WVSQD

For my first interview so big it became a two-parter, I connected with the powerhouse video collective WVSQD. WVSQD is [carteBlanche], crispy_doodles, Dub Prophet, and Solodolo84. This formidable quartet of visual producers has been an important part of the vaporwave scene for the past few years not just for their video work but also their organizing and connecting within the larger scene. In part one I managed to get Carte, Crispy, and Solo together to document the fabled origins of WVSQD. Along the way we talk YouTube culture, the importance of visual media in vaporwave, the legend of L I N D A, and the power of coincidence. Read to the end to see why we stopped part one where we did and stay tuned for a part two later this year!

Pool Plants: You’re a mysterious bunch in a lot of ways so today we’re going to lift some of the fog, or possibly create some extra fog depending on where we end up. But to start I want to get to know you individually a bit. So, as individuals, how did you get your start in vaporwave and how did you get your start in the video production scene. Did those two things correspond with each other or not?

[carteBlanche]: I started making videos before the pandemic for 猫 シ Corp. I just made two videos and posted them and sent them to him. I didn’t think much of it but he got back to me and told me about them and they were interesting, not your normal typical videos. It wasn’t your traditional vaporwave video because I was new, I didn’t know. So, little things like that got me going back in the day and that’s what got me started making videos. The vaporwave scene though, we’ll get into that a little later but it involves Crispy, Dub and Solo and all of them. I wouldn’t be a part of anything vaporwave without them so after their story, you’ll understand that part of it.

crispy_doodles: I had a YouTube channel pretty much as soon as YouTube started. I didn’t even have the internet at home, I would just go to school and watch videos. I started uploading my own videos way back in 2010. I have some really old videos from my study abroad trip to Japan. Then it evolved into mostly shitpost videos. I always wanted to make a YouTube Poop but I never did. My channel pretty much stopped for five years in 2015 and then the pandemic bought me back and I started doing Let’s Plays. I was learning how to use video editing software and I always wanted to do Twitch streaming. So, I would stream on Twitch and record it through OBS and learn to edit it. That evolved, and around that same time I discovered the Krelez Vaporfunk channel. That’s sort of when my channel pivoted to both a Let’s Play channel and a vaporwave channel.

But let me back up. Vaporwave itself I discovered during the aesthetic meme phase on the internet. I guess that’s mid-2010s, 2015 or so. Obviously the very first one I heard was Lisa Frank 420 and Luxury Elite followed not far behind. Then YouTube started recommending me mixes, all the old mixes that everyone knows and loves that you can’t find anymore. After I started doing Let’s Plays and uploading more videos, about a year later I started doing vaporwave mixes. So that’s where the video editing and the vaporwave converge. And then it further converges with music videos after I meet Carte, Solo, and Dub. My channel is a little bit of everything but I certainly love all aspects of it.

Solodolo84: I’ve always been a fan of vaporwave since 2011 or 2012. Hearing Lisa Frank and stuff like that for the first time, I knew there was something there because it gave me the feeling of listening to DJ Screw. You know I was a Screw-head when I was in middle school and high school. So that slowed and throwed, that chopped sound was always there. So when I came across vaporwave it’s like, this is the next step of it. I just took to it, I’ve always been a fan of it. As far as video production I had no experience. I grabbed some songs that I liked, I had a couple of visions and ideas. My first time sitting down at Vegas, I made ten videos. I put them up on YouTube, I had a YouTube channel since 2008. Doing those first ten I enjoyed it, I enjoyed getting my ideas out so I could make room for new ideas. I caught the editing bug and I’ve been at it ever since 2022.

cont...

P: What are your biggest non-vaporwave influences for video production and what non-vaporwave music or artist would you most want to make videos for?

S: Growing up, I’m an ‘80s baby, my mom and my grandma were movie buffs. My grandma would watch a lot of film and television and my mom worked in a video store so movies was always being played in the house. I grew up listening to Isley Brothers, Frankie Beverly and Maze, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Crosby Stills Nash & Young. It was always a hodge podge of different sounds being played in my house, so listening to different sounds and different genres was second nature to me.

As I have a family that’s into film, I was always into imagery. How do these people put their ideas together? From the paper, storyboards, getting into the loop with the actors, to putting in on the camera and putting it on video. So movies was always a language, so to speak, how you get your ideas out. These are your thoughts, putting these characters in these situations, and you have a soundtrack to that. It was just a marriage that I always had an interest in from a young age. Putting it all into vaporwave, it just seemed like it was natural to me it just made sense from my standpoint.

P: The musicians you named earlier, would you want to make videos for that music? Anyone else come to mind?

S: If I was to make a video for a non-vaporwave person, it would probably be to score a documentary of a musician when they’re making an album or doing studio sessions, just to see how these things are coming about. Just to see how the whole process works. How do they approach what they’re doing. How does the writer, the director, and the producer of a film all get in the same room and get on the same page to where everybody’s vision and everyone’s input makes sense for the project going forward and how it’s best to convey that information to the viewer or the listener.

CD: I’ll answer the second one first because… Lady Gaga, hands down. I was making faces while I was muted like, “I have to say Lady Gaga!” I take already made footage and rearrange it and I don’t think my style of editing jives with making a “music video” but maybe I could do some post-production type work. I have filmed a music video before so I could probably do it but it’s the nerves. I’m getting sweaty just thinking about working with Lady Gaga! But I would want to meet her.

As for the influences on my video editing I’m going to go back to YouTube Poops. When I was getting started making videos I didn’t really have the chops, I didn’t know what I was doing. I had Windows Movie Maker on a crusty laptop and I was using the trackpad. Most of the videos that I made were kind of in the style of YouTube Poop but there’s no quick cuts or audio mixing or anything. For example, I have a video called Culture Shock. At the time it was my “magnum opus” and the effect was mostly just putting a channel change in between each clip. I had no sense of anything except I just put the clip in and do the channel change to the next clip.

Obviously Let’s Play channels were a lot of influence for me, such as Game Grumps. Weirdly enough, I think Cinemassacre was influential on the way I made my videos, his style of comedy and editing. At the time I was in college so it was new and exciting, the YouTuber journey that was still kind of new at the time. I guess at the time he wasn’t on YouTube, he was on ScrewAttack, but I digress. There’s kind of an amalgamation of influences on my video work, but that’s not influencing the vaporwave itself. I feel like vaporwave is a self-contained bubble. But it is breaching because I’m working on an album that I think is YouTube Poop-influenced in the way that I chopped some things and put them together in a funny way. So maybe they’re more connected then I thought, now that I’m saying it out loud.

CB: I don’t have any non-vaporwave influences. I mean I was influenced by the vapor artists who's songs I make videos for. There are artists and visuals from the 90s and 2000s that I like to consider in the vaporwave universe and also new artists that inspire me too.

P: Ok, what is the true origin of WVSQD?

CB: It's early 2022... We’re in the Vaporfunk chat! There was a YouTube chat like any other YouTube chat, there’s a bunch of YouTube chatters. None of them really talking to each other, we’re just talking. We don’t really know each other. Dub was Dub, always keeps things cool but to himself. I knew of Solo by his profile pic but that’s pretty much it. I don’t know their versions of this time but I think me and Crispy were beefing, let’s be honest. Us two could not see eye to eye in the chat.

CD: He’s telling the truth!

CB: We’re arguing so bad that something hit me and I said, “Vaporwave is what brings us together and vaporwave is what will get us past this!” For some reason I said that. No random YouTube people would say that to each other but that’s what I said! Strange for me to say but that happened *laughs*.

And then, literally right after that I heard a Luxury Elite song playing and for some reason it hit me... I said, “Wow, Luxury Elite is the best, aren’t they?” And Solo was super confused like, “You don’t know?” At that point I’d listened to the Vaporfunk station but people there don’t look up and google the names, they just listen to the radio. But something hit me to say that. For the next week after that I didn’t go to the Vaporfunk channel, I’m in the Luxury Elite SoundCloud channel just replaying the first couple of songs over and over. It was so inspiring to me. Then, a week later, I rejoined the Vaporfunk stream and I saw in the chat Luxury Elite with a heart emoji!

Back in those days you didn’t see people out and about, it’s not like today where they’re on Discord. It was like seeing a rare Pokémon, like a legendary. When I saw that, it was weird because ten minutes later it disappeared. Like it happened and I said, “Did anyone else see that? This is crazy!” Out of the woodwork Solo and Crispy and Dub were like, “Yo I’m here!” It was that crazy to all of us. I don’t know if that can happen again or why that was like that but that’s the real origin. It’s not like all four of us like the same vapor and we were talking about it. That’s the origin: we were there for that event. You tell me how that happened..

CD: At that point we weren’t called WVSQD. I know Dub had been making videos for a while but we all started making more music videos so I think we officially became “wave squad” in the middle of 2022.

CB: It was just a couple weeks after that! Finding the name, then Dub made the No Can Do video and that’s the official first premiere.

P: So what is the origin of the name?

CB: Crispy said we’re best friends now, like we’re a collective! So I was like, wave squad? But the full word “wavesquad” was taken by some dead defunct channel. So I said let’s condense it. You want to make them read between the lines a little bit, you don’t want to spell it all out! We just went with it. That’s one of the harder things, too, coming up with a name but it was kind of incidental.

P: That’s what I’d call a happy accident because the condensed spelling is pretty iconic!

CD: I think it was really solidified when we came up with the logo. That was not too long after we started our Discord. We all joined Discord so we had a chat going to talk about vaporwave stuff.

CB: It was a lot of stuff happening.

CD: A lot happened in a short amount of time.

CB: For months we communicated only on this YouTube channel and we were under attack by different trolls, things that are hard to explain. Someone was a cop, trying to infiltrate. This YouTube channel had 100 people checking in. Solo, am I lying?

S: It was deep in there!

CB: We had a whole team of people there and it wasn’t like YouTube is today. It was only 100 viewers but everyone was checking in on the chat and was really close. But when you do that and you have that much fun you also bring out trolls, and this cop. It was a federal agent! I don’t want to get dramatic but they would say nice things to Crispy and then talk trash about me on Reddit.

CD: Oh yeah, so many weirdos.

CB: There were weirdos trying to do weird stuff! That time when we were doing everything in public on YouTube chat was crazy. So eventually we had to move to Discord. Things got more official with the logo so we said we might as well do all this. It was Crispy that told me to make a Bandcamp page. I was dropping an album every weekend that summer.

S: That [carteBlanche] summer run was legendary!

CD: Legendary.

CB: It was like an anime! Every weekend. I did drop like six straight albums that summer. When I say those are my inspirations, I don’t know what it was but it’s like we were just waiting and then it was off to the races!

CD: We collabed a little before then but there was no true WVSQD collab until we were WVSQD.

P: Solo, anything to add?

S: That’s pretty much how it happened. It was a lot of different smaller things leading into larger things leading into larger things.

CB: Tell them about what we were doing in the chat.

S: During that time, during the Covid time, me and Dub would be in there just talking about UFC, boxing, and stuff. So on weekends the Vaporfunk chat would turn into our personal fight night watch party. We’re all at home watching the fight and talking to each other in the chat on a Friday or Saturday night. We just kind of bonded from there.

CB: The nights would turn into a bookmaking casino. We would be talking about odds, fights would play out, normally the way I had thought *laughs*. During the week, it would happen that I would name a stock that was going to go up and some random homie in the chat would buy the stock and it would go up and we would celebrate the next day. It was weird stuff that would go on in this chat.

CD: For real! It was like day shift and night shift. We had the office during the day. That’s why a lot of our WVSQD stuff is office themed. I was the day shift, I’m always on during the day.

CB: I was night shift and I was saying stuff where, if you heard it now you’d say “of course,” but back then it was crazy. I’d say we’re going to meet these vaporwave people and other people would say, “You guys are crazy! You’re not going to make a vaporwave album, vaporwave’s dead. Corp isn’t going to talk to you guys.” At that point nobody talked to us, we had just seen the Lux heart emoji.

P: It’s interesting to think about the time period you’re talking about. At first it seems like the story is very tied to the pandemic. Not just the pandemic in general, but what you might call in 2022 the mid to late period of the main pandemic. As opposed to the second half of 2020 and 2021, there had now been a couple years of developing online scenes and communities. People were settling into new rhythms of being home more and trying to figure out what to do. But then at the same time I’m thinking about 2022 maybe being a particular downpoint in vaporwave. It was more reasonable to say at that time that vaporwave was “dead” or getting close to it. So you guys coming together at that specific time where these communities did grow, but this one had formed around a music genre that felt like it was in the past. But your love for it coalesced in this specific situation. Which, in my opinion, is symbolic of why vaporwave has blossomed again. People’s passions connecting together in that way.

CB: Yeah, I think that anytime there’s a dip there’s an opportunity for it to go back up. We might be a reaction to the “vaporwave is dead” phenomenon. I think anyone out right now might be a reaction, a response to that idea.

P: Maybe you wouldn’t have done it if there had been a lot of people doing it. You might’ve felt like it wasn’t necessary.

S: Yeah, speaking for me that’s why I started making videos. Because I used to be in these comment sections, these different chats, and I would just see everybody arguing over what’s vaporwave and what’s not vaporwave. What’s the vibe and what’s not the vibe. So, being of a certain age and a certain time, I’m from that era. So I figured I’m going to throw my hat in the ring and I’m going to make something that I feel passionate about. I dare anyone to say to me what I do and what I make isn’t vaporwave. This stuff is representative of my past and my nostalgia, how I approach the medium and what I love about it. It grew from just the love of the craft, love and respect for the artistry and the work that people do. The music that they make inspires me to make my videos, just like how I incorporated the movies guys made in the past into my videos. So I dare anyone to tell me isn’t vaporwave because this shit is it! How are you going to tell me what I’m making if I lived it!

CD: You mentioned we kind of showed up during a vaporwave lull and I think looking back, for me vaporwave was this ethereal online thing and there wasn’t a scene for me until I discovered the Krelez Vaporfunk channel and saw there was a scene! Then I found out as we became a squad and got to know people in the scene that there is a big scene and a lot of people. Discord really helped with that. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we caught the right “wave” and I’ve seen the aftereffects. I wouldn’t say we’re the reason vaporwave is still alive but we’re part of it! But I do see a lot of newer artists and groups, like Children of Vapor, taking up the mantle too. I’m not here to gatekeep or anything. I want more people in the scene, I want people to enjoy the craft, and I want to see it evolve.

P: To expand on this, what do you think is something new or something that was missing in the scene that you brought as WVSQD.

CD: A visual focused collective. We as a group are like, “We’ll do your visuals!” more than we’ll do music for you. Solo has said this a lot and I’m going to echo it, but a lot of people really discount what visual artists do. They don’t know the work that goes into it. They make this beautiful music, this great 30 minute set. And then they hit someone up two days before it’s due saying, “Hey can you make some visuals for it?” I feel like us being around and setting boundaries and letting people know visual artists still need time to work. We’re people too!

P: I’m slow as hell at making videos so I get it!

CD: If I’m working on a 30 minute set I’m putting at least 6 hours into it. It’s not one to one, one minute of footage isn’t one minute of editing. There’s the research, the downloading, the scrubbing, the cutting, the chopping, the rearranging, slowing down and adding effects. It’s everything!

P: The 6 hours is maybe the time you spend making a video but there’s also the other time you spent doing research in general, creating a library of your own clips that you like. All the time in general that you’ve spent watching videos and creating your own aesthetic. It’s invaluable.

CD: I guess to add on to that, people respect the musicians but I think they now have more respect for the visual artists that work behind the scenes these days. I definitely feel like there’s a lot of respect coming from people see our visuals.

S: Pretty much all I ever wanted is for the musicians of the vaporwave scene to have a little more respect for the visual side of it. Because this is audio-video, it’s not just the music. I mean we could go even as far as the album covers! If these album covers aren’t photoshopped stuff or real pieces, then most of the time it’s still images from a commercial, or a movie scene, or what have you. Those people had to find that and I doubt if they’re just getting a random image and just saying, “Hey, here’s your album cover.” A lot of time goes into finding all of this stuff.

When you’re doing sets for people, you don’t want your sets to be the same all across the board. Whatever I do for one artist isn’t going to be the same direction or theme or approach as I would make for another artist. After a while it kind of seemed like the visual side was either being played second fiddle or it wasn’t cared about as much. As a visual artist looking at the scene, I felt like we were getting the short end of the stick. But we’re the second hand of it, we’re the left hand of the whole thing. If you didn’t have the visual artists, you would just be getting random commercial blocks, or looping gifs, or you would just get a solid image for thirty minutes! That’s not interesting to the viewer. It might be cool for the listener to hear this music if they’re not tapped in or they’re not tuned into the screen. But for the viewer, give them something more that they can engage with and they can experience along with listening to the music. Those things go hand in hand.

I’m just glad that people are starting to come around and say hey this is just as important as the music. It’s not one or the other, it’s both! Both of them marry together and create this vibe that we’re going for. It’s a lot of work, the grind is the grind. But I enjoy listening to the music which makes me enjoy making these projects, and I just hope that the viewer enjoys the work and the end result.

CD: Solo’s one hundred percent correct. To me the visual part of vaporwave is super important and for me has been there since the beginning. It might not be commercial blocks or moving visuals, but even the album covers! Luxury Elite’s World Class, those kind of album covers had aesthetic. To me, that’s vaporwave visuals. The Saint Pepsi Private Caller video is iconic to me. That is vaporwave right there, all of those visuals together. The chaos and flipping through all those ads but they work together perfectly. You need the visuals because the sound of vaporwave is one thing but it’s the visuals that invoke. To have those on the screen to look at enhances the music.

P: Let’s get back into more lore and talk about L I N D A! What’s the story of L I N D A, let’s get it on the record.

CD: How long do you have? *laughs* Before VaporFM there was Krelez Vaporfunk 24/7. VaporFM is the child of Krelez, when we were all hanging out it was the Krelez Vaporfunk channel. On the Vaporfunk channel it’s a stack of TVs as a visual and the bottom middle TV is just a string of commercials nonstop. Compilations pulled from YouTube or Internet Archive or something. But sometimes the TV would freeze, it would just freeze on a still image. It’s frozen on things like the squeeze wrench. One time it froze on some kind of shadow purple entity and it was frozen for a solid two weeks. When this thing showed up we were like, “What the hell, it’s just frozen on the screen and it’s kind of creepy!” We all know what L I N D A looks like, she’s creepy. One of us had said we asked for Linda too many times so that’s how L I N D A got her name. But what does that mean? This is the lore lore. There was another ad that would run sometimes for a catalog called Hot Rock. You’d flip through and order albums from it. Underneath the phone number it said “ask for Linda” and I just thought that was so funny. So that’s where the name came from.

But where did L I N D A come from? We all started this big search, how do we find her? We had a screenshot and not much else to go on. I was certain it was an MTV thing and Carte was certain it was a jeans commercial. Some of our other friends worked with us and we found the commercial, shoutout QT Bear. We found a shorter version and then we found the long version with L I N D A at the end. That ad is the 501 Blues commercial, the very first one which aired in 1984 during the MTV VMAs. So, there’s some fun lore.

P: When you first saw the short video, it didn’t include LINDA but you could tell it must be it if you could find the whole thing?

CD: Yeah, so she’s cut off at the end. I don’t know if you’ve seen the original ad but at the end there’s a couple on a boardwalk and they’re just playful, she kicks him in the butt. I think that’s pretty funny. Then after that LINDA shows up, there’s this guy against the wall. It’s hard to tell exactly what it is.

S: It’s like a stone pillar almost.

CD: Yeah, with a car behind it, like the headlights? So this guy gets up, I can’t tell but he must be some kind of celebrity because they had so many celebrities in these. They had Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander. So many people. It might be Stanley Tucci, that’s my lore. He gets up and walks away and this is what’s behind him, it lingers on that for a minute. None of the other 501 Blues ads from this era have anything like this, this is the only one.

CB: One of us found it. I think I found it?

S: Carte found the original commercial and QT Bear found the extended version that has the LINDA ad at the end.

CD: That’s the one that aired during the first VMAs.

CB: Wait, Fiji’s doing an interview right now and L I N D A’s on screen!

CD: Nooo!

S: Stop it bro! Stop!

CD: I’m going over there right now!