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.

cont...

So here I am, it’s 2022. I’m freshly divorced, I’m spending time with my new partner who is like, “Hey, my partner’s streaming!” I’m polyamourous, my partner is polyamorous, so the partner of my partner is my friend. And he’s streaming Legend of Zelda, and that’s pretty cool. My partner is streaming Hollow Knight or some shit, and that’s pretty cool. I find this game called Sword of Succubus. This game is hilariously hot, ludicrously sexy to the point that it’s really goofy. I wanted to stream it, I wanted people to see it. One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed doing is when I find something I want other people to see it, to hear it. It turned out that I couldn’t stream that on Twitch so there was a time I was streaming on some other website. But my kids noticed that my computer setup had gotten more elaborate and they were like, “Hey what platform do you stream on?” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m just streaming to friends right now.” Which was kind of true, most of the people that watched on that other website were my friends. They just wanted to watch me play this dirty game.

I ended up “going legit” and streaming on Twitch. That was a thing for a hot minute. I dabbled with being a vtuber and really enjoyed it so I became a vtuber full time. I was streaming three nights a week and having a great time with it. I was doing medium format and long format videos as this character, doing really elaborate shit. It was really neat until I ran out of energy for it. One of my biggest videos at the time was I had found this vhs tape called “Coping with Crossdressing”. It turned out it was actually a bunch of closeted trans women in the early ‘90s trying to convince the camera and themselves that they were still men and that this was fine, what they’re doing is fine. It’s all totally normal. It was very clear to the rest of us watching it that they were trans women. And it’s such an interesting thing to do, and I want to do more videos like this.

But then, *deep breath* Trump got elected and I was in the middle of producing my second vaporwave album. I had made a vaporwave EP as a joke. In early 2024 I coded a video game and I’m like, “Wow, I coded a soundtrack for this game. I actually composed a song, this is wild!” Something inside me thought, “What if I made vaporwave, how hard would that be?” So I found an interview with Luxury Elite where she was talking about how, “I just get in audacity and mess with it until I find a loop that loops so well that I can’t notice that it’s looping anymore and that’s how I make a song,” and that was interesting. So just as a joke I made three vaporwave songs. And one of my friends said “So, where’s your Spotify link?” So I put my music up on Spotify because I can afford that. So here I am, making my second full album Sea Dog and Trump gets elected. I’m talking to my dad as it gets confirmed and he says “Feels like I’m in the Twilight Zone” and that’s when I made the song Midwatch, which comes from the song Twilight Zone. That immediately got stuck in my head and I couldn’t not make a song about it. That’s when I started making protest music, the album Sea Dog. Because I really need to tap into this deep anger and resentment I have for the environment I was shoved into throughout my entire life and express it in a way that other people can know that they’re not alone.

At that same time, I was working on a series of videos that went along with my streaming thing. I was streaming Earthbound at the time, my favorite Super Nintendo game. I was trying to relate a place in Earthbound to the trans experience. I had all these interviews lined up. Belief It or Not from Youtube, who had 100 times the subscribers that I did at the time, did an interview with me and that was super cool. I was very excited about it. I was beginning to record things onto VHS and I recorded that whole interview onto VHS. That came out in October 2024 and by the time November came around I had just lost faith in humanity. I had really lost my way. Then January comes around and executive orders get signed that begin taking away my human rights. I try to explain this to people in my life and they’re like, “At least you’re white,” or “Nothing has happened yet.” Sure, but I’ve been screaming that the writing is on the wall and every time I point at it they’re like, “That isn’t what that means,” and six months later that’s exactly what that means. I got so tired of it, I had gotten tired of warning people for the past six years that shit was getting worse. And I didn’t know what to do. I was floundering and at the same time my job schedule was fluctuating so hard that I couldn’t plan my streams. I lost all motivation to stream, all motivation to work on my medium to long format content.

I didn’t know what I was doing, and I’m sitting at work and there’s a guy across the cubicle wall from me and he often plays 70s prog rock on his computer. I’m thinking, “I’ve got headphones, I can listen to whatever I want if I can find a stream.” Youtube was the only reliable streaming platform I could find. I found Blade Runner-style music 24/7, I found some long vaporwave mixes. I started thinking, “A lot of this is AI shit, and a lot of this is old, tired shit. I want to make a station, how hard is it to make a station?” And I knew I had a lot of music, royalty free stuff that I’d used for streaming, that was vaporwave style music but not necessarily vaporwave. But also a bunch of royalty free vaporwave music that I’d discovered, like Anonymous420 and some Business Casual songs that had been uploaded as free for streaming usage. I had 14 hours of music including my own music. I knew that 14 hours of music would be enough for a few days but I would get tired of it real fast.

So, I asked Reddit, “Hey, who wants their music to be played on the station? It’s not monetized but I can buy your music.” I try to overpay everybody’s price since we all undersell ourselves on Bandcamp, we really do. We would rather have people listen to our music than pay for it, but we really undersell ourselves. So I try to overpay people for their music. And that’s how I met you and Robin Circle and MarbleStatue, and the station quickly jumped to 25 hours of music within the first week of establishing itself. Which was pretty rad because that meant there was a chance you didn’t hear the same song when you listened to it. If you only listened to the station 4 hours a day there was a high chance you wouldn’t hear the same song for a few days.

P: From that point to the beginning of the summer, how much music did you build up? 40, 50 hours?

N: I think by the time spring rolled around we had 50 hours of music, and now I have 3 and a half days of music, around 84 hours of music. Which is fantastic because now I can listen to the station and I almost never hear the same song until I crave it again, which is very good. I’m always looking for more. In general, every month I go and check out the artists that had previously hit me up. I’ll do the Children of Vapor first, all our new albums. And then if I have money left over after that I’ll go to other artists that have reached out to me in the past and see what they’re up to. If they’ve put out anything new I’ll grab that.

P: This summer you changed things. You started this new version of the server with videos and other stuff. What made you realize you wanted to make that change?

N: That was always something I wanted. I wanted that so bad because I know that, for a lot of us, a music video is half of the experience in vaporwave. It is very grounded in its own visual experience. Vaporwave aesthetics came out of seapunk aesthetics, this mish mash of nostalgic 90s bullshit. Like those early 3d prototypes that we all grew up seeing in the late 80s, those postcards with all the dolphins on them. Lisa Frank bullshit. All of that smashes together into what we consider to be vaporwave aesthetics. Also, the commercials. If we were raised by TV then a third of what we were raised by was the commercials and that is very much a part of our childhood. A lot of us are capturing that capitalism of our childhood and putting a funny mask on it. So with the visuals being such a big part of vaporwave, I wanted that to be part of the station and if there was a music video available we could play it.

The server that I was originally running it from was this automated server where all you had to do was say, “This is my background video, these are my songs.” I was talking to customer service and I kept bugging them about adding options, like if I could add videos to the playlist. It was so far down on their priority list that I started looking around for other options. That’s when I found RadioBOSS, which does radio management. I love radio scheduling, that’s cool, and it also does videos. I was able to dump all the videos that we had available into this software and they’re now on the same list as the songs. So if New Stop by Robin Circle comes up it will play the video instead of the song. Just to have that flexibility is exciting for me, and I can log in at any time from my phone or desktop and manage it.

So I did that all on a server that I configured myself. It’s a little more expensive but it’s worth it. And then I saw VaporFM come back on, everyone’s watching VaporFM, and I’m like, “Damn, look at them with their stack of TVs showing all sorts of stuff!” All I have is the same visuals over and over again in the background unless a music video comes up. That’s when I started downloading daytime television vhs tapes from archive.org. There are tapes of The Young and the Restless, The Price is Right, Saturday morning cartoons like Thundercats. Then it goes into Ducktales or something like that. Here’s a broadcast from TV Asahi in Japan of an episode of Zeta Gundam, my favorite Gundam series next to Stardust Memory. Here’s some episodes of the original Sentai that turned into Power Rangers Turbo in America with commercials. So I have those playing if a music video isn’t available.

P: What was the most unexpected difficulty in transferring over to this new system? Was there something that surprised you?

N: Yeah, it was how much the station cut out. It would cut out every 36 hours. It turned out that the server space I was renting, the people that managed it were like, “Hey there’s too much traffic going to this port,” so they throttled it, but I didn’t know that was happening! So I ended up having to buy a Raspberry Pi and make the backup station, which is fun! But right now there’s only an hour and a half of content on the backup station. We could always add more but that’s what it’s got right now. Usually if it goes down I notice within an hour and a half. But sometimes it goes down while I’m asleep and if it goes down at 2am and I don’t log in until 9am then that’s rough. But at least it’s the same stream repeating. You can hear us freaking out that the station isn’t working.

P: It is pretty funny!

N: It’s pretty fun. I’ve seen comments in chat like, “Please reattach your arm!” *laughs*

P: What’s next for the radio station and what’s next for Nightleek?

N: What’s next for Nightleek is an interesting question. I don’t know what’s next for the station. I want more people listening to it and I want more listener feedback about what they want. Another thing that I want is to make a website that can host it instead of YouTube. One reason is if I have it on a website then I can better see how many people are listening to it. Right now, our listener statistics are based entirely on Cyberpunk 2077 plays. It turns out that I can just broadcast it as an mp3 stream that can be easily translated into a Cyberpunk 2077 radio station. I think all the play statistics I got this month are just from Cyberpunk. I asked the staff at RadioBOSS and they said it doesn’t take YouTube into account because it’s going through OBS, which is third party software and it doesn’t talk to RadioBOSS.

I want to have a better way to track this, not for me or money, but for artists to know that people are listening. I want people to know that there is somebody out there who likes their music, so I want there to be a better way to track how many people are listening. If that means I need to move Ghostwave to a website and take it off of YouTube, that’s better anyhow because YouTube is garbage and is full of copyright detection algorithms but it doesn’t really boost anybody. It might be a low-quality backup stream but I would prefer it go through a website that could better keep track of how many people are listening to it. Also for people like my kids who have YouTube restrictions on their devices. I want to put it on internet radio apps, just so people can find it and listen to it any way they feel like. I want to make it so easy to listen to Ghostwave no matter what your preferred format. And I get the full play statistics so I can give artists the full picture of who’s listening.

P: I think that’s a great idea to have it accessible on more platforms, I would love to just listen on my phone.

N: What’s next for Nightleek is something that Anonymous420 turned me onto: using just library music for samples. If vaporwave is supposed to be a commentary on the emptiness of corporate media and the uselessness of nostalgia, about how everything that we remember and feel nostalgic for is actually manufactured, why not use corporate music to do that? I subscribe to Epidemic Sound, a carryover from my streaming days. It’s a great search engine for music that nobody cares about. And some of it’s good actually! But it’s just music that was made by people who didn’t get signed by a label and decided to upload it to a music library instead. The current project I’m working on right now is Beautiful Business Woman with Mary K Ashley, that’s our split album. She made eight songs so I had to make eight songs. For the first three I was using actual legitimately released on a label music for samples, but then I got on this different kick.

World Class by Luxury Elite really cemented me in the vaporwave genre. It took me from being a casual ironic enjoyer of vaporwave to a legit vaporwave fan girl. It’s my all-time favorite album by any vaporwave artist, it's so very good. And as I’m analyzing it now in 2025, what I’m realizing is that a lot of it is just one or two loops and that’s it! It’s deceptively simple, they don’t sound simple. But really it’s just four measures repeated and she does it in a way that’s so interesting that you’ve been listening for three minutes and you don’t realize you’ve been listening to the same loop. She’s so good at picking her tracks and picking her loops.

What I’ve been doing is going to WhoSampled and finding these obscure crate dive-ass songs that she sampled for this album, songs that are by artists that nobody remembers. I listen to these songs a lot, then I go to Epidemic Sound and try to find corporate library music that has a similar vibe. And I’ve been lifting samples from those and then following the same process. For “Well-Fed Ex” I was listening to “Express” by Luxury Elite. My plan was to follow the basic format of Express with a completely different sample, but then I got carried away. That’s the thing, I always get carried away but that’s ok because I’m making it my own. I’m basically using Lux as a skeleton because I want to learn that late-nite lo-fi format. I want to learn that genre because it’s my favorite thing to listen to but it’s not something that I’m used to making. So I don’t know if I’m going to continue with only using library music all the time but it’s definitely a challenge that has been issued to me. A gauntlet that has been thrown by a hot babe, and you know. Hot babes and plate mail, that’s cool shit.

That’s what’s next. Can I continue to make the same kind of music but only using library music. If you look at corporate, the two bonus tracks were entirely library music. On TRANSTRENDER the songs “gender-affirming haircutes for them” and “imagine human rights” were made entirely out of library music. I think “imagine human rights” is one of my more powerful songs and those vocals “It’s been tough feeling sad / It’s been hard in America” are actually from a song that I found on Epidemic Sound where I just typed “human rights” into the search bar and that was one of the first songs that I found. It’s like a country song. One of the great things about it is you can download the stems, I can just pull the vocals out. As long as I match the key up it works great and I can just shove lyrics into songs the way I’ve been doing.

So, it’s really not going to be all that different. It’s just a different approach. I can’t do “girls gone before us” or “some day (HE WILL HURT YOU)” like I did before where I take a song that you know and I fuck the lyrics up, or I take a song that you know and I leave the lyrics out. It’s a great way to move forward because I know if I get more popular I will get copyright takedowns. And if I get copyright takedowns that means I’ve arrived!