Vapor Talks #8: desert sand feels warm at night

The slushwave purveyor talks about his musical journey and the growth of the scene

Slushwave started in the mid-2010s as a subgenre of vaporwave based on slowed-down J-pop songs with ghostly vocals and loads of flanger and phaser effects, pioneered by U.S. producers Telepath and MindSpring Memories.

A second generation of artists started pushing the sound forward during the pandemic. William Hallworth-Cook remains at the forefront of that movement. Under the name desert sand feels warm at night, the UK artist produces some really idiosyncratic ambient music, and he’s also been the creator and host of the popular annual Slushwave festival since 2020.

Coming across vaporwave in 2017 and starting to make it the following year, he saw wider success during the pandemic with his long-form albums New World Disciples (2021) and Dream Desert (2022). His romantic and dreamy, often sample-free music regularly explores emotional themes of loneliness, abandonment and depression. Will proved his ongoing status as a true innovator of the scene with his most recent album Vjaġġ tal-Qalb (2025), one of my favorite releases of last year.

Contrary to his mysterious-sounding moniker, Will comes across as a sociable, kind and friendly human being. We spoke over Zoom about his personal vision of slushwave, how the community emancipated itself from the vaporwave scene, and which artists are really pushing the sound forward in his opinion.

You’re classically trained as a musician, is that right?

That is correct. I’m at my workplace right now [turns the camera of his laptop to show the auditorium of an empty concert hall]. My day job is an audio engineer recording classical music. To do that, you basically have to be a musician, because you have to read sheet music and understand the musicality.

I started playing piano when I was six years old, just as a hobby, and really enjoyed it. I did many years of classical training, and then a couple years of jazz and improv. I was never going to be a classical musician, that wasn’t my goal. It was always a hobby on the side, and as I progressed through school and university, I just kept it up. During my later years of school, I realized that I enjoy the tech side of music production. Classical engineering just seemed like the perfect thing to do.

What kind of music were you into as a teenager?

My early teens were dominated by house music – you know, that sort of late-1990s minimalist trance. I always liked the chiller side of things. If you strip away the drums in a trance track, you basically have an ambient track. I loved deep house for the same reason, I always enjoyed that ambient element of it. In my mid-teenage years, I was more into 80s new age and ambient stuff, and I quite liked the cloud rap beats. I discovered vaporwave in 2017. It felt like this was what I’d been looking for my entire life, and I transitioned very naturally.

How did you discover it?

I went through my GCSEs, the sort of low-level school exams that you go through [in the UK] when you’re 15 or 16, and I actually chose Mandarin as my language. It was very hard, but I used to listen to a lot of 80s Cantopop and Taiwanese stuff, just to help me subconsciously learn it. Also I really enjoyed the sound and that led me into listening to J-pop and city pop. One day Spotify in its silly little brain was thinking, “He’s been listening to a lot of Japanese music, and this Telepath track title is in Japanese, so let’s put that in his recommended playlist.”

I listened to that one track and was completely entranced by it. For some months I just thought it was a cool track by some Japanese artist. When the penny dropped that this is an actual thing and loads of people do it, I was just listening to vaporwave. I tag-surfed Bandcamp and discovered Dream Catalogue and all the other labels.

Had you started making music at this point?

Yeah, I’d been making house music since 2013. Once I discovered slushwave, I didn’t instantly start making it, because I was so grounded in my house style of music that I didn’t really know how to approach it. In 2018, me and a friend started this little label and hosted random albums under vaporwave-style aliases. I wanted to make a slightly vaporwave-y house ambient thing and then a more classic vaporwave release.

One day, I just wrote down the words ‘desert sand feels warm at night’. I was like, “That’s cool, let’s put that in, let’s make an album based off that.” But I didn’t really know what I was doing, so it was a bit of a mishmash. You could almost call it classic vapor, because it’s very rooted in all of the tropes rather than trying to make a slushwave soundscape. But then after a while it clicked, and I was really going for Desert Sand, while my friend was still doing the label. At the end of 2018, start of 2019, I pumped out 10 albums in the space of three or four months.

Apart from Telepath, which artists were inspiring you at that point?

I hadn’t discovered MindSpring Memories yet, so it was mostly Telepath, and also Nmesh – his work often goes into quite ambient stuff. But even from the start, I was really just trying to be my own person. What I realized at the time is that a lot of people were trying to be Telepath, apart from Angel [Marcloid alias MindSpring Memories] – she very quickly made her own unique aesthetic, so she’s the exception to the rule. But everyone else was really copying Telepath in many ways, and I didn’t want to do that. He was the inspiration for me to get going, but not the inspiration for my sound and how I treat things – for that I relied on myself as much as I possibly could.

But you still worked mainly with samples, right?

Yeah, I was very much sample-based in the beginning. I was not the first person to start doing sample-free vaporwave either of course. At one point I just wanted to make something and pretend that I found it on the internet. I would make the entire track, export it as one file, and that was what I had to work with. I couldn’t chop and change it. It was literally like I downloaded it from YouTube, and that was the beginning of sample-free slushwave – the Forgive and Forget album in 2019, that was the first one. In the description, I called it an experiment, because I had no idea what people were going to think of it. My singing is dreadful, and the mixing is dreadful, but it’s obviously worked, because that’s now a big thing, which I’m very privileged to have been at the birth of. It was just an experiment, but it took off.

I’m curious about New World Disciples, the album that put you on the map in a broader sense. It came out in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. Did you feel like it would become something special when making it?

No, I did not. That album, I don’t feel as connected to it as I do with other albums. At the time I was less focused on my emotional state, more on the instrumentation and musical pictures. That’s potentially why I didn’t really see it as a massive thing, because it was more of a cool technical exercise, but it worked beautifully.

All my albums, especially my sample-free ones, I try to make them about what stuff I’m going through at the time. There was a lot of transformation in my life, so that was potentially the influence for that. But again, I wasn’t thinking about it that emotionally. I was at university at the time, and they had a really good synth lab, so I went down there and I was playing with these weird old synths.

Needlejuice [Records] picked it up, and that was the catalyst. It was the perfect storm. They’re a non-vaporwave label, and I remember the moment when they sent me a box of vinyl – 30 copies. That was when I thought, “This is big!” I realized that 30 copies is just the standard they send to artists. They told me last year that they’ve sold 2,000 vinyl copies of that album. That’s unheard of numbers in vaporwave as a whole. I did not plan for that to be such a success.

Another factor in the success was Zer0 [Rei]’s iconic cover. The artwork was almost a revitalization of what a slushwave cover could be. MindSpring [Memories] had that old CGI vibe back in the day, so to bring that back was really interesting. Even an average person might see that cover and just be intrigued by these pyramids and those beautiful, colorful clouds.

New World Disciples (album cover art by Zer0 Rei)

We need to talk about Dream Desert (2022) as well. You had longer tracks before that, and slushwave in general was prone to having long tracks, but on that album you were expanding them beyond everything that had been done.

Well, Dennis [Mikula], who runs Geometric Lullaby, said to me: ”Look, I want to release this box set of four tapes. Do you have any material for this?” I said, “Not really.” And he said, “Oh, why don’t you make something new?” And I said, “Great idea.” [laughs] I’d wanted to do a long-form album for quite some time. Virtual Dream Plaza was a good example of how long form can work, and I remember some really long MindSpring tracks, and being captivated by the way they progressed.

This is an album where I was particularly thinking about the atmosphere that I was creating. A lot of the samples are very personal to me, tracks I’d been listening to for years before. It took bloody ages, because I wanted to make sure the vibes were right, and that it progressed as I wanted it to. For example, the first 10 minutes of the first track is just taken from a five-second outro song. So I turned five seconds into 10 minutes, and that’s the thing I was trying to do – take the smallest parts and just make them beautiful over a long time. It was quite carefully crafted.

How did the Slushwave festival actually start?

Pre-COVID, there wasn’t a slushwave scene. It was very much a subgenre of vaporwave. 2020 came around, and all these little URL festivals started popping up, and I suddenly had the idea of starting a slushwave fest. I got in touch with [YouTube channel] Vapor Memory, who I’d done a set for before, because he was a big fan of mine at the time. He was well up for it, and I got my friend Tim Six to co-host it with me. He was running Global Pattern, then a slushwave-focused label.

My goal was for people to realize that there is a community and there are some smaller artists who deserve to be heard. In 2020 and 2021, it was exponential growth for me, which I was very lucky to have, but at the same time, I wanted to turn some of that over to other people who I thought were amazing. There are quite a few factors why this thing grew as it did, but one of them is definitely having this centralized fest, because that existed even before the [Discord] server.

You were one of the first vaporwave artists showing your face at those IRL festivals. Was anonymity ever a concern to you?

Honestly, I had never thought about it. I never publicly posted my face anywhere when I started out, but I didn’t have the mindset of wanting to be anonymous. I just had the mindset of not really wanting to show my face. But I was very open, even in the interviews I was doing, I was just myself, like I am now. I’m not some sort of mystic being. So my face reveal actually came about because of Econ 3, which was my first-ever live show. I was like, “Do I now go the Luxury [Elite] route and get a mask, or do I turn up and be myself?” But I just wanted to be myself. I respect people who want to be anonymous, but it doesn’t sit well with me musically if I’m this character ‘Desert Sand’. My music is so personal to me. My music is me in many ways, so to present it, I need to be myself.

How much do you think your musical training helped you making slushwave?

It certainly was easier. The sampled stuff, that’s its own set of skills. It took me five years after I started to learn proper masterings. Now I’m a mastering engineer, so it comes very naturally, but it’s just a whole another set of skills. I think [my musical training] really helped me out when I transitioned into sample-free [music], because I now have the music theory to just make tracks. Because I was a musician, I was also able to sing. Even to this day, I’m one of the very few slushwave artists who actually sing on their albums.

What’s your stance on AI and producers using it to generate their own sample material?

I would say to those producers, just make it yourself. It’s easier than ever to download a DAW, there’s so many free plugins you can get and so many free VSTs. Take a month or two just to learn some music theory. That’s the way forward. It’s tempting, when you need a sax line for example, to just make that stuff in AI. But that can lead to laziness, and you’re also taking away opportunities from musicians who, especially in this scene, wouldn’t even want to get paid – they just want to be a part of a cool album. It’s such a fun and wholesome process to collaborate with people, and that is worth so much more in my opinion.

Which albums from your catalog do you feel most emotionally connected to?

One that sticks out to me is Drifting in a Sea of Clouds. That album was made during a very difficult time in my life. I was really going through some stuff, and I was just pouring my heartache into the album. Every track is soul-crushing and heartbreaking in a way. That one I feel so connected to, and then honestly, the latest album [Vjaġġ tal-Qalb], because there are some really strong themes. I made it over the course of a year, on and off. It’s about my journey through dealing with emotions, and the importance of sharing your emotions with people, and the dangers of bottling them up. It’s basically about exploring my emotions and eventually telling people about them and asking for help.

The album slowly gets more hopeful as it goes on, but it’s always uneasy. Even the last track, which feels very much [like an] end credit scene, still has moments where it completely collapses into something. You could say that’s doubt creeping back in every single time. Some tracks are really unstable, the pitch constantly changes, the rhythms and vocals sometimes completely descend into noise. I was really nervous to drop the album at first. It’s so wacky, so different, so unsettling. But it’s now one of my highest rated across all review platforms, up there with Dream Desert levels of ratings. People were absolutely craving this.

Starting an album with a 40-minute track is quite a statement.

[laughs] “Bluebells” is the album’s fantastical, ethereal theme. It’s the calm before the storm. I think it’s the best sample-free track I’ve ever made. Even the pre-slush version is really good. It’s seven minutes long, and it’s one of the most catchy, dreamy melodies that I’ve ever created. I started learning the sax last year, so that’s me on that too. I also hid it throughout the album, there are a few tracks that sort of hide it as the countermelody. It’s always there – the bluebells will blossom in your heart eventually, you just gotta get there.

How would you describe the development of the slushwave scene in the last four or five years?

Right now, it’s all about diversity in sound. Slushwave is so far away from vaporwave now. It’s much more ambient-adjacent. Separating from the main scene has only done it a world of favors, because we’re now in this bubble. You know, if barber beats are going to destroy vaporwave, we’re totally unaffected. And that is a real pleasure to see. What happens in vaporwave doesn’t affect slushwave whatsoever. We’re very much self-innovating, we’re a strong community, and everyone’s so supportive of each other. We really don’t accept pretentious people. We don’t like that at all. We thrive on just helping each other out.

That’s why every year with the Slushwave fest, one of my main goals is still to put on people for the first time to push their music out there, to show people what the community is, and that people are there just because they want to share the love. It’s not about proving yourself. It’s a wonderful thing.

When you say slushwave has separated from the main vaporwave scene, what do you mean exactly?

Of course its roots are always going to be in vaporwave. There’s no doubt about that. But if you look at modern slushwave and its inspirations, you could pretend vaporwave didn’t exist, and you would be fine. Back in the days, when Telepath and MindSpring Memories were making it, you could still clearly see the vaporwave influences. It was much more choppy, raw and lo-fi. Now, people are creating soundscapes. They’re creating atmospheres. They’re creating vibes. It just doesn’t sound like vaporwave anymore.

It’s not a stretch to say that we don’t care what goes on in the scene. I mean, we do care, and we have to care when it comes to labels. One of the big things with barber beats was the fact that it caused labels to take less risks, to release very same-y low-effort music and push opportunities away from smaller artists to get on those labels. That is an effect that we do have to care about from the main scene, but in terms of the sound and where the genre is going, the vaporwave influences are long gone.

Would you say at one point it will just be another subgenre of ambient music?

I mean, I totally agree. I wouldn’t say it is just ambient music, but it is ambient music. It is an ambient-adjacent genre, and that’s actually a very prestigious title for it.

You spoke about the influence of Telepath who basically invented this genre and shaped its foundations in 2014/15. He came back last year with four new albums after a decade-long hiatus from this type of music. What was the reception in the Slushwave scene and on the server like?

The scene was torn when he came back, about whether to respect him or not. Obviously the music’s fine, it’s nothing crazy, but it’s very well-produced. It’s just some nice slushwave, nothing innovative. It’s clear that he’s stuck in his old ways. The way it was packaged and released, it’s a bit of a cash grab too. And the hype died down quick. I think the general vibe is that people don’t really care that much. That made me proud, because I was nervous that people were gonna jump back on the old “Telepath is the God” again, and forget about the community. But that didn’t happen at all. People are very much aware of the innovation and where the scene is heading, and they realize that Telepath isn’t a part of that.

He actually made a desperate attempt and joined the Slushwave server for a while, and we were genuinely trying to engage with him. But he seems to take this very mystical, pretentious stance of not answering questions and being very spiritual. You could call it performative art – whatever, it’s fine. But it does matter when he says very condescending things and treats us as if we were a lower class to him. It’s those unwelcoming vibes that we didn’t really want. He left the server again – I think he realized that no one gave a shit about his ethereal personality that he was trying to pull off. It was not a vibe. It really wasn’t. He’s shooting himself in the foot because he wants everyone to love him. But you’re not going to do that by dismissing the community that’s built on the foundations of what you made back in the day.

On a more positive matter – who’s currently pushing the slushwave scene forward in your opinion?

My good friend days of blue skies is pushing boundaries. Illusionary ドリーミング and memorykeeper7 are pushing boundaries with their sample-hunting. 18 DAYS is doing some amazing sample-based slush. you still feel them out there, don’t you is doing some amazing sample-free slush – entirely with outboard gear, which is insane.

A good start is always to look at last year’s Slushwave fest lineup.

Listen to desert sand feels warm at night on Bandcamp

desert sand feels warm at night’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• death’s dynamic shroud – 世界大戦OLYMPICS (Ghost Diamond, 2014)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – 断線 (self-released, 2015)

• サイバー ‘98 – DIGITΛL FORΞST (Dream Catalogue, 2014)

• Illusionary ドリーミング & memorykeeper7 – Våra Minnen (self-released, 2024)

• Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – Rainforest Hill (self-released, 2018)

• 羊を数える – 夢の信号 (self-released, 2023)

• 18 DAYS – ኮከብ ጠባቂ (self-released, 2025)

• Psicadence – 超越的欲望 (self-released, 2024)

• days of blue skies – ලෝක දෙකක් අතර (self-released, 2025)

• ネザーnether – 二二二八 (self-released, 2022)