Vapor Talks #6: Zer0 Rei

A conversation about noise music, neurodivergence, the AI witch hunt and the Slushwave community

Sebastien Dessauvage is a busy man. After a decade of booking shows at a DIY punk venue in his hometown of Kortrijk, Belgium, the music producer is now running an alternative art gallery. He’s moved into visual art through the creative use of retro CGI software, and he’s been on the organizing team of the annual Slushwave/Naturewave festival for the last couple of years.

Starting out as a noise musician under the alias Crucifix Eye, Dessauvage discovered experimental electronic music in the 2010s, adapting the artist moniker Zer0 Rei and exploring the realms of IDM, ambient, drone, breakbeats and even dungeon synth but always “firmly embedded into the third wave of Vaporwave music”, as he states on his website.

Taking some time out of his hectic schedule, he joined me for a Zoom conversation on his artistic journey outside of the mainstream, a rare nuanced take on AI music and why Slushwave 2026 will be even better than any previous edition of the online and IRL festival.

Zer0 Rei, photo: Yoni Lambrechts

Hey Sebastien! What’s Kortrijk, Belgium, like?

It’s a village pretending to be a city. It’s 80,000 people, but we punch seriously above our weight when it comes to culture and music. There’s tons happening, but at the same time, it’s small enough that you can have a sit down meeting with close to anyone on short notice, because there’s not 50 people waiting in front of you, and you can run into random big players in terms of culture at the bar or at the bakery. So it’s a good place to be.

What are some of your earliest memories of music?

I remember us having a big pile of vinyl records growing up, partially because this was around the time when vinyl was considered complete garbage. You couldn’t get people to take it from you, even for free. But we had a couple of 7-inches and 12-inches, and it would be a ritual that my mom would put those on for me, so that’s a very fond memory.

What kind of music was that?

Your standard pop stuff. Michael Jackson albums, that kind of thing.

So we’re talking late 1980s, early 1990s here?

Well, I was born in ‘89. I’m in the dad group of the vaporwave scene. Tim Six and Cat System Corp. are both around my age. We’re very much building a family. [laughs]

What kind of music were you into as a teenager?

I was lucky that a friend of my mom’s took me to the local alternative music venues quite early. At 15 or 16, I got to see my first proper punk and metal shows, and it got wild pretty fast. I saw Melt Banana, Boris and Wolf Eyes during a span of two months at the main venue. At that age, that will have a profound impact on the rest of your musical career.

Were you already into electronic music back then?

Not at all. That’s been one of my big discoveries these last couple of years. I have a lot of catching up to do. In ideal circumstances, I listen to one album that’s new to me every day, and a lot of that is just catching up on 40 years of techno, ambient and experimental electronic music.

Discovering noise music in your teens, did you start playing in a band?

I tried to learn an instrument, but that was never my forte. I have pretty bad ADHD and I’m autistic, so that’s a good combination to either get really deep into things or to bounce off them. I got a bass guitar and tried to get into that, but I got distracted by the pedals so quickly that I ended up being a solo noise musician instead of being in a band. So that’s where I started going wrong. There’s actually a lot of [former] noise musicians in vaporwave, but they don’t often bring it up themselves.

Many neurodivergent people feel at home in this vaporwave community as well. It just seems to tickle our brains a bit differently than other music.

Totally. It’s also a specific kind of not playing by the rules. One thing I often bring up when it comes to vaporwave is the way that the effects are handled with the same amount of reverence as you would traditionally have for the actual instrument. So you don’t play guitar, you play reverb. I think that fits the neurodivergent way of looking at things quite well.

Vaporwave generally seems to speak to outsiders – people who don’t find their place in society very easily.

Vaporwave is also unique insofar that it’s the first truly decentralized music genre. The main location of the genre is the internet. A couple of the local people sometimes joke about how Slushwave [festival] has come to Kortrijk of all places, because what we’re doing is extremely niche and specialized. But there’s enough weirdos spread across Europe to fill that auditorium.

In terms of being that outsider art genre – I’m no scholar on techno, but I think you can say the same thing about the roots of techno music in Black culture. Movements like breakcore also came from an underground scene, young people testing boundaries, squat parties and all that. So it’s another wave in that same ethos, making a home for people. Vaporwave did that in a wonderful way.

When and how did you first discover vaporwave?

I was a late bloomer – super late to the party. I was aware of the genre, but in the same way everyone who’s too much online knows about it. Around 2018, there was a confluence of moments in my life where all my music gear was in storage and we’d just bought a house, so I was stuck there with lots of spare time and some amount of stress and I was like, “Let’s look at this vaporwave thing, which seems kind of ironic and cool and all the noise guys I used to like are doing it now.” That was the first time when I really got in touch with the genre and did some research.

Until then, you’d still made noise music?

Yeah, just really experimental, harsh noise walls. I had some high profile releases as Crucifix Eye, like this split with Vomir [in 2012], who is the grandmaster of harsh noise walls out of France. It felt transgressive, the wall of sound thing – just playing as loud and monotonous as possible. That was my last stopping off point before going vaporwave.

I came up alongside and as close friends with Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night. We were both in that wave of people that had seen the classics, so we’d seen Telepath and 2814 establishing the genre of slushwave or dreampunk, and we were taking that and pushing it a little further.

Who were some of the other artists that inspired you to go down that road?

Cat System Corp., especially the HIRAETH album. To me, that is still one of the go-to albums, because it’s so diverse and it really showcases everything the genre had been up to that point. And as cliché as it might be, I’ll be the forever defender of the original album, [Vektroid’s] Floral Shoppe. I actually put it on yesterday while working at the art gallery, which is a somewhat applicable place for it to play, not even in an ironic way. That’s just a great, iconic album. And then the James Ferraro stuff that really transcends genre. Those were all super influential for me, in terms of showcasing how deep the genre was.

What drew you into vaporwave and away from the noise scene?

The fact that the noise scene really wasn’t as transgressive or experimental or interesting as it was pretending to be. It was a lot of pretending to be or not be a Nazi while yelling into a microphone and scrap metal against scrap metal. After a while, I’d been there and done that. What drew me into vaporwave is just how musically offensive it was, in both senses of the word, without being that loud. The loudness wasn’t even necessary, and this was so much more intriguing to me.

Did you become a part of the vaporwave community quickly?

Yeah, that initial era was a lot about connecting with people and labels, answering open calls, submitting tracks to compilations, just getting my name out there, and also getting to know the scene through Discord. A lot of the early friendships and feedback structures for music developed there, and that was just me trying to find my voice, and that developed into playing live around the Black Magic era, which was considered very cutting edge in the scene. No one was playing live at the time, and it started rolling from there.

There’s no clear definition of vaporwave in terms of musical characteristics. It’s basically like, if you’re calling it vaporwave, it is vaporwave, right?

For me, it’s a cultural thing. There’s no set of characteristics that have to exist together, but there are certain important elements: It needs to have that nostalgia factor and some kind of temporally edited sampled sounds or at least should be referring to sampled music in some way. It’s also delineated by what it’s not as much as it is by what it is, for example something that’s hip-hop usually cannot be vaporwave at the same time.

In the end it’s really a case of “I know it when I see it”. A lot of it is in the ethics and the scene around it. Anything Cat System Corp. makes is infinitely more likely to be vaporwave because he made it, just because of who he is and how much his output is affected by that journey. If you made something that sounded perfectly like vaporwave but had no link to the actual scene, that would be an edge case.

If I’d listen to Cat System Corp.’s recent music without knowing it’s him, I wouldn’t think of it as vaporwave, but as ambient or drone music.

Yeah, and it’s an interesting discussion that he sparks with that. Or someone like Tim Six, who is also making more classic ambient stuff without it interfering with his vaporwave alias. Tim keeps that line a little more on the ambient side, where Cat System Corp. is still considered a vaporwave artist through and through.

Your own music as Zer0 Rei has been moving away from classic vaporwave too.

Yeah, in the last two or three years it’s been going more towards ambient techno, IDM and breakbeat. I switched from working in Ableton with some hardware additions to picking up a Dirtywave M8 which is a handheld tracker, similar to the LSDJ cartridges that people use for chiptune music – same concept, but on steroids. It has 250 GB of memory, a full built-in sampler and synthesizer system. For me, it’s been a revelation, because I have a famously bad sense of rhythm, and this really accommodates that. Because it’s grid-based, it automatically syncs in that aspect.

A lot of what I did early on with the Zer0 Rei project was what I called MIDI-hacking – taking existing song structures, decontextualizing samples and reprogramming them, using those MIDI signals to create new tracks. This device allows that as well. It’s been fun to actively learn more about electronic music, technically improve as a producer and take some of the cultural lessons from vaporwave into that kind of music. At least I’d like to think that’s still somewhat visible. I treat each album as a sound design exercise, to really envelop myself in the visualized end point and build something around that that’s coherent, that makes sense as an album.

What’s your stance on using AI in music production?

Well, the only thing I hate more than the lazy use of AI is the witch hunt around it, because it sounds anti-intellectual and anti-technology and reminds me of how people talked about photography when it was coming up, as if it’s ‘not a real art form’. Of course there is a lazy way to use AI, same as with sampling, same as with any kind of effects. Lazy vaporwave artists would just take an entire indie album, slow it down by 30% and release it as if it was their own music. That was sinful, if not illegal, and bad for the genre. The credibility of vaporwave as a genre has been heavily impacted by that.

But I know a couple of really good producers that heavily use AI and are afraid of talking about the way it impacts their production and the very skillful and artistic way they use it, just because they’re afraid of the backlash. I think that’s a shame, because it’s a productivity slash creativity slash accessibility tool that can greatly impact and make your work better. It’s really complex as well, the line of what is AI and what isn’t. I’ve made multiple albums using stem-splitters, which were back then also called “AI song deconstructors”. So is that AI music, even if I use it on my own tracks? Where’s that line, guys?

In terms of your visual art, how did you develop those skills in parallel to your music practice?

Some skills I built out of necessity, because it’s DIY, it’s punk, you make your own covers, you spray-paint CD-R’s and try to sell them to people. With the exception of one release, I’ve done the artwork for all of my albums throughout the past decade. When it comes to the vaporwave stuff, I did some more collage glitch stuff up until Hellveterra [in 2019]. After that, I discovered Bryce 3D, the retro computer software I now use obsessively.

I discovered that when I came across some of Cat System Corp.’s and Tim Six’s album covers that looked like video games, but I didn’t recognize the games, even though I’m a big gaming nerd. I’d already built up the connection to just ask the guys at that point. Then I just jumped into that with both feet and started doing daily renders. I’ve apparently become one of the main users of the software. There’s tons of people that have picked it up since. It’s been a fun journey.

photo: Yoni Lambrechts

You’re also heavily involved with Slushwave, which has turned into the most important festival in the genre. What’s the story behind it?

Well, the original idea is Desert Sand [Feels Warm At Night]’s. It’s his brainchild, and he’s the creative force behind it. For him, it really is about that little corner of the scene which is uniquely creative, valuable and authentic, and showcasing the best and brightest in both upcoming and established artists from that scene.

During COVID, online festivals were everywhere, and a lot of them were pretty boring, because there was no interactivity, and you didn’t really learn that much. [At Slushwave] you have Will [Desert Sand], Tim Six and Jeff from [YouTube channel] Vapor Memory with the questions and interactions and that wholesome and informative atmosphere around it. That really drew me in, because it was an online festival that I could actually sit through without getting bored.

I was chatting to Will over Discord a lot, and at some point I had the crazy idea of doing it IRL. I ran a punk music venue here in Kortrijk for more than 10 years with my wife. We organized more than 1,000 shows throughout our time there, so we have a bit of experience doing live shows. That got me hooked up with the local BUDA Arts Center, which is quite outsized for the city. So I pitched Slushwave not just as a music event, but as this audiovisual experience with projected, pre-recorded visuals on a cinema screen, and it came together in an absolutely magical way. It’s tough to describe, but if you’re in the room with the plush cinema seats, the huge screen and sound, you just melt away into it. It’s a really fun experience.

With the vaporwave scene being so anonymous and secretive, was feasability of an IRL festival ever a concern?

The scene is quite different now. We’re surfing on a little de-anonymizing trend, partially because the voices that were the most adamant on being anonymous ended up being kind of creepy about it. We had the advantage that my face was public, because I had performed under different aliases, so I didn’t really care too much about that, and Will [Desert Sand] is classically trained as a musician, so he also had less qualms about that.

Of course it’s still a challenge, because we have to find those artists that are willing to be on stage. We ask a lot of people in the scene and they’re like, “I don’t have a live set,” or “I don’t have a way of traveling,” or “I’m just not feeling it, I don’t want to be on stage.” But if people want to perform live and still protect their anonymity in some way, that’s something we’re willing to work with.

The Slushwave crowd is an insanely thankful, happy, joyous crowd, and the musicians as well – just really genuine people full of love for the music and the artistry around that. Like I said, I’ve done a lot of live shows, and I’ve really never had this few problems and this much appreciation for what we do.

I remember this on-stage panel discussion in 2025, and while I was delighted seeing actual human faces, I was quite disappointed that all of them were white and male.

Yeah, we’re acutely aware of the fact that we haven’t been as much of a change of pace as we wanted to be. We need to do better than this. We’re not being representative, and we might have been a bit lazy here. It’s always the same issue. If it’s about flying down to Kortrijk without any guarantee of being paid for your time or efforts, being in a foreign environment where you don’t speak the language, then that will always be easier for white cis-het people than it will be for trans POC people. But we do need to put in that extra effort to reflect the scene that we love in the lineup, so that it’s not just all white guys, and other people also feel safe to step into that era of live show vaporwave. It’s an aspect that I’m not super proud of, where I really want to do better and where we’re, in my book, going to do a lot better this year.

Can you direct readers to a good entry point into your discography?

Well, if you happen to be into dungeon synth, it would be the albums Hellvetera and Mortiiiis. Hellvetera is actually something in between mallsoft and dungeon synth, so if that sounds cool to you, jump into that one. Breathe is basically hip-hop instrumentals reimagined as eerie New Age ambient. If you want something more danceable, Errant Hardware and the one with the Arabic title are straight-up breakbeat IDM with really short, ADHD-ish tracks – a lot of fun.

You haven’t released new music in a while, right?

No, but I’ve been playing live a lot this past year. Not gonna complain about that. It’s really fun to have these opportunities doing experimental ambient stuff, some of which is more jam-based, completely unprepared, with musicians from a collective I’m working with. I’ve also been doing hardware live sets with my new solo material, which is very IDM-y ambient techno, but in my own style. There’s a full album of unreleased new material in that style. I just need to gather it and slap an album cover on it. I’d also want to do vinyl, but it’s a rather big investment, so I’d like to get a label involved. This is definitely one of my plans for 2026.

Listen to Zer0 Rei on Bandcamp

Join the Slushwave Social Club on Discord

Zer0 Rei, photo: Natasha Winge

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Zer0 Rei’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• 猫 シ Corp. – HIRAETH (self-released, 2014)

• James Ferraro – Far Side Virtual (Hippos In Tanks, 2011)

• Fire-Toolz – Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) (Orange Milk, 2019)

• Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe (Beer On The Rug, 2011)

• glaciære – Pool Water Blue (self-released, 2016)

• S U R F I N G – Emotion (100% Electronica, 2019)

• Luxury Elite – World Class (Crash Symbols, 2015)

• christtt – No Lives Matter (Bedlam Tapes, 2016)

• CVLTVRΣ – Upscale Loft 高級ロフト (self-released, 2014)

• ATLAS.exe – Tropical Midi Selections (New World, 2018)