Vapor Talks #3: Brickmason
The Maine-based ambient and vaporwave producer and Hushtones label head in conversation
Brickmason has been on the forefront of the post-pandemic vaporwave movement, both as a prolific producer himself and as head of the Hushtones label, ever since he appeared with his first releases in 2022.
The Portland, Maine, resident managed to establish himself in the scene with some innovative concepts: Among his more recent discography, you’ll find two well-received albums full of vaporwave vignettes inspired by Motorola Razr ringtones from the 2000s. Deeply influenced by dark ambient, dreampunk, classic signalwave, mallsoft and videogame soundtracks, Brickmason connects to the vaporwave tradition of the mid- to late 2010s, before barber beats became so overly dominant.
I spoke to Bobby – that’s how his friends call him – about musical childhood memories, how he came to run Hushtones as a sister label to the infamous Geometric Lullaby and why the massive rise of AI slop will not mean the end of vaporwave as a subculture.
What kind of music were you listening to as a kid?
I was born in 1990, so I’m part of the CD generation. Since I was very young, any money that I got always went to CDs. As a kid, I got into anime soundtracks by Maaya Sakamoto or Yoko Kanno, these amazing composers who worked on popular Cartoon Network Toonami anime that we had in late-night television at the time. I played lots of DDR [Dance Dance Revolution, ed. note] with my friends in high school, and when I had my first jobs, I would bring my CD player and headphones to work, so I’d wash dishes and listen to these weird DDR mixes.
Me and my step brother, we weren’t allowed to listen to certain music, so we got our hands on blank cassettes and made mixtapes off the radio of the cool stuff that we weren’t allowed to buy, like Eminem and 50 Cent. So I have this weird attachment to cassettes from me being a kid, and now in my mid-30s, cassette culture is coming back again.
Did you get any musical training?
Not at all. I didn’t go to college for music or anything like that. I’m a teacher. Though my dad was an amateur drummer. I remember he was always tapping his hands, tapping his thumbs, and I’m always nervously tapping and drumming too. I played a bit of drums as an elementary kid, but I never had a drum set.
I actually go by Brickmason because my dad was a brick mason. That’s where the name comes from – I like the metaphor of physically putting sounds together to make new music.
What kind of music were you into before discovering vaporwave?
All the indie music of the 2000s and 2010s. I was really into Passion Pit and Death Grips, good stuff like that. Anything Pitchfork would review, I would look at it. But I’ve been collecting music since I was a kid. A lot of what I sample is from my childhood CDs, or stuff my friends shared with me on external hard drives that we physically mailed to each other, just to steal each other’s music. It’s a weird, eclectic mix of electronic and ambient music.
When did you start producing music?
In 2017, I just bought this expensive keyboard thing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I watched YouTube tutorials, trying to learn piano because I wanted to create something, and I failed. During COVID I stumbled back into vaporwave. I had seen it vaguely over the years, and then rediscovered the scene. I found an album by Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza, NTSC Memories, and loved the atmosphere it creates and the beautiful simplicity in its creation. Listening to that gave me confidence to put my own spin on it. That’s when I started making my first little things, which I released on Bandcamp in 2022.
What exactly about vaporwave got you hooked on it?
I liked how different it is. There’s definitely something about the weirdness and the atmosphere of albums like NTSC Memories that just tickled that part of my brain that wanted something atypical. It goes against everything that popular radio and algorithmic culture stand for. I think a lot of us oppose popular culture or boring stuff that’s on the radio.
Within vaporwave, there’s vapor ambient, there’s future funk, there’s signalwave that samples classical music – any kind of modern music you can think of, it all exists there. It’s like a little secret that we’re all part of. It’s just worlds to explore, like an open world video game where you just travel to these different places and find these giant lost monuments. Even now, I’m finding incredible albums from over ten years ago that I’m falling in love with.
You’ve been running your own label, Hushtones, as a sister label to Geometric Lullaby, the label of black metal artist and vaporwave producer Dennis Mikula. How did that actually happen?
It was really random. He put out this message to his Bandcamp community one day: “Hey everyone, I’m interested in starting a sister label, so if you have an idea, email me and let me know.” And he has so many followers, so I was one of many people who emailed him with an idea for what I wanted to do. Within that was the aesthetic, the types of releases, things that I like and don’t like – my whole philosophy. We had met before that twice at festivals, and in May 2024 I launched the label. I 100% run and curate it, so I don’t have to ask [Dennis] for permission or anything like that.
What was your vision for the label when you emailed him?
At that point, barber beats were really big in the scene, and it was all that was getting major releases on labels. Even labels that had this awesome history of dreampunk and dark ambient were switching to doing more barber beats, chasing its popularity. It felt like the whole scene was moving towards random mixtapes, so I just wanted to gear it back towards the sounds that I love, stuff that creates an atmosphere. Geometric Lullaby, over time, has done a really great job of curating that, and I wanted to do more of that. I love concept albums, I like when an album has an idea and an identity, a strong sense of space, location and time.
I want to do more dreampunk In the future, because I like that stuff so much. I love slushwave, and hushwave as well. I actually want to help to put more of that out, curate sounds like the Begotten project. I like that sound a lot, and no one else is releasing it. What I like about it is how voice is a central component of hushwave – those whispery, resonant vocals.
Your last two releases had that narrative vocal element too, these Aperture Experience albums. I wonder what’s inspired you to do that?
There’s a band called The Books from the late 2000s, a duo of a cellist and an electronic musician. They broke up a while ago, but they’re probably my favorite band of all time. They used a lot of weird spoken word vocal samples, all blended throughout, creating cinematic, narrative pieces, and I really loved that. Their song “Tokyo” has a nice vaporwave adjacency – it samples an announcer on a Japanese airline flight. So I’ve stolen that sentiment and looked for opportunities to do that myself. The first thing I ever released, The 5 Seasons, was all 100% original synth that I made during COVID on a little Akai. It’s nothing but vocal samples the entire way, it’s like a spoken documentary synthesis.
Some of your music borders on dark ambient or drone music. How important is the vaporwave genre label to you?
It’s vaporwave if you say that it is, right? It’s like someone saying, “This is art.” I think the U.S. Supreme Court once said this about porn: “You know it when you see it.” Because there’s no legal definition for it. I actually think the word vaporwave is a verb more than anything. It’s transformative, at least that’s the overall intention. It just means using what the world has given us to create albums that have a sense of identity and space. There’s vapor ambient, vapor drone, vapor jazz. We attach the word vapor- to anything.
I get a lot of submissions, and they’re often just ambient or drone albums but they might say something like: “This is the story of this experience I had in the 1980s in the New Mexico desert…” So they’re looking to enshrine memories, experiences or pieces of their own life. Like me, a lot of people in the scene don’t have any level of musical training whatsoever. This is an opportunity for us to create and be heard.
Before this generation appeared, I couldn’t imagine media coverage of the scene through an interview series like this one, mainly because anonymity was almost sacred in vaporwave. That seems to have changed, right?
Well, Hushtones does put out some music by artists who prefer to be unknown. There’s a couple projects of well-known artists on here, who just want a faceless, new alias. So there’s still a bit of desire for that, and some artists still famously will never have their face shown, like Telepath. There’s just one blurry picture of him, taken from Facebook years ago. I don’t think I’ve seen a picture of Blank Banshee, just him in the mask. And then others, like Begotten, which is assumed to be a project of Dennis Mikula. He’s never admitted publicly that it’s him though, so who knows?
But if you look on Discogs right now, it says there’s 55,000 vaporwave albums that people have bothered to catalog. There’s so much being put out that you almost need a face to stand out. Maybe the rise of live music and festival shows normalized more faces being seen. I wasn’t even around back then, but people talk about Econ 1 [the first 100% ElectroniCON festival in 2019 in Brooklyn, New York] as this spiritual event where everyone got to meet each other for the first time.
For the European scene, that moment was Slushwave, when they started doing it in person in Belgium. For years, Cat System Corp. was just this mystical entity to me, and suddenly there’s this dude sitting on stage, speaking English with a Dutch accent.
Oh my god. [laughs] You know, I’m really into Lovers Dream (恋人の夢), I’ve released him on my label, and I got to meet him in Texas this past year. I bought him Chick-fil-A at the mall. It’s really bizarre to have a person in front of you who is completely unlike what you thought they would be like or look like in person.
Today, Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night is huge, and he’s happy to have his face shown. For me, I actually turned my personal Instagram page into my artist page. I just changed the name of it from my real name to Brickmason, but my name is still on there. I didn’t really care that much. I’m not one of the OG’s, you know, the 2013 people. James Ferraro was at Econ 4 when I was there, but he walked around with a cardboard box on his head. I saw him, but didn’t even know it was him.
I remember seeing photos of Telepath playing Econ in this weird silver costume with a mask.
Yeah, it looked like… you know, when the fire truck comes and it’s cold outside, they give you this shining space blanket. I think he played Econ 2 with Vaperror as Televape, and Vaperror had that green skin suit on. Have you seen that photograph? Such a legendary performance.
With the fourth or fifth generation shaping vaporwave’s present, do you think it’s currently living through a resurgence?
Yeah, people are finding new ways to explore their childhood nostalgia and melancholy, new sounds are being found and developed by new personalities who are making really unique things. I see a lot of attention and excitement around vaporwave right now, and I’m finding new albums all the time that are saying and doing new things. Are you familiar with the DreamCastle album Lego Castle (1979-98), for example? I really think it’s one of the most important albums that’s come out in the past years. There’s a whole visual album for it as well. I drove four hours to go see that – he rented a room above a coffee shop to show it. That’s why I was so eager to put it out on VHS immediately.
How do you personally come up with new album concepts?
Sometimes I have an idea – like, Marley Station Mall [in Maryland] is my childhood mall. It’s probably gone in the next five or 10 years. They just announced that Macy’s is shutting down now. So I wanted to make something that commemorates that mall that I grew up at. But aside from a specific thing that I want to make for my own attachments and connections to my life, I still spend lots of time on Tumblr, just scrolling images, and sometimes I’ll stumble across an idea there. I’m very much inspired to make albums by album art.
One of the recent albums I released is Abandonware Landscapes. Abandonware is software that’s no longer supported. I came across that screenshot from this weird 1990s game, and I wanted to make an album sampling abandonware video games for that. I saw this Pinocchio sales poster from the early 2000s on Tumblr, and I was like, I want to make a ringtone mixtape album, so I made these two of them recently [Ringtone Memories and Ringtone Dreams].
I have a couple images still saved that I really want to make an album for, something that creates that kind of sound. One of them is an image of a rain-soaked neon hotel sign at night in Japan. I think I’m calling it the Dolphin Hotel after a place in one of Murakami’s novels [Ed. note: Dance Dance Dance, 1988]. I want to try to make a dreampunk-adjacent album for that, just because this image reminds me of one of my favorite novels. It might never happen, but I just like the idea of it.
What’s your set-up, what kind of software are you working with?
It’s really awkward and weird, but I don’t use what everyone else uses. I don’t use Fruity Loops or Ableton, but Reaper. It’s a free DAW. I record everything in Audacity, so I throw a number of different samples into Reaper and then I’ll live-record and live-mix things and add effects, then I’ll chop it up, delete some stuff, piece things together and layer them. I call myself an Audacity producer. That’s my weird duct-tape way of making music. It’s how I started, and I’ve always kept doing it this way. It just works for me, and I like it.
Many vaporwave channels on YouTube are full of AI slop already, while Bandcamp has just officially banned it from the platform. What’s your stance on generative AI? How do you see it changing the scene?
I think it’s going to get to the point very quickly where it’s just imperceptible, where I’ll have no idea if submissions I get are or aren’t AI, and it won’t really matter. People use it as a tool, and I’m fine with that. I know some people who do dabble in it, and I don’t really care. They will use it for album art – not to generate it, but to upscale and refine it. But when it comes to music, as an artist, I would just say that there’s too much good stuff out there, so why bother? It’s lazy. If you’re an artist, you’ll get so much more out of searching things and finding your sound versus just generating it.
For me, this is all still incredibly important, as silly as it sounds. I just love playing with weird samples that have been mailed to me on a hard drive back in 2009 by a friend of mine who lived in D.C. at the time. And I had so much fun hunting down ringtones all over YouTube and online cellphone archives. So I just think that you’ll get more out of searching for your own samples.
I guess one thing is that I’ll want to know if an artist uses generative AI. Otherwise, when I find out, I feel disappointed and cheated.
Definitely. There’s usually a strong, measurable reaction from the community, when it’s found out that an album is AI. At the end of the day, it’s your art, and it’s your expression, and you should be expressing part of who you are, and people are going to judge you by it. They’re gonna think of you as an AI artist, whether they say it publicly or not.
If you mess with AI because you want to and you just think it’s fun and stupid and silly, that’s fine with me. But if you’re doing it to be lazy, then I don’t like it. It’s kind of reassuring that vaporwave has a low bar for entry. But I don’t want AI to be that low bar. I’m fine with barber [beats] being the low bar. I prefer that over AI, if that’s the reason for it.
“At the end of the day, it’s your art, and it’s your expression, and you should be expressing part of who you are, and people are going to judge you by it. If you mess with AI because you want to and you just think it’s fun and stupid and silly, that’s fine with me. But if you’re doing it to be lazy, then I don’t like it.” (Brickmason)
Where do you see the scene heading in the next years?
I don’t know but I really wish future funk would have a resurgence. I remember going to Econ for the first time and hearing 3D Blast. Future funk is the heartbeat of the genre, and I love it so much, but it currently doesn’t have a lot of curation. Not a lot of labels are putting it out, and the labels that are, it isn’t all high quality like it’s been in the past. I’ve joked around with Lovers Dream, who has released future funk in the past. I’d say I’d put out your new future funk album, as long as you gave it a dark aesthetic, like Sailor Moon in goth gear. [laughs]
Where would you recommend an interested reader should start into your discography?
I like nightcommute a lot. It’s a good blend of signalwave and ambient, it’s easy to get into, and I love the vibe. It has some incredible synthy samples. It’s supposed to give that feeling of dread of a night commute. You know, it’s late at night, it’s cold and dark outside, but it’s just another day, you’re off to work and it’s a long drive.
And then ÆON Mall Kyōto-Gojō, which sounds a lot brighter. I sampled Majestic 12’s music for that one. He’s a barber beats artist, a good friend of mine. I wanted to create a ‘barber mall’ album with vocals. I used a text-to-speech program for the mall announcements, it’s not AI though.
So if I died tomorrow and then in eight years someone would ask, “Who was Brickmason?”, then those two albums would provide the answer.
Listen to Brickmason on Bandcamp
Discover Hushtones on Bandcamp
Brickmason’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
Nmesh – Pharma (Orange Milk, 2017)
Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – NTSC Memories (Ailanthus, 2013)
Soft Replica – Only If Ever In Dreams (Liminal Garden, 2022)
PowerPCME – Kmart 1989-1992 (Lost Angles, 2016)
自決 9 6 – Pink Soda (Seikomart, 2017)
Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe (Beer On The Rug, 2011)
Death's Dynamic Shroud – Faith in Persona (Ghost Diamond, 2021)
PΣRMANΣNT//ZΣIMP – GIVE ME A RAZÓN (Bogus Collective, 2022)
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – A (Dream Catalogue, 2016)
猫 シ Corp. – Palm Mall Mars (self-released, 2018)
