Nightleek タマネギ
I interviewed Nightleek タマネギ, one of the co-founders of Children of Vapor and the operator of 222.5 FM Ghostwave Pirate Radio, a streaming vaporwave radio station on YouTube. We talk about her background in radio, the evolution of the radio station, letting politics inform your music, and finding inspiration in Luxury Elite and library music.
Pool Plants: When did you first get the idea for the station? Did you start as a streamer and then start thinking about the station?
Nightleek タマネギ: Ok, so that is kind of a complicated question. I grew up with broadcasting, I grew up listening to radio shows, I grew up recording the radio. My dad was in the Navy and working at a radio station and recording radio stations for me. When we first moved back to the US in 1992 I was 7 years old. I remember one of the best presents I ever got as a very small child was a portable radio, one of those little ones that’s the size of half of a brick. It’s got one speaker in it and an antenna, you can plug it in or it runs on batteries. I remember getting back to the United States and just turning it on and trying to find music and being so excited to have discovered, for the first time, country music. Because we had lived in Scotland and they didn’t have country music stations, I just listened to whatever I could find. So I was like, “Ooh wow American music!” *laughs*
My parents ended up getting divorced and my dad moved around a lot. While he was a firefighter in the Navy he was a radio guy on the side. He ran a fake radio station for the ship he was on at one point. By fake, I mean it didn’t broadcast anywhere but inside the skin of the ship. The ship has an internal intercom system and he ran the radio show on there. When I joined the Navy, I wanted to join in public affairs. I wanted to do journalism because that is heavily related to radio. But they didn’t have any openings so I joined as an IT. In the ‘90s they had merged radiomen and data processor into the same job, “IT,” because in the ‘90s it made sense. “Radios and computers, these are all the same thing!” The problem was that radio waves were moving at a 20-degree angle, as far as progress goes, and computers were moving at an 80-degree angle. When they decided to merge them those two lines had intersected and they were like, “These are the same thing.” Then they immediately went in two different directions again.
So, as an IT I focused on radio. I worked with UHF, VHF, satellite. I did internet stuff but it was all in terms of satellite radiation. We made a fake radio station on our ship, too, where I plugged an mp3 player into a spectrum analyzer, plugged the spectrum analyzer into an audio patch panel, then plugged the patch into a headphone jack somewhere. Then we called somebody on the bridge and said, “Hey man, you got a free speaker? You should turn to channel 3, just trust us,” and they’re like, “Thank you so much, God bless you.” *laughs* We played music like a pirate radio station in the sense that we weren’t supposed to be using that equipment in that way, not that we pirated the signal.
But it’s very much been in my blood. When I was a child I took apart my walkie talkies and wanted to see how they worked. I wanted to go to Radio Shack and get the necessary equipment to hijack the local classic rock station that I knew everybody in my neighborhood listened to and play something else on it instead, just for the neighborhood. I never managed to get that stuff because I didn’t have money as a child. But that was one of my ambitions, to hijack a radio signal.
P: I’m surprised you didn’t become a phreaker!
N: I wanted to! I’ve always been hacker adjacent, but my lifepath didn’t go that way.
ASHLEY GOLD
I sat down with Ashley Gold, the new superduo of Mary K Ashley and Gold Blu-27, to discuss their album phoenix loud/ツーソンへのナイトドライブ from mid July. I learned more about their origins as vaporwave artists, how they connected and came up with this album, and the iconic drive from Phoenix to Tucson. We connected over our shared love for Oneohtrix Point Never, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, and regional meme lawyers.
Pool Plants: How did you get your starts in vaporwave as fans and as artists?
Gold Blu-27: I think it was way back in September of 2024. I was really deep into electronic music like Aphex Twin. Mostly just listening to a lot of Aphex Twin. And I listened to a lot of my music on Spotify. Usually most of the time Spotify gives album picks and I like to listen to those. One day one of the album picks was I’ll Try Living Like This by Death’s Dynamic Shroud. I didn’t know at the time what vaporwave was, I just saw the really interesting cover and pressed play and was like, “Woah what the fuck is this shit? This shit sounds funky! In a good way. Like the cool electronic Aphex Twin way.” And then I just put it inside.
Two weeks later, I guess, you know this video of Nickster who covers the samples of Eccojams Vol 1? What the hell is Eccojams Vol 1? I just start getting more into what the hell vaporwave was and it’s like, “woah this shit is amazing, I could get into this.” And so I think at first I tried working on Sonus because I didn’t feel like FL Studio at the time. I was trying to follow this guy on YouTube who did a recreation of A3 from Eccojams.
After that the first project was called Hands Across America, based on the charity event where people put their hands together from New York all the way to California. And then I just got into that particular era. What if I make music like that? And that’s how Sunny Blu 27 was born. Back then I wasn’t really the kind of person that put dedication into my own projects. So it took about a month or two with the project but most of the production time was in December 2024. After that when January came I published the album and started on my whole vaporwave journey becoming an artist.
Ashley: So when I was in middle school that was when everything was blowing up in terms of the initial vaporwave scene. So I was very familiar with the aesthetics but not really the music. In terms of music, I was mostly a fan of things like the Hotline Miami soundtrack which was of course synthwave, and because of that my main avenue into vaporwave was through plunderphonics. Things like the Avalanches, any kind of sampled music, like Burial, Gorillaz, stuff like that. It’s all that stuff I’d always loved so much.
What got me into making it was my friend was a collector of vaporwave vinyl and cassettes and she got me back into it in 2023 after a long time of just ignoring it for punk rock in the middle. I think what appealed to me most was the punk rock aspect of stealing samples and making them your own. I think that was the most appealing thing as an artist. But as a fan it’s been connecting with other artists that are just incredible and you would’ve never thought you’d be able to talk to them. It’s very interesting As far as my favorite, favorite vaporwave thing of all time. I don’t know if it’s straight up vaporwave, but Replica by Oneohtrix Point Never would be my desert island pick. It’s just perfect. So for me as a fan, maybe one day I’ll have my own Replica.