Vapor Talks #39: Hydroplaned Into a False Reality!
The Gen Z producer about the allure of Nintendo Wii soundtracks and Frutiger Aero-inspired vaporwave
Ever heard about genres like aerowave or dariacore? Do you know what the modding scene is? Have you listened to OsamaSon or XavierSoBased?
If you’ve answered “no” to all of these questions, you’re very likely not a member of Gen Z. Whenever I talk to artists from that generation, I usually end up feeling really old for a minute, but I’m also always just learning so much from them.
About a year ago, I’ve encountered the abundant discography of a semi-anonymous vaporwave artist from Salt Lake City, Utah. I was intrigued by the colourful Frutiger Aero-inspired soundscapes on the album photos (E:) released in 2025 under the Enterprises alias, then I discovered the four-hour aerowave epic 𓋹 (Ankh) by Hydroplaned Into a False Reality! – at that point in time, I didn’t even realize that the same person behind those two projects was also behind Channel Surfing by WiiWare!, an album made entirely out of samples from soundtracks for the Nintendo Wii console.
The prolific producer behind all of these aliases only started releasing music in 2023, but in this rather short amount of time, he’s become an important pillar of the scene, founding his own DIY label World End Collapse and partnering up with established labels like Hushtones or Vault Of Discoveries for physical releases of some of his albums. If you’re looking for the most creative, innovative and productive minds of the current vaporwave scene, look no further.
We sat down recently and talked about his personal musical journey, what’s been inspiring some of his most celebrated projects and what things he’s interested in right now – inside and outside of the vaporwave scene.
You’re based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Did you grow up there?
Well, I don’t live in Salt Lake City directly, I generally live in a suburb outside of it, but it’s the closest big city to my current location. And yes, I’ve lived in Utah my entire life.
And you’re 21, is that right?
Yep.
That makes you one of the youngest vaporwave producers I’ve interviewed. You could technically be my son.
Yeah, there’s people I know in the vaporwave scene that are older than my parents, which is kind of crazy too.
Not sure how old your parents are, but I’m 49.
That’s actually older than my parents. (laughter)
I just spoke to УВБ-76, who’s 55, and I spoke to 秋 (Autumn) earlier this year, who might be slightly younger than you. Such a wild range in this scene.
For sure, it’s really cool.
When you think of your childhood, what kind of music do you hear playing?
My mom was really into Queen, and I remember hearing that a lot in the car. My dad was very into They Might Be Giants, and that’s the band that I’ve been extremely inspired by. I love their music so much, and I love how they are kind of all over the place. I like to take that aspect and put it into my own art where I don’t feel like I have to be put in a bubble of a genre in order to express my music.
What kind of music did you get into as a teenager then?
In elementary school, I used to listen to a bunch of dubstep, and I thought it would be super cool to be a dubstep producer but that never happened. Then I got really into rhythm games during my middle school years. I started playing this fan-made version of Guitar Hero called clone hero, and it had a bunch of songs on there. The first band that I really got into was System of a Down, and then I went further into more crazier metal, and I just kept going until I decided to stop.
Did you play in any high school bands or learn any instruments?
Not really. I took a guitar class in my high school, and I had a couple friends that were like, “We should start a band. That’d be so fun.” But I didn’t know if I really wanted to do this, and I also didn’t really play an instrument. My friends were like, “We’ll figure something out.” But we never even did anything. That’s the closest I got.
When you stopped listening to metal, where did you go from there?
In high school, I got really into Death Grips. That scratched the itch that I couldn’t find anymore within metal. I have ADHD, and that kind of music just gives me a dopamine rush, so that worked out perfectly. So I got more into rap in general, and I found out that Death Grips use a lot of sampling, so I wanted to try doing that. I installed the free trial of FL Studio, and I made a really bad EP. I still have the songs somewhere. I think I’ve sampled some of them, but I’m not telling people that I sampled them… except I am now. (laughs)
Another artist that I’m really inspired by is Lil Ugly Mane. Even the name Hydroplaned Into a False Reality! was inspired by him, because he often has these really long song titles. Because I was going just by Hydroplane at first, but then I wanted to make it much longer because i generally thought it would be cool, the name doesn’t really mean much but its more of a stream of consciousness thing where I didn’t consciously come up with everything, in fact it was even longer at one point. It also was inspired by Lil Ugly Mane. You know, on the cover of his EP Uneven Compromise, it says “Corrupted By The Darkness You Fall Into An Endless Sleep And Other Paths That Result In Failure And Unacceptance”…
…yeah, I remember I really loved his mixtape Mista Thug Isolation.
All of his albums are so good, including those weird “three-sided tape” mixtape things. He was one of the first people that made me think about getting into more weird productions. Well, and then I discovered a new thing – a weird little genre. You might be guessing due to context clues what genre this is… it is vaporwave. I actually discovered it through Pad Chennington’s videos on YouTube.
I was still in high school when I saw one of his videos pop up. Watching a few of them, I understood that albums can actually be more than just a bunch of songs, more like a concept piece or a piece of art in general, like an artistic statement. Vaporwave also seemed pretty easy to make and I wanted to try it out. This was back in 2022. I was not in the scene at all at this point due to me just wanting to upload music onto Bandcamp. As far as I could see, there was nobody making Wii-inspired vaporwave at that moment – which I later learned wasn’t the case – and I thought it would be interesting to try something out.
So I made [WiiWare!’s] Channel Surfing, and I uploaded it, and then I took it down a month later. I deleted a lot of my older music when I first started for some reason. I really have no idea why I did this, but then in 2024 I decided to eventually re-upload all of my older material that was decent, and it’s kind of crazy how insane that alias is getting now. I appreciate it, but it’s super surreal that this album I made when I was still in high school is now actually getting a vinyl release through Hushtones.
I think I made Jesus Christ Rain Heaven right afterwards, and again, I deleted that two days after I made and uploaded it. After reuploading it, I saw that generally some people seemed to like it, and I don’t understand it – but I respect it.
Could you name artists and albums that influenced you when you started making vaporwave?
A lot of these albums that were in the Pad Chennington videos obviously. But let me think. (pause)
Robustom’s Public Broadcasting Service is one that inspired me. I kind of grew up on PBS because my family did not have a lot of money when I was growing up, so it was just the cheapest television channel, which was mostly educational stuff.
DRAKE 遗事 JOSH / / JOSH 遗事 DRAKE [by MILLENNIAL DREAM CORP., ed. note] was one of the first ones I got into too. I thought it was cool as a concept and I essentially grew up on this early era of Nickelodeon live action sitcoms so it scratched that itch for me. I didn’t realize that it was meant to be a joke until I saw matsu [the co-owner of Shatterfoil Industries] in the Vapor Physicals Discord server, and he mentioned that this was literally created by people in 4chan as a joke, and I’m like, “Are you kidding me?”
Did you start connecting with the scene on Discord right away?
Not really. What basically happened was that I made those albums, and then I was gonna move on, so I was just releasing a lot of weird ambient noise stuff for a period of a year. I’m referring to that as my non-vaporwave era. I had a huge Rate Your Music/AOTY phase, so I was really annoying for that year in my life. I eventually discovered death’s dynamic shroud and I was like, “Oh yeah, vaporwave, I remember that. I forgot about that world of internet people still doing that? Let me revisit that.”
That’s when I really got into listening to a lot of stuff. Before I was just aware of it, and I liked the concept of just uploading something to Bandcamp, but I never really listened to the genre so much. But when I started getting into DDS, I went back and rewatched a lot of Pad Chennington’s YouTube videos and I discovered a lot more weird music like that. I just kept finding stuff. I’ve also always loved the idea of the scene and really wanted to get into it, but I didn’t know how to properly get into the scene. Through the YouTube recommendation, I found FUNNYNET, this podcast that christtt, Discoholic, and 3D Blast were doing forever ago. I listened to all those episodes, and somewhere they mentioned Hot Takes in the Skeleton Lipstick episode, so I listened to a lot of that.
Then I was like, “I don’t want to watch people talk about the scene. I want to be in the scene.” I thought it was gonna be so cool once I finally get in and people start talking about my albums and care about my music. I realized that I need to stop caring about that more recently, but I really wanted to get to the point to be on something like the YouTube side of the vaporwave scene, and now I kind of have, because Pad Chennington did a YouTube Short on the WiiWare cassette box that Hushtones did a while ago, which was really cool.
You recently wrote something funny and interesting on Bluesky: “The vaporwave scene is the best scene that I’ve ever been in, and that is solely because everyone is mostly adults.”
(laughs) Yeah, that’s because the only scene I got into before, like around last year, was dariacore. For context, dariacore is a subgenre of plunderphonics, but it’s really fast and insane. It was created by [the artist] Jane Remover. But most people in this scene would literally be extremely young, like around 13 to 15, and I’m like, “This isn’t a scene, guys. You guys are all literally children. There is nothing here, you aren’t doing anything interesting.” I don’t mean this in a mean way, but people would freak out about the tiniest things ever, like someone would be complaining on Twitter that somebody else was mad at them for retweeting p0rn. So I eventually stopped caring about it, and I’m glad I’m no longer super active within this scene.
Let’s talk about your album 𓋹 (Ankh). At 62 tracks and a length of over three hours, it’s a really immersive experience. What were your inspirations here?
The album that mostly inspired me for this was sobergaze’s Wiiきおくにとどめる. I realized that you can make really long vaporwave/Frutiger Aero kind of things, and I wanted to do something like this too. I’d created the alias Enterprises for one album, photos (E:), and I used the exact same effects chain for both this album and Ankh on every single track. Ankh is just a lot longer. I have finally listened to the album entirely in one sitting, because I got the artist copies of the cassettes. Now I can kind of see why everyone likes this album. This is really good. (laughs)
There was a review on Ankh that really spoke to me, someone on Bandcamp saying that all the music is a familiar vibe from childhood, yet the whole time there is something off, a feeling that there’s something wrong with this reality that we find ourselves in. This is such a perfect description of all my music. I don’t think of it as one-dimensional or just being about nostalgia. I always try to apply an extra layer of detail and content. I don’t want something to be just all positive or all negative – I want a sweet spot in between because that’s just like life is for me, mentally. There’s great stuff that happens and then there’s not great stuff that happens, but overall it’s kind of good. That’s the way I see it.
One of your recent releases was called E c o l i f e ™ 🌱. That album was actually completely sample-free, right?
Yes, I made the music. I didn’t play it on an actual synth, but I did program everything through FL Studio. I do have a synth, but I haven’t used it for a lot of things. I usually use it for just chopping up beats and stuff. It has little drum pads, and those are fun to program. For this one, most of the sounds were just [MIDI] SoundFonts. There’s the default Microsoft one, and there’s one that was made for Windows computers that I downloaded. There’s a Kirby 64 SoundFont, there’s a Wii SoundFont, and there’s a Pokémon SoundFont. It’s a mix between all of those.
A lot of your recent music falls into that Y2K/Frutiger Aero-inspired vaporwave bucket. Some people have started calling it aerowave. Is that the main focus for you right now?
Honestly, it has been for the past three albums I’ve made. I do want to continue to make more albums in this style in the future because this is just the era that I grew up in, so this is what I’m mostly nostalgic for. No harm to anyone that does 80s stuff, because I mean, that makes sense, but I feel nostalgia for the time I was a kid, and I’m sure people feel it’s okay to do that too. I love all the 2000s vibes around. But I’m also working on other stuff – right now I’m working on a new slushwave album.
There’s an aquatic theme appearing throughout some of your releases like WaterSoft™ or magical mystic waterpark. Is that another childhood memory?
Yes actually, in a way, though I’ve never thought about it that way. WaterSoft™ samples the music from a game I played on the Wii called Fluidity. It’s a fun game, I’ve beaten it three times. It’s a game that I grew up on, and it’s like this whole open world experience. There’s also a sequel and it sucks, but the first game was really good, and I basically made this album out of the soundtrack.
With the magical mystic waterpark album, it was heavily inspired by an actual waterpark that I would see on the freeway that was a massive waterpark, the album is more specifically about what I imagined it to be as a kid. And now after properly visiting that waterpark, I can say that it’s kinda just okay and I don’t like waterparks that much. For the actual production of it, I stole those field recordings from a YouTube video. I don’t know what this person was doing – it was just someone recording audio in a waterpark, and I’m confused because they market it as a sleep video. I don’t know how you would sleep on this, but I just stole that and it worked perfectly for the album.
You’ve released eight albums under your WiiWare! alias now. What’s the significance of Nintendo Wii music and soundtracks to you?
The Wii was just the console I grew up on. I was really into video games growing up. That is where I spent most of my time when I was super young, and I have a lot of nostalgia for that time period in general.
Are you still into gaming a lot?
To an extent. I like replaying a lot of games I played as a kid every once in a while. I’m more casual as an adult now so I’m not like playing them constantly, but there’s games that I get really into, and then I play them constantly for a week, and then I stop. I’ve been playing a lot of Celeste recently, and I’ve gotten into the modding scene. That’s been really fun. I don’t play a lot of Call of Duty or those types of games. I like to play a lot of weirder stuff or more story-based games.
What are you interested in outside of vaporwave or even outside of music?
I’m really into movies. I got into it through horror films and stuff like that. A lot of my favorite films are more like weird, scary movies. I work at a movie theater, so I get a lot of free tickets, and I get to see lots of new things.
Do you see yourself producing artists or being an artist in the future?
I think I prefer doing cool stuff behind the scenes. That is something that I am super into.
You’re also running a tape and CD label, World End Collapse. What’s the vision for that?
Good question. I don’t know. Originally, like forever ago, I was mostly focusing on weirder stuff. But then I also don’t exclusively listen to weirder stuff, so now I just put out vaporwave stuff that I really like, across subgenres. The most recent one I put out was the LAPA album. Shoutout LAPA. [LAPA is an up-and-coming signalwave producer from Argentina, ed. note]
What are you into right now in terms of new music?
It’s currently a 50/50 mix for me between vaporwave and underground rap – stuff like OsamaSon, XavierSoBased and ksuuvi, that kind of people. It’s weird because it’s gotten really popular but they still use the term “underground”. I don’t know if it still counts as underground though. It’s not what’s been referred to as underground rap before the 2020s, more like this extremely distorted and kind of weird type with heavy, loud, super-saturated 808s. I think many people who are a lot older and not as open-minded will be like, “What is this? Why do people even listen to this?” Yeah, I’m actually listening to this music a lot.
And who are some of your favorites in vaporwave right now?
I’ve been listening to a lot of Itachi’s music. I love their stuff so much, and I’m also friends with them. It’s extra cool to be listening to stuff that’s by people I know. Liam Smidzik’s awesome too, he makes a lot of really cool stuff. I’ve been friends with him for a while. We’ve both kind of gone into the vaporwave scene at a similar time. Me and him have a band called Ceramic Planetarium which has some cool albums.
Another artist I’ve been a huge fan of is Rooms Without Doors. She is genuinely one of the coolest artists within the vaporwave scene where every album feels like a fully in-depth piece of art and I love her work so much. There is definitely a lot more I could mention, but these are the first to come to mind at this current moment.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on a weird slushwave album that I sampled entirely cloud rap beats and stuff like that. I’m also working on a drum’n’bass-inspired slushwave thing. It’s actually a collaboration with a lot of artists from the scene like Itachi, Lover’s Dream, Psicadence and a couple other cool people. That should happen eventually, I hope. Crossing my fingers. Another thing that I’ve been working on and off with is the debut album for me and catfries’ band! Its been in the works for a while and it should come out eventually but only time can tell at this moment.
One last question – you recently posted on Bluesky: “I don’t give a f**k if they produce a legendary album. I’m not gonna give a f**k about a racist.”
Oh, this was just about some of the edgier people in the scene. I’m not going to name them and give them a platform, but I’m seeing people talking about certain artists and albums online, and I’m just like, I don’t care, you know? Even if it’s influential, I don’t want to support this. I just don’t want to listen to music by bad people, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad people who make vaporwave.
Bandcamp Links
Hydroplaned Into a False Reality!’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
christtt – deep dark trench (2018)
death’s dynamic shroud.wmv – DERELICTメガタワー (2014)
▒▓新しいデラックスライフ▓▒░ [New Deluxe Life] – ▣世界から解放され▣ [Freed From The World] (2012)
tdstr – VCH (2025)
DISEASE – 愛情のある関係 (2025)
👁🗨📲 [Eyeclick] – 👁点击と👁 (2023)
Internet Club – Redefining The Workplace (2012)
恋人の夢 [Lovers Dream] – Skylines (2024)
Rooms Without Doors – Late Night Road Fantasy (2024)
Radio Pirates – 虚空の女 (I can distort your mind until it breaks) (2024)
Hola , Muy Interesante Entrevista. Con Tan Solo Unos Pocos Años En El Vaporwave , Hydroplaned Into A False Reality ! , Se Esta Convirtiendo En Uno De Los Jóvenes Con Más Talento De La Escena. Un Saludo.