In the spirit of my popular Best New Ambient roundup series, I will now send out brief, personal recommendations for great new ambient/experimental albums on the day of release (or shortly after) instead of waiting to include them in a roundup. I hope you’ll find value in these occasional short “reviews”.

You can also access them through a new rider on the homepage.

Lusine – Melting Days (Ghostly International, 2026)

Last week, I was swimming in a small lake, surrounded by nothing but wild forest and with the sounds of children playing in my ears, when the chord progression from Lusine’s “These Walls” suddenly popped into my head.

The evenings are slowly getting shorter, and the first families are returning from their long vacations. Since we know that these hot, humid days will soon be nothing more than a vague memory, we’re rushing to make the most of them. And by rushing, I mean finally taking this trip to the lake and not putting it off again.

After venturing into a more song-oriented branch of electronic pop, Lusine returns to instrumental ambient with his tenth album, Melting Days – a work that invites repeated listening, and whose captivating sonic textures and organic sound design never overshadow its subtle emotional depth.

Lusine is the stage name of Jeff McIlwain, a Seattle-based veteran of electronic music and film score composer who has been active since the late 1990s. Loraine James once described his 2007 album Language Barrier as her “favorite ambient album of all time.”

For his part, Lusine has cited Susumu Yokota’s 1999 album Sakura as a major influence on Melting Days, and that’s one of my all-time favorite ambient albums as well. Neither album is beatless, as a stricter definition of ambient would require – much like Yokota, McIlwain gives his melodic pieces plenty of room to breathe; at the same time, he structures them and gently propels them forward by weaving airy drum and percussion sounds, both recorded live and programmed, into many of his tracks. Some tracks also emerged as happy accidents in the studio, such as when he ran a cello loop through dozens of filters for “Apparition.”

Since the mid-2000s, Lusine has worked on numerous film scores, and it is undoubtedly one of the worst clichés to describe an album of atmospheric, instrumental electronic music as the “soundtrack to a nonexistent film” or something similarly flowery. The fact is, however, that Melting Days does indeed possess a cinematic quality – this music is meant to evoke images, albeit rather abstract ones.

What I also particularly like about this album is that it doesn’t overly dictate the emotions it aims to convey. The press release mentions that the producer was going through a period of grief and loss while the album was being created, but Melting Days is not a sad, depressing work. At its core lies a gentle, slightly pained melancholy, yet the album continues to show a lively interest in the world, as many of its sounds seem to mimic small, microscopic movements in nature, thus reflecting the cycle of life.

“Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.”

Bruce Chatwin

Yesterday I read an article in the paper about an unprecedented surge of visitors to the Dolomites this summer.

There are a few photos and videos circulating online that show the worst recent excesses of mass tourism: People standing in line for hours just to take a selfie at a famous viewpoint or get an overpriced breakfast donut at a mountain hut. All the parking lots are packed to the brim. Cars are lined up all the way down into the valley.

At the same time, reports of litter, vandalism and noise pollution are on the rise. A local is quoted as saying, “These people aren’t interested in the mountains. They come in flip-flops just to take pictures for social media.”

Another video shows massive tourist crowds at the famous Three Peaks – hundreds of people lined up at a shuttle bus stop. They all want to arrive at this popular attraction in the most convenient way possible. Many are dressed as if they’re on their way to a beach party.

I remember my last thru-hike in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains at the Czech-German border, shortly before the pandemic. Even back then, I saw crowds of people at particularly instagrammable hotspots, while the rest of the trail was largely deserted. I can only imagine how the situation has escalated since then.

This exact kind of mass tourism is one reason I haven’t been to the mountains in years. I do miss them sometimes, but when I read articles like these, I think that maybe I’ll never go back again.

This news article isn’t the only one of its kind that I’ve come across this summer. I’ve seen similar photos and videos of last week’s solar eclipse. I read an investigative article about how the current U.S. administration is turning national parks into profit centers that look like Disney theme parks. On the other side of the world, self-proclaimed adventurers are crowding the summits of the world’s highest mountains in large groups, creating chaotic and dangerous conditions.

For the longest time, I believed in the widespread notion that intensive traveling makes you a more cultured and open-minded person. But I’ve actually begun to think that the whole myth of travel might have been a big lie from the very beginning, at least in this day and age.

A few months ago, I read a thought-provoking essay by called “My Case Against Travel.” Many readers felt offended by it. I think it’s a brilliant piece, because it manages to put some uncomfortable truths into succinct, simple words.

Sema is a Rome-based journalist who has previously worked for Big Tech companies and used to “travel like crazy” for many years. In the piece, she talks about a friend who went to Mexico City, LA and Hawaii, all within two weeks, but got sick and spent most of the trip in bed. “It got me thinking,” Sema writes. “Why did she have to travel to all these widely far-apart places in two weeks? Wouldn’t it be enough to visit just one of them? When asked, she said, ‘Well, you know, we were in the region.’”

Reading that, two thoughts came to my mind: First, this could have been me, or many of my friends or co-workers, a decade ago. Second, it reveals an incredibly shallow and cynical understanding of the world.

Working in the music industry, I was a frequent flyer throughout my twenties and thirties. As a young and ambitious journalist, I would hop on a plane across the pond every other week to conduct an interview in New York, LA or Miami. When I started consulting for big brands and labels, I would regularly fly into London or Munich just to attend a presentation or meeting, and fly back the same day, with nothing on me but my laptop.

The tech company I worked for later held offsite meetings at fancy destinations in remote locations for hundreds of employees from all around the world. All I remembered afterward were conference rooms and expensive restaurants. During my many work trips, I rarely saw more than the airport, my hotel and the local office, which was furnished with the same designer chairs as in all the other cities.

My boss at this company once told me, with a hint of pride in her voice, that she had spent 250 days traveling in a single work year. I guess I learned to view that lifestyle as glamorous myself. People just feel a sense of accomplishment in being part of the machine. If you’ve ever walked from the subway at 8.30 a.m. to one of the office towers at King’s Cross or to the World Trade Center, you know what I mean.

This mindset carried over into my personal life without me realizing it at first. I would mindlessly fly to Lisbon over my birthday, or to Paris just for dinner at a trendy restaurant and a concert. I thought I really needed to get away to Mallorca for a few days to clear the headspace after the dreadful Berlin winter.

Look, I’m not even writing this to brag. Today I feel ashamed, but I was so convinced that this behavior somehow “broadened my horizon” and made me a true “citizen of the world”. Sure, my carbon footprint was exploding, but I didn’t really have a choice, did I? After all, I was still voting green and didn’t eat any meat, right?

I often thought of Bruce Chatwin, a travel writer who inspired me massively when I started my career as a journalist. A lone wanderer and globetrotter, he was always on the go, traveling mostly on foot while deeply immersing himself in foreign cultures. But the romantic style of travel he described in his books has become almost extinct, perhaps even impossible.

My business trips surely didn’t bear any resemblance to it. Often I felt like I was getting dropped into the same air-conditioned hotel breakfast room in another country or continent, eating the same avocado sourdough toast that I’d get at the café around the corner back home. The last time I visited New York, I hardly even recognized this city. It had once been this mythical place I truly longed for, but now it felt as if I’d never left Berlin.

I’m not entirely sure if all those years of intensive travel have actually done me much good. Sure, I’ve taken a handful of life-changing trips and made some experiences I wouldn’t want to miss. Looking back at it, I could have done without most business travel though, and being completely honest, even a large portion of my vacation trips weren’t all that memorable.

These days, nothing excites me about traveling anymore. Everything seems so strangely homogenized – sometimes I get the feeling that even in the most remote places on Earth, I’d find nothing but a selfie viewpoint and a generic latte café blasting some bland AI feelgood music.

Since I’ve left my last music industry job, most business travel fell away with it. For the few remaining journeys, I’ve decided to choose ground transportation whenever possible. My actual goal is to make 2026 the first year in three decades that I won’t set foot on an airplane. It’s not just about my environmental footprint. I’ve also realized that slow traveling causes less stress to the body and mind.

I know I will eventually have to get back on a plane – after all, I’m not retired yet –, but in general, I really enjoy staying home right now. Instead of rushing through another city trip, I’d rather get to know the area where I live much better. I’ve been learning the names of local birds and trees, and exploring every single trail in the vicinity. I’m building an actual connection to the place I just thought I already knew. I’ve come to realize that my knowledge of it, too, was merely superficial, just like many of my visits to foreign places.

Now I’m roaming the same woods every day with my dog, and I’m learning so much about the land that I live on. On these daily walks, unlike on many of my trips, I’m fully present and attentive. It’s not a source of stress, but of comfort. I don’t need to spend hours in transit and I don’t need to push my body through overcrowded airports and train stations. I don’t need days to recover, like I did after most trips.

I find true happiness in certain brief moments of peace and stillness on these hikes. When the afternoon sunlight breaks through the branches and leaves of a tree. Or when a pair of cranes passes through the sky above me.

I don’t miss those years of corporate business travel at all. I will admit that every now and then, I do miss my thru-hiking days – but reading those news articles, I am thinking that those might just be gone forever.

The elusive artist, who came up in Brooklyn alongside the Jungle Brothers, was one of the last true outsiders in hip-hop. Through a legendary run of solo albums on the WordSound label in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was able to build a loyal worldwide underground fan base. However, he struggled with homelessness, depression and drug addiction for long periods of his life.

Sensational, birth name Colin Julius Bobb, reportedly passed away in early August 2026, at age 52.

Sensational was born in Guyana in 1974. His family moved to the United States when he was still a small child. The boy grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and was exposed to hip-hop culture on the streets, while calypso and reggae played at home.

As a teenager, Sensational became friends with Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers, who had grown up in neighboring East Flatbush and became one of his first mentors. He started out as a dancer but soon switched to rapping under the stage name Torture.

In the early 1990s, he joined the Jungle Brothers during the recording of their planned third album, Crazy Wisdom Masters. The demos, co-produced by avant-garde jazz bassist Bill Laswell, were ultimately rejected by Warner Bros., the group’s record label.

In the 2010 documentary The Rise and Fall and Rise of Sensational, Laswell recounts that the Jungle Brothers used to hang out at his home studio all the time back then; he’d often come home late at night to find Sensational digging in the more offbeat corners of his record collection, listening to albums by Anthony Braxton or Derek Bailey.

After Crazy Wisdom Masters got shelved, a more accessible Jungle Brothers album, J. Beez Wit The Remedy, was recorded and released in 1993. Sensational, or rather Torture, was featured on lead single “40 Below Trooper”.

A few songs from the Laswell sessions remained on the record. Tracks like “Spittin’ Random Wickedness” allow a glimpse into the material’s innovative potential – combining abstract, psychedelic lyrics in the vein of the Ultramagnetic MCs with chaotic, noisy production reminiscent of the Bomb Squad.

Crazy Wisdom Masters would have been an uncompromising album, probably without much commercial appeal, but unfortunately, even the simplified version didn’t sell well. After the disappointing numbers of J. Beez Wit The Remedy, the Jungle Brothers were dropped by Warner and went on hiatus.

Sensational also took a break from music. He returned in 1997 with his solo debut, Loaded With Power, released on WordSound, an independent label run by writer, producer and activist S.H. “Skiz” Fernando Jr. alias Spectre. The album was made under extremely lo-fi conditions using subpar equipment; since Sensational didn’t even own a microphone, he’d recorded his vocals through headphones.

Once again, it was Bill Laswell who brought Sensational and Spectre together – a connection that ultimately led to collaborations like the underground classic “Pillars Of Smoke.” I remember seeing the video back then on a late-night music channel and being completely blown away by it.

With the Crooklyn Dub Consortium compilations, WordSound brought the local scene in the Greenpoint neighborhood into the spotlight. Before gentrification in the 2000s, a number of artists centered around Spectre and Laswell had settled here and were producing instrumental, bass-heavy, subterranean-sounding beats influenced in equal measure by The RZA and Lee “Scratch” Perry. DJ Spooky gave this dark new sound between hip-hop and dub a memorable name: Illbient.

At that time, New York City’s experimental rap scene was, on the whole, a creative hotbed. The grassroots community centered around the record store Fat Beats and the Lyricist Lounge at the Nuyorican Poets Café thrilled open-minded hip-hop fans, not just in New York and the rest of the U.S., but even in Europe and Japan.

Loaded With Power found fertile ground in that global indie rap scene of the late 1990s. Sensational’s signature stream-of-consciousness lyrics set to sparse, unconventional beats received rave reviews in influential magazines across the genre spectrum. Between 1997 and 2002, the MC released a series of similarly out-there albums on WordSound and other labels, such as Matador and Mike Patton’s Ipecac.

Toward the end of that period, WordSound released an independent film called Crooked, a low-budget docu-fiction about a hip-hop producer (Spectre) and an underground rapper (Sensational) who spent their days hanging out at open-mic sessions, selling and/or smoking weed, and regularly getting into trouble.

Around the time the movie came out, Sensational lost control of his life. He spent all his money in clothing stores and clubs, fell behind on his rent, and finally was evicted from his apartment. Temporarily moving to Cypress Hills, a notorious public housing project in East New York, he spiraled further into depression and addiction.

During his darkest days, he was penniless and homeless, sleeping on friends’ couches and in the subway. The little money he earned came from selling bootleg CDs on the streets of Manhattan and doing other things to make ends meet. He was repeatedly admitted to correctional facilities and psychiatric hospitals.

Although he had sold all of his production equipment and no longer even had a roof over his head, he still occasionally released new material with the help of other artists and producers. Most of them were fans of his music. His WordSound recordings had earned him a reputation that extended far beyond New York – producers from all over the world wanted to collaborate with the mysterious, elusive MC.

In the documentary mentioned above, Icelandic musician Curver – of the electronic duo Ghostigital – recounts the story of their collaboration with Sensational. They had offered him $1,000 in cash for two verses, traveled to New York and booked studio time, but the rapper didn’t show up for the session. Since he had been arrested while drunk in a bar, they had to reschedule. Eventually, they received the verses, which can be heard on their Ipecac album In Cod We Trust (2006).

In 2005, Sensational was also invited to Osaka to record with Kouhei Matsunaga (aka Koyxen), a Japanese experimental musician and illustrator who had previously collaborated with artists such as Conrad Schnitzler, Merzbow, Mika Vainio and Asmus Tietchens. Their brilliant collaborative album was released in 2006 on WordSound, and a follow-up album followed in 2010 on Autechre’s Skam label; the IDM gods from the UK had also produced a remix for the first album. These two beautifully strange records were quite overlooked, but remain true underground hip-hop gems.

According to the documentary, Sensational recovered in the late 2000s and got his life back on track. The internet, particularly the MySpace platform, enabled him to make new connections abroad, collaborate remotely, and secure gigs. A series of new releases and projects boosted his profile so much that he was able to go back on tour.

In the 2010s, he kept a lower profile but continued to release dozens of albums on a variety of independent labels. He collaborated with experimental producers around the world; some of his projects were available in physical form only at concerts. Discogs lists 50 releases, 50 performances, and 170 contributions including guest appearances, songwriting, arrangements and production work.

In the final years of his life, Sensational continued to record music at irregular intervals but still released several brilliant projects, such as The Pearl, a 2022 EP on the Canadian indie label Naff. The four tracks were produced by Planteaterz, a duo consisting of the label owners Priori and Ex-Terrestrial, who usually make leftfield house and electronic music – but here they explored a minimalist take on futuristic boom-bap, built around dusty drum breaks, analog synth basslines, and strange sampled sounds. The tracks are strongly reminiscent of Sensational’s earlier WordSound material, while the accompanying remixes by Maara, J. Albert, and Lowjack take the music into more experimental electronic territory.

In 2024, another new Sensational project appeared on Bandcamp without much fanfare: Poiesis, a collaborative album with Kyoto-based producer Unbuilt, who’s also running the Throughout imprint. These ten tracks are rooted in the b-boy tradition, but also seem to be influenced by the aesthetics of hauntology – loose, off-beat drums stumbling over ghostly echoes and eerie synthesizers, seemingly inspired by groups like Anti-Pop Consortium or the Def Jux catalogue, while Sensational’s unpredictable flow of syllables moves in all directions like sprawling 3D wildstyle pieces or Rammellzee’s Letter Racers.

The electronic music producer Madteo announced Sensational’s passing on 11 August 2026 on his Instagram account. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on zensounds in 2025.

One reason for this is that not too many vaporwave artists actually compose their own music on hardware synthesizers – they mostly rely on samples from other artists’ works and express their creativity through editing, looping, and the use of effects. Not so with ysft, however: He chooses to create tracks from scratch and then apply his slushchain to these original compositions, rather than sampling existing material.

This extra effort has certainly slowed down his release schedule, especially when compared to the productivity of other artists in the scene, but this stoic focus on quality over quantity has earned him the respect and admiration of many of his contemporaries. After just three extremely atmospheric albums and a few URL live sets, ysft has already become something of a “producer’s producer.”

In true vaporwave style, ysft has chosen to remain anonymous, but I was fortunate enough to be able to send him a series of questions and receive written answers that actually revealed more information than I had expected – even though there were certain aspects he preferred to keep to himself, such as the origin of his poetic-sounding pseudonym and the name of his main project outside of vaporwave.

Read my written interview below with the Florida-based musician and producer, and catch him live later this month at the Slushwave Festival.

Where did you grow up and where are you currently residing?

I was born and raised in Central Florida, just outside of Orlando. I still live here.

Did you grow up in a musical household? What kind of music was played around the house when you were a kid?

Yes, definitely. Both my parents have always loved music, and there was almost always something playing, especially in the car. My dad was into more rock-oriented music, 70s psychedelic rock and classic rock. He also played drums when he was younger. My mom liked a lot of 80s hits, reggae, and jazz. She’s also a painter, so that creative influence was always present as well.

My older brother was another big influence. He played guitar in a few local bands as a teenager and introduced me to a lot of grunge and shoegaze music.

What kind of music did you get into in your teenage years?

I grew up with a lot of interest in punk, emo, and grunge types of music. That led me towards more aggressive styles of music like metal, hardcore, screamo etc. throughout my middle school and early high school years.

Later in my teens, I started exploring a wider range of music online. I found a lot of interest in calmer and more experimental types of music – a lot of post-rock, ambient, and instrumental music, and a lot of the indie music that was coming out around that time. I also got really into jazz and math rock.

Did you learn instruments or get musical training? Did you play in bands throughout high school and/or college?

I’m mostly self-taught. I learned piano and drums on my own and taught myself how to use DAWs for production. I was lucky to have a lot of friends who played music, so I always had access to guitars, drums, and other gear long before I owned much of it myself.

I played in a couple of bands during high school while also making electronic music in FL Studio. Since then, I’ve been involved in bands pretty consistently throughout my 20s and up to the present.

When did you start producing music on a computer?

I downloaded a cracked version of Fruity Loops 4 or 5 when I was 12 years old. I played around in that for many years and sort of got the grasp of mapping chords, melodies, and drum patterns out through MIDI. A lot of practice with song arrangements and songwriting. I got my first synthesizer around that time too, a MicroKorg, and also began practicing piano.

Did you work on any musical projects before ysft?

Yes, quite a few actually! I’ve had another solo project that’s been releasing music since 2014, and I’ve played drums in several bands over the years. I’ve also recorded and contributed to a lot of my friends’ projects. I think in total I have around 20 albums and EPs I have been a part of that are outside of the ysft project.

When exactly did you discover vaporwave? How did you find the music?

I discovered vaporwave around 2014 or 2015. Pretty sure it was on YouTube. I was already listening to a lot of lo-fi types of music and had an interest in cassette tape recording. I don’t really love the genre term, but I listened to a lot of “chillwave” during its peak in the late 2000s into the early 2010s prior to hearing vaporwave for the first time, artists like Washed Out, Neon Indian, etc.

I was also really into city pop and Japanese music in general, so hearing some of those familiar sounds recontextualized in a completely different way was something I found really interesting.

What did you like about it? What drew you in and what kept you there?

It was the lo-fi atmosphere and overall energy of the music. I also really connected with the aesthetic. I’ve always had a lot of nostalgia for 80s and 90s media, so that part resonated with me.

Who were some of the formative artists and releases that influenced you?

Within vaporwave and slushwave, t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 is an easy answer. I don’t think I need to go into much detail there since they’re one of the biggest influences for most slushwave artists. MindSpring Memories and early desert sand feels warm at night works were also very foundational for me.

Outside of vaporwave, the album Person Pitch by Panda Bear (of Animal Collective) was a big turning point for me with music. Hearing that album as a teenager completely changed the way I viewed what music could be. It was the use of texture and all of these “non-musical” elements that really stood out to me. The density of the music was unlike anything I had heard before. Animal Collective’s follow-up album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, really solidified those ideas for me, and I’ve been fascinated by that approach ever since. They’re still my favorite artists to this day.

Did you connect with the online vaporwave community?

Not at first. When I discovered vaporwave, I wasn’t very active in online communities outside of the social media I was already using to keep up with my friends. It wasn’t until I started the ysft project that I made an effort to connect with communities online, mainly through Discord and YouTube URL events.

Your first release as ysft came out in 2023. Tell me about the genesis of that debut album.

Prior to my initial work on that project, I was experimenting with a sample-free vaporwave/synthwave sound, using a lot of cassette tape recording and leaning into 80s and 90s sort of synthesizer and drum machine sounds. I made a few tracks for that project that I would like to officially release some day under a different alias.

Around the same time, I was also making a lot of ambient music for my other solo project. I didn’t really want to flood that project with ambient releases since it wasn’t specifically an ambient project, so I thought of starting a separate alias for that material. I got heavily into the newer slushwave that was happening around that time, so I thought I could combine the two newer projects I was working on already and make it something more akin to the slushwave sound. Listening to desert sand feels warm at night’s sample-free albums solidified the idea that that was what I wanted to do with the project.

You’re creating most of your music from scratch on hardware, which is quite unusual for slushwave and vaporwave in general. What does your creative process entail?

Yeah, I think that mostly comes from spending so many years playing and performing with hardware. I’ve accumulated a lot of gear over the years, and I definitely prefer the more hands-on approach that it offers. I’m a big gear nerd for sure.

The process usually starts with either a drum pattern or a chord progression I’ve been playing around with. I kind of just bounce ideas around until something clicks. During this part of the process, I’m writing and recording everything at a faster tempo and higher pitch than what will eventually become the slowed-down, slushed version of the song.

Once the arrangement is finished, I’ll usually record it to cassette tape and then transfer it back into a new project file. From there, I add the slush effects and any additional layers the track might need. Mixing in this part of the process can get pretty tricky because the tape naturally compresses everything, causing certain details to become much more prominent while others sort of disappear. It usually takes a few passes of going back to the original project, adjusting the mix, recording it back to tape, and repeating the process until it feels right.

So far, your Bandcamp page features just three releases. It’s interesting, because most other vaporwave producers are so prolific. Does that have to do with your work process as well?

Yes. Since ysft is a sample-free project, I write and record every element of the song from scratch. It’s definitely more time-consuming than finding a sample that’s already written, mixed and mastered to work with. The process is definitely slower; for example, each album has taken me roughly six to eight months to complete. It’s a lot of trial and error until I’m satisfied with the sound.

I also try to be pretty intentional with the music I make for this project. It’s the first thing I’ve done that has a defined theme, and it’s not really something I want to force if I’m not in the headspace to channel it. I also have other projects outside of this that I have been busy with since ysft’s inception, so my free time to explore creativity and make music is divided.

Some people in the scene still think that only sampled music can actually be vaporwave, but original music has been a part of the culture for a very long time. What makes your music vaporwave/slushwave? Isn’t it just ambient music?

I can see a lot of valid points for both sides of the sampled vs non-sampled music in vaporwave argument. I don’t necessarily think my music is especially ‘vaporwave’ sounding, so I usually don’t try to push that or convince people of that. I think slushwave is a bit more open-ended since it lends itself to a more ambient listening experience than traditional vaporwave.

I try not to concern myself too much with the logistics of genre and cataloging things that way though. For me, it’s more about the sonic atmosphere of everything. Capturing that energy or sound is more important than the Bandcamp tag you put on it.

So far you released three albums between 2023 and 2025. How would you describe the development of the project since its inception?

The first album, 最 後 に 永 遠 に (finally, forever), was an exploration of me trying to figure out how to work with slushwave production while still holding onto the ambient and lo-fi elements I had been experimenting with in earlier projects. The album was created during a more difficult period of my life dealing with grief, loss, and confusion. I wanted to use the project to process and explore those emotions by putting them into songs. At the time, I thought this project would be a ‘one-off’ sort of thing that I wouldn’t necessarily come back to.

With the second album, 幻 の そ の 他 (phantom other), thematically I wanted to create something more on the darker end of the emotional spectrum, and a bit more hi-fi in terms of production. A few of the songs on this album I already had in the works towards the end of completing the first album. Some of the songs on this album are my personal favorites that I have done with the ysft project. I think this record feels like the conclusion of many of the themes introduced on the debut album.

The third album, 自 然 | 恋 | 絶 望 (nature | love | despair), is a three-part work, with each section exploring one of those themes. It’s supposed to be a rebirth or reincarnation sort of album and a reflection of the human experience. I think in a way it encapsulated the ideas I was working with with the first two albums but from a different perspective other than my own.

Where do you see the future of slushwave heading? What do you think about the state of innovation in the scene, and who are the most innovative producers out there?

I think slushwave has been in a renaissance era for the past few years. In my opinion, Perli tal-Passat by desert sand feels warm at night and days of blue skies was a big turning point. The album is the first I’m aware of that was heavily utilizing stem splitting samples in their process. This opens up so many new possibilities of what can be done with samples. Beyond its creative approach, it’s also just an incredibly solid album. It was actually the release that inspired me to start a separate alias for sample-based music, 发光的 e c h o e s, and begin experimenting with stem-splitting myself.

All of days of blue skies material after Perli tal-Passat is some of the most innovative slushwave that has happened to date in my opinion. Everything from the sample usage and layering and the effect chains he comes up with are very unique and distinct. He utilizes a lot of effects that aren’t widely used in slushwave. Bit-crushing is a big one that comes to mind and I think is a big part of his signature sound.

I also think Psicadence’s rise in popularity has had a big impact on the scene. His more bass-heavy production and use of electronic music-oriented samples brought a fresh sound to the genre that is undeniably incredible. I notice a lot of other newer artists leaning into this more groove or dance oriented type of slushwave. His more recent releases seem to be a bit more focused on ambient and experimental sections as well, which I have really been enjoying.

What’s your relation to other subgenres outside of slushwave, like signalwave or barber beats for example? Are you listening to other stuff, and if so, what in particular?

Outside of slushwave, signalwave is the genre I am the most interested in. victory over death has been one of the most interesting artists I’ve found in the scene in general. I’d highly recommend checking out their work if you haven’t already. Other than that, I still enjoy a lot of the more classic vaporwave sound.

What are you interested in outside of vaporwave, in terms of music, art, films, other media?

I listen to music from all over the world, and there honestly aren’t many genres where I haven’t found something I love. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of jazz.

Outside of music, I’m a big fan of international cinema, especially East Asian films. I love Japanese horror, and I’m also a huge fan of the more experimental films the Shaw Brothers were making throughout the 70s and 80s. I’m also really into film photography, which has been a hobby of mine since my teenage years.

Is music a hobby or a career option for you?

Most of my life revolves around music and art in one way or another, so I’d say it’s a bit of both.

What are your musical plans, what are you working on right now?

Most of my time recently has gone into preparing my live set and getting ready for my trip to Belgium for Slushwave 2026. I’ve also been slowly working away at the fourth ysft album. I’m hoping to have it finished before the end of the year, but I’m not trying to rush the process.

I’m also working on another album for my sample-based project, 发光的 e c h o e s, which should be out fairly soon.

I can’t say too much just yet, but there may or may not be a vinyl release of the first ysft album in the near future.

Listen to ysft on Bandcamp

ysft’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – アンドロメダ (2014)

• Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night – 新世界の弟子たち [New World Disciples] (2021)

• Psicadence – 過去の共鳴 (2025)

• Tupperwave – Grocery Store Sunset (2024)

• vcr-classique – exotics (2019)

• Infinity Frequencies – Shrines (2013)

• 骨架的 – Holograms (2010)

• MindSpring Memories – e a r l y t r a n c e (2017)

• death’s dynamic shroud.wmv – 世界大戦OLYMPICS (2014)

• 猫 シ Corp. – OASYS ♁ 博物館 (2016)

In the first half of the year, I’ve been interviewing more than 50 artists – two per week on average. I will be spending the rest of the year finishing the book, working on a few commissioned stories and writing more personal essays here.

Today I want to start with a book recommendation though.

Eva zu Beck – The Wilder Way

I’ve mentioned Eva in a recent article about my favorite YouTube creators, because I think she’s a great advocate for alternative lifestyles and philosophies. I wholeheartedly recommend her inspiring and well-written memoir, The Wilder Way, which I just devoured over a rainy weekend in July.

Eva grew up in Poland, but moved to London as a teenager. She earned a degree from Oxford, found a well-paying job at a start-up, married young and adapted to a lifestyle full of affluence and ambition. Soon, however, she felt she was living out someone else’s dream rather than her own, which is why she eventually left everything behind to travel the world with a camera.

These days, Eva lives in a simple cabin in the Carpathian mountains with her German Shepherd, Vilk. She’s into overlanding and running ultramarathons in remote places. Having left most of society’s norms and limitations behind, she rejects the prevailing consumerist complacency. Her YouTube channel has grown to almost two million subscribers over the course of a decade; she’s also been hosting her own travel show on the National Geographic channel. At 35, she’s now looking back on her radical search for a more feral lifestyle. Such a powerful read.

Get Eva’s book

Ambient Album of the Month (July/August 2026)

Martin Brugger – The Shell (Squama)

The Munich-based label founder (Squama) and jazz bassist (Fazer) returns five years after his solo debut album Music for Video Stores with another gorgeous piece of lowercase ambient, this time with subtle hints of post-rock and lo-fi folk.

The Shell feels like the hazy soundtrack to a long-forgotten summer from many years ago. You can hear the strumming of an acoustic guitar in the distance, and layers of static blur the memory. If you just listen to one ambient album this month, make it this one. Thanks to for reminding me about it – make sure to check out Caro’s great Berlin culture newsletter as well.

Felisha Ledesma & Snakeskin – Palm Of Hand (Paralaxe)

For this live performance, recorded at a Swedish avant-garde festival, sound artist Felisha Ledesma teamed up with the Lebanese dream-pop duo Snakeskin. Stylistically, Palm Of Hand falls somewhere between free-form ambient and electroacoustic composition, blending field recordings with synth drones and sparse vocal passages spoken or sung in Arabic.

The piece explores trauma, anger, and grief in the wake of the explosion in the Port of Beirut and the bombings of the Gaza Strip, yet there are also glimmers of hope. This is no superficial background music intended to lighten the mood, but rather an immersive experience that is particularly well-suited for deep listening sessions.

PJS – Auroras (okla)

These days, so much music produced with modular synthesizers sounds extremely generic and interchangeable, yet the duo of Jordan Christoff and Patrick Dique somehow manages to create 40-minute modular improvisations – without the use of overdubs or presets – that captivate me from start to finish.

The music simply flows with an energy that seems to draw directly from life itself, with an underlying melancholy setting the tone. It has often been said that good ambient music must work both as a background and as a foreground listening experience, and this is a prime example of how it’s done.

Tim Six meets Minereed – Afterlife Overdubs (biardo)

Last year, Ukrainian ambient and drone artist Tim Six performed a live synth set at a small art bookstore in Paris, his adopted home. Experimental musician Minereed recorded the performance on tape using a single microphone and later added overdubs featuring bansuri, zither, vocals, and other sounds. The Social Levitation Crew also contributed drums and percussion.

The result is a truly unique psychedelic journey into a dub-like, tribal-inspired ambient-non-ambient style that blends driving rhythms with analog drones and electronic textures. It’s also unlike anything the artists have created before.

FKP & PREMIUM CHANNELS – nowhere texas (self-released)

This sample-based road trip audio drama by the Texan artist, photographer, and author PREMIUM CHANNELS sounds like pulling over at an empty rest stop late at night and, while you’re filling up, hearing distorted voices over the wailing sounds of slide guitars and organs, coming from an old, battered radio inside the gas station – a harmless but slightly eerie moment, like the slow opening of a psychological horror movie.

I’d like to draw your attention to the beautifully evocative prose included with this ambient signalwave release – follow along with the plot as you listen by checking the info tab for each track.

“We have been on the road for one month, three weeks, two days, seven hours, and about 43 minutes. I don’t know what I’m looking for, honestly. I’m hoping that it’ll be obvious when I see it. After traveling east on down from Eden via State Highway 16, we’ve spent the last week getting wasted with some college friends in San Antonio before deciding to continue east to see the piney woods. We’re currently on U.S. Route 259 blowing north towards a place called Nowhere.”

Bonus Beats

Macroblank – 美容師 COLLECTION

My favorite curator of barber beats released a massive collection of reworks of Haircuts For Men tracks (“the barber who inspired me to do what I do”) from the 2015-2020 era, “for anyone who’s just getting started with the genre.”

The collection features 250 tracks, nearly 24 hours of trip-hop and downtempo music, mostly pieces by unknown studio musicians and bedroom producers found on old lounge compilations, which have been slowed down, edited and slightly reworked. Most of the original sampled tracks are credited in the Bandcamp blurb.

This 100% plundered but completely AI-free collection is absolutely intended as background music to create a calm, inspiring atmosphere – so turn on shuffle mode while you’re working, cooking, reading, doing chores or just chilling out.

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 three-hour aerowave epic 𓋹 (Ankh) by Hydroplaned Into a False Reality! – I didn’t even realize then 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.

Subscribe now

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 called 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!

• WiiWare!

• Jeffery HQ

• Ceramic Planetarium

• World End Collapse

HIAFR!’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)

I have no illusions about the power dynamics in our relationship with Big Tech, but I do strive to be mindful about the overall amount as well as the individual pieces of content I consume. That means I try to avoid certain content that I might gravitate towards, but that will have no positive impact on my mental well-being (in my case: anything related to the culture wars, global politics or the manosphere).

What’s so fascinating about YouTube – like any other algorithm-driven video platform – is how my niche interests are served up to me as a wild mix of short- and long-form videos, competing only through thumbnails and headlines, without much context or narrative thread. I guess we’ve all heard of people by now that have seen all the key scenes from a popular TV series but haven’t actually watched the show itself and have no intention of doing so. I’m not judging anyone here – I’m just finding this somewhat indicative of our strange times.

It isn’t all black and white though. It took me some effort, but I believe that I’ve managed to train “my” YouTube algorithm really well. It took a couple of restarts – whenever I’ve relapsed and fallen back into a habit of watching negative stuff that dragged me down into a rabbithole of conspiracy theories and doomsday scenarios, I just reset my account by switching off recommendations for a while.

Over the last few months, I’ve actually become quite disciplined in my behavior and consumption patterns. My YouTube homescreen currently tends to serve me some exceptionally good stuff – that’s why I got the idea for this post. Even Shorts and Recommendations have repeatedly suggested amazing new content to me that I probably wouldn’t have come across otherwise.

So let’s take a look at what I’ve actually been watching and subscribing to.

It probably won’t surprise you that my number one category is still music-related content, especially in-depth looks at music production, documentaries, video podcasts and long-form interviews with artists and other industry figures.

Some of my friends and colleagues know that I have a very specific quirk: I’m really into vocal coach reaction YouTubers. My favorites are The Charismatic Voice (a channel run by the popular opera singer Elizabeth Zharoff), The Vocalyst, Beth Roars and The Fairy Voice Mother. I’m not watching these ironically – as someone who’s spent most of his life listening to either rap or instrumental music, I am learning so much from their analysis, the vocabulary they use and their massive knowledge of music theory, singing technique and human anatomy.

Other than that, I’ve been enjoying the stuff that I believe most sane music lovers would enjoy, like the odd Zane Lowe or NYT Popcast interview whenever they have an interesting guest, Drumeo challenges to learn Danny Carey’s drum parts, jazz covers of Nirvana songs, and of course, baffled reactions to Angine de Poitrine.

A big one for me is NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series. The recent one with Armand Hammer was my favorite of this year so far. I still sometimes go back to past favorites by Caroline Polachek (2023), Willow (2024), or the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet (2025).

(A little tangent here: As a long-time fan of the International Anthem label, I’ve been following the contemporary “gorp jazz” scene in L.A., particularly two groups with overlapping members: Jeff Parker’s stellar quartet, which came together in the late 2010s jamming at the Enfield Tennis Academy club, and the brilliant free improv/groove jazz quintet SML. Both the ETA IVtet’s latest album, Happy Today, and SML’s Spontaneous Music Live remain on constant repeat, just like some of the SML members’ solo and collaboration projects outside of the group.)

The biggest music channel on YouTube is probably still Anthony Fantano’s The Needle Drop. I don’t watch it very often. He doesn’t talk about too much music that interests me, and I don’t feel I learn anything valuable from his reviews. To me, he seems like more of a follower of pop culture than an actual music lover; he tends to voice strong opinions and talk at length about the latest social media gossip, but as a critic, he doesn’t strike me as someone who has many interesting things to say about the music itself. I could be wrong though – as I said, I haven’t engaged with much of his content in a while.

Right behind him in terms of popularity is Rick Beato. Rick’s coming from a slightly different angle, mainly because he’s older, well-versed in theory and has been part of the industry himself as a producer and songwriter in the 1990s. I do have mixed feelings about Rick as well; his persona, that blend of know-it-all record store clerk and macho guitar center snob, can really rile me up. That being said, I do follow his content because there’s at least a hypothetical chance I might learn something, and I found his obvious admiration for DOMi & JD BECK in his recent interview kind of cute.

(Another brief tangent: I just got around to checking out DOMi & JD BECK’s long-awaited second album WHO ASKED? on Blue Note. Their music is truly special, heavily influenced by 70s fusion and prog, as well as experimental hip-hop and electronic music. Most tracks on the new record feature vocal passages by the duo alongside an orchestra. I am finding the heavily processed vocals a bit hard to get used to, but the music is as complex and energetic as ever, full of surprising twists and turns, and the orchestral elements add substantially to JD’s lightning-fast, polyrhythmic drumming and DOMi’s highly idiosyncratic style on the keys.)

Outside of music, these are some other content niches that I’ve been engaging with quite strongly. Looking at my subscriptions and recommendations, I can make out a bunch of very specific content buckets that I seem to enjoy:

• skateboarding videos and interviews (I get recommended enough good stuff just because I subscribe to The Nine Club and Thrasher)

• mindfulness lectures by Alan Watts, Jack Kornfield and other famous Buddhist teachers (if you’re even just casually interested in these topics, your algorithm will flood you with tons of it, so I’m not going to link any specific channel)

• simple living, off-grid culture and self-sufficiency (I’m a long-time subscriber of Kirsten Dirksen, a video journalist who’s making films about “unconventional (and unique) homes, backyard gardens (and livestock), alternative transport, DIY, craftsmanship, and philosophies of life”; I also subscribe to Exploring Alternatives, Tiny Home Tours, Liveration and Happen Films)

• travel content with a focus on Asian megacities, mainly in China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan (I just let the algorithm serve these up for me by watching, liking and saving)

As an addition to the last bucket, I want to recommend three related channels that manage to calm me down and/or relieve my anxiety when I’m really stressed or on the verge of depression:

• Solo Travel Japan is a channel that’s showing videos by a person traveling across the country by train or boat; these films are more about the mode of transportation itself than their destinations. All videos are on mute by default.

• Alone in Japan – Letting the Day Drift By is quite similar in its effects but contains short aesthetic video portraits of single people in Japan living a slow lifestyle, without ever saying a word. (It does seem as if I’m particularly into videos where people don’t talk.)

• Zero Waste Life is not a channel but a playlist of documentaries from the Japanese public broadcaster NHK. It contains short portraits of people living a sustainable lifestyle in Japan – not as an urban hipster trend, but as a deeply philosophical decision.

In terms of YouTube personalities and influencers, I don’t subscribe to many but I’m a fan of the Polish travel vlogger Eva zu Beck. In her own channel as well as her National Geographic series Superskilled, she’s been documenting her adventures from living in a cabin in the mountains to running ultramarathons in the arctic to overlanding with her German Shepherd in the desert. I’ve been an active subscriber for some years, and watching her personal growth has been impressive.

I’m also subscribed to the channel of Roaming Wild Rosie. She’s a thru-hiker and former interior designer who moved from London to rural central Sweden four years ago to renovate an old cabin in the woods. I enjoy the fact that she talks surprisingly little in her videos, focusing instead on showing her progress with the handywork. This portrait from an Italian channel gives you a glimpse into her introverted personality (turn on subtitles).

Lastly, I will make an awkward confession: I’ve recently discovered this Australian comedy channel the O.G. Crew, and I do feel quite ambiguous about it, but there’s no way around the fact that I have spent quite some time with it.

Let me preface this by saying I used to be really into stand-up comedy, but all of my former heroes are pretty much dead to me now (yes I’m talking about you, Dave, Louis and Aziz). That’s why I haven’t engaged much with this genre of entertainment in some years, but the O.G. Crew managed to lure me back in.

The channel spun off from a previous comedy channel called Yeah Mad. It’s built around a group of five comedians from Australia and New Zealand, and they’re engaging in all sorts of silly games and challenges. Their Aussie/Kiwi accents seem to make their jokes even funnier – especially for me as a non-native English speaker with an obvious German accent.

In terms of characters, my favorite is Abby Boom, a queer half-New Zealander, half- Lebanese woman who can be both unbearably loud and extremely funny. She’s a strong advocate for the LGBTQ+ community; she will call out racist, sexist or otherwise problematic jokes when necessary, but she’s not a killjoy – she can definitely have a good laugh at herself too.

Then there’s Alan Fang, an Asian-Australian comedian in his early 20s with a truly offbeat, dark sense of humor. He’s the wild card because his bits tend to go off the rails sometimes, but this can also lead to some hilariously surreal situations.

There’s also Akila, a young man with Sri Lankan roots who exudes the sharp, sarcastic wit of a sage. You often get the feeling that he’s high or otherwise detached from reality – he will say nothing for ten minutes and then, completely out of the blue, drop the funniest comment you’ve heard in your life.

I believe that Sam(antha) Walsh plays more of a character than some of the others; she’s doing her bit as a stereotypically ignorant, superficial and standardly beautiful white Australian woman. As a millennial, Sammy is slightly older than Abby, Akila and Alan, who are clearly members of Gen Z.

Finally, there’s Andrew “Hammo” Hamilton, a huge, tattooed ex-drug dealer with a thick Australian accent; he just turned 40 and still lives with his parents. He’s apparently a toxic partner (his ex-fiancée Nikki is a frequent guest on the show) and has no problems with cracking problematic jokes just for the lolz. His smug, self-satisfied ‘straight white dude’ vibe really pushes my buttons, but I’m also fascinated with his character, a mix of street smarts and Peter Pan syndrome. Like the other four, he can be hilarious at times – especially his laugh is contagious.

In summary, I tend to feel sympathy for Abby and Akila. I don’t hate Sammy or Hammo, but I wouldn’t want to be friends with them either. Alan is the weirdest character out the bunch – you never know what to expect with him. He’s like a time bomb, just waiting to go off.

I won’t recommend any particular episode because all episodes I’ve watched have about equal amounts of really funny and really dumb moments. To be honest, I don’t know if I even wholeheartedly recommend this channel. I’ve just spent some rainy and cold days with it and have literally laughed my ass off, but there were also many moments when I felt deeply ashamed.

If you’re looking for harmless, safe comedy that doesn’t hurt anyone, you definitely won’t enjoy this much. For anyone who, like me, came up with the dark humor of George Carlin and Larry David, they might actually be worth checking out. Be warned though – you will be offended.

That’s it for now. I’ll be keeping a relatively low profile for the rest of the summer, although there will, of course, be more Vapor Talks coming up soon. I hope you’ve found a few interesting, strange or funny recommendations in this rather unsual update from me. Thanks for reading!

Please do recommend me your favorite YouTube channels (music or otherwise) in the comments.

“Chillwave is when you're at a South Carolina beach with friends and while wading in the ocean far, far from the shore someone asks 'we need to head back soon?' And you have work in the morning, an 8 a.m. meeting maybe, but you emulate the quiet ripple of the tide and you say 'naw, we'll make it back,' and you're right. You do make it back.”

This quote comes from a woman named Christy Mullins, who’s a friend of the musician Chaz Bear alias Toro Y Moi. During a day trip together, she’d taken a photo of Chaz fueling up at a gas station, which he used as the cover of his 2010 single Leave Everywhere. Then she posted this heartfelt note on her blog.

Speaking more concretely, chillwave was a form of dreamy, sun-soaked indie pop, made by one-man band projects like Toro Y Moi, Washed Out, Neon Indian and Memory Tapes, in the late aughts and into the 2010s.

Remember when everyone first got on Instagram, how people were using this filter app, Hipstamatic, to make their photos look like old, faded Polaroids? This is what the music sounds like, but in a good way.

At the time, various terms were thrown around to describe the music: Chillwave, glo-fi, dreambeat, hypnagogic pop or h-pop. Chillwave was the one that stuck.

It was essentially the result of bedroom beatmakers trying to write indie pop songs, and indie rockers trying their hand at making lo-fi beats.

Spiritual predecessors can be found in the hazy nostalgia of Boards Of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children (1998), the warped drones of avant-garde guitarist Christian Fennesz’s albums Endless Summer (2001) and Venice (2004), even the dusty, raw soul loops of the late J Dilla’s Donuts (2006).

The movement was implicitly political, because it was a reaction to the 2008 global financial crisis – think college kids retreating into memories of their carefree childhoods in the face of economic collapse. Realizing they would never be able to pay back their student loan debt, they didn’t get angry and break stuff but resorted to making laid-back tunes that felt like a soundtrack to a never-ending, grainy Super 8 family vacation film. Call it resignation. I’d rather frame it as acceptance. Collapse now, and avoid the rush.

In the early 2010s, critics were arguing whether chillwave was complete, utter bullshit (Jon Pareles in the New York Times) or “the most interesting and vital, stupid indie phenomenon” of its time (Brandon Soderberg in The Village Voice). Most of the leading chillwave artists left chillwave territory behind when their sophomore albums were due on a slightly bigger indie label with a bit more budget, often to the detriment of their music.

2009’s “summer of chillwave” has since become the same distant memory that the music once evoked. But it became hugely influential not just to its most direct subgenre successor, vaporwave, but also to the pop and electronic music of the following decade. Find below a roundup of 10 chillwave albums (and EPs) that still hold up today.

1. Panda Bear – Person Pitch (2007)

In 2005, Noah Lennox alias Panda Bear of the experimental rock band Animal Collective moved to Lisbon, Portugal. When his guitar was held up in customs, he had just a Boss Dr. Sample SP-303 at his disposal for a few months after the move overseas. He’d bought it because the hip-hop producer Madlib had reportedly used it on his classic Quasimoto album, The Unseen (2000).

Not having his guitar around, Lennox experimented with layering his characteristic, Brian Wilson-inspired vocal harmonies over sampled loops, edited and manipulated on the SP-303. The results of these experiments would inspire a whole generation of indie musicians and songwriters to try out working with samplers and electronics, essentially kickstarting the chillwave movement. And yes, this album came out roughly two years before the genre term was even coined.

2. 18 Carat Affair – Spent Passions (2009)

You can hear echoes of Person Pitch in the cocktail of psychedelic sounds bubbling up in the blogosphere at the time, such as Denys Parker’s early recordings as 18 Carat Affair. Some of the Kansas-based musician, songwriter and bedroom producer’s works apparently go all the way back to 2005; these 30 demo songs were self-released as a collection of MP3s to burn to a CD-r in 2009.

Parker had a background in jazz composition and would become an important figure in the early vaporwave scene. Apparently he records most of his music live on hardware (synths, tape recorders and drum machines), because he wants his tunes to have this spontaneous, momentary snapshot quality. On these early works, he’s still moving on firm chillwave grounds, singing over warped hip-hop breaks, filtered basslines, yacht rock loops and droning guitars. Brilliant stuff.

3. Matrix Metals – Flamingo Breeze (2009)

Flamingo Breeze is a strange record by any means. Its hypnotic synth loops have fittingly been called “alien lounge music” and “hypnagogic kosmische” by David Keenan. I also love how Tyler Craig of the blog Tiny Mix Tapes (rip) described it as “the perfect soundtrack to the shittiest summer of your life.”

The late Sam Mehran recorded these three long suites under his Matrix Metals alias. The A-side starts out like the memory of a French filter house track overheard from the club toilet, while the B-side spirals off into more noisy and weirder territory. It occupies the experimental end of the chillwave/hypnagogic pop movement; a bit further leftfield, you’d find James Ferraro’s lo-fi ambient stuff from 2008/09, which has been called chillwave too. I find that somewhat of a stretch.

4. Washed Out – High Times & Life Of Leisure EPs (2009)

Ernest Greene grew up in Georgia and rose to fame on MySpace. Within the span of just a week in September 2009, he self-released the seminal EPs High Times and Life of Leisure under his chosen artist name, Washed Out. Both are collections of somewhat demo-like, wistful indie pop songs interspersed with a bunch of lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals.

Based on a looped sample from a 1983 Italo disco tune by Gary Low, Greene’s smash “Feel It All Around” (off Life Of Leisure) became the definitive chillwave anthem. The song would get another life when it was picked as the intro tune to the TV series Portlandia, fittingly enough a satirical portrait of hipster culture. Also, I just learned through YouTube comments that the infectious High Times opener “Belong” blew up a decade later due to its inclusion in the video game Bear.

5. Memory Tapes – Seek Magic (2009)

Dayve Hawk was the ex-frontman of a blog-era indie rock band when he started making solo music under several similar-sounding artist names – Memory Tapes, Memory Cassette and Weird Tapes. His 2009 album Seek Magic has been dubbed “the greatest chillwave album of all time” by Stereogum’s Ian Cohen, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. It’s an album of proper dance pop songs shrouded in nostalgic haze and tape hiss, half New Order and half Guided By Voices, full of creative ideas, riffs and hooks, melodies and counter-melodies. Greatest chillwave album of all time? I don’t know. It’s definitely up there with the best.

6. Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms (2009)

Like most other chillwave ‘bands’, at first Neon Indian was mainly the solo project of a lone songwriter and producer, Mexico-born and Texas-raised Alan Palomo.

We’re still in peak chillwave territory – the crunchy drum machine beats are here, the analog synth arpeggios and the layered vocal harmonies. The songs have titles like “Should Have Taken Acid Wth You”, “Terminally Chill” or “Deadbeat Summer”. The whole album is carried by an vague sense of melancholy, nostalgia and longing. If you’ve never heard about chillwave, you might as well start here.

7. Toro Y Moi – Causers Of This (2010)

At the beginning of his career, the South Carolina musician Chaz Bear alias Toro Y Moi made indie pop with an underground hip-hop beat-making approach. Influenced by producers such as the late J Dilla or Flying Lotus, he combined experimental hip-hop beats with detached falsetto vocals and almost incidental, gorgeous melodies.

He’d release a few singles and loosies during the summer of chillwave, and then follow up properly with his debut album Causers Of This. Tracks like “Imprint After” or “Talamak” encapsulate that loose post-genre feel that was prevalent from the L.A. beat scene to the UK’s post-dubstep circuit at the time; they’re also just very good songs at their core. Just a classic album really, regardless of genre.

8. Games – That We Can Play EP (2010)

Between 2009 and 2011, Daniel Lopatin alias Oneohtrix Point Never and his former high school buddy from Boston, Joel Ford of the indie group Tigercity, created some brilliant music together, first as Games and then as Ford & Lopatin. This one’s a bit more synth pop than chillwave, but it does live somewhere inbetween those poles. It was all just a jumble of exciting new sounds anyways.

The duo once listed their influences in a Pitchfork interview:

“DJ Paul, DJ Screw, Aphex Twin, Italo disco, the Weather Channel, Weather Report, Return to Forever, Boards of Canada, James Ferraro. [Gang Starr's] Moment of Truth and [Miles Davis'] On the Corner are huge records for us. DJ Premier and Teo Macero are two of our favorite producers. Their cuts and edits always recontextualize performances and samples in the most psychedelic way.”

This EP is my favorite from their catalogue because it’s bookended by two hypnotizing electro-pop tunes, “Strawberry Skies” (featuring perfect girl-next-door vocals courtesy of a young Laurel Halo) and “Shadows In Bloom”. Both remind me of those warm, long summer nights when I’d just moved to Berlin, riding my old, battered bike home across Warschauer Brücke while the sun slowly came up.

9. Surfing – Deep Fantasy (2012)

Chillwave came and went, even though it existed a bit longer and had more staying power than most other internet microgenres of the time. It developed in 2008 and was over by 2011, when the blogosphere slowly started embracing a new style of sample-based experimental electronic music that would soon be dubbed vaporwave (the Wall Street Journal once called it “chillwave for Marxists”).

Vaporwave’s early pioneers – like Vektroid, Internet Club or Luxury Elite – were deeply influenced by chillwave. The Australian duo Surfing, who came from a band and a production background, combined a solid chillwave/synth pop foundation with early vaporwave’s glitchy electronic grooves. Their debut album Deep Fantasy remains a bonafide classic that I still regularly return to; despite sounding extremely of its time, it has proven its timeless qualities.

10. Whitewoods – Spaceship Earth (2013)

The enigmatic Virginia duo Whitewoods first got recognition on Tumblr, Soundcloud and Youtube in late 2010: Their catchy tune “Beach Walk” sounded like a warped tape that had been baking in the summer sun too long, even for chillwave standards. In addition, there was a sense of irony in their approach that had never really prevailed in chillwave. It mirrored the movement on the verge of dissolving, but it was fun.

Three years later, Whitewoods would release their debut album on the netlabel Business Casual, a collection of sample-based lo-fi pop still clearly rooted in chillwave’s DNA but with vaporwave’s sonic hallmarks. This record closes the loop for me, as it shows how the sound would keep evolving – chillwave was definitely over by that time, but some of its key elements kept living on in a different form.

Inspired by the nascent net art scene, Luke felt inclined to create his own idiosyncratic vision of original, synth-based vaporwave, which he’d spread out over three influential mixtapes under a new alias, Eyeliner, between 2012 and 2015: High Fashion Mood Music, LARP of Luxury and BUY NOW.

In 2025, author Michael Brown published a full book about Eyeliner’s masterpiece BUY NOW as an entry in Bloomsbury’s popular 33 1/3 series. This outstanding contribution to cultural analysis offers the most compelling summary to date of the early history of vaporwave. It succeeds in vividly contextualizing both Luke’s artistic journey and the development of a global online community enthusiastic about net art, eccojams and the “utopian virtual” sound.

When I spoke with Luke recently, I got to know one of the most open-minded, down-to-earth, friendly and kind people I’ve met so far in the entire vaporwave scene. This conversation serves merely as a brief introduction to the world of Eyeliner – if you want to learn more, you should definitely read Michael Brown’s book. Also, be on the lookout for a new Eyeliner album, probably in 2027.

Subscribe now

There’s a quote in Michael Brown’s book which I can very much relate to. You told him that for a certain period in your teenage years you were “slightly afraid of the world”, and being in your bedroom with a computer felt “incredibly comforting.”

Well, I was the youngest child in my family, so I was left to watch as much TV as I liked. I was watching Twin Peaks at six, seven years old. I was also left alone to just play on the computer, because my parents obviously saw I had an aptitude for it. There’s that feedback loop that happens when you are stuck with a Commodore 64, some video games and a couple of manuals for [programming language] BASIC. There’s something so cozy and comfy about it. Back then, it wasn’t defined by a market or an outcome, it was just something interesting to tinker around with. My friend’s father worked for the government post system, and he would bring home all the old computers. We were playing DOOM on it, doing all this crazy stuff.

In the early to mid-90s, everyone was listening to grunge and indie rock, but you were into 80s synth pop – music that was really out of style. Michael Brown interprets it as a reaction to your older brother, who was into ‘cool’ music. Would you agree with that?

I was thinking about this too. I started with Rage Against the Machine, Fugazi, Dead Kennedys.. that was my brother’s influence. My brother was also into bands like Weather Report; we had random jazz records and experimental stuff that we’d found in thrift shops, but 80s synth pop was in that cringe zone, and it was something I resisted at first. It wasn’t until I got into Devo that I just dove straight into new wave. At a certain point, I got really into The Knife, and that was definitely a slow break to get into that cringe level of 80s stuff.

My brother’s friends would make fun of me for listening to this rollerdisco music. Because it was kind of camp – not necessarily queer camp, but certainly in that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. I was coming from new wave and punk, going into synth pop, but it was coming up against that Commodore 64 chiptune stuff, and in a way, I’ve always combined the two. The dark wave industrial stuff was feeding into synth pop as well, and even 80s British heavy metal would end up in a lot of those Commodore 64 soundtracks. In my mind, it’s all the same blob, and that’s what fascinates me especially with Disasteradio, the video game use in and of itself, as kind of its own entity, a convolutional blob of all these different influences.

For many of us here in Europe, there was a natural pathway from 80s synth pop, EBM and industrial to IDM and hauntology. Was that important for you too?

Well, I listened to Boards of Canada’s Music Has The Right to Children daily, but I’ve only really just gotten into Aphex Twin in the last years. The other more Warp-adjacent stuff, like Squarepusher or Autechre… they were in the sphere, but I only encountered them online with the guys from the IRC channels, because a lot of them were based in the UK and [mainland] Europe.

Before that, I was actually just listening to Steely Dan for four years straight – I never want to listen to them again at this point. (laughs) But I just get fixated on one or two records and thrash the shit out of them. The next big group I was obsessed with was Add N to (X). They had that vintage broken synth sound, not on some kind of analog fetishism, but rather like a crazy art project. I remember seeing the cover of On the Wires of our Nerves, and it’s someone cutting a synthesizer out of this woman’s tummy. I ordered that, and then I managed to get all of their albums. That’s the side of EBM that I was interested in.

When you got into vaporwave in 2011, you’d been making synth pop and electronic music as Disasteradio for some years, so you were a bit older than your US peers. Did that influence how you reacted to vaporwave?

Yeah, I guess in that I felt able to immediately engage with it. The first albums I remember hearing were Midnight Television and the Computer Dreams/Napolian split on Beer on the Rug. I felt like I could respond to this, because this was just something that I understood, but I wanted to to do it in my own weird little way. With that first Eyeliner record, there was a frustration that I had taken so long to make Disasteradio albums that I just wanted to do something immediate and ephemeral, and I wasn’t really invested in any kind of payoff from it. Which was kind of silly, because [Eyeliner]’s been way more successful than Disasteradio ever was.

Midnight Television and Computer Dreams were both sample-based. A few months later, James Ferraro made Far Side Virtual, which was largely sample-free. Was he an inspiration to you?

Yeah, I listened to Far Side Virtual every day for months when it came out. I studied that record. I was also listening a lot to Fatima Al Qadiri’s EP Genre-Specific Xperience. It felt like what was happening was a culmination of what I was referring to as net art. It was the Tumblr era – a lot of italicized Times New Roman, Windows XP UI elements and these default wallpapers. I would include even Corey Arcangel’s artwork with his Photoshop gradients and his modified Nintendo cartridge; one of his other art projects was a command line interface that he wrote for Linux that would order Domino’s pizza. (laughs)

I wasn’t on Tumblr too much, but I heard these records, and I was like, “Oh, these are Tumblr kids making this net art music.” This thing was really interesting to me. I was never drawn to doing the sample-based stuff. I think it was more about the repetition and the curation – not in the sense of a DJ set, but the curation of a loop… That Computer Dreams record is very hypnagogic too. It’s using a DJing formality to basically produce this other feeling, and I guess it’s that feeling that I felt I could do and I wanted to do from scratch as a challenge.

Michael Brown talks a lot about the concept of post-irony in early vaporwave. With Eyeliner, it feels fun and ironic but there’s also this serious love and appreciation for music which is often frowned upon – like 80s synth pop, stock and production music, smooth jazz and TV themes.

Yeah, there’s a point with those library albums and soundtrack records where, once the disbelief and cynicism is suspended, it does become a genuine thing, and I love that duality. It’s like, I’m not being serious, but I am being sincere, you know? In making it, you’re devoting yourself to creating this very strange combination of things, and you kind of disappear into it, you can really lose yourself in that. The exploration of that is very cool.

It’s like being in the mall, and losing yourself in those moments, when you actually know that you’re just a consumer. There’s something very profound in that, because you’re giving over to something else. Like, you’re picking something up off the shelf and you’re jokingly going, “yes, this is me”, but then you’re sort of believing it for a second. It’s not nostalgia – maybe it’s a level of self-obliteration.

The promise that’s kept in these banal consumption goods, it almost becomes true, even if just for a second.

Yeah, it’s like treating the market or rather capitalism like God for a second, to try to interpolate that relationship, or just become it for a second. I remember this Twitter post, “Cocaine was a sacrament that the banking class used to commune with an entity called the market.” (laughs) It’s that kind of thing. It’s treating something unspiritual as spiritual, and falling into it for a second and seeing what happens to yourself. It’s very interesting, and at some point trying to describe it becomes ineffable. That’s what I love about it too.

That’s why we need music and art as a language to talk about it, and records like the Eyeliner debut, High Fashion Mood Music, manage to capture that feeling. Please talk about the circumstances in which that was made.

I was a broke freelancer. I was 28 or 29, and I’d been going through a massive breakup from a 12-year relationship. I remember it being a very cold winter in a very cold flat. We had this artist space where we would shoot music videos, this turn-of-the-century Victorian warehouse where they used to make batteries, and it had all these old woodfloors. There’d be icicles on the inside of the roof in the morning. Our olive oil would go cloudy. We were all shivering and completely broke. So I’m sort of putting a costume on, because I’m play-acting, making this fake advertising music, while I’m trying to basically survive. I was picking up all the sound design and composition jobs I could, and we were doing a lot of video work as well.

You basically made the real thing and the persiflage at the same time.

Yeah. But see, the commercial work didn’t really pick up so much until BUY NOW [in 2015], when I ended up working on sound design for KFC, Chanel or Panera Bread. That was definitely the most financially secure part of my life at that point.

When I first discovered vaporwave, I didn’t know any artists but just downloaded all the “Vaporwave Essentials” from those graphics that were floating around on Reddit. I think both High Fashion Mood Music and LARP of Luxury were on that.

Yeah, I was very grateful and humbled to be included on those alongside albums like Far Side Virtual. I assume it’s been very good for my visibility as an artist, and I think it was the first time that we saw Utopian Virtual as a subgenre in those sort of charts, which hasn’t been so much of a talking point lately. But I’m still a big fan of that, and being put into this sub-umbrella for vaporwave, I found that very cool.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of these Utopian Scholastic things themed around 90s and 00s encyclopedia programs like Microsoft Encarta, and that whole Y2K/Frutiger Aero-inspired strain of vaporwave.

You mean like trndytrndy, right? That record was totally blowing up. But it’s becoming something entirely different now. It’s so funny though, because Frutiger Aero wasn’t so much a cultural movement when it happened. I mean, you were there too – it was just something you saw and you knew, but it wasn’t aestheticized yet, like we’ve turned the whole ancient 80s music into an aesthetic, and that’s happening now with those sort of things.

Going back to the early vaporwave days – did you connect to it mainly online, or was there a local scene in New Zealand as well?

I was a little bit involved with SPF420, watching those TinyChat shows, but we also had this local scene around the Crystal Magic Records [CMR] crew. I wasn’t that involved, but we did have a few artists dispersed throughout New Zealand, like Fraser Austin from Crystal Magic, who was doing RealPlayer 7 and Feelings, and Chris Cudby, who was previously in Golden Axe, doing Power Nap. There was Splash Club 7, the Kerosene Comic Book crew, and all of these indie-adjacent electronic artists who were getting into vaporwave too. There was also Jónó Mí Ló, an artist who was a member of [Yves Tumor’s early vaporwave project] Teams; he’s from the States, but he relocated to Australia for a bit, and we would chat about vaporwave all the time.

Crystal Magic Records between 2011 and 2014, that was us [in Wellington] and we were doing vaporwave, but there’s also Satin Sheets up in Auckland, and he had a strong bridge to the States through 100% Electronica. We all got into vaporwave at the same time, so we were all engaging with it as a social circle as well, but as New Zealand artists, by default we weren’t looking that far abroad, because we’re not afforded that many opportunities to play in Europe or in the States. Having said that, Golden Axe did play a big European tour, and I’ve been to Europe four times.

After the first two records on CMR, BUY NOW came out on the US label Beer On The Rug, which had previously released Floral Shoppe and other early vaporwave classics. How did that happen?

Beer On The Rug emailed me after LARP of Luxury, so they were waiting in the wings, and CMR was built around a social circle that was rapidly crumbling. We were all in our late 20s, also I think Fraser had overcommitted to the label himself. I would love to hear his side of the story at this point, but there are a few projects that got too stressful for everybody, and then it just stopped happening. I just got the distinct impression that Fraser wasn’t interested in putting out BUY NOW, so I sent it to Beer On The Rug.

Beer On The Rug was definitely ran a little haphazardly. I think nobody got paid, but I don’t think that’s the point. If you’re looking to earn a living on vaporwave, you’re looking at the wrong place. But being part of that label, next to Ramona [Vektroid] and Computer Dreams, was just incredible. Getting that album art was definitely half the equation, because they got [design agency] EyeBodega to do it. Actually, when they sent the first draft, my wife Chloe said, “That’s cool, but just ask them for something else, see what else they’ve got.” She’s a jeweler and an object artist, and I trust her in terms of aesthetic decisions. So the actual art for BUY NOW is not the original art but the second thing they made.

EyeBodega actually pivoted to being an art studio, doing more ceramics and that sort of thing, but they did the poster for the [2017] show that I got booked at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia with Saint Pepsi, Death’s Dynamic Shroud and Plastic Ivy. I remember how blessed I felt as I was nervously peeing in the bathroom at this art gallery, and I looked up above the urinals, and there’s a poster of Laurie Anderson playing on two tape decks. Just to be part of all of that made me so grateful. I can’t say enough how important that album art and the kind of synergy of that image with the music was.

Musically, the first two albums were based in this sound world of Korg WaveStation presets, but for BUY NOW you switched to the Korg M1 and combined it with LinnDrum and slap bass. That’s such a simple but genius combination.

It was just an effort to try to restrain the computer. Limiting those possibilities from square one is so important to me. I’ve always wanted to do these very restrictive things. Because a computer can do whatever you want, and it’s tough when you just start throwing things together that are too disparate. If you’re pulling from the same palette, you can layer quite gratifyingly, otherwise things can clash by default.

Maybe it’s also from having worked for my father, because he started a stained glass studio in the early 80s. Seeing all these old men just using the same tools every day, that manual labor aspect of it… it’s like, you know your tools, and you take care of them, and you just learn how to use them very well, but you don’t have to go out of scope, because you know what your tools can do, and you’re there to do the job.

There is this trauma in synth pop: If you listen to an album by a band from like 1984, it will make sense, but a lot of bands got ruined in that period from ‘86 to ‘88 and they had to rehabilitate, or they became grumpy industrial bands. I don’t know what it was, maybe the mastering studios going towards CDs, so that everything came out brighter. So I’m trying to hold back against that wave by not installing new plugins – I just use the same plugins over and over, just try to get really good at it.

It’s that kind of roleplay like, “I’m a library musician, I bought three rack units, I have a mixing desk and an Atari 1040 ST [computer]”. You pick a process and you give in to that. I still use a lot of presets too. I started working with VST [Virtual Studio Technology] plugins when they first came out. Everyone was like, “Presets are disgusting, you should learn how to use your instrument.” But that soon becomes this very kind of macho value judgment. Just pick a preset and go for it. Someone’s made it, you know, so respect the person who made the preset.

In that sense, your music isn’t actually sample-free, because it’s crowded with the sounds of performers that just weren’t credited properly. Someone is playing on those presets. Someone played that slap bass on the Seinfeld theme.

By the way, that slap bass I used is an M1 preset, but the Seinfeld theme bass was from a Kurzweil sample library CD, I believe. But yeah, all those waveforms had to come from somewhere. I saw a beautiful reel from the guy who made the drum sounds for the roll in the [Roland] TR-909. I was like, “Oh my god, that’s crazy, the hi-hat is real!” Sampling does extend down to these little things made by, you know, random Japanese guys just goofing around.

I love hearing a preset that I started to spot. There’s a lot of [Yamaha] DX7 presets on those 80s records, like those DX7 tubular bells, that bell sound on “Nespresso”, which is on so many records. I just love that language, there is a hidden knowledge aspect to it. There’s something in the spotting of it, in the knowing of it, that’s very mentally chewy to me. I annoy my wife with it constantly.

There’s a longer gap between BUY NOW (2015) and Drop Shadow (2020), though you released a Disasteradio record, Sweatshop (2017), inbetween. Did you take a conscious step away from vaporwave then?

I was just obsessed and getting consumed by that Disasteradio album. I was working on Eyeliner tunes too, but I just got transfixed on the idea that I needed to finish this Disasteradio album, because it had been six years since the last one, and people were bugging me about it. It took so long, and it didn’t have the impact that I thought it was going to have, but I’m still glad I latched onto it, stuck with it and put it out.

When I was making BUY NOW, I was working for my dad again, cutting glass and stuff like that. So I was on the bus going to a manual labor job when I was listening to those tunes. With Drop Shadow, I’d moved out of downtown and into the suburbs, so I was listening a lot while I was driving. I was still doing a lot of manual labor jobs to get by though while working on Drop Shadow.

What were the musical inspirations for that one?

Well, my mum was in hospital for a while with some mental health stuff, you know, she’s bipolar, so it’s quite a heavy album for me. Drop Shadow has this arc where it goes a bit dark, and then it’s like, “Keep calm, carry on.” It’s interspersed with a lot of water sounds, and then it ends on kind of a Steely Dan light jazz thing. It was one of the more challenging times in my life of all the times I was writing a record.

I was listening to the group that did the soundtrack to Akira, they’re called Geinoh Yamashirogumi. They have an album called Ecophony Gaia, and it’s one of my favorite records. They’re a very crazy group that was started by this psychoanalyst doctor guy. They’ve also done albums of Bulgarian and Russian folk music and stuff.

The follow-up brb (2023) was your last Eyeliner record up until now. You’ve mentioned writing that one in Hong Kong?

Yeah, I was stuck there during COVID, and brb was very visibly influenced by that city. I moved to Hong Kong in February 2020, and then I couldn’t come home, but out of all the places in the world to be stuck, Hong Kong is the best. The courteousness of people there is just incredible. It’s bustling and hustling, but everyone was masked up and looking out for each other. I got quite a lot of exposure tangentially to Cantopop and watched a lot of Wong Kar-Wai movies there, made a good couple of friends. It was a very cool place to be.

The album I’m working on right now is based around vocal samples, very hauntological in a way. I’m thinking of it like kind of an internet signalwave thing, in terms of finding vocal samples on linguistics databases and looking for wav files on random FTP sites, or system sounds for telephone switching firmware, using dial tones and numbers, that sort of Kraftwerk Computer World stuff. That’s almost getting back towards what early Disasteradio was doing. I’m going for sort of a financial stock market thing as well, it has this kind of late capitalism thing going on… I’m really excited about this one.

This is a new Eyeliner album you’re talking about right now?

Yeah, I’m calling it, like, Pound Yen Euro Dollar. Because I was walking past a cash exchange thing in Hong Kong, and they had all the currency symbols all over it, and at one point it just said EYES. Look, I’ll show you. (writes the title on a piece of paper and holds it into the camera, the four currency symbols reading: £¥€$).

When’s that coming out?

Should be next year at this rate, depending on how busy I get. I am working in exhibition design for a museum, and we’re doing a big redevelopment at the moment, so we’ve moved our entire collection out.

Are you still following the vaporwave scene?

Well, I tried to listen to nothing but vaporwave for a month in winter, and I got quite depressed. (laughs) Also, I’ve had two kids back to back. My oldest is three and a half, and my youngest is 18 months, so it’s hard to follow all the new music. What have I been listening to? Some Bulgarian choir music, the Meat Puppets, Little Feet, a lot of this post-Grateful Dead sort of country rock, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan…

There’s always stuff that I need to listen to. There’s just so many of these Bulgarian choir cassettes that have been just uploaded to DSPs. I got into Tuvan throat singing as well, and I found this album with Bulgarian voices, a Russian jazz ensemble and Tuvan throat singing together! Like I said earlier, I get down these rabbitholes, and I find them hard to get out of.

Listen to Eyeliner on Bandcamp

Eyeliner’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums

(unranked)

• James Ferraro – Far Side Virtual (2011)

• FM Skyline – Advanced Memory Suite (2019)

• Power Nap – Shaped Canvas (2019)

• computer dreams – computer dreams (2011)

• Fatima Al Qadiri – Genre Specific Xperience EP (2011)

• Luxury Elite – World Class (2015)

• Saint Pepsi – World Tour (2012)

• computer slime – ミスト(2013)

• PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises – Home (2013)

• midnight television – midnight television EP (2011)

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 wi…

Read more

The person behind the 식료품groceries project is the artist and composer Jordan Bortner, a Texas native who’s been living in N…

Read more

Signalwave is clearly having a moment right now. Many participating artists just started their journey…

Read more

Around the same t…

Read more

Scott might be relatively new to vaporwave, but he’s been involved in ambient music for decades…

Read more

To fans of sample-based, experimental electronic music, he’s better known as the founder of the popular vaporwave label Geometric Lullaby, and as a producer under aliases like Electric Specter or runescape斯凱利. Some people believe that he is also th…

Read more

Like many of his peers, he was inspired by stumbling across random cues online – finding an Infinity Frequencies song in a forum post related to Backrooms lore, seeing a friend on Instagram posting a 猫 シ Corp. album, discovering t…

Read more

The mastermind behind the label, the Ukrainian (now Paris-based) artist Tim Six, clearly isn’t a newbie to undergr…

Read more

When the experimental composer Adrian Rew first visited the Horseshoe casino in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, a monstrous gambling establishment of 100,000…

Read more

I’ve spent the last few weeks holing up out here, doing research…

Read more

Read more