Welcome to the Plant Shoppe! + October/November Happenings

After a very long construction period, the Plant Shoppe is now open for business! This side of the website will be mostly for documenting my own projects and releases, as well as the occasional essay or review when I feel inspired.

While I haven't had a proper release since Time Slip: Solid Gold in July, I have been very busy. First of all was a major undertaking, the first Children of Vapor URL Festival You Wouldn't Download That's What I Call Vaporwave Alive Ultimate URL Hits Vol. 1. Nightleek タマネギ, Robin Circle, and I brought together most of the CoV crew along with other friends and some great acts that we connected with for the first time. All along we were able to raise around $800 for The Trevor Project and really strengthen our friendships and connections in the vaporwave scene. Definitely looking forward to doing other versions of fests and shows in the future!

For the festival I made two different music sets looking back to early musical inspirations, both of which can be listened to here. Subaqueous Transmissions was really the genesis of the whole festival, a collaboration between myself and ishiiburidai after connecting over a love for early dubstep during a summer url festival. I dug back into my archives to find the deepest, dubbiest dubstep that first caught my attention in the mid-2000s. You can see that video here. But after I finished that I wanted to keep going so I returned to a project first conceived in the spring, taking the classic cuts from early-2010s vaporwave and giving them the phonk treatment. I enjoyed it so much I ended up mashing up a bunch of '90s Memphis rap over the top. I tapped Robin Circle to do the visuals and you can find that video here.

cont...

One thing that happened as we were getting the festival ready is I had my first release on another label, in the coolest way possible. La Mano Fria of Sud Swap Audio came upon my dscwrld.iso EP from May while looking for floppy disc-ready music. I made a bonus track and it got the full Sud Swap treatment including an art floppy. I even ordered a floppy drive for my computer! This project really brought me back to my childhood of actually using floppy discs in the early '90s. And La Mano Fria has been an excellent person to connect with, I really appreciate his diy community spirit and perspective on the scene.

I also got involved with a few different collaborative albums and compilations that came out this fall. Ultra Maximum Vol. 1 and the followup DLC release are two parts of a glitchy jungle anti-AI project conceived of by HD CAMERA 忠実 , 至福 †. This project was a musical change of pace for me and it was really fun to explore some different production techniques and sound output then my usual vaporwave stuff. tegmen mortis maledictum is a very spooky Vampire themed album organized by Roman Foster. This also let me experiment with some different techniques, including sampling by recording live off an old vinyl (with my phone, lol).

I love submitting to compilations because it usually means I get to work off of a prompt. The nosleep compilation from slowinternet is an amazing collection of artists brought together by recent interview subject .mp3Neptune around the theme of spooky dreams, which honestly wasn't much of a stretch for me. I enjoyed finally sampling one of my all-time favorite tracks along with a timely grab of some Christian nut who dreamed of the rapture after Charlie got it. I also submitted a very noisy drone exercise to the Vivarium Recordings compilation Selected Brobient Works, Vol. 3. I actually reused a track from the Subaqueous Transmission mix (hint: it's the most brosteppy one) and applied the techniques I used to make Rogue Wave.

Damn, I have been busy! There's a lot more to come in December as well but I'll save that for the next post. To finish off I want to give a few shoutouts. Huge thanks to B O R T media, Deep Sea Current, and DJ x86 for including my music in recent mixes and radio shows! It really means a lot to me to have my music put out into the world. Thanks again to La Mano Fria for the floppy release and also inspiring me to stay grounded and keep this project focused on people. Finally, shoutout to the Seattle homie [carteBlanche] for connecting IRL and the whole WVSQD crew for being major CoV early adopters.