Vapor Talks #31: Tim Six

The Ukrainian musician and label founder about his journey from drone doom to solarpunk-inspired vaporwave

Among the many DIY tape labels in the vaporwave scene, Global Pattern has been standing out due to its commitment, curation and impeccable design. Celebrating ten years of existence, it’s been a key pillar to the global slushwave community.

The mastermind behind the label, the Ukrainian (now Paris-based) artist Tim Six, clearly isn’t a newbie to underground DIY music. Starting out in Kyiv’s drone and noise scene in the mid-2000s, he made acoustic, ritualistic drone music as Creation VI. Since discovering vaporwave in the early 2010s, he’s been exploring different styles from classic slush to new-age-ish, solarpunk-inspired ‘naturewave’.

I spoke to Tim about his two-decades long journey through ambient music and his move from the dark, dystopian, doom-laden sounds of his beginnings to a more hopeful, bright, renewable-energy-powered vision of the future.

all photos courtesy of the artist

Where are you from, and where have you lived over the years?

I’m originally from Crimea. I spent my childhood there, then went to university in Kyiv, lived there for ten years. At some point, I started bouncing around between Crimea, Kyiv and St. Petersburg. Around 2016, I moved to St. Petersburg. I found a scene of like-minded people and fellow geeks there. It’s such a diverse, multi-cultural, multi-genre city – St. Petersburg is really the cultural capital of Russia, while Moscow is the business capital.

When this full scale invasion [of Ukraine] happened, I was still in Russia. I’m Ukrainian, my wife is Russian, and we just had our kid. We immediately left for Paris, because my wife had already worked there, and that’s where we’re still living right now.

Did you grow up in a musical household?

My dad is a school teacher, and he started teaching in the early 80s. This was during Soviet Union times, pre-perestroika, and there was a lot of illegal music circulating among high school teachers. They were actually exchanging reel-to-reels back then, because cassette tapes were still kind of pricey. They were copying all these Western records, often imported from Eastern Germany, like Pink Floyd and stuff.

We had a bit of musical diversity at home – some Soviet records, some pop music, but we also had Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre on reel-to-reel. My earliest memory of music is probably listening to Zoolook on my dad’s huge headphones. We were also enjoying Baltic space rock like [Latvian band] Zodiac, I guess that’s left a trace.

Did you learn any instruments as a kid?

I played some guitar in high school, and then I just started making music on my own. I started doing the vocals in a metal band. It was doom metal, black metal and grindcore as well. I was really into that type of music throughout high school and even the first years of university.

Until then, I’d wanted my music to be as fast, brutal and extreme as possible, but suddenly it just changed to be the exact opposite – really slow and minimal, but still heavy guitar music. I discovered drone music and ambient – Brian Eno, Terry Riley and the whole minimalist movement. I got really into that and the so-called British esoteric underground – Coil, Psychic TV, stuff like that. A lot of influences were colliding, and I was trying to do something in between. Sounded really shitty at first though. (laughs)

This was all done with acoustic instruments?

Yeah, I didn’t get into playing any synthesizers until much later, so all my early stuff under the Creation VI name was done with just voice, guitar, flutes, some other acoustic instruments processed with effects in Ableton, and tape loops. I was basically doing musique concrète, manipulating the sounds of the real world. I didn’t have the skills to do electronics properly, so I was relying on manipulation of guitar and voice, which is what I knew. When I started releasing albums, people would ask me, “What kind of synth does that deep, heavy drone?”, and I would say, “Oh, that’s just my voice pitched down three octaves.”

Were you part of a scene in Kyiv at the time, in the mid- to late Aughts?

Yeah. This was still pre-social media, pre-Bandcamp. I had MySpace and would meet some people through that, but there was a local community mostly around guitar music, like stoner, hardcore and metal stuff. I remember we had a doom metal internet forum called Just Doom, and I was the admin of the drone subforum.

There weren’t many gigs though. Obviously there were metal gigs, but no one wanted to hear drone music – people would just get bored. I played my first gig in 2012, at a dance festival in a squat in Lviv [in Western Ukraine, ed. note], and it was pretty cool. I played at the very end, deep into the night, and people were laying down on the floor, tripping out completely. Afterwards I was getting invited to more shows, because people realized that live drone music is actually a thing.

When I moved to St. Petersburg, the drone scene there was on a different level. It had been happening since the 90s, so there would be gigs in public galleries and all kinds of festivals. It was way more accepted in general. You had this sound museum right in the city center, downtown in the tourist area; it was called Experimental Sound Gallery at first. We would play there every week, whereas in Kyiv, you still had to persuade people that it’s actually worth it.

Did you go to university to study music?

No, astrophysics. (laughs) But I didn’t make a career out of that. Today, my life is all about music. I’m running the label, doing artwork, mastering and mixing, playing live –all kinds of stuff really.

When did you first learn of vaporwave?

Around 2010, when the drone forum started dying out, I started running a blog about drone and dark ambient music. Tumblr was happening in parallel to the blog network, those were the early days of social media, and I saw this seapunk thing popping up there first. I didn’t really connect it with music though.

As I’d been part of the drone and noise scene, I was already listening to James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, the stuff they did as The Skaters. I’m still friends with Spencer, he’s been a really big influence on what I do. He wasn’t ever associated with vaporwave, but he was doing noisy psychedelic music, which was quite often sampled as well. You just didn’t immediately hear that it was sampled.

Skeleton [骨架的] was probably the first proto-vaporwave I discovered – the Holograms album. It was just ambient music to me. I didn’t realize it was sampled. The term ‘vaporwave’ hadn’t even been invented yet. But at the time, Bandcamp started becoming a thing, and I started searching for music there. That’s how I discovered all this other experimental proto-vaporwave stuff that Beer On The Rug was putting out.

I was really into New Age music, like these cheesy old New Age tapes, which I still listen to these days. There was an artist, Transmuteo, who was doing a mix of New Age, vaporwave and drone. At some point, Floral Shoppe came out, and I remember this online festival, SPF420 – they were doing a show with Transmuteo and Macintosh Plus. I found this interesting and cool, but I still didn’t follow it too closely.

It might have been 2014 when I first heard Luxury Elite and Telepath, and I found that really cool. A friend of mine from Kyiv actually released Nightlife [夜遊び], the split album by Telepath and Silver Richards, on his weird label called Freak Friendly D.I.Y. – he was putting out all kinds of music, some black metal, some hip-hop, some noise and some vaporwave. We were listening to that as he was dubbing the tapes, and I remember really liking it.

Wait a second – a Ukrainian DIY label released that split album?

Yeah, it’s actually a funny story. At that point, PayPal wasn’t working in Ukraine, so we had to create fake accounts pretending we were UK citizens. We actually photoshopped our IDs to be able to receive money from Bandcamp. But we couldn’t withdraw the money, because we’d need a British bank account, so we were just receiving the funds in PayPal and spending them right back on Bandcamp, creating sort of a natural circulation of the money.

Those fake accounts were shut down quickly by PayPal, and that meant they were going to take away your money, so we would make sure to spend it before we got shut down. When my friend was just about to release this Nightlife split, his account got blocked again, so he asked me if he could use mine. I remember being at my day job, watching my email, and suddenly all these sales were popping up. I was like, “What is happening here?” Before that, he’d sold maybe 30 or 50 tapes, and for this one, he’d made 100 and they went pretty much in one day.

We didn’t even really know Telepath back then. He was still self-releasing everything on Bandcamp for free. Dream Catalogue might have been around, but I think they’d just started doing tapes, so my friend just wrote a message to Telepath like, “Can I do a tape for you?” And he was like, “Sure, dude.” Of course it would become the best-selling tape in the history of his label. (laughs)

Did you start making vaporwave then as well?

Yeah, pretty much immediately, but I didn’t really like the results. I was still learning. I didn’t put anything out until 2016 when I started Global Pattern. The first release was my still shitty, but halfway listenable attempt at vaporwave. As usual, I did it anonymously, the alias was lucid beach85’. I didn’t tell anyone it was me. I just made some tapes, took a photo and uploaded it to the Vaporwave Cassette Club group on Facebook. I’d already been part of it for some years because I was collecting vaporwave tapes – early Dream Catalogue, Luxury Elite, stuff like this.

Before I started Global Pattern, I was running this ambient label called Pantheon, which was pretty successful actually. I had a lot of releases coming out, and I was pretty busy with that, so it took some time to start a new label as well, because I really wanted to do it, but I didn’t have much time. I still had a day job and I was doing the ambient label, which was all about DIY handmade covers, so it took a lot of time. We were making box sets manually, carefully decorated with leaves and hand-stitched covers, a lot of gluing assembly.

For me, Global Pattern was a way to just make just a plain tape with a plain J-card again. I was simultaneously in this drone scene, but also listening to vaporwave. I always listened to many genres. When I moved to St. Petersburg in 2016, I decided to to make Global Pattern a proper label for other artists, not just my own projects.

The original idea was to feature post-Soviet vaporwave artists, to make it a local scene label. I released this Ukrainian girl, M4, who was doing classic future funk, and then Zhurnal Mod and a little bit later, From Tokyo to Honolulu. There were plenty of people doing vaporwave in Russia and Ukraine. Demos started pouring in, a lot of people started reaching out to me, and I was reaching out to artists as well.

You started releasing music under the name Tim Six in 2016 too, right?

Well, when I started to get into electronic sound and synthesizers, I decided to separate that a bit from the stuff that was using my voice or acoustic instruments. That was when I started the Tim Six project. I was into New Age, I was trying to do something dreamy and positive, and Creation VI was already associated with dark ritual industrial music and this heavy drone style.

I’d support people like Aidan Baker or Attila Cihar, artists from these experimental metal circles. I wanted to branch out into this more lightweight ambient sound, so I started using the Tim Six alias for that. That’s basically a translation of my name from Ukrainian, by the way. My real name is Timothy, and Six is the direct translation of my last name.

I find this shift from dark ambient and drone doom to New Age and solarpunk in the latter half of the 2010s really interesting. In speculative fiction – books as well as films – the 1990s and 2000s were all about cyberpunk and dystopia. In the 2010s, it felt as if we had enough of those bleak visions and were craving some form of hopeful utopia, so the movements of solarpunk and climate fiction arose.

Yeah, because the dystopia became reality! It came too close to what we’re actually experiencing. So while we were reading the cyberpunk stuff as a warning, some others were apparently reading it as an instruction. For people like Elon Musk or whoever, it wasn’t so much criticism but more of a manual, right? (laughs)

New Age music has always been this guilty pleasure for me, and I still really enjoy that cheesy stuff that most people usually discard. Vaporwave is often working with discarded music. People would be sampling Muzak, which wasn’t even seen as actual music but just some byproduct of capitalist economy, or commercials in signalwave. Basically, you take the most annoying thing possible and turn it into music.

With New Age, it was kind of the same, but not many people tried to recycle it. Transmuteo did it really early. When I started to connect with Telepath around 2017, we would spend hours having the most esoteric talks, because he’s really into that stuff – all this New Age, chakra, astrology, numerology kind of stuff. Telepath is basically a New Age pillar in the vaporwave scene, not just with his more recent aliases, but even back when he was doing classic slushwave. It wasn’t always obvious, but from the beginning, it was very symbolic and esoteric.

Telepath is also a huge synthesizer nerd. He would buy and resell retro synths, and he would talk about it a lot. I didn’t know anything about it, so he’d tell me to try the [Korg] Wavestation A/D, this 1980s synthesizer. Both Jornt [Cat System Corp.] and I got our synth advice from Telepath. It’s thanks to him I started to get into hardware. He released one of the first Tim Six albums on his Virtual Dream Plaza label. It was me, Jordan Christoff, Origami Girl, a bunch of other people, this little community of New Age enjoyers.

When you started making New Age and solarpunk-inspired vaporwave, were you inspired by books as well?

I didn’t really know that many hopeful [science-fiction] books, just some short stories. But I was really inspired by the political side of things. I was reading Buckminster Fuller and Murray Bookchin, these early figures of eco-anarchism. I was trying to understand how we arrived here. At one point we were still imagining this really positive, optimistic future, which vaporwave is often about, when we were promised prosperity, freedom, democracy and equality. But it didn’t turn out that way, so I was trying to understand: Where did we go wrong?

Around the time, I started getting annoyed with people online just being edgelords and shitposters and vouching for accelerationist right-wing thinking. For some reason, that started to get really popular in the [vaporwave] scene. HKE of Dream Catalogue was a huge catalyst for it. I even had a big fight with David [Russo alias HKE, ed. note] on Twitter; he was calling solarpunk “leftist bullshit” and I was like, “No dude, it’s anarchist. It’s not even about left or right. Surveillance capitalism is not a fiction anymore. We don’t have to imagine a dystopian world, it’s already here, and we’re living in it, so why not try to imagine something different?”

That edgelord/accelerationist school of thinking has luckily vanished from the scene. But where do you see it heading currently? Is there actually still a bigger vaporwave community, or is it just a bunch of micro-communities quietly moving away from each other?

Both is kind of true, actually. Pre-pandemic, you had [the 100%] ElectroniCON [festival], which was a big uniting force. People came out and actually showed their faces for the first time. I remember watching the streams late at night and chatting to all my friends online, and we were really excited about Telepath playing live, for example. It was just a huge thing for the community. Everyone felt this is now on the verge of becoming something bigger, more real and tangible.

The pandemic cut that off, but then a lot of online things started to pop up, like Slushwave. At the same time, these subgenres started drifting away from each other. Barber beats came out, and it’s really a scene of its own. It’s not even vaporwave to me. Dreampunk separated itself from vaporwave completely too. Slushwave started to become its own thing, and signalwave as well.

At the same time, a lot of people are still communicating between those scenes, so I wouldn’t say it’s become too separated. See, I’ve been into slushwave for a long time, and Global Pattern is kind of a slushwave label, but I also have a signalwave alias and I try to stay in the loop with that community as well.

People in these communities are really engaged and dedicated. Everyone who comes to the IRL Slushwave festival is an actual fan who knows all the artists. It’s a cool experience to meet those people because you don’t have to start from the beginning and explain what vaporwave is or whatever. You just immediately know what to talk about. It’s so liberating and inspiring to be surrounded by like-minded people who really know their stuff.

Now if ECON would be happening again and if I was to do it, I would make separate stages – a signalwave stage, a slushwave stage, a future funk stage. Because it’s really different audiences right now, and the music serves different purposes, moods and desires. At the same time, it can all coexist pretty much like in the early days, it just needs some really powerful force to unite it all. For example, the Nobody Here documentary reunited a lot of people. Not everyone liked it, but that’s not the point. The fact is that everyone in the scene watched it and had an opinion on it, and people were discussing it online.

If you’re looking at Global Pattern, which is about to turn 10, and your own music as Tim Six, what’s on the horizon for both?

The label currently has just a few releases per year, and I see it as a time to reflect. At some point I thought maybe I should close it, because I was feeling sort of a disappointment, I guess, with how things were going in the scene. That was around the time when all that Twitter drama was happening. But then I decided I was still seeing a lot of potential. Even if a bunch of people started to associate vaporwave with some sketchy right-wing thinking, I decided to continue.

I think we hit something really potent with the solarpunk thing. Those compilations that we did were really successful – probably the most successful releases in the whole catalogue, in terms of numbers of streams and feedback as well. So I have an idea to continue the series, but a little more sophisticated than before – not just a compilation, more a collaborative project, so people can really come together to create something and to lead by example.

But you know, since having kids and moving to Paris, things have just been slowing down for me. I just needed some time to regroup and settle down in a new place, in a new country, to process the war, the politics and all that stuff. Only recently I’ve felt that I’m starting to get back on track. I finally realized that If I just spend my days doomscrolling, it will have me thinking we’re all done.

But I want to keep pushing and trying to imagine a different world. I stick to this principle – if you want to see something happen, you need to become the force that makes it happen. Right now I’m really looking forward to this year’s Slushwave festival, which is getting bigger and bigger each year. It’s just so good to get together and have some beers with the legends of the scene sitting right there next to you under the sun in the park, you know?

Listen to Tim Six on Bandcamp

Discover Global Pattern on Bandcamp

Tim Six’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• luxury elite – world class (2015)

• Transmuteo – Cymaglyphs (2011)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – ゲートウェイ (2014)

• 猫 シ Corp. – 家族. 劳动. 쇼핑. (VHS version!) (2018)

• 天気予報 [Asutenki] – 真夜中の天気 (2017)

• MindSpring Memories – मुक्ता भव यत्रासि (2016)

• ll nøthing ll – artificial nature (2018)

• desert sand feels warm at night – 水に流す (2019)

• Vaperror – Mana Pool (2014)

• Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – NTSC Memories (2013)