Vapor Talks #37: Copywrong/CANAL+

The Arizona-based producer creates atmospheric signalwave with a new wave aesthetic

The videocall window appears. The young man with big hair who’s sitting in front of the camera is wearing a white shirt and a tie, and for some reason, next to him stands a single potted houseplant.

Despite his friendly and professional demeanor, he doesn’t come across as a man of many words. Which, of course, is perfectly fine and also fits very well with the enigmatic sound collages he creates under the alias CANAL+ using looped clips from European television shows of the ’80s and ’90s.

It turns out that although he mainly sampled French programs for his CANAL+ releases – and the project’s Bandcamp page even lists Paris, France, as its location – he is actually a producer from Tucson, Arizona, a major city in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, not very far from the Mexican border. He has spent his entire life there and speaks virtually no French.

As I talk with him, I learn that he’s a true child of vaporwave – and that might explain some of my earlier observations. Ever since he discovered the genre a decade ago, he’s been immersed in the music and culture of the 1980s and 1990s, viewed through vaporwave’s hazy, nostalgic lens.

From his early days as Super Nintendo through his brilliant signalwave catalog as CANAL+, to his more experimental and versatile works as Copywrong, he has gradually freed himself from all restrictive constraints while remaining true to the plunderphonics idea.

During our conversation, we talked about his various pseudonyms, his biggest influences, his search for samples and his musical tastes. We also discussed what led to CANAL+’s involuntary three-year hiatus between 2022 and 2025 and what the future holds for the artist behind CANAL+ and Copywrong.

all photos courtesy of the artist

When you think of your childhood, do you hear a specific style of music playing?

I would always just listen to the radio in the car when my mom would drive me to school, and I remember on road trips my dad had this CD of Meddle by Pink Floyd. He would also just listen to [internet radio] Pandora a lot.

So what type of music did you get into as a teenager?

One big occurrence was that I was just looking at this YouTube channel one day, it might have been [EDM/dubstep channel] Monstercat or something similar to that, just looking through their songs, and I found this one that had this weird pink thumbnail with a black checkerboard on it.

It turns out it was that “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing” song [by Macintosh Plus alias Vektroid, ed. note], and that just really blew my mind. When I was listening to it, there was this weird feeling inside my body. I can’t explain it. It was crazy. After I heard that, I wanted to seek out more music that was like that, and that’s how I got into vaporwave.

You didn’t listen to any other styles of music before discovering vaporwave?

Not really a whole lot. I guess it just wasn’t a big interest for me.

Did you start making vaporwave right after discovering it?

Not immediately, no. This was in 2016, maybe early 2017, and I started releasing my own stuff on Bandcamp in autumn of 2018. But it was under a different name – super nintendo. It was mostly just regular vaporwave, not specifically focused on TV recordings. But the super nintendo Bandcamp page got mysteriously deleted in 2022. [Some super nintendo albums are still available through the Bandcamp page of the label Palm 84, ed. note]

In 2020, you launched a new alias, CANAL+, which became really popular in the signalwave community. What was the reason for starting anew?

I just thought it would be fun to try something different, because even though I experimented with signalwave a bit as super nintendo, I wanted to try and delve into it a little further. I was influenced by Asutenki (天気予報) a lot at the time.

I suppose you were into Sport 3000 as well?

Oh, totally. I was into all the aliases, not just Sport 3000, but also Kanal Vier, Video Interface, VVVX Software… I would listen to all of the signalwave stuff, and then a lot of the Italo disco stuff too. A super formative artist.

Did you seek out the online vaporwave community at the time?

Yeah, I did. That was mainly just on Discord servers, not even for music though, just to hang out with people.

Canal+ is a French pay tv program, and your music samples a lot of old French broadcasts. What’s your connection to France?

There’s not really much of any connection. My original plan was to have this Japanese television-themed alias, Fuji TV, but there was a lot of Japanese-themed signalwave out there already, and I decided to go with something else. I thought maybe it might be nice to try something different.

When I was looking for samples around the time that the original incarnation of Fuji TV was being developed, I found this YouTube channel called TELE 80 TELES 90, which had a lot of French television clips, and I just thought those looked really interesting. They were certainly different from all the Japanese clips I had been looking at.

Do you speak fluent French?

Not much of any French at all. When I was looking for samples, I would turn on YouTube’s auto-caption to figure out what they were saying. Towards the end of CANAL+, I was trying to de-emphasize the vocal aspect in a way, tried to focus more on purely instrumental songs, but when I released the newest album [in 2025], I had realized that people who spoke French were actually listening to my music, and I felt more compelled to include speech in the music again.

You released 15 albums as CANAL+ in 2020 and 2021. Was the pandemic a catalyst for you to create more music?

No, not at all. It was more just trying something new that I hadn’t done before. Something that would happen often was that I would come up with an idea and I would make that idea into an album, and then maybe I felt that I could refine that idea a bit further, so I made another album with the same idea. You can see that with Dimanche après-midi and Vendredi, and then Revenir and Diffusions nocturnes, those are pretty similar. The same goes for Lumière et ombre and Repères.

That makes a lot of sense. Another pair of similar albums would be Ensoleillement and Le spectateur.

Oh, definitely. Here I wanted to try and move further into a sort of mid-90s sound, whereas with previous albums I had mostly focused on a kind of late 80s, early 90s sound. Looking back at it, I guess there’s not really a whole lot of difference, but at the time I thought there was a big difference.

What led to the temporary end of the CANAL+ project in 2022?

Well, the hiatus wasn’t really a decision that I made. Départ wasn’t intended to be a farewell release. It was just that the super nintendo Bandcamp had been mysteriously deleted one day, so I went and re-uploaded everything, because luckily everything had been saved, but the next day the page had been deleted again, and I had also been booted out of the account that I had been using to access the CANAL+ page.

That’s why I stopped releasing things, because I didn’t have access to it. At least I thought I didn’t. Because in early 2025 my computer broke, and I had to get a new one, and when I tried to log back into Bandcamp, I suddenly found out that my login for the CANAL+ account still worked. The super nintendo page was still gone, but I had full access to CANAL+ again, so then I put out the latest album, Modulations sans frontières.

Did you make any music as CANAL+ during that involuntary hiatus from 2022 to 2025?

Only one song, it’s from fall 2024, this 30-second joke song for The Gas Station MegaCompilation on Hitachi Home Video.

You’d gotten a lot of positive reactions from the community to the original CANAL+ discography though. It really influenced many artists in the newer signalwave generation.

Yeah, I guess some people really liked my stuff.

I just want to understand why you let that Bandcamp hiccup basically end the whole project.

Well, at that point I was feeling constrained by super nintendo, and in a way I had also felt somewhat constrained by CANAL+ too, so I decided to start again under a new alias, Copywrong, and I decided that under Copywrong I would let myself do anything. This included just regular vaporwave, signalwave, and putting all kinds of effects on tracks. In that way, since I wasn’t limiting myself anymore, I didn’t really need CANAL+ as an outlet for signalwave.

What would be something that Copywrong can do but CANAL+ could not have done?

For CANAL+, I’ve usually favored a clean sound for the samples, whereas in Copywrong, I like to make the songs a little dirtier sounding. I like to put more effects on them. Also, I look for samples that aren’t obscured by a whole lot of speech. I try to focus more on the musical aspect.

Would you say there is a message contained within your music?

I don’t think there’s a specific message. It’s more just creating an atmosphere.

Can you talk about how you create that atmosphere? What do you gravitate towards when looking for samples?

That’s difficult. I really enjoy sort of melodic things. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’ve been really into International Telecom over the past couple years, and that kind of music is very melodic too.

Do you listen to a lot of original music from the 80s and 90s?

Definitely. Let me go to last.fm and look at my top artists. (silence) Well, Pet Shop Boys and New Order are pretty high on the list. I really like Devo too.

Do you still follow the signalwave scene closely?

Yeah, I’ve definitely been making an effort to keep in touch with new releases. In terms of collaborations, I haven’t done a whole lot of them, but it would be nice to do more.

Anyone in particular that you’d want to collaborate with? International Telecom, I suppose?

That would be cool. I’d definitely like to collaborate with Contoso or any one of his other aliases.

Do you see music as a creative hobby, or is it also a career option for you?

Definitely more of a hobby. Right now I’m in university. I’m studying environmental science. I guess it’s just fun for me looking for samples, to look through all these old television clips and to know what kind of keywords you have to use in order to find the specific kind of thing that you’re looking for.

How many people in real life know that you’re making vaporwave?

I think pretty much just my family.

Is there a local music scene in Arizona that you’re tapped in?

There’s no local scene. KJ Valium has been hosting shows a few hours away in Phoenix, but I haven’t been able to go to those yet. I think I appeared at one of those once, but I was a teddy bear.

What does that mean?

Oh, I wasn’t able to go there, so there was a video projector playing the songs, and then on stage, there was probably like a teddy bear on top of a desk.

Do you have any plans to perform live at one point?

Yeah, I think that would be nice.

What are your general plans in terms of future musical projects?

I’ve been working on a new signalwave album for Copywrong that I think a lot of people will like. It’s very similar to Vendredi. In the last couple years I’ve also started to learn keys and guitar, and I’ve been trying to arrange and compose my own [original] music. That hasn’t really been released, but recently I’ve had the idea of putting together an album of covers that mainly just use this analog synthesizer I have, kind of like “Music for Parties” by Silicon Teens [a 1980 ‘virtual band’ project on Mute that re-imagined rock’n’roll standards through a new wave/synth pop lens, ed. note].

What are you listening to right now?

Recently I’ve been getting back into KROPN, this signalwave artist that had a lot of really good releases back in 2016. It’s not music-focused like my stuff, it’s definitely more sound collage, kind of like Negativland, and it definitely focuses on American television. It’s really fun to listen to. He’s wiped his Bandcamp, but you can find his stuff on Internet Archive, and I’ve uploaded three of his albums to YouTube.

Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.

Thanks, you too. This has been a really nice talk.

Listen to CANAL+ | Copywrong on Bandcamp

CANAL+/Copywrong’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• Eleven Eastern – Eastern Standard (2018)

• Mere Notilde – Solanin (2018)

• Ｓｐｏｒｔ３０００ & バーチャル Paragon ™ - ｓｅｃｒｅｔ ｐｌａｃｅ (2018)

• Glitching – Channel Selector (Ultimate Edition) (2023)

• ロフト tapes – Trackpack カセット 2 (2018)

• 骨架的 – Holograms (2010)

• Surfing – Deep Fantasy (2012)

• luxury elite – prism (2018)

• haircuts for men – テ​ロ​カ​セ​ッ​ト (2014)

• chris††† – new wounds (2014)