.mp3Neptune

I interviewed .mp3Neptune, long time artist and traveler in the vaporwave community and the head of slowinternet netlabel. We talked about early days on Tumblr, aliases galore, the line between personal project and label, and Boards of Canada.

Pool Plants: I want to start talking about you and your musical journey. How did you get your start in the vaporwave scene and were you making music before that?

.mp3Neptune: I was making music before that, I actually started making music in 2011. I remember the very first thing I ever made was this really, really terrible dubstep remix of the Tetris theme song. I was making a lot of dubstep and EDM-type stuff. I was really into that; I still am to this day. That was exclusively what I was making, but then something happened and I started listening to Boards of Canada.

P: Longtime favorite!

M: I got super into them and that was kind of my gateway into the more… not laid back necessarily, but more “experimental” genres of electronic music.

P: What was it that brought you to them at that time?

M: I think I was just always interested in electronic music. I got super into Music Has the Right to Children. To this day, that’s one of my favorite albums. I don’t know, I don’t even remember where I discovered them. It might have been on Tumblr, which will come back up in this interview. I got really into that album and after that point it was all over, I was hooked.

P: So you’re getting into them and then what leads you to vaporwave?

M: I guess in a way it’s a very natural progression. Boards of Canada has this sound that’s very fuzzed out, very retro 70s vibes, VHS tapes, stuff like that. Naturally I was already kind of attracted to those sounds. It was on Tumblr that I really first started getting into vaporwave. I have this blog called Planet Online. Back in my day it was what was referred to as a “glow blog.” Imagery of cyberpunk, electronics, 3d renders of undulating spheres, stuff like that. I was already in the netart sphere. I was making a little bit of visual art and posting it and it ended up getting picked up by a lot of people that were fans of vaporwave at the time. A lot of those people I don’t even think are on the internet anymore, but at the time it was a very insular vaporwave community just on Tumblr.

I remember getting into Blank Banshee and Infinity Frequencies, Infinity Frequencies especially. It was through audio posts that people had uploaded onto Tumblr, I wasn’t even looking at Bandcamp pages at the time. I did end up doing that later but originally I was just listening to individual tracks like, “Wow, that’s super weird and interesting!” Eventually there was a lot of drama on Tumblr and people ended up jumping ship from there to Twitter. Vaporwave twitter obviously was a huge community, a massive amount of people there.

cont...

P: So there’s a Click Fraud album from 2015 and The Memory Machine is also from 2015. Are those your earliest vaporwave albums?

M: Funnily enough, that Click Fraud album I was actually making during the 2013-2014 period. Originally it was not called Deep Linking, it was called Maritime Incorporated. I released it under my alias “Cubik!” that I was using back then, that was the alias that I was making all the EDM stuff under. I put an exclamation point at the end because I was super cute and clever like that. *laughs* It got like no attention. I posted it on Tumblr, it got zero attention.

P: So is that the first one?

M: Not only is that the first vaporwave album I made, it was the first album I ever finished. It had a totally different name, different track titles and album art. At the time when I uploaded that I was still trying to be anonymous so I didn’t want people to figure out who I was by digging. Which, in retrospect, nobody was going to do that. But at the time I really had to cover my tracks and be covert about this. But that’s actually the first album I ever made.

P: Is The Memory Machine the first .mp3neptune album?

M: I think so! I’m trying to remember, yes it is. That’s the first .mp3neptune album, but the first single was actually Deathscape I. I posted that on Soundcloud before I uploaded The Memory Machine. The first album was The Memory Machine.

P: Like most people who started in the mid 2010s, you have released a lot of music. One thing that really stood out was that a lot of it didn’t actually sound very vaporwave to me. I mean that affectionately, because obviously it’s a big tent. But I hear a lot of different influences in your music. I did pick up a little Boards of Canada, a lot of other electronic genres. One thing I was trying to key into was how much is sample vs sample-free. What was your general process back then for making vaporwave and has that process changed very much since then?

M: Yeah it’s definitely changed. Back then, I’m sure people were doing it before. We had the whole dreampunk scene that was really coming into the full scope in 2015. People were already doing original production in their vaporwave at the time. I was listening to vaporwave and there were people who were doing so much with these samples, so I just thought, “I already kind of know how to produce music.” What I wanted to do was try to combine vaporwave with the stuff I was already making, add a little bit of ambient or drone or synthesizer noodling. I wanted to create a synthesis of those two things. I’m reminded of the intro track to I Love You, Saturn City, which is 17 minutes long. That and The Memory Machine were me trying to synthesize the vaporwave sound that I was hearing with my own original production ideas.

Also, part of the sound that I had going on back then was that I think I was sampling different things. I was sampling Crystal Castles on that first album, Lorde. Whereas a lot of people were still on the train of sampling late 80s or early 90s music. That’s just not a genre that, before vaporwave, I really listened to that much. My mom would listen to 80s music in the car with me as a kid but other than that I wasn’t super invested in 80s or 90s music, so I just sampled stuff that I like to listen to. Pretty much everything I sampled on The Memory Machine was something that I legitimately listened to on a daily basis back then.

Nowadays, I feel like most of my music under .mp3neptune is either very low in samples, it’s not really the backbone of a track, or I just won’t use samples at all. Although, this upcoming album that I’m putting out actually does use a ton of samples. But for the most part I’ve leaned away from that, not the detriment of my music, but I do want to get back into it.

P: We can get back to that at the end. Am I right to say that the album you just put out with Sanyo Static, that felt a little more classic vaporwave style?

M: Yeah, I was definitely going for that. The thing is I had all those Sanyo Static tracks already made, and I was going to release them just as Sanyo Static. Then I thought, “Well, what if I blew this out into a bigger project.” But I couldn’t think of anything else to sample, I was sort of out of that phase. I go through phases where I’ll be really into sampling things one day and then the next week I’ll be more into doing other stuff.

P: Ok, I’m dumb then. So you’re Sanyo Static?

M: Yeah, that’s just a collab with myself *laughs*.

P: How did you distinguish between the two?

M: The Sanyo Static tracks are mostly sample based, where the .mp3neptune stuff is all just my own production. I wanted to try to make it sound as cohesive as possible. I don’t know if I succeeded, they definitely do sound different. But I wanted it to sound like it belonged in the same universe, which it more or less did I think.

P: See, this is why I’m doing this!

Ok, what are your biggest non-vaporwave influences, musically and aesthetically?

M: Definitely Boards of Canada, of course. I would say aesthetically, it’s kind of all over the place. I have a lot of aliases, I have 10 or 15 different aliases. This goes back to the Tumblr thing, I also have 10 side blogs and all of them have different vibes. I really like curating one kind of theme or aesthetic together and having it be really cohesive. That’s one of my favorite things to do. So I think I pulled a lot of influence from that in general. Like visually, all of my aliases have completely different looks to them and different approaches for production. Also, I’m really inspired by EDM music even though I don’t know if it’s always super audible in the actual music I make. Also there’s this strain of electronic music going on in the early 2010s that was like XXYYXX, Giraffage, Ryan Hemsworth. That sort of stuff where it’s super synthy, trap influenced. Hip hop, but more playful and instrumental.

P: I was a big Ryan Hemsworth fan, more from the DJ mixes. He’s great.

M: Definitely.

P: You talked about the themes. I’m realizing I don’t know most of those different aliases you’re mentioning. But as I was going through the .mp3neptune discography, I noticed a strong space theme for a lot of the albums. Kill the Devil has a religious theme to it. What are some of the other themes that you bring into your music, narrative themes beyond the music and aesthetic. What inspires you in that sense?

M: I’ve been thinking about this. I realized that, for whatever reason, I subconsciously always go back to themes of time passing or things changing. Which makes sense for vaporwave. But it’s always themes of wanting to go back to the past and not being able to, or getting older. Just time passing in general tends to keep coming up over and over again. That’s what The Memory Machine is about, that’s sort of what I Love You, Saturn City is about too. View From the Chair Swings, which was my “looking back on that year” album. There’s obviously Memories We and the Monolith Shared.

P: I Just Want Everything to Last Forever… seems like a very personal album.

M: Yeah, exactly. That’s something that I always come back to. I’m not really sure why, that would have to be a discussion between me and my therapist. *laughs* For whatever reason, I feel like I’m frequently preoccupied with that sort of thing.

P: Going back to Click Fraud album at one point you had “Consumer Demons” listed for $1000 as a single. I have noticed other hints of anti-consumerism in your themes or message. Is that true?

M: Maybe a little bit? I think that if there is, it’s certainly not intentional. I do have very lefty opinions on that sort of thing, so maybe that comes through. But I never tried to get super political or socio-economic with my music. I’m basically just making things that I’m thinking about. A lot of my music can run a bit catty, a little bit snarky sometimes. But it’s usually about the vaporwave scene or something.

P: Maybe I haven’t heard those yet? A lot of what I’ve heard was… maybe sincere isn’t the best word. But sincerely felt? You’re really engaging with your nostalgia.

M: I guess it does depend on the album. There are albums like Kill the Devil and I Just Want Everything to Last Forever… which are very sincere and kind of about specific things in my life personally. And then there’s albums like Empty Faces in Digital Spaces. In my opinion, one of my best albums. That’s definitely a send-up of… not really the vaporwave community, but the internet as a whole at the time. In fact, I like to joke that I invented Dead Internet Theory with that one. Because the concept is imagining that you’re online for such a long time and talking to all these people, but then one day you realize that none of them are actually real people. They’re all just bots, you haven’t been talking to anybody! It’s kind of like a “waking up from the Matrix” sort of album, a little bit cringe but in a fun way.

P: It probably was true that there were a lot more bots than we realized at that time, but the idea of dead internet wasn’t really talked about 10 years ago. AI was not what it is now, bots seemed less present. It felt like the internet was still full of people back then.

M: If I was to make that album today, people would be like ,“What the hell are you talking about, of course half the internet is fake people!”

P: “Old news!”

Shifting more to what’s happening right now, where do you see yourself in the vaporwave community in 2025?

M: You know, I’ve felt like I’ve taken a bit of a backseat in the scene. Part of it is just that I’m pretty bad at networking. I’m not very good at using Discord and that’s where a lot of stuff happens. Social media tends to be really taxing on me emotionally and mentally so I try not to use it too much. As a result I feel like I miss a lot of things, or I’m not particularly involved. This year I’ve actually gotten way more involved than I was the past few years, but there was a time where I sort of felt like, not hanging up the hat or anything, but just kind of letting .mp3neptune exist as something that I did, and then it’s not really touching it as much. But obviously I’ve turned around on that thought process.

Kind of hard to answer because I feel like I don’t see myself in the community that much. But when I am in it, it’s sort of a difference between how I perceive myself versus how other people perceive me. It’s like, I feel like I’m not that important or not that big of a deal, then other people will be like “This classic vaporwave artist .mp3neptune!” and I’m like, “Woah, really?”

P: That’s how I saw you, especially initially! My introduction was the WAVEZZ album and, to me, seeing anyone get a release on Business Casual is significant.

M: That was years coming, too! That was one of the first labels I ever really wanted to send something into but I never felt like I had anything good enough to send them until that album.

P: So, with what you were saying about how you were feeling a year or two ago. Did that album feel like a culmination, like “I got to the point where I’m releasing on Business Casual,” and maybe you were ready to pause for a bit?

M: Yeah, that album in particular was hard. I put blood, sweat, and tears into that and it doesn’t necessarily show, which is kind of funny. Like, I listen to that album and it kind of just sounds like a mixtape of some good music that I made. But in reality, behind the scenes, I was going through it making that album. Trying to create something a lot more cohesive than I’d ever done before. Initially, the album was going to be very different. It was going to be more meta and self-referential and kind of a send up of the vaporwave scene. It was a lot more cynical. I realized after a while that I didn’t really want to do that anymore. That was kind of sending me over the edge.

So I scrapped almost all of the tracks, I kept a third of them and I added other tracks to it and that’s what ended up being WAVEZZ. Which is why it sounds the way it does, it’s all over the place genre-wise. But yeah, that album took me… it was a pretty tough album to make. I think that might’ve been part of the reason why I was considering taking a step back for a little while. But once it released and people said they were liking it, I realized I was just overthinking it. I was so in my head at the time about that record specifically. I just couldn’t see anything else and I was frankly not doing well when I made that album. But after I put it out, I felt like a huge weight was taken off my shoulders and I was ready to jump back into things a little bit.

P: With slowinternet, how does that factor into moving into this next stage, rethinking how you’re in the vaporwave scene.

M: slowinternet started in the beginning of 2022 and I was initially it wasn’t supposed to be a traditional label. The reason I made it was because I have 10 different aliases, and when you have a bunch of aliases you’re traying to keep separate from each other you have to create 10 Bandcamp pages, which is a huge pain in the ass. So I was like, “Let’s just start this thing.” I called it slowinternet because that’s actually the title of an album that I’d put out years ago under my alias Geoflesh. I liked that title so I used it for this Bandcamp page to just throw anything up there that I make that isn’t .mp3neptune. That way I don’t have to keep making new Bandcamp pages and linking it to my PayPal and all that frustration. It was originally going to be just that and I went through this somewhat manic episode of making these little albums. The Sanyo Static album and the pyramid observer album specifically are the first two. I was really honed in on making those and when I uploaded them people seemed to like them.

Then somebody emailed me. It was xrt who’s on the page as ᴍᴇxɪᴄᴏ １８０. That artist sent me that album asking, “Hey can I release on your label?” Originally I was gonna say, “No, it’s not really that kind of thing. This is just my thing.” But then I thought about it more and I was going through a phase where I was just pumping out the music and really itching to get stuff out there. So I just thought, “Why not try this? And if it sucks and I hate it then I can just stop. It’s not a big deal. I can just deal with the bandcamp payouts and whatever.” It was pretty well received from people who listened to it and then I kept getting other demos. My friend Melissa sent in a thing, I got an album from Clean Slate, I got an album from OMS. Ok, this is actually just a label now! It sort of became an internet label when I wasn’t looking. It turned out to be a lot of work to run a label.

P: Then, after summer 2022, you stopped for a few years?

M: Yeah, I got so burned out. I was, that was right before the whole ordeal with WAVEZZ and all that. I got so burnt out that I just decided to completely stop releasing anyone else’s stuff on there. If I came up with anything of my own I would maybe upload it but I’m not going to have this be a label anymore because I don’t want to deal with it. There was a huge pause there.

P: Bu then, this spring, we have more albums! Beyond wanting to revisit the project for yourself, how did you start thinking about wanting to release other people’s music again?

M: It kind of happened naturally. I’ve been in a really good spot musically lately and feeling like I can finally organize my thoughts around it again. My friend Declan opened up a label called Untoward. It’s kind of a unique label where everything is hosted on its own website and they run it away from Bandcamp so there’s no fees or extra weirdness. I was talking to Icing Expert about that label and he brought up that he had something he wanted to send me. I listened to it and I really liked it and I was like, “Let’s do it.” It was sort of similar to the beginning of slowinternet actually, in that it wasn’t fully my original plan or idea but it just sounded like a good idea when he brought it up to me.

P: So then you were like, “I’m back?”

M: Definitely. It felt really good, too, because there were people that were actually excited to see slowinternet return. I wasn’t expecting that, I didn’t think people really remembered it all that much. But people were like, “Oh slowinternet’s back, cool!”

P: So what do you want to do next with slowinternet? I know there’s about to be a compilation coming out soon, but in general what’s your larger goal, if you have one, or are you just going to keep seeing what happens?

M: I’m just going to keep seeing what happens. When I started slowinternet back up again I wanted to do it because I got super burnt out on it before and I didn’t want a repeat of that. So, I decided if I’m going to do this I’m going to treat it as casually as I can. And just kind of release whenever. There was a stretch there when I was releasing an album every two weeks, The initial run of slowinternet was every two weeks and it got a little too hard to keep up with. So, I’ve scaled back and I’ve decided to just treat it like a fun little hobby. Which is funny because now I’m releasing this massive compilation. Which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that I would be doing casually. But it’s still very laid back and I’m not putting too much thought into making it this main job of mine. I didn’t want to think about it too hard.

P: Passion project?

M: Definitely.

P: So what is next for .mp3neptune or any of your other projects?

M: Next for .mp3neptune is that I have an album in the works that is going to remind people a lot of 2015, 2016. Especially 2016. I think it’s going to remind people a lot of Empty Faces in Digital Spaces. It’s actually remnants from the project I was talking about earlier where it got really self-referential and cynical. I just feel like I’m in a better head space for that kind of thing now. I’m definitely going to finish that up and put that out at some point in the future, it’s going pretty good. As far as anything beyond that, though, I don’t have any specific plans. I am working on a different side project that I can’t really say anything about. It’s going well, too, I’m pretty excited for that one.

P: We’ll definitely keep an eye out for that!

Last question: People love to say vaporwave is dead. I don’t know if it’s dead, but maybe it’s undead. If vaporwave is undead, what type of undead do you think it is? Zombies, vampires, Frankenstein-types. We’ve got revenants, we’ve got liches. So many options, what do you think?

M: It’s got to be, like, the 28 Days Later zombies, the ones that run real fast and go all crazy. Something like that because I just feel like it’s all over the place at this point and chaotic in that way. It feels like…

P: Terrifying.

M: Yeah. It’s terrifying! *laughs* It’s a terrifying scene. It’s so funny, too, that people are like, “Vaporwave is dead.” I don’t know! I feel like it’s super alive but it’s just kind of all over the place now. It’s sort of been atomized into dozens of little scenes. There’s the Barber Beats, there’s Slushwave festivals happening, there’s an entire community around Signalwave now. It’s all over the place.

P: I was talking to [carteBlanche] about this recently. Everyone talks about this, it’s both a meme and a genuine point of conversation. It’s both dead and also very alive. It does really feel like both are true in different ways, and also kind of in the same way? That’s why I landed on undead.

M: It does feel a little bit like a zombie. I remember it died the very year I got into it! It was always kind of dead, and coming back in different forms, taking different shapes.

P: It’s like one of those movies where they’re like, “Wait, maybe the zombies have their own society? Maybe they’re not so bad?”

M: Or you know what, maybe it’s like a Poltergeist! It’s dead, it’s definitely dead, but it’s sort of come back in a different form. Like in a different shape. It’s very different from 10 years ago or 15 years ago.