistic evolution
Dan Mason (often stylized as Dan Mason ダン·メイソン in his early career) is a proponent of vaporwave’s second generation who has been releasing music under that name since 2013. His 2015 classic Miami Virtual was recently named one of the 30 best albums of all time in the genre by Reddit’s r/Vaporwave community.
The Florida native is not just a talented sample curator and manipulator, but also an actual musician with a background of playing guitar, singing and writing songs in indie rock and post-rock bands. The sound of his main solo project evolved from a mix of classic vapor, vaportrap and future funk influences to his own, highly idiosyncratic version of chillwave and dreampop.
But Dan Mason keeps innovating within the genre. As Ghost Enterprise, he’s been creating original compositions in an Utopian Virtual/Y2K/Frutiger Aero style – see 2025’s brilliant Vistas album. This spring, he stirred up the scene by releasing two lauded albums under the alias Self in Decay, which sound like lost tapes from the early vapor days that have been baking too long in the Florida sun.
I spoke to the artist about his early days dabbling in eurotrance and post-rock, discovering vaporwave during its first wave of popularity, his path towards writing more original material and the reasons for his recent return to classic sample-driven vapor. Read the full conversation below.
You’re based in the Orlando area. Did you grow up in Florida?
Yeah, I’ve been a Florida boy my whole life. It’s one of the most vaporwave ass places to grow up. Palm trees and beaches everywhere, and those sunsets and sunrises…
You also grew up in a musical household, didn’t you?
Well, my dad was a bluegrass musician, and he was in a rockabilly band when I was really young. I jammed with him all the time. I’ve been in all sorts of different rock bands, post-hardcore and post-rock bands, all that stuff. I started with guitar because I was influenced by my dad, and every Sunday, my mom would play classical music in the house. We had a huge record collection too, we had every Beatles record ever. When I got older, I was gravitating more towards the Men At Work and the Roxy Music records that we had. I remember we had Sade’s Diamond Life on vinyl.
Your mom worked in a record shop, right?
She did. This was before I was born though. That’s how we got all these records. I think she got them for free for working there. We had a closet full, we had the shelves full in one spot, and there was still a box in the garage full of records. I’m honestly curious what those tapes sound like now, sitting in the Florida humidity for 30 plus years. I wonder what shape they’re in. They probably sound like vaporwave now. (laughs)
You mentioned getting into post-hardcore and post-rock. Was that in high school?
Yeah, I was in a post-hardcore band with a couple of friends. We never did any shows really. I did an indie rock thing with some other friends. We played one show, a charity event to raise money to help someone with payments for their cancer treatment. When I went to college, I used to do these coffee shop nights, where I would play a solo acoustic guitar set, and I would make ambient guitar music with a loop pedal, just layering these loops.
I met this guy who asked me to join his post-rock band, creatordestroyer – one word, all lowercase. Not a single venue got it right though. (laughs) They always made two words, uppercase. But it was a lot of fun. In fact, we played three shows out of this place called Uncle Lou’s in Orlando, and there was just some news recently about the owner of Uncle Lou’s, who got taken in by ICE, which sucks. I’m very upset about it. That guy was the indie music scene in Orlando. That place was so cool. They just took the pool tables, moved them to the left, and there you were on the floor with everybody else. It was perfect. There weren’t a lot of post-rock bands in Orlando, by the way. I think we were the only one.
Were you into that style of music at all when that guy wanted you to join his band?
I was into it since around ninth grade, when a friend of mine invited me to go see some pop-punk band, and one of the bands that opened for them was this post-metal band, Russian Circles. They were so cool, I was completely in love from the first song. Their record Enter [2006] was in my playlist forever. I used to put their name into Pandora and see what would come up – a lot of Explosions in the Sky and stuff like that.
When did you start producing music on a computer?
As soon as I was able to download Audacity on my mom’s terrible, awful Windows ME computer that she had from work. Then I got a hand-me-down from my sister of a Windows XP machine. I still had Audacity, and I had this tiny stick microphone from the mid-90s that was for voice chat online. I used to take it, set it on top of my guitar amp and record that way. I’m not gonna lie, it sounded pretty good.
Then my high school friend introduced me to Fruity Loops [FL Studio], and I got myself the demo version. The thing with the demo version is you can’t reopen saved files, so I would have to make the entire track in one sitting. I would save it still, because I thought maybe one day I’ll buy this and then I will actually be able to reopen this file. I got really good at making tracks really fast, just by the seat of your pants. I was always a very improvisational person. Like I said, I grew up jamming with my dad all the time, so I could improv, that was just my thing.
What kind of music were you making at the time though?
It was the worst trance music you’ve ever heard in your life, I was super into trance at that time too, like Robert Miles style stuff, that late 90s style of trance. I was getting into that in high school. I still come back and listen to some Eurodance sometimes. [hums Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”] That’s one of my favorite Eurodance songs. It’s so catchy.
When and how did you discover vaporwave?
In my senior year of high school, one of my friends showed me. I don’t know if he found it through 4chan or the Anthony Fantano review, but he showed me Floral Shoppe for the first time, and I hated it. I may have changed my opinion on it over the years, but I was like, “well I can do that”, and I started basically slowing down those shitty trance songs I made. So I was doing sample-free vaporwave before everybody else! (laughs) Well, actually I think Eyeliner was already around at that time. Anyway, I slowed those down and posted them to Bandcamp, and then I went onto [4chan’s] /mu/ [board] for the first time, like, “Hey, new vaporwave act. What do you think?” And I actually got 50 downloads. I was like, “That’s crazy.” (laughs)
Was that under Dan Mason already?
Yeah. The album was called Slow Down [released in May 2013, ed. note]. There’s a collection of tracks called Lost on my Bandcamp, and that’s all my pre-2015 non-sample-based stuff. That’s still available to download. I didn’t want to get rid of it completely, because I want people to be able to listen to some of the old stuff if they really wanted to. But it’s a terrible album. It’s awful. Like, this is not vaporwave. I don’t think I really started making actual vaporwave until late 2013 or early 2014 when I did my first sampling work.
Is Dan Mason actually your legal name?
Not at all. I used it because at the time, I didn’t want to have this goofy vaporwave stuff mixing with my serious post-rock stuff or any of the trance stuff. There’s something cool about the anonymity, there’s something freeing to it. You can just do whatever you want, and no one’s gonna care, no one’s gonna get on your case about it. But I didn’t really dive into it as hard as other people. I mean, I’m also just frigging second or third wave vaporwave, so I’m like, whatever.
You released stuff in 2013/14, you’re definitely second wave.
Right. What would be third wave then in your view, like post-Dream Catalogue stuff?
Yeah, I’d say the generation influenced by listening to Dream Catalogue that started releasing in 2016/17.
Gotcha.
You said you didn’t even like Floral Shoppe at first. When did you really get into vaporwave?
What got me really into it first was Blank Banshee with the vaportrap stuff, but the real big one that got me actually enjoying the genre was the split album Nightlife by Telepath and Silver Richards [from December 2013, ed. note]. I was like, “Oh, I get it now.” I was just listening to it yesterday, because it’s so good and it still holds up. It’s probably still one of my favorite vapor albums of all time. It hit the nail on the head perfectly, two giants at their time. Telepath is still a giant, Silver Richards hasn’t really done much since 2018. He’s just gone. I don’t know where he is. If you’re reading this, Silver Richards, I want to do a collab anytime, please!
Yes, and I want to do a Vapor Talk!
Volume 128 [from January 2014, ed. note] was one of his early releases on Fortune 500, and that’s a really good record too. So I listened to that, and I understood it, so I started making it. That’s when I started actually going online, finding old samples. The first thing I ever flipped was a Bee Gees song, “855-7019”, and then I started sampling commercials and stuff.
What did you like about vaporwave now that you, as you say, understood it?
A lot of people say it’s the nostalgia of it, but it’s not nostalgic for me. I didn’t grow up with this stuff that much – except the late 90s smooth jazz, because I’ve watched these commercials as a kid. Maybe some of it was because of my parents’ records, but they didn’t really listen to smooth jazz or city pop. I don’t know, there’s just something about the texture of it, probably the analog-ness, the warmth of it that really does it for me. It’s comforting, just really nice and cozy. (laughs)
How did you share and distribute your music online back then?
SoundCloud and Reddit were the two big places for me. I didn’t get onto Twitter until about 2015/16. Facebook was another one, back when they still showed your friends in the feed and not random ragebait stuff. At the time I would finish a track, and I would post it immediately on SoundCloud and share it on Reddit, Facebook and wherever I could.
One of the biggest moments for me was when I released the track “Make Me Love You” because Telepath reposted it, and I was like, “Holy crap, this is my hero right here. This is crazy.” I think that’s even what led to DMT Tapes finding me, getting that ball rolling and just heading down that path. It was kind of a domino effect.
Was DMT Tapes the first label that you were on? Your albums in 2013/14 were all self-released on Bandcamp.
Yeah, Vito [the founder of DMT Tapes] reached out to me at the end of 2014. He says, “We’re a Florida-based vaporwave label, and we’re releasing Florida-based vaporwave artists.” So I go to his label page, and I see all these artists. And I’m excited, like “Yeah, let’s do this”, and I literally just rework one of my other albums – it’s called Loveless City in Japanese – and create an album called Miami Virtual [released in February 2015, ed. note], because it’s all Florida vibes.
Later I come to find out all the 20 other releases on DMT were just Vito re-releasing himself over and over again underneath different names to build up a hype onto his channel. I was the second non-Vito artist on there – I think the first one was Shima33, though I don’t know they’re based out of Florida [Shima33 is based in the UK, ed. note.]. DMT was starting to gain traction because of just the sheer amount of releases he was just putting out, and from there I started getting some traction.
But yeah, Miami Virtual really was just a redo of another album. I was giving it another pass, basically taking out the parts that didn’t work, and putting in some new stuff that I thought worked better. On that album, you get a taste of what everything was in 2015 – a little bit of the vaportrap influence, a little bit of the future funk influence, and some classic sample-style vaporwave. I wasn’t pushing any boundaries with the creativity on it, but I think it’s a very good, refined, entry-level vaporwave album.
Who were the artists and producers from the scene that you first connected with?
I didn’t really know too many people at that time. I was just posting my stuff online, and then I was leaving again. After I released Miami Virtual, I started talking with some people more. I started connecting with an artist, he goes by Windows 98のご紹介 and did some releases on Dream Catalogue and Bedlam Tapes. I used to hang out with him because he lives in the Orlando area too. We went to a mall one time and just hung out there. (laughs) I didn’t really start making tight connections until I met people like 3D Blast. I still talk to Blast all the time. I was just talking to him yesterday.
I started dabbling in future funk and then got hit up by BizCas [the popular vaporwave label Business Casual, ed. note]. I released the Summertime EP with John [Zobele alias christtt, the label’s founder, ed. note] in 2016. That was awesome – the first time I was ever released on cassette. It was a split cassette with another artist named Future Girlfriend. Let me just say, the dubbing on that tape was awful. This is when John was still duplicating tapes himself. The right channel didn’t work, the tape was sluggish and overblown. It sounded awful, but it was just cool to be on tape.
Were you influenced by Saint Pepsi at all?
Honestly, I wasn’t really listening to him much at the time. I knew who he was, and I probably listened to a couple of tracks like “Cherry Pepsi”, which is a really good song. By the way, Saint Pepsi, nicest guy in the entire vaporwave scene. But I was really more into MACROSS 82-99. Sailorwave hit at the right time and was a big influence for me, trying to dip my toes into the future funk side of things. I listened to a lot of other stuff on BizCas too, probably more than I listened to Saint Pepsi.
The years 2015 and 2016 were a strange time for vaporwave. The Dream Catalogue label had blown up but then they deleted many of their albums – as we now know, because of copyright infringement claims. They shifted their focus towards what they called ‘hardvapour’. Many felt repulsed by all that online drama and the infights though, so they moved on from the scene.
Yeah, it sucked. It was just a really dividing moment. At the time, that ambient side of vaporwave was really the one that was taking off the hardest. You had the future funk side over here, and then the ambient side over here. The middle ground of just classic style vaporwave was still happening, but it wasn’t where the big pull was heading towards. At that point I started leaning way more into the future funk side of things, so I made the Summertime EP, I made Summer Love, I made Miami Virtual 2.0 and started doing more dancey stuff. On my end that was the best course of action, because I think trying to stick with the ambient side at that time, it was just an absolute mess.
When the Dream Catalogue purge happened, nobody really knew what was going on. They just fell apart at that point. They started doing the hardvapour stuff, which was more influenced by UK Garage and other stuff, and I get why they went for that – they were trying to do less sample-based stuff. It wasn’t really my style and I never got into it, but my real issue was that they were doing all these in-jokes that only like ten people on their private chatrooms would get. And they were kind of jerks about it the whole time. They would come to chatrooms and start arguments, trying to pick fights. It just came off as very mean.
It’s funny, you know? For a while, Dream Catalogue was the genre, and then it tanked the genre, and then Simpsonwave came in and blew it up again. A lot of people don’t want to admit that it was a huge proponent of bringing vaporwave to be where it is today, but it really revived the genre.
Were you actually still playing in that post-rock band too?
Well, the future funk stuff started really taking off, and I started getting traction because some music from Miami Virtual was used in a Dead Mall video by Dan Bell [in April 2016]. That got me a lot of push. At the time I was getting paid 50 bucks to do a show with the band once a month, but I could do a cassette run and make more than what I was making with this band. So I thought, why am I not just focusing on this? I have an actual following here, people are actually excited to listen to me. Then I had to move out of where I was living, and after I moved, I couldn’t do that band anymore anyway, because it would be too much of a drive to go meet up with everybody. In the end, it worked out for the best.
Was that when you decided to focus more on writing original music with vocals?
Yeah, I thought, if I want to do this legitimately, I got to start doing less sample-based stuff, because I’m going to get in trouble at some point. That’s when I started making albums like Void [2018] and Hypnagogia [2019], which were almost made back to back. I started doing my own vocals to slow down and chop up in my own way. I was not in a good headspace at that time, and I was just gonna put that into my music a little bit more. I also think I just mellowed out a little bit in general.
I’ve just always been into emo, and I’ve tried a few times prior to mix emo and vaporwave. I’ve been trying to mix vaporwave with other things, like I tried a few times to mix post-rock and vaporwave. I was just like, I gotta make vaporwave-style melancholic stuff, but just make the lyrics very emo, and I just went into that harder. It worked for Void and Hypnagogia, even into Forever Nothing [2020] and I’m Not Going Anywhere [2020]. That was my hardest – I went more emo than vaporwave on that one.
Forever Nothing was released on George Clanton’s 100% Electronica label. That felt like a logical next step for you. It was really popular at the time.
Yeah, George wanted me to get on the label, and we were planning to do all these live shows after the first 100% ElectroniCON [festival], but of course it all stopped because of Covid. But because we’re vaporwave, and we had been online for most of our careers at that point, it was so easy to just go back online and start doing Twitch streams. We were able to just crawl back into our holes real nice and easy [during the pandemic].
I had friends from the post-rock days that were really struggling to find how to do anything music-related because they didn’t have their live events. I was sending them messages and coaching them, showing them how to start streaming, trying to tell them how to survive on just online alone. I would say to them, “You got to start communicating with people in your scene online. It’s about the in-person connections, but it’s digital.”
What’s your view on the status quo of the post-pandemic vaporwave scene?
I think the last true peak for vaporwave was probably ECON 3 [in 2022]. That was a really good one. It was nice to just come back together, see everybody one more time, and just hang out and have a big event for everybody. ECON 4 [in 2023] was a disaster with the whole controversy thing going on, which I’m not going to dive into too much. I’m gonna be real, I didn’t even know who John Maus was. And then George [Clanton] was basically like, “I’m not doing this anymore.”
I think he put a lot of weight on his own shoulders there. He was trying to push and control the direction of the scene, then the cracks started to show from what was basically just a simple mistake on his end, and it all fell apart for him. He’s focusing on himself now, and I can totally understand him; more power to him, you know? I think it really hurt him a lot, and in more ways than I can even know. It hurt the scene too. It sucks. Now we’re all directionless, we don’t know where to go. At this point in time, there will probably never be an ECON 5, unless someone really wants to step up and be the next pusher on this vaporwave scene.
You’ve just released two brilliant new albums in May under the alias Self in Decay, and people have responded very positively to them.
Yeah, I was having so much fun making those because I just took a lot of the pressure off. I feel I have all this pressure on me all the time – I’m worried about my algorithm, I’m worried about my post placements, I’m worried about getting eyes on this, selling this, selling it out, like bro, I’m just gonna make stuff because I freaking want to again. So I started making classic style vaporwave again, just for fun. And the pressure is gone. It’s so easy. It’s the biggest rejuvenation of the soul.
There’s this style of writing and producing that I do, it feels almost like a mental cleanse, or like an anxiety release. I will sit down, and I will make an entire album in a 24-hour period. I’ve done those a few times, and I’m throwing everything at the wall, I’m not sure what I’m doing, I don’t even know if it sounds good or not, I just do this to cleanse my mind really.
Was there a certain spark that inspired Self in Decay?
It was a mixture of people in [the Nobody Here documentary] talking about back in the day when we just did it, you know, we didn’t care about any of this. That’s what it was like, you just did it because you did it. And then James Webster [of Death’s Dynamic Shroud, ed. note] made a post about how vaporwave is very straight now, but if you listen to Eccojams or Floral Shoppe, the cuts aren’t clean, they’re very staggered and juddery, a little off-kilter.
I wanted to sit down and make an album like that. I said to myself, “I’m gonna act like this is 2013 again. I’m gonna finish this album and I’m gonna post it on my Bandcamp and my YouTube and just tell people it’s out, go listen to it. I’m not gonna try to do promo or build up hype. I’m done with this.” Because I want to have fun with this again. I just want to make stuff and release it, not worry about it, you know?
Why didn’t you release those albums under your regular artist name?
Because it’s so drastically different than the direction I’ve been going in with my other aliases that are active right now. Dan Mason is my chillwavey, dreampoppy, vaporwave-with-vocals stuff. Ghost Enterprise is sample-free vaporwave instrumentals. Devil Killer is just drum’n’bass that I make for fun on the side.
But this is so different than any of those other ones, and I would just like to have at least one alias where I don’t have any obligations with it at all. That’s Self in Decay, because I feel like I’m decaying, my self is decaying, and I wanted to make something to reverse that, just take out some of the cobwebs in my brain and clear the head.
I’m happy people are really liking them. There’s no monetary goal at the back of this. I’m making it because I wanted to, and I think people can tell when you’re making music just because you’re having fun. They feel that vibe in it, that human connection. They can just tell.
Listen to Dan Mason on Bandcamp
Dan Mason’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
Webinar™ – w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m (2021)
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 and Silver Richards – 夜遊び (2013)
Eco Virtual – ATMOSPHERES 第2 (2014)
Blank Banshee – Blank Banshee 1 (2013)
Mobilesuit (aka Mobile Suit Belial) – Kokoro (2015)
S U R F I N G – Deep Fantasy (2012)
Cobalt Road & STΛQQ ƟVERFLƟ – Biosphere (2016)
alyzea – Dream OS (2025)
Eyeliner – Drop Shadow (2020)
PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises – Home™ (2013)