Meet My College Roommate, a Moderately Successful Vaporwave Producer

A college roommate of mine now makes music under the name ID Cℎίℯƒ. That moniker might not mean much to the more morally upstanding reader, but for certain circles of suburban teens looking to do a little light-to-moderate-drinking on a weekend evening or between classes or whatever, ID Chief was a godsend. Far removed from urban centers where such low-level debauchery was accessible to anyone with enough street smarts to know the more unscrupulous bartenders around town, bright-eyed young kids with Internet knowhow instead called upon the services of a sketchy website—now reportedly defunct, but then based in China, according to a quasi-official Facebook page—to craft them high quality fake drivers licenses.

I have that website to thank for admission into many age-restricted concerts when I was in my first year of college, freshly plopped down in New York City. But I wasn't the sort of kid who would've been cool enough (or frankly smart enough) to come across such felonious contraband on my own. No, the ID I was using belonged to my then-roommate in Fordham University at Lincoln Center's campus housing, Brant Stuns, then a guitarist in a moderately successful beach pop band called the Young Friends, who was fresh off of a gap year spent on a cross-country tour with the then buzzy indie rock acts Surfer Blood and the Drums. We're around the same height, a similar build, and we share a birthday, so making use of that piece of plastic was as simple as memorizing the Idaho address emblazoned on the front. When he offered the use of one of his two treasures from ID Chief, I jumped at the chance.

Brant moved out of the dorms after our freshman year, partly due to a drunken incident that involved two New York City police officers and our school's head of security storming into my bedroom at 7 am (more on that later). He didn't really get in trouble or anything. He just realized that he wanted nothing to do with our Jesuit school's draconian rules about, well, just about everything, but strictures of dorm life certainly didn't jive with his lifestyle of rampant indoor smoking and alcohol-fueled destruction of communal property. I lived in the dorms for two more years, and he holed up in a surprisingly affordable spot in Hell's Kitchen. We saw each other at a couple of emo-revival shows (ah the early '10s!), but mostly we drifted apart. After we graduated, he moved back to Arizona.

At some point in that span, however, he happened upon vaporwave, that ill-begotten genre birthed at the end of the aughts that thrived on excavating old funk songs and slowing them down as a comment on consumerist culture or something. I never quite figured out the societal critique, and Brant, now known as ID Cℎίℯƒ, says that side of things didn't have much of a draw for him, either. Instead his ear bent toward future funk, the high energy sub-genre built on slopped-together samples of forgotten 80s Japanese pop songs, or late-70s funk hits—often, as he puts it made by "just literally slowing down another song and putting a shit ton of reverb and compressor on it." With just a handful of moving parts, making songs like these seemed achievable, even for someone with rudimentary production chops.

He channeled a lifetime's practice of staying up late and watching YouTube videos into his first experiments with Ableton production. The process was simple: he'd come home from his job as a software developer, flip through old funk playlists on YouTube, and wait for something interesting to pop up. Then he'd download it, slow it down, add a drum loop, and voilà.

Imagine my surprise to learn—in 2016—that both vaporwave (or its offshoots) still had a thriving scene and that Brant was a fixture within it. A few of his tracks have been picked up by influential YouTube channel Artzie Music and viewed hundreds of thousands of times by listeners all around the globe. He's not touring or playing shows, aside from the occasional Twitch-broadcasted livestream, but he's been able to turn a humble practice into a real following, something even his vaguely buzzy indie band was never able to accomplish.

Recently, Brant and I caught up while he was on his lunch break to have a serious chat about what it means to make vaporwave several years after it was a viral Internet fascination—and also to get some insight into that whole police incident.

Do you remember that time we got fined for a noise complaint?
Yeah, we were skateboarding in our living room.

We were making beats too.
[Laughs] Also in the living room! Yeah, that's right. We were skateboarding and grinding on our living room table with a MIDI controller and speakers out there. What were we thinking? We were young, man. That was exactly what we should have been doing at that point in our lives. We should have done it more often.

We just had some jerks living below us.
It was those girls; they really didn't like us at all. Looking back I don't blame them. If I had neighbors like me then I would be pissed.

You drove another roommate out of our apartment. He slept in the lounge until the school would let him change rooms.
From smoking in the living room. Well, that was one of many things. We were rowdy. My life's gotten kind of boring. I live by myself for the first time ever. That works out great because I can stay up really late and do music all the time but it's also really quiet usually when I'm not doing that.

Versus…
Parties all the time and nonstop drinking.

Tell me how you got into vaporwave. You were like mainly listening to emo stuff when we lived together.
I got into it like three years ago…to learn how to use Ableton was the real goal. I realized, "Oh shit, people are just taking other people's songs and using effects and putting their own drums on top of it." I was like…well, that's pretty easy. And then for whatever reason, people actually gave a shit about it? It's cool that these songs are getting attention even though they're just slowed down 80s funk songs with your own drums on it.

Is that frustrating to you to have these songs take off after making records with your band that were actually labored over?
I think that's just really reflective of the times. Nobody wants to hear new shit [Laughs]. They just want to hear a cool beat and some samples. It's like hip-hop for people that don't like hip-hop, if that makes sense.

When you started producing were you aware that vaporwave was already kind of over as a phenomenon?
Yeah, I figured it out real quick [Laughs]. But I never really made vaporwave in the strictest sense. There are like 80 offshoots of it now. Future funk was an offshoot that I saw was coming up, and people were really into it, so I jumped on that. This was a little less boring or ambient, I guess.

How's work on your album going? I remember you had a lot of abandoned projects during school.
I think I've been saying I've been working on an album for like a year and a half now. I've made like three but I've scrapped all of them. God, I just keep getting bored like halfway through. That's kinda just my whole life…getting bored of stuff halfway through.

So a lot of your success has come from this YouTube channel Artzie—what's the deal with the Anime gifs that are paired with each video?
Artzie's in full control. They'll ask if it's cool if they can use my tracks, but I'll always say yeah. A song will get way more views through them than it would ever just sitting on my SoundCloud. They just post it with whatever fitting gif they decide. The whole genre has this whole Japanese fascination. I thought it was cool at first to have an album with all Japanese song titles. One of the first albums I was listening to is Macintosh Plus' Floral Shoppe. Every track is in Japanese. I always thought it was just a trolly thing, like, "Good luck talking about this," but then everybody jumped on it. It's kind of overplayed now.

There's this element of cultural appropriation.
Uh, yeah. Definitely. On Soundcloud, I can see the countries where my listeners are and a big one is always Japan. I'm like, man, are Japanese people seeing these stupid Google-translated song titles into Japanese and wondering "What the hell are these people doing?" I think it'd be really great if Japanese people started making music with really random English titles. But I haven't come across that yet. Japanese listeners just have to think it's the dumbest thing ever.

Thanks for talking to me about all this, it's good to get a peek behind the curtain. One final question…what happened that time the cops showed up in my bedroom?
I totally knew you were going to ask this. I'm just going to exclude names. What's the backstory? There's really no backstory. We were all just drinking. You were asleep.

It was like 7 am for context. The sun was up.
I was in bed too—I'm going to clear that up. There were people hanging out in our living room. Some alcohol containers were thrown out of a fifth story window in the eyesight of New York City's finest. I don't wanna say it was thrown at, but it definitely landed around. The police definitely saw some alcohol thrown out of a window. I woke up to our third roommate saying, "I fucked up; the police are coming; let's go." You were sleeping and the dilemma was, "Do we wake Colin up?" The drunk decision that it'd be better for our case if there was someone asleep. So we did that shit.

They came and woke you up and I imagine you were just like, "I don't know what the fuck's going on." And, um, we thought we'd gotten off scot free. We camped out for a few hours, came back, thought we were fine. We started smoking a cigarette in the living room [ed. Note. this too was very much against the rules of campus housing]. Then the fucking head of security came back by and said, "I know everything; you guys are done." I don't wanna say…it ended up being all fine somehow. I always thought some sort of repercussions would come from that, but nothing ever happened. Lesson learned: say you have no idea what happened if you're ever in any dorm trouble.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ID Cℎίℯƒ is planning on releasing an album "soon," you can find more news on Twitter and Soundcloud.

Colin Joyce is THUMP's Managing Editor and you can find him on Twitter.