Vapor Talks #9: 猫 シ Corp. (Cat System Corp.)
The vaporwave legend about early beginnings, influential albums and building a distribution network
Look at past Vapor Talks episodes and you’ll notice that almost every producer has at least one 猫 シ Corp. (Cat System Corp.) album in their alltime Top 10 list.
Part of the second generation of vaporwave producers, Jornt Elzinga started releasing music in 2013 and has built an outstanding catalogue – including classics like Hiraeth, Palm Mall, News At 11, Class Of ‘84, Palm Mall Mars and the underrated vaporambient epic Building a Better World, a brilliant collaboration with Telepath.
After moving from his home in the Netherlands to Finland at the start of the pandemic, he’s been focusing on his family and building his independent label and distro company Hiraeth Records. In 2025, he released his first new work in five years, Blueberries on Mars, an album of sample-free ambient and new age music.
Here’s the story of a true vaporwave pioneer who started making this music when almost no one else in Europe even knew of it – and who remains full of passion for the culture and the community almost a decade and a half later.
Growing up in the Netherlands, what kind of music were you into?
I grew up on Dire Straits and Pink Floyd, just regular 80s/90s radio music. As a teenager, I’d listen to anything from Green Day to 2Pac, but my main focus was metal. I was – am actually still am – really into folk metal. I also liked some dark ambient and dreampop, but I’d say metal was the main focus. I went to a lot of festivals.
How did you get into making music?
I actually learned Cubase for a school project. It wasn’t very serious at first, but it triggered my interest in making music, and by 2010, I became more serious about it.
You started out making dark ambient and drone music, right?
Yeah, some harsh noise too. I was sampling stuff from my dad’s workshop, like forklifts and metal chains and other weird sounds. At one point, I wanted to release a piece on an analog format like a VHS tape, but that was very tricky because I didn’t have the setup and the money. I’d heard someone else had done a floppy disk, so I literally googled “music released on floppy”. That’s how I came across this early vaporwave project by Miami Vice, the one with the yellow cover [Culture Island, December 2012].
It was a spring day in 2013, and it immediately clicked. It felt like liberation, a spiritual moment, transcendent in a way – as if I just came home and this was where I belonged. It was what I’d been looking for all the time. The music tickled this weird nostalgic feeling for a place that I’d never actually been – it felt as if I was transported back to watching the weather channel back in the early 90s.
I remember watching a lot of late night TV – coming home from somewhere, not being able to go to sleep immediately, just having something running in the background.
Sometimes we’d record a movie on VHS via timer, but we’d let the tape run out, so everything that came after the actual movie was also recorded. I even sampled a softcore film off one of these tapes in a project – that was Late Night Stereo.
When you discovered Miami Vice’s music, did you find out and learn about vaporwave immediately?
There wasn’t much information. Everyone was still anonymous. I found a documentary about seapunk, and I thought – is this just a joke, or is it real? I didn’t understand it. Then I found an article about vaporwave, I think Internet Club was in there, and I listened to the music and didn’t even understand they used samples. When I found the Fortune 500 label, slowly it all began to make sense. I learned the music was sampled, slowed down and reverbed. I went on Bandcamp and all these albums popped up. They say never judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly what I did. I downloaded so many albums. I still have them all in a folder somewhere. Some stuff was too experimental for me. I didn’t actually enjoy Floral Shoppe too much. Telepath’s or Luxury Elite’s music felt more accessible to me. The Disconscious tape [Hologram Plaza, April 2013] was actually the first one I ever bought.
Did you start trying to make the music right away?
No, I was still working on that floppy disk, the harsh noise stuff. But soon all I was listening to was vaporwave. I couldn’t even listen to normal music anymore. That’s how much it took over, and then I thought – do I maybe want to make music in this style too? At first I thought no, because it’s already there and others are much better at it, but it started to gnaw on me. I really liked those corporate names that most vaporwave artists had, so I was messing around with Google Translate and came up with my artist name. I set up the Bandcamp page and made a banner that I still use to this day.
Then I downloaded Sade’s “Cherish The Day” and put it in Adobe Premiere, because I knew it had a slow-down function. I started looping and pasting and totally forgot to put any reverb on it, but I made a first album that way – Global Catwork. It was really horrible, but I was proud of it, so I put it online [in July 2013]. On the very same day, someone bought it for $1, so that was nice.
I also wanted to sample this Italo disco mix which I’d downloaded from Kazaa or Limewire. I was thinking about that feeling when you come home from the club and a song is still ringing in your head. That album was called Special Edition [August 2013] and it suddenly became very popular. I reached out to [U.S. label] Beer On The Rug like, “Hey, do you want to release this on tape?” To which they replied, “No, we don’t do vaporwave anymore.” That’s when I started thinking about doing it myself. I had already dubbed some cassettes at home. I found some information about how to fold a standard photo print of 9 by 13 centimeters to fit exactly in a cassette case. I started with five tapes, which became 10, and eventually I sold out. From there, I just kept the ball rolling.
You started collaborating with Telepath as early as 2014, right?
Yeah, I think he reached out to me over email and we just started chatting. Our first project was Fragmented Memories and then we did Blue Dream. At the time, I had many self-imposed rules in my head. One was that I never wanted to sample guitars – it just didn’t sound like vaporwave to me. But then I heard that kind of early proto-slushwave that Telepath did, and guitars had a place in that sound. We were basically inviting each other to our very distinctive worlds.
Telepath seems like a mysterious persona. Was he already as reclusive back then?
He’s always been quite a character. We talked a lot about music and aliens and stuff like that… sometimes we’d have these deep discussions, and other times we’d just have fun. In 2015 or 2016, they asked him to play in the UK, and he decided to hop over to the Netherlands. He stayed at my place for a couple of days, working on music. He actually finished two or three Virtual Dream Plaza albums in my bedroom. He’s always been a nice and positive person. He’s very much into spreading the love, the spiritual stuff, you know? [laughs] But I really respect him for what he does.
In those early days, were you aware of other European producers making vaporwave?
I knew of HKE, though at first I thought he was Japanese or Chinese, but then I learned he was from the UK. I knew CVLTVRΣ was from France, and we already worked with him on Fragmented Memories. Everyone else seemed to be from America, or they were anonymous, so you didn’t know where they were actually based.
Your album HIRAETH came out in April 2014. It was really diverse in its sound, with some early mallsoft, some classic vaporwave and some hypnagogic tracks. How did you go about making that one?
That was a very personal, intentional album. Every track title would reflect something from my past. I wanted to live up to that feeling that the word describes [Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a nostalgic longing or homesickness]. It wasn’t so much a concept album, like most vaporwave releases tend to be, but more of a regular artist album, where you would showcase everything you do.
I made a couple of tapes and they sold out instantly, so I had to order more. All of this was totally DIY, all the folding and cutting and pasting. It was a labour of love, and it did very well. I’d previously done the collaboration with Stereo Component [Ocean Beach, January 2014], which was actually Yung Bae. We did that project together on Fortune 500, Luxury Elite’s label. People really loved that, so I saw an immediate spike after that. That was the starting point of what I would continue to do.
A couple of months later, Palm Mall came out. What inspired you to create this mallsoft classic?
Like I said, I was a big fan of Disconscious’ Hologram Plaza. I had this idea in my mind to make a concept album about a Japanese-American mall with bright tiles and glass all over, so I wanted it to sound like that. And the A-side would just be one long track, while the B-side would be more like singles. I was talking to Gonzalo [Silva] from No Problema Tapes, because he was going to do the tape. I’d sent him some early versions with the background noise, which we both liked a lot. I actually discovered the reverb by accident because I was going through Cubase presets, and the very last one was called Unreal Room. I put that on and tweaked it to sound as if you’re in that mall. I also wanted to add these spoken word advertisements and chimes, so I gathered all those things and started cutting and pasting background noise.
Then I did something radical – I just put a super long background track on everything and slapped reverb on the whole thing, which was supposed to be Side A. I wanted you to be able to imagine these little stories happening in the background – you know, someone pushes a cart, someone walks by with a suitcase, and then there’s a guy saying something like, “I’m just gonna grab my laptop and sit over there”, which became sort of the Wilhelm Scream of mallsoft.
Growing up in Europe in the 90s, we didn't actually have big malls. We had these shopping centers with a bunch of department stores, but not those huge American or Japanese style malls.
Yeah, it’s totally fake. [laughs] It’s just my imagination of how it would sound and feel. But that’s so inherent to vaporwave, isn’t it?
Sure. It’s that ‘nostalgia for a place and time you never knew’.
Exactly. I came up with my own version, like, how do I want it to sound?
2015 saw the release of OASYS, another impactful project. Talk about the genesis of that one please.
Back then I was working in the renewable energy sector. One day I had to go to the university in Groningen, and I took a bus which said ‘air conditioning inside’. I found that very futuristic for the Netherlands at the time. I arrived at the university – big building, solar panels, open spaces, plants, bright colors and a lot of white. It had this 90s vibe to it, but very modern and ecological-minded. That was the original inspiration. I wanted to make kind of a proto-solarpunk album. You’re in this futuristic building. It’s 20° C [68° F], and everything’s very comfortable. It’s this perfect world, almost like a dream, like in the movie Vanilla Sky.
You said you were working in the renewable energy sector. Didn’t you see music as a career opportunity?
Not really. It was more like a hobby which made me some pocket money on the side. All money went straight back into the next release. I’d also purchase other people’s tapes to keep it circulating. At some point it became more serious, and I realized that I could sell a lot more tapes. I started dubbing hundreds of tapes at home. It wasn’t until a little bit later, around 2018, that I decided to make the switch. I wasn’t super happy with my work, and I was at a point in life where I needed a change, so I just thought, I’ll take the gamble and see what happens. At the same time I formed the plans to move to Finland, so I had to give up my job [in the Netherlands] anyway.
You’d already released Shopping @ Helsinki in 2016. For that one, you used some actual field recordings from a Finnish mall, right?
Yeah, my girlfriend actually took me to some malls here. For the first time I saw actual mall culture in Europe, and these malls weren’t even dead, they were very alive. I just put my phone down – we had our coffee and talked, and afterwards, I’d cut out all the talking but keep the rest. I used a lot of field recordings from there, and I’d ask my girlfriend to do even more recordings. She also took some photos in the mall, and I used those in the artwork. It was almost a project of us working together.
News At 11 from the same year is one of my favorite vaporwave albums of all time. The idea is so brilliant – musically imagining a world in which 9/11 never happened. How did you come up with that concept?
One of the triggering factors was this YouTube compilation which had an image of the Twin Towers getting hit while this Weather Channel music was playing. I just thought, what a grotesque image to use with it. I would have never done that, but I came up with this idea to make a mix of Weather Channel music that would sound as if you were driving to work that morning [of 9/11], just a bright day with blue skies and perfect weather. I started thinking: What if the towers never got hit? What if the old world never ended and we continued to live in those blissful, fearless times? I wanted to use samples that would hint at [the attack] and then cut them off immediately, like – no, didn’t happen. Never happened.
You were 12 in 2001, so that historical moment also coincides with your own transition from childhood into puberty, leaving a more careless part of your life behind.
Yeah, that summer I left elementary school and went to a new school. I think we might have just started school in September. Our lives were changing, we were changing, and suddenly the world was changing too. It was a very weird time. When I saw it happening, I’d never even heard the word ‘terrorist attack’. I just thought, what does that even mean? I couldn’t foresee the consequences that it would have for the world, like the war [on terror], the surveillance and whatnot. The whole world went to hell after that.
Class of ‘84 came out the same year. What inspired that album?
Musically, I was really inspired by bbrainz and early Saint Pepsi for that one. I might have just watched The Breakfast Club, so I got really into those high school vibes. I wanted to make a soundtrack for a typical American high school movie that no one has ever heard about. My older sister used to watch a lot of Saved By The Bell and Full House, and we would watch Fresh Prince of Bel Air together.
Why did you decide to make the Palm Mall Mars sequel in 2018?
I knew I wanted to go back to mallsoft, and someone had contacted me about an art project – something about a clothing brand from Mars. That concept instantly clicked with the thing I was working on, so I asked him if I could use some of his art stuff for this project. It all made sense. It had to be Mars, because I wanted an ultra-futuristic feeling. I found some perfect samples and it just all clicked together.
At the time, vaporwave had fallen out of favour with the mainstream and the music press, even though the scene was still going strong.
Even before that, people had started meme-ifying it, like “vaporwave is dead, long live vaporwave”. Then everyone was posting these random images with the caption “Is this vaporwave?” I hated that so much, because for me, it was pretty serious. Around the time, FrankJavCee made that Simpsonwave thing, and it became immensely popular. I thought this is probably just a phase. The ones that were in it, like Telepath, Luxury Elite or myself, we’d just continue what we were doing.
The memes were quickly forgotten, and vaporwave became popular again. It was almost like someone had pressed a reset button. Things were shaken up quite a bit, but the good stuff prevailed, and we went into the third or fourth wave of producers. Some people might have gotten fed up with it, but others just kept going, and new people were showing up all the time. I guess you could say the same about metal music to a certain degree.
The gatekeeping started again when barber beats came along.
Yeah. To be honest, I liked a lot of it when it came out. I still like some of it, but it’s just too much, and too much of it sounds and looks the same – it’s not very creative anymore. But in general, it was an injection of fresh air.
There’s an almost five-year gap in your discography, starting in 2020 until Blueberries On Mars came out in 2025. What was going on?
Well, one of the reasons you can hear shouting in the background. [laughs]
I thought a cat made that noise! How many kids do you have?
Two. One just turned four, so he’s a pandemic kid. The younger one, she’s one and a half. What happened is that I moved here [to Finland] and decided I wanted to focus on my label. I really wanted to build something up, but everything just worked against me. First Brexit happened, then the pandemic and the lockdowns, then Trump became president again. All of these things had a negative impact on my business. I was working hard to fix it, so making music just became a lower priority.
When I was still in the Netherlands, back in 2019, I got asked to make a soundtrack for a kids book series. There were so many red flags that I had to pull out of the project, but I already had a couple demo tracks, so I kept working on them over the years. But my software started crashing, projects got corrupted and my VST didn’t work anymore, so I lost interest in it for a while, until I got new energy to work on it again. When it was finally done, there was a long line at the pressing plant, and when I’d just received my records with huge delays, the pressing plant went bankrupt. That, plus the kids and the office work…
I understand. The new album is all sample-free, right?
Yeah, I needed to do something different. I felt like I’d sampled everything, and I kept finding stuff that someone had used already. I started moving more into [writing original music], but as I did everything by ear, I did also find my own limitations. That’s why I’d asked Telepath to collaborate on Building a Better World. But I wanted to do Blueberries totally by myself, and I wanted it to sound very basic, very early new age-y. The reviews on Rate Your Music indicate that people didn’t really like this direction. Someone even gave it zero stars. [laughs]
Well, not knowing that it’s a Cat System Corp. album, you would probably not even think of it as vaporwave. It sounds just like an 80s ambient/new age album.
The idea was to make an album to play when you go to bed, because that was also the original idea behind the book. It would play when kids go to sleep, and that’s why it has this very basic looping ambient sound. I worked with Vanitas on the artwork, and I told him that it needs to look like some new age tape that you found in the second hand bin at some flea market. That’s what I was going for, so if you say it sounds like an 80s new age album, that means I accomplished my mission. But I can also see it belonging to the more ambient-leaning vaporwave sounds like solarpunk or naturewave. It doesn’t always have to be about shopping malls or high schools.
How are things with your label going now?
It was hard in the beginning, but it’s actually working well now. It just took different turns than I thought. At first I wanted to focus on original releases, but after COVID, people didn’t have any money, so sales went down and that left me with a lot of stock. But I noticed that many American labels didn’t have actual distribution and European customers had to pay import fees. All these metal labels were doing distro, so I asked myself, why is there no vaporwave distro company?
I was modeling my company after [metal] labels like Nuclear Blast. I wanted to do everything very professionally, not like a bedroom label run by some kids. I set up this whole framework with bookkeeping, warehouses, fulfillment, Bandcamp shop, WooCommerce, Shopify site… I started doing distro for No Problema Tapes, then Caledon Plaza and Arctic Contact got added and other labels started coming in. I’ve started distributing a dungeon synth label, Dungeons Deep. I’ve been into the music for a while. Culturally, it links really well with vaporwave. It’s a natural fit.
Are you working on any new music right now?
I recently released a remix project, Hiraeth: The Ambient Works, and I have an album of leftovers from Building a Better World coming. It’s called Empire of Light, and it’s been sitting on my shelves, but it’s supposed to come out this year. It’s more of a dark ambient or drone record, rougher than Blueberries. People might be done with listening to my music after this. [laughs] But I just needed to make this for myself.
I have many other ideas – I want to do a barber beats album, an atmospheric jungle album, a signalwave album. I want to do mallsoft again, but I don’t want to get back into illegal sampling. I got some strikes on Spotify that made me feel it’s getting serious now, so I shouldn’t be messing around anymore.
Listen to 猫 シ Corp. on Bandcamp
Visit the Hiraeth Records US store or EU store
猫 シ Corp.’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
“There's plenty more great albums... but I picked 10 that many don't know or might have forgotten.”
Digital Island Fantasy あきた – 3rd Street Promenade (self-released, 2013)
CVLTVRΣ – Virtual Life (self-released, 2014)
Ｏｃｅａｎ Ｓｈｏｒｅｓ & 表面オーラ［ＬＯＣＡＬ］– ＳＯＬＩＤＡＲＩＴＹ(self-released, 2019)
懐かし2002津波 – NEON DREAMS / HOLOGRAM VISIONS (Lost Angles, 2016)
luxury elite – fantasy (Fortune 500, 2013)
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – ゲートウェイ (Dream Catalogue, 2014)
日本人 (Japanese) – 日本人 (Fortune 500, 2013)
ショッピングワールドjp – MARKET WORLD (Fortune 500, 2013)
Infinite Quazar – Grand Prix (Fortune 500, 2013)
glaciære – pool water blue (self-released, 2016)
His collaboration with telepath rings my dopamine levels