Vapor Talks #32: Strmi

Meet one of signalwave's most exciting newcomers

Since releasing his first project in September ‘25, the Serbian producer Strmi has been taking the signalwave scene by storm.

Like many of his peers, he was inspired by stumbling across random cues online – finding an Infinity Frequencies song in a forum post related to Backrooms lore, seeing a friend on Instagram posting a 猫 シ Corp. album, discovering the infamous Pad Chennington video, landing on the Signalwave Discord server and finally finding a global community of like-minded sample hunters.

Starting out with a Balkan take on classic genre tropes like old television transmissions, Strmi soon started using the signalwave template as an actual storytelling tool. His highly creative album concepts include the lost broadcast of a basketball game, an attempt at capturing the vibe of psychotherapy sessions, and the depiction of a night at the bunker as a kid during the Yugoslav Wars.

Even if it’s just a tiny online niche that knows about Strmi’s atmospheric sound collages yet, his conceptual works are already finding an immense amount of resonance in that community. However, Strmi isn’t resting on his laurels. Even if he’s been making this style of music for less than a year, he’s concerned about repeating himself and encourages himself and his community to constantly keep creating something new. Follow me into the restless mind of one of the biggest talents of the signalwave scene.

all images and screenshots courtesy of the artist

You live in Serbia, did you grow up there as well?

Yeah, I grew up and still live in Belgrade, the biggest city in Serbia. It has two million residents, which is quite big for Balkan standards. I’d say I had a pretty normal childhood past the age of 13, after my parents’ divorce finally got settled and I moved in with my dad. Now, though, I live alone.

My parents weren’t really that much into music. My dad listened to some Hispanic music, and my mom was into Turbo-folk [popular Serbian style of music mixing traditional folk with pop and commercial techno, ed. note], so I didn’t resonate with her music much. But Belgrade is a really vivid city. There’s something going on everyday, not just on the weekends. I met a lot of great people here, music and non-music wise.

What type of music were you into as a teenager?

It started very bland with just radio and YouTube recommendations, so I was listening to really popular music. Eventually I started listening to rap. That was the first genre I tackled. For three years, I was really into hip hop, first just the mainstream stuff like Eminem, and then I started digging into more niche hip hop artists.

One of my favorite albums was Man On The Moon II by Kid Cudi, a hip hop album influenced by [psychedelic] rock, and with that I started to transition to other genres and more abstract music. I also have it on vinyl as well, so it has a special place for me even if I don’t listen to it anymore.

I started listening to everything – ambient, jazz, progressive metal, trip-hop, drum’n’bass. It wasn’t like I had a father who was a metal fan, so I’d become a metal fan. I had to build my own music taste. I had to listen for myself to learn what I like. Some of my friends now are in a hardcore band, so I discovered hardcore going to their venues and listening to their music. I’m still very open in terms of genres I’m listening to.

What about musical training? Did you learn any instruments as a kid?

When I was in seventh grade, my mother encouraged me to learn how to play guitar. I got some lessons for about a year, but it was pretty pointless, since I wouldn’t ever play outside of the lessons. Now I’ve started playing bass. I’m all self-taught though. I’m playing in a math rock/mathcore band with some friends now. It will take time, because I’m fairly new to this and they’re also still new, but a bit better than me already. It will be a process, but I really want to focus on this band in the future.

When and how did you first discover vaporwave?

At first I discovered random YouTube mixes, with [thumbnail covers of] futuristic cars driving into a sunset. I also heard of Macintosh Plus, just who she was and the famous song [“Lisa Frank 420”, ed. note], but the first actual encounter with vaporwave was when I discovered Infinity Frequencies. I was not a very social kid at the time. It was post-pandemic, and everyone still stayed inside a lot. I was a big fan of Backrooms, and I was checking all the descriptions in the forums. That’s where I stumbled across “A Faint Signal”, and I was so amazed by it. I didn’t even know what samples were, I had zero musical knowledge. It just sounded very impressive to me. At the time, I was still listening to rap, so it was this weird foreshadowing.

For some reason I didn’t explore Infinity Frequencies’ discography at the time. I just went back to listening to other music for a while – metal, jazz, trip-hop and so on. Around early 2025, I stumbled across vaporwave again and started looking more deeply into it. One of my friends posted News At 11 [by 猫 シ Corp., ed. note] on Instagram. I was impressed – like, “Wow, a 9/11 vaporwave concept album, I want to hear this.”

And then I came across a video that probably everyone knows, the Pad Chennington signalwave video. That one actually brought a lot of people to the genre. I watched it three times in a row, and it’s an hour-long video. At the time, I already was making ambient and trip-hop music in FL Studio. I knew how to make vaporwave when I stumbled across signalwave but I didn’t know what they were actually sampling.

On your Spotify profile, there’s only one EP called Druwork. It sounds completely different from anything you have on Bandcamp. It’s not signalwave, more trip-hop adjacent I’d say, quite breakbeat-heavy and funky. Is it sampled music as well?

Yeah, everything on that is sampled. Nothing is played live on that actual album, but I did perform it live with some friends last year – one played drums, another one played guitar, and I did all the rest. I originally made this album just for myself to listen to at home. I just make music all the time, and I listen to it all day. One day I felt like finishing this EP, and then I did that live event, and it turned out really awesome. Over 220 people came out that night. I am still to this day impressed how many people came. But right now I feel I’m kind of past that project already, it’s basically a closed chapter to me.

Druwork live event, Belgrade, Serbia, 31.01.2026

Can you try to describe what drew you particularly into signalwave? What did you like about it?

I like the ambience, I like the aesthetic, I like that it’s about forgotten media. I’m not super fond of the Japanese aesthetic though, because it’s been overdone for ten years. Personally I wouldn’t do that anymore. I would want people to go outside of their comfort zone. I want the signalwave scene to become even more experimental.

I’m a very conceptual person. I read and write a lot of fiction. So I’m very into concept albums, not just listening to them but making them as well. Not just bashing out five songs that sound similar, but making up an actual storyline around it. I was drawn into signalwave because there aren’t any limits to the genre. I look at it not even as music, more as audioplays. I can sample anything and create little audio dramas. On my album The Night of March 24th, at one point there’s 30 seconds of just people packing up their stuff. That wouldn’t make much sense in many other music genres.

Which artists or releases outside of Infinity Frequencies and NEWS AT 11 have influenced you the most?

CT57’s Road To Nowhere is an obvious one, TV2’s [1450 KHz at] Broken Grove too. Those inspired me a lot. There’s another album called 2 Million something by S.N.R.T.M. – it’s a Moroccan signalwave album. When I saw that, I was like, “Okay, I’ll make a Serbian signalwave album, just to represent my culture.” That would become Dnevnik. It’s the first signalwave album I released. I didn’t even have a Bandcamp at the time, I had zero followers, but I put so much work into it. Searching for the right samples, I even asked my friends to ask their parents about old Serbian media. I was using game shows, children’s programs, jingles, everything. It’s just how I work – I dig really deep.

Originally I just wanted to make this one album with Serbian samples, and then continue making other music. When I finished it, I remember I sent a message in the Signalwave Discord server saying, “This will be my only album ever.” That was ten months ago, and since then I’ve released ten albums. (laughs)

It’s not even been a year, but you’re already getting a lot of traction in the community. When I asked around on the Discord server about young talents to interview for my series, your name immediately came up, even from a couple of really established producers.

I feel so honored! I don’t even care about being popular, I just want my music to resonate with people. Even by the third album, people were already hyped for my music, since I had a more theatrical approach of announcing albums. Some have also commented on how well my albums resonate with the concepts sonically. I have to say I am quite a perfectionist. I build a new chain of effects for each album and try to change my approach on every release, because I really want them to sound different from each other, depending on the concept.

Are you engaging with the online signalwave community a lot?

Yes, I am very engaged. I hype people up, especially if they release experimental or conceptual albums. I’m very open with praising people and supporting the community, because without it I would have never gotten the traction that I did. I think it’s just important to support the community you are in. A lot of people in music are so fixated on building their own popularity, so they forget about the community that built them, but to me, that feels like betrayal, as if you’d betray a friend who was there since the beginning. Also wanna shout out the Channel 0 comp since its the community of new artists that also helps push me and praise me, so big thanks to them.

Going back to your album concepts, how do you actually come up with them?

For each album, I write these essays in my notes. I write down quite a lot for each album. There’s a whole essay for each album I made, except for Dnevnik, because it doesn’t really have a concept, and The Balkan TV Cycle has just a bit of concept, but not a very special one. But generally, I sit down and write a story – the concepts do take up a lot more time than people think, more than the music itself –, then I collect some visuals, and I start making anchor songs, that’s what I call them. So I make a song, and I’m basically like, “Okay, I want this album to sound like this song.” It’s mostly a certain emotion that the song evokes. For Sessions, I had three anchor songs for example, since I wanted three different emotions evoked on the project.

The Balkan TV Cycle is your longest album – it’s 150 songs that run for over three hours.

(laughs) That album was a nightmare to make. I wanted to exclusively feature Serbian and other Balkan media, but there’s just not that much content online, whereas for Japanese media, you’ll find millions of YouTube videos. I’d discovered some archives, a lot of ripped Balkan vinyls. It was a tedious process. I just came home from school, sat down and made 10 to 15 songs a day for a month. Finding 150 good Balkan samples is hard. I wanted it not to be monotone or stale, so I mixed a lot of different genres on the album.

A fans’ favorite is definitely Sessions. I really like that one too, and I think it was the album that introduced me to you as an artist.

It’s an important album to me, because I’ve been going to psychiatry since I was very young. It was a recurring thing in my life. Emotionally, I was always in that place – yet that place still feels so unknown. The album is trying to capture that liminal feeling of therapy sessions – somewhere between “I feel heard” and “I don’t feel heard.” That’s why it needed three anchor songs, because it captures so many different emotions. It’s a bit happy, a bit sad, just like a session. I wanted that album to resonate with people who had the same experience as me. It’s definitely inspired by Infinity Frequencies and the Backrooms, because I always wanted to make a “liminal” album, but I didn’t just want to copy-paste the same feeling. I think I did a pretty decent job.

One of my favorites in your catalog is Game That Never Aired. How did you come up with that strange concept?

Well, in Serbia, NBA games run at 3am in the night [due to the time difference, ed. note]. My dad and I used to joke, like, “Imagine waiting for 3am, and then a game disappears.” So when I started making vaporwave albums, I thought, “Maybe I can make this into something.”

The Night of March 24 is another really interesting one, because it’s autobiographical. It basically tells the story of the night when NATO started bombing Serbia in 1999, and how you suddenly had to hide in a bunker with your family.

This one was actually inspired by NEWS AT 11. It’s also more of an audio play, it’s not even that much music. I wanted it to sound as scary as it was back then here in Serbia. I wanted to raise awareness about it, because a lot of people don’t even know this actually happened. It’s not to point fingers or blame. No one’s responsible for this except for the higher-ups [in politics and the military, ed. note]. I just wanted to use my platform to raise awareness about an event that lasted 72 days, but impacted my country for another 30 years.

This album is the perspective of a kid in that time, because this came very abruptly. We knew about the tensions, but we didn’t know this would happen on a random Wednesday. So this little kid is watching TV, nothing unusual, and then suddenly his whole world falls apart, you know, now he’s packing up, the news running in the background, now he’s outside with his family, and you hear the sirens, the bombs. The last song is actually the longest one, the bunker song, and it’s five minutes of just ambient drones with these bunker sound effects. I tried to capture that feeling of not knowing if and when you will get out of there. There’s no ending to this album. The kid ran away to the bunker, and it doesn’t know if tomorrow will even come.

You just released a trilogy of albums called Act I: Encounter, Act II: Sanctuary, and Act III: Graveyard. What’s this about?

I’ve been very fascinated with the idea of a multi-album concept for a long time, and when I had some free time before my university exams, I started to conceptualize this series of three albums. So there’s an unknown, nameless guy, he’s watching TV, and a girl appears, she talks to him by switching channels to words. It’s like Bumblebee from Transformers when he switches the radio to talk. The first album is about that confusion, when you’re taken into this vivid world of an unknown entity.

The second album, Sanctuary, is about the place where they live, this cartoon world that’s stuck between TV channels. Entities have formed from old TV characters and cartoon animals, and they live in these cartoonish mythical places. So this girl actually managed to break the bounds of that cartoon city and contact the outside world – and she shows this guy this place of imagination. It’s all a bit glitchy, because it’s not supposed to be there, as it’s all made of media that wasn’t properly decomposed, and you’re seeing this world of entities using stuff from old TV ads to make their sanctuary beautiful. The whole album is just them walking through this sanctuary, going to a mountain, seeing the sunset.

Then comes Graveyard, and it’s the realization that it can’t last forever, and that the sanctuary energy is just going to be used by a new program, and every sanctuary gets destroyed whenever a new program is made. You’re watching this beautiful vivid place disintegrate and literally black out in front of you. It’s a horrific scene. Plus, the main character actually developed a friendship with the girl, and she knew the whole time this would happen, she just never told him.

You basically wrote this piece in the form of a classic drama in three acts?

Yeah. Since the whole concept is a theater play and I very much love theater, you can even hear the audience clap at the end, like a curtain call. There’s also a lot of hidden lore in the downloads. I left notes, I left pictures, so there’s actually a lot more to dig into.

The whole concept is kind of an allegory. I’ll give you one explanation. So the girl is a vaporwave album that expanded the borders of vaporwave, the sanctuaries are vaporwave’s microgenres, and the graveyard is a burnout, a warning that without enough evolution, the genre will eventually collapse on itself.

It all starts with you stumbling across an album that’s actually “the girl” / “the entity” – it could be any album, could be Macintosh Plus, could be Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night, whatever. You’re coming into this world, and you’re starting to explore things. Every sanctuary you come across is a microgenre, and every entity that lives there is a producer, and they all make their sanctuaries so beautiful by using old, half-decomposed media. So you walk around Bandcamp, you walk around YouTube. And then comes the graveyard. This is a slow burn of a person getting bored of the same stuff, a warning that vaporwave will stagnate and die if not pushed forward. I want to encourage people to experiment, to do something interesting, or else vaporwave will collapse into itself.

You know, I really love vaporwave and the community, and I want to inspire people and show people how beautiful it is, but also how fragile it can be if you just stay in the comfort zone. I don’t want another sea of Japanese media, when you can sample anything in signalwave. I don’t even see signalwave as a genre, more like a tool. For me, it’s a tool to make these little plays, these little audio dramas. Every album is its own universe, its own experience to immerse yourself in.

I never want to stop making vaporwave, I want to keep pushing and reinventing myself. I hope everyone realizes that I put much thought into my work and my concepts. I plan everything quite methodically – every song, every album title, every image. Nothing is random in my music. But it’s not even about myself being the greatest or whatever. I just want vaporwave to live on, maybe in a different form, and evolve. My only goal is to be the ignition for that change. Whenever I read about a cool concept or a great interview, it makes me want to be better as well. And whenever I watch a really good bass player, it inspires me to pick up my bass and play. That’s the impact I want to have on people too.

You haven’t done any collaborations with other artists yet, have you?

No, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do them. I just have a very particular workflow, and some of these visions are really emotional to me. I mean, an album like Sessions just couldn’t be a collab album. But I’m definitely open to collaborations. We’d just need to find the right concept. Actually, I had a concept collab album planned with M1 t e l e v i z i o, but we never did it. Both of us just had a lot of work and other priorities in life. It would have been an interesting one, for sure. He’s Hungarian, and I’m Serbian, so you can probably imagine what the concept would have been. I don’t want to spoil it though, because maybe we’ll still get to do it one day.

At this point, is music more of a hobby or an actual career option for you?

Actually, I don’t want music ever to be my career. I fear it will lose its essence. If I have to make an album to pay my rent, it will probably be shit, and I won’t like it. So far I’ve made every album because I really wanted to. I’ve made so many albums in those couple of months, but if I ever don’t feel like making music for three months, I won’t force myself, because anything that would come out of it wouldn’t be genuine, and I don’t want to make non-genuine music. So music is definitely more of a hobby. I don’t want it to be a job, because then I will look at it as a job, not as art. I want to get a normal job – I study psychology, so I’d like to work in psychology – and then do music on the side.

Listen to Strmi on Bandcamp

Strmi’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Nmesh – Dream Sequins® (2014)

• Hallmark 87 – Quiet Storms (2022)

• CT57 – Road to Nowhere (2024)

• 猫 シ Corp. – NEWS AT 11 (2016)

• death’s dynamic shroud.wmv – DERELICTメガタワ (2014)

• Infinity Frequencies – Between two worlds (2018)

• Dreamcastle™ – Lego Castle: 1979-98 (2024)

• Chuck Person – Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010)

• S.N.R.T.M. – 2M القـنـاة الثـانـية

  (2023)

• desert sand feels warm at night – 新世界の弟子たち [new world disciples] (2021)