HYDROPLANED INTO A FALSE REALITY! and Liam Smizdik

Welcome to a very free-wheeling interview with HYDROPLANED INTO A FALSE REALITY! and Liam Smizdik. Hydroplaned (aka HIAFR, Ian, and many others) runs World End Collapse, Liam (aka world of mystery and others) co-runs Zero Based Collective, and together they just released the excellent new album the blast, their latest release as ceramic planetarium. We talk about so many things, including internet communities, Coin locker kid, reusing album art, running labels, and more. There's even a couple of true lore drops by HIAFR along the way!

Pool Plants: Thank you for joining!

HYDROPLANED INTO A FALSE REALITY!: I’ve never done something like this before.

Liam Smizdik: Me neither. I did an interview one time but it never got released because it was kind of low quality. We both think that, both parties.

H: Was it on Sammy’s thing?

L: Yeah.

P: You mean the audio was not good quality?

L: It was an interview by a friend of mine. The thing is though he hasn’t listened to that much of my music so… He just kind of didn’t have that many questions.

P: Ok, so how did you first get introduced to vaporwave?

H: I got introduced to vaporwave through Pad Chennington’s videos, weirdly enough.

P: It’s not that weird.

H: It’s kind of weird. I started producing vaporwave before I got into the scene. I think my first vaporwave album is from JESUS CHRIST RAIN HEAVEN, an album I made one of the first times I’ve made a thing with FL Studio.

P: Was this after the Pad Chennington videos? Or even before that?

H: I saw his videos and I thought that was a really interesting idea to upload videos to Bandcamp with no connection to what I’d done previously. I was like, “This is cool, I like being able to have this cool anonymous thing.” And now I’m not very anonymous with everything but it was this cool idea that first brought me into it.

P: What were you doing before?

H: Weirdly enough, I have an analog horror series! I was really into that community.

L: Fun fact, that’s how we both met!

H: If anyone wants to watch it feel free to reach out, but it’s delisted and it’s not super public. It’s a thing that exists. I have some issues with how I did some stuff but that’s a different conversation.

L: For me that’s kind of a broad question. Ever since I was a kid I’ve known, not so much the music side of vaporwave, but the aesthetic. Specifically, the aesthetic part was pretty big back in 2016, 2017. I was 9 years old and that’s when I found out about it. As for the music aspect of it, I got into it more like how Ian did with Pad Chennington’s videos. I also was producing vaporwave when I wasn’t even in the scene. I was just fucking around with my friend Gabe. Shoutout to him, we made two albums under the name Radio Pirates. Both were repressed on World End Collapse a couple years ago.

H: I’m going to casually say shoutout to Shaving Cream Records.

L: I forgot! That’s what we released music under. It’s been rebranded to Planetville Sound.

P: When did you guys meet?

H: During 2024. No, way before that.

L: It was back in early 2023.

H: Yeah. I was really into RYM and that whole scene. I was a very pretentious music nerd at that point. I think Liam followed me from having a presence in the analog horror scene. I’m still friends with folks in that scene. I posted something on my Instagram story that said, “Hey, send me songs to check out and I’ll tell you my thoughts on it,” and he sent me a song from Coin locker kid, which is now one of my favorite artists ever. We just talked about it and started talking, we became friends. Then we realized he made vaporwave and I made vaporwave.

cont...

L: It’s really crazy how much that aligned. We used to just talk exclusively over Instagram messages. But then I got his user name on Discord and all we talked about for a week straight was Coin locker kid and stuff related to that.

H: His music is so good, Coin locker kid. That’s an artist that I feel like I’ve been very inspired by. He has a very interesting style with experimental rap and hip hop and I’ve never seen anybody replicate his style. It’s a really cool rabbit hole to go down through.

L: Yeah, there’s an entire lore. There’s a whole overarching story to the whole CLK universe. He has three aliases that all incorporate the letters CLK in them.

H: It’s four, I think. I don’t know if that one really counts. That was a thing that was going to exist and no longer existed, which is Me oh myriorama. He’s one of my favorite artists of all time. He’s very sample heavy too. I think there’s a song on Traumnovelle, it samples the intro to Sweet Caroline. I found that out because I was in a Barnes & Noble one time and I was like, “woah it’s that song!” because I’ve never listened to it on my own.

P: Neil Diamond was actually the very first concert I ever went to as a little kid. I don’t really remember it, I kind of remember the laser lights. I’m quite a bit older than you guys, totally different generation, so Neil Diamond was more relevant when I was kid. At this point, it’s basically just Sweet Caroline at sports games?

H: Bah bah bah.

L: I think among the younger generation Sweet Caroline has made a bit of a resurgence but not for a very good reason. There’s a completely horrible EDM remix of Sweet Caroline.

H: The drum and bass remix where the drop is so off key and so bad. *laughs*

P: To jump off of something you were just saying about Coin locker kid, about working with sample-based stuff. Where do you land on sample-based versus sample-free music? I think you both have done both?

L: I have done sample-free music but I think all I did was compose stuff on Google Chrome music maker and never released it. For the most part though pretty much all my stuff is sample-based.

H: That’s a thing that Fishy would do. That’s someone you don’t know, Pool Plants, sorry.

L: That’s his cousin.

H: Fun fact, yeah. MyNameFishy, she’s really cool. She featured on Boardwalk, which is my album that I made.

L: I was featured on the same song as her!

H: Oh yeah, that’s right! Anyways, I think they’re both cool. That’s a tough question because most of my stuff is sample-based. I have a few things that are less sample-based like A Short Stay in Hell which is a more recent album I released that’s completely sample-free except for sampling the House theme, which is something I’ve done twice recently. I love sampling stuff, I love going crazy with stuff. My earlier music is definitely just slowing down things and adding reverb, which is the classic approach. But I also love the idea of sample-free stuff. I don’t really have a preference but both for me, I feel like I’m not super opinionated on either because I love both the same amount.

P: How would you characterize your musical sounds? What subgenres do you prefer to work in, both individually and as Ceramic Planetarium.

H: I don’t know… With Hydroplaned I’ve done almost every genre. I’ve done signalwave, I’ve done slushwave. I’ve done weird drone ambient things. I’ve done a lot of other stuff like that.

L: I don’t really try to go for a specific subgenre of vaporwave. Some of the recent stuff that I’ve been working on I wouldn’t even categorize as vaporwave. I just try to do me.

H: Liamwave.

L: Yeah, pretty much. As for Ceramic Planetarium, we try to do slushwave-adjacent music. I would say a lot of it isn’t super traditionally slushwave but a lot of the characteristics are there.

P: Liam, a lot of what I’ve heard from you I would call ambient. I know that’s not really a vaporwave genre. But I was listening to Cloud Shaper and other albums and it’s kind of like, we’re doing eccojams but the way you’re treating the sound approaches ambient music. And Ceramic Planetarium especially came across as very ambient. Does that sound right to you guys?

H: The whole album doesn’t have drums until the fifth track so yeah, I’d say it’s ambient. Speaking of sample-free stuff, the first two tracks on the new album are sample-free. I did those and Liam edited them.

P: Talk about that album and how specifically you came together to make that music.

L: The last Ceramic Planetarium album before that came out back in August 2024 on Hitachi Home Video. After we released that, we were wanting to make a new Ceramic Planetarium album for a while. But we didn’t start doing anything until early November last year.

H: We were planning to make this album for a while.

L: I remember multiple times throughout last year and sometimes the year before. I was hounding Ian like, “Bro we need to make the next Ceramic Planetarium.”

H: And I was like, “fineeee.” But in my defense, I was working on so much stuff.

P: Going back a little further though, before the first album or when you’re making the first album. How did you guys decide to make this type of music, what kind of conversations did you have about collaborating together and where that would go?

L: I think both of our styles back in late 2023 and early 2024 were a lot more primitive, if that’s the right word. It was just a decision on a whim. We were just like, “Yeah let’s collaborate and make a project,” and now here we are.

P: So you didn’t even really talk about it that much, it just naturally went there?

H: I think it actually started by Liam sending an image and saying this would be a really cool album cover. And I thought we should just make an album about this.

P: Is that the cover of the first album?

H: Yeah.

P: That’s cool, that’s a really cool way to work.

H: Yeah, it’s funny because we also realized there’s another person that used this exact image. It’s a good album, it’s a Virtual AirBnB album.

L: I think we discovered it a couple months afterwards.

P: I’m looking at both of them and I would not have known. I can see it now since you’re saying it. But whoever did the glitch work on your cover, I think it looks really cool and not even that similar. Same with vaporwave music samples, people can work from the same thing and come up with something totally different.

L: There are so many instances within the vaporwave community of people reusing the exact same images for album covers and then not realizing that someone else used it. That’s why I try to find more obscure stuff rather than just looking up commercial compilations or whatever.

H: Yeah, I’ve been doing that a lot for this slushwave stuff I’ve been releasing as Holy Ghost, which is my Virtual Dream Plaza alias I’ve been working on. But I feel like a lot of the time when it comes to album covers I just deep dive for things. There’s some crazy album covers. For the EP that me and Liam did called 1975, 1976, I think I found that album cover from a meme on Instagram. I screenshotted it and I’m like, “We gotta make an EP out of this.”

L: That’s fucking awesome.

P: What are your biggest non-vaporwave influences, and why is it the Wii?

H: *laughs* Shit, I’m getting singled out on this one probably.

P: Yes, that’s mostly for you.

H: I have a lot of nostalgia for the Wii because that’s the console I grew up on. Most of my samples come from that era of music. Not albums like Friendly Work Environment or the more slushwave and traditional vaporwave ones. But I feel like a lot of my stuff comes from that Wii era. I’ve sampled Wii stuff all the way back to Recollection of Memories, which I think is my third album (which I then remade it a couple months later). I’ve gravitated towards stuff that I’m nostalgic for and I’m very nostalgic for video game OSTs.

L: For the musical influences and the aesthetical influences I kind of have two different answers. For the musical side of things I like a lot of cassette ambient music. Obscure ambient cassettes that you find on YouTube from the mid to late 2000s. Stuff like James Ferraro, obscure CDs and stuff like that, too. I’ve been trying to incorporate that more. For the aesthetic influences, shout out to people like Tek Lintowe. That’s one of my biggest aesthetical influences ever.

P: What do you think about the relationship between vaporwave and the furry community?

H: I don’t know if there’s any strong correlation but also I’ve seen some stuff that’s related to it. For me it’s a form of self-expression. There’s Vaporfurries which is a Discord server and that’s mostly just people who are furries in the vaporwave community.

P: Is that where last year’s compilation came from?

L: Yeah. I’m in that server, too. I’m also a furry but obviously if you’ve seen how I am and what I post I don’ tend to talk about it too much. I don’t view it as a super large part of my identity but I am a furry.

P: I’m not a furry, but as an outsider I noticed over the last year that there does seem to be a fair number of furries in the scene. I have heard about the discord channel before. I guess I wasn’t sure if there just happened to be furries in the scene, or if there was something deeper there.

H: I don’t know if there is, it’s mostly just the one Discord server. Not every vaporwave person that’s a furry is on that server. I think it’s mostly Slushwave Social Club people because that server is made by Alex from Slushwave Social Club. Shout out to him.

L: Furries and vaporwave though, it is a pretty interesting phenomenon

P: Are you ever at a convention or anything and you’re talking to other furries who aren’t into vaporwave and you’re like, “C’mon guys, listen to vaporwave!”

H: I have not been to a convention unfortunately.

L: I have not been to any convention, even.

H: I’m down to go to one but I haven’t. It’s mostly a money problem but also I’m at school so I don’t have that kind of free time.

P: There’s at least one big one that’s in Seattle every year but I get how they wouldn’t hit up Salt Lake City so much.

H: Yeah there’s stuff down here, too. I just don’t have anyone IRL to go with, which is also kind of a problem.

P: Another connection to vaporwave, right? Very few of us know more than one or two other people in real life.

H: I don’t know where .mp3Neptune lives but he lives in the same state so we should meet up sometime. If he’s reading this, that would be really cool.

L: For me I’m a little less fortunate. I live in a town in Northern Florida where there’s a little less than 13,000 people, so there’s no one.

P: Do you ever try to get your friends into it and they’re just like, “Nah.”

L: I’ve never shown them vaporwave and I’m not planning on it.

H: I’ve been wanting to do that with some friends but I haven’t been super public about this stuff. I mean in person talking about it. I wear shirts and stuff, that’s kind of the extent. And if someone recognizes it then I’m like, “Heck yeah I can talk to you about this.”

L: Has anyone ever recognized it?

H: No, not yet. It would be cool, but it hasn’t happened.

P: You would have to be wearing a literal Floral Shoppe t-shirt. What else could possibly be recognizable to anyone? Maybe the Eccojams dolphin?

L: Even if they do recognize it they’re probably just like, “I like your Greek god t-shirt, that’s cool. I don’t know why the Japanese text is there though.”

H: I used to have the Desert Sand hoodie that was released through Geometric Lullaby for Dream Desert and I would have people compliment it all the time. I think I used to work at a Sam’s Club but only one person knew what the albums were. It was kind of weird because where I’m at now is a smaller town in Utah because that’s where my school is located. But when I’m at my parents’ house I’m near more people. It’s a weird culture shock if you’ve lived in a small town before. It’s like you go to a more populated area and there’s people here, what the heck.

P: Let’s talk labels. HIAFR, how did you to decide to start your own label?

H: I started World End Collapse mostly because, well it all comes back to Pad Chennington again. He did an interview with Geometric Lullaby and him doing that made me think it would be really cool to start a label, so I started a label. It’s kind of funny. Before the 2020s it was easier for everyone I think to get more notoriety and stuff like that. I had that expectation and then I got into the scene and I was like ok, here’s my tape release! And I don’t think anyone bought it until 6 months later, and I was like shoot! I felt really bad, I just wasted money for that.

I feel like the more I’ve been in the scene, the more I’ve been able to connect with people and it takes a lot longer than what I imagined. I would listen to podcasts like Hot Takes Vapor and other things in the vaporwave scene. I specifically remember on an older episode of Hot Takes I heard Skeleton Lipstick say, “If you have a really good album people will just listen to it.”

P: Not true!

H: I learned that the hard way, I think. There’s times where I don’t know what people think about my albums. I feel like I make too much and I’m overcrowding myself, in a way. But there’s some albums that people really like, like I’ve heard a lot of great things for both photos (:E) and 𓋹, which are both very similar albums because they were made during the same production time.

P: I’m a big photo (E:) fan!

H: I think that one is more digestible than the 3 hour long Frutiger Aero album. *laughs* It’s interesting because 𓋹 was originally going to be another enterprises album but I realized photos (E:) was getting traction so I decided to release this on my main page. It was mostly a business decision, which I kind of feel a little weird about but I wanted more people to check out my main stuff and not this weird alias that I made for one album.

P: To go back to the label part, do you think that it’s easier to get attention as a label instead of as in individual artist?

L: For me, no. Absolutely not. I’m just going to leave it at that.

H: For me, it’s the same thing with putting out music in general. I’ve been doing World End Collapse for two years now. There’s something coming for the anniversary, that’s cool. There’s no way I’ve been doing this for this long!

P: Liam, how did you decide with Sammy to start Zero Based Collective?

L: Sammy’s the mastermind. He had the idea of it being a label and a collective, which you’ve seen how we’ve been doing that.

P: I can relate.

L: He said, “I’m gonna do this,” and I offered to help. Since he was focusing on it being a collective, I was like, “Let me do social media stuff, run BlueSky and Instagram and stuff.” As of more recently, he’s been putting me in charge of uploading the albums and all that.

P: What do you think is difference between a label and a collective and why are you calling yourself both?

L: I think a label is more casual, more open to the public. Anyone can release an album on this. Whereas with a collective it’s more tight-knit.

P: That’s how I think about it too. It’s a little different with a collective because you’re plugged into the different artists. But coming from the point of view of a label, what do you think should be the relationship between the label and the artist. In terms of releases or whatever other kind of relationship?

H: I like things being professional. Sometimes friendships come out of label stuff. I became really good friends with Susie from the band Rooms Without Doors.

L: From the band Rooms without Doors?

H: *laughs* Yeah, the band Rooms without Doors. Which is also one person so it’s an artist.

P: I know her as Catfries from Bottle Collection Tapes, yeah.

H: She’s someone that was on my label forever ago and we just talked and became actual friends. But there’s some people I work with and then when I’m done working with them I’m like, “Goodbye!” *laughs*, It mostly just depends.

P: What do you think is the responsibility of the label to the artist? What are you offering to someone if they’re coming to you?

H: For me, with World End Collapse, I really like the idea of having people get a foot in the door with stuff. Through people submitting to my label, I think I give people an opportunity. I think a lot of the time, when it comes to me doing physicals, a lot of the stuff I release physically is for people who’ve never had that before. So it’s interesting. To have people experience that in a way and what it's like to have a physical release, it’s neat.

L: For Zero Based Collective the way we do it is far more casual than World End Collapse. At the moment it’s just digital only and most of the artists they reach out to Sammy. Sammy is the one who still runs the submission form. The artists reach out through Instagram and he says sure and then I’m in charge of uploading. This is more of a Sammy question to be honest.

H: I mean, when it comes to World End Collapse, this is kind of off topic but I’m going behind the curtain here. I was thinking when Liam was talking like, “Damn, it would be nice to have another person helping me,” because I’m the only one doing everything. I design everything, all the tapes and CDs. There was a brief period where, sorry to anyone who was dealing with me going through burnout with the label while also staying consistent with uploading stuff. I feel like I’ve been able to actually stay on top of it now, but towards the end of the year I was struggling to stay motivated and keep going.

P: It’s a lot of work and not always a great return. You can work so hard on something, the music kicks ass, great presentation. And it gets lost in the shuffle with everything else. One thing I’ve been talking about with a lot of different people is there’s a problem of listenership. There’s not a problem with production, there’s tons of artists and tons of labels. Lots of people doing really cool stuff. But such a high percentage of the scene is producers and I feel like there’s a limit to your attention when you’re also making your own music and trying to get it out there. Even with the best of intentions you can only be so plugged in as a listener, too. We need more people who are just fans and just listeners, have more energy to keep listening and finding new albums. But I don’t know how to make that happen.

H: One of my favorite parts of running the label is getting a submission from someone who has no presence in the scene and listening to the album and falling in love with the album. That’s happened countless times where someone reaches out and I’m like, “Holy cow, I want to put this out it’s so good!” Having a forum where people can reach out to me gives me the opportunity to check out newer people and to realize a lot of good music is getting produced by people. Sometimes I see albums that are better produced by smaller artists than I’ve seen produced by bigger people. You just slowed down a sample, and this person makes their own songs! No shade to people who do that, I don’t mean that in a mean way.

P: There’s a lot of different levels of people producing, sample-based and sample-free. I work almost entirely with samples, I love it, but I have a ton of respect for sample-free people because that seems so much more involved and difficult to do.

One thing I’ve thought about sometimes with Children of Vapor, you know about the term “impresario” from the past? Like especially in the opera days, turn of the 20th century, there used to be this person. Kind of like being a movie producer, your job was to get all the people with talent into the same room so they could make something cool. Sometimes I feel like that is what the role of a label should be, like what you’re talking about. How can we identify all these people with talent and try to get them more attention, and maybe connect them with other people with talent. Connect the music people with the video people and so forth.

H: I think the closest label to World End Collapse is probably Freshwater Media run by one71. He’s awesome. He’s probably in a similar boat to me since he does weekly releases, too. Sometimes I’m like, “Ooh this is really good, why didn’t they submit to me first!”

P: You guys are both rocking really big backlogs, too, from what I’ve heard.

H: There’s a lot of good music and I find a lot of great stuff on that label too. Shoutout Freshwater Media. Also, fun fact for people, I actually designed the Freshwater Media logo!

P: That’s a lore drop right there!

L: Bro, even I didn’t know that!

H: You didn’t know that? I don’t think I talked to anyone about that actually. That’s a label to definitely look out for. They’ve been releasing some stuff on physicals that I think helped people. Specifically with someone like CLV since they’re a smaller artist. It’s always mind blowing to see a newer artist get a huge release suddenly. That’s how I felt like when Lover’s Dream ( 恋人の夢 ) started getting big too. The person I was once in a VC with making telepath recreations, now has a vinyl release on hushtones! It’s crazy.

P: Like you said, there’s so much good music out there and getting a release isn’t always a sign that your music is definitely better than something else that didn’t. I sometimes assume that it comes from a personal connection, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’ve been working hard to develop those connections, too, and I think it makes sense for the scene to work that way. But from the outside it can be hard to tell why one album gets more attention than another.

H: The one video Banshi made for 𓋹, 🧷. It was crazy, I was not expecting it to get to that point. I uploaded it and my thought process was that I’ve had stuff get to 1,000 views. I have one 3 second clip of Markiplier that got to 2,000 views and I have no idea how that happened.

L: I think anything Markiplier related will get some views.

H: Yeah, but this got 1,000 views in a night. How did this happen? I’m using the same channel as the analog horror stuff so I still have a little bit of outsider influence just on the YouTube channel. I didn’t realize that as an aspect until that video came out. I didn’t even think about it that way. It’s just an algorithm thing. It’s now 70,000 views? [80,000+ views as of 2/6 – ed.]

L: When he uploaded that on his channel I got the notification and I was like, “Oh nice,” because he hadn’t uploaded for months. Wasn’t expecting it to get to this point!

H: And it’s deserved, the video is incredible!

L: Shoutout to that one commenter who doesn’t understand what vaporwave is.

P: That was the amazing thing with the comments, the video broke containment.

H: There were some crazy things. Every once in a while there’s some personal comments and then there’s comments like, “Hey this is from that weird aquarium game on the DS,” and I’m like, “Yes it is, I sampled it.” Then there’s this one guy replying to people and I had to shut it down! He kept commenting under people liking the song saying, “This is stolen!” I’m like, “Can you not be annoying?” There’s some funny comments here.

L: Special shoutout to “I’m 8, shut up.”

H: My favorite comment ever.

P: It’s possible too! It really could be an 8 year old.

H: An 8 year old on the internet…

L: An 8 year old on the internet? That’s what I was when I found out about vaporwave aesthetic.

P: I was 25 when Eccojams came out, I’ve been watching the whole scene develop as an adult and thinking about it in that terms. Talking to you guys and other people in your generation is so great. Not necessarily finding out when they’re 9, but even saying “I was 15 years old in 2021.” It’s such a big difference to start but all leading us to the same place in 2026.

L: Even me and Ian, there’s a big difference. He’s 21 and I just turned 18.

P: We’ve had a couple under-18 year olds in Children of Vapor too so it’s not unusual.

H: It’s weird because I got into vaporwave when I was in high school. And this is not the Hot Takes vapor podcast but I’m going to be mean. In the Dariacore scene there’s so many children! There’s 13, 14 year olds making Dariacore! How?

P: That’s probably younger than the character of Daria!

L: That kind of rocks, I’m going to be honest.

H: And what’s crazy about it is that some of that is better than my stuff. How are you so good at this! I did join a Dariacore server and it is not the type of vibe I want. It’s kind of a weird experience that I didn’t even get into music yet when I was 13, and you’ve got people making it.

L: You’ve got people born after the peak of EDM making stuff that’s trying to replicate the peak of EDM.

H: Yeah, they missed peak Fortnite, is what they say.

P: I attribute pretty much all of that to the computer. When I was in high school, like early 2000s, I did music, I played in orchestra and had friends who played music. I only knew two or three people that were producing music in any way at all. I can remember one guy who was making dubby techno. I remember being completely blown away that this guy was making that kind of music at 17. That was the one guy I knew. You know a lot of the most famous electronic musicians start coming into their own before they turn 20, or even 18. But I think that with the explosion of Fruity Loops, and now all these app-based and browser-based DAWs that are completely new to me, it’s so much easier to get into it. And why not? Why shouldn’t a 13 or 15 year old fuck around and figure out something cool. Like they’re doing anything that different from what we’re doing.

L: You know, this is kind of unrelated but something that is kind of crazy to think about is if covid didn’t happen, or didn’t get to the point that it did, would half of these younger artists even be here right now?

H: Maybe.

P: Some of them would’ve just been hanging at the park? Do kids still do that?

H: I have no idea. I have a younger brother who’s chronically online, but I was also a chronically online thirteen year old so I guess that’s ok. This is like how my generation is the first generation that was basically raised on the internet. I don’t remember a time where the internet did not exist, which is crazy to some people.

P: I think that’s the main delineating point for the generations. For millennials, elder millennials like myself have strong memories before the internet. Some of the younger millennials don’t have such strong memories. Or maybe it’s not even the internet so much as smart phones. It really is such a big demarcation in our society.

L: I think when I was around 4 years old I used to play around with one of those phones that had a physical keyboard that would slide.

H: I remember my uncle having one and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

P: That’s Frutiger Aero now.

H: I’m really curious what’s going to happen in 20 years when people start to get nostalgic for this time. It’s going to be weird. Very off topic but that’s where my mind is at.

L: Famous pop stars will try to replicate it and we’ll be like, “That’s not authentic!”

H: That’s just how it is, I’ll probably be nostalgic too.

P: Since we’re talking about the future, looking at the near future now. What’s next for you two as artists and what’s next for the labels?

H: I can answer for both. For Hydroplaned I’m trying to do a thing where I’m releasing an album every month, which is going to be fun. I was doing that a while ago, but before DI4LECT FR0M REfLECTIONS I wasn’t cranking out albums a lot and I was missing that time. I’m going to dedicate the whole year to doing that. This month I’ve released three albums within two weeks.

P: When you say you want to release an album a month, do you mean you want to slow down to an album a month?

H: Probably. I guess I go with what my brain thinks I should upload stuff. If I’m working on something and I think it’s cool I’ll put it out! With vaporwave being easier to produce there’s stuff that I’ve released that’s been completely impulsive. Like Interact with the world!, sorry to anyone who likes this album I’m going to ruin it. A lot of those tracks are reused tracks from a different album that doesn’t exist. I was trying to work on it and never finished it.

L: I think that’s fair. If it was recycled tracks from already released stuff that would be worse.

P: We wouldn’t know it was recycled if you didn’t say it.

H: That album was going to be called Observation Station. I might make it still, I have an album cover. I might try to do that sometime this year. Honestly, I’ll do that. I’m deciding live now.

P: You heard it here first!

H: Or read it.

P: You read it here first!

L: As for me, I think I want to go bigger with every release, like in sound. I want to start using better DAWs. For the past year I’ve only been using Audacity and VirtualDJ. But back in November my friend bought me FL Studio producer edition and I haven’t been using it. I’ve been planning on it but I haven’t, which I feel bad about. So after this next album I want to truly get better at this and make better material.

H: Shoutout Gabe, other half of Radio Pirates. He has an album called flstudio_win64_1541989. He’s crazy. He has a specific aura for his music and I love it so much, he’s awesome.

P: I appreciate that you have a crew, these people you’ve been working with and have connected with.

L: I’ve known Gabe for longer than Ian actually, coming up on six years.

H: Famous Prophets. This is pre-Shaving Cream Records.

L: It’s proto-Radio Pirates. A lot of my music from early 2023, I don’t like much of it at all. I was still very much new to making music in the first place. I was only doing it for mere months at the time.

P: I’ve noticed that with a lot of our younger members in CoV they can have mixed feelings about a lot of their earlier work. I think that’s normal as you’re continuing to find your musical voice, not that that’s ever a finished product. You do stuff and a year later you’re doing something else. Any other things you want to say at the end of the interview?

H: I can shoutout some stuff with World End Collapse. I have a few releases coming up. THE LAST SEARCH FOR THE USS DAYBREAK by PREMIUM CHANNELS. That’s mostly all I can probably talk about. For February I have two really cool signalwave albums. In April I will be releasing some music by people from Children of Vapor, I have a couple things from that. A lot of really cool stuff I’m releasing this year, including one of my favorite vaporwave albums ever. It’s not a huge album but it’s an album I’ve been very influenced by.

L: I’ll do a bunch of shoutouts. First and foremost, shoutout to everyone from ZBC. That’s like 20 people. Shoutout to Mallory, shoutout to Fishy, shoutout to shinrei, shoutout to itachi ツクヨミ, shoutout to Hayden.

P: I know itachi ツクヨミ!

H: Let me talk about itachi ツクヨミ. I’ve seen him rise up and I’m happy for him. I remember when his first album came out, and now he’s collabing with Roses Over Eden? It’s so cool.

P: We’re both in the Channel 0 group that happened at the end of last year.

L: I’m not done yet with my list. Shoutout to The Sleep Dealers. Shoutout to everyone from the center for New Artistry discord server, if y’all are reading this. It’s not a public server, it’s very private. Ok I think that’s it, but that’s like 40 people.

P: Thank you for not shouting out 40 individual names, though I would’ve typed them all out if you did. Shoutout to you two for doing this interview.