If you’re into slushwave, there’s one artist you simply couldn’t have missed. My first encounter with ｔｅｐｈ ｃｏ. 愛’s music also known as Tephra happened during Signalcon 2023, an online festival organized by 直子coed ( check their collab ＮAＧ♢ＹA░Ｍ AＬＬ░ＤAＴΞ░ 1 9 8 5 ). After that festival, I kept an eye on this emerging artist. While preparing for the first Vaporloot Festival, I reached out to invite him, and that’s how we started talking. Following an appearance on French radio with myself and a performance at the second Vaporloot Festival, it felt only natural to ask him to get more involved in our new Vaporloot project by writing a short article about a few albums that inspire him.
As always these records are making their way into the Dungeon !
M y s t e r yミステリー & desert sand feels warm at night – 人生は幻想です
This album is quite special to me because the energy I received from it spoke to me in a profound way. It instilled within me a sense of clarity in purpose, atmosphere, and sound when it came to the music aspect of my art. Particularly the final track of this album, この世のものとも思えない, which is a collaboration between both artists, sparked an interest in the mysterious (no pun intended) as well as concepts that are transcendent to the human experience. It also inspired a part of my story which involves the metamorphosis of a person into a being of unknowable capabilities, even truly to the wielder themself. The cover art evokes, to me, an image of a god/goddess shaping the fate of not only Earth, but the inhabitants as well; as if she is the patron deity of the planet. I took that sort of concept even further by putting this character, in control of universal power (“this character” being the CEO of ｔｅｐｈ ｃｏ. 愛), and shaping the fate of only humanity due to human selfishness; toiling away in dimensions hitherto unknown to mankind, in order to preserve their existence for all of eternity, eventually encouraging the abandonment of the physical realm at the right time. I think it is both beautiful and terrifying that the motivations of a being of such heightened existence can be boiled down to some of the most primal, most human emotions: fear and love.
death’s dynamic shroud.wmv – DERELICTメガタワ & 失われた時REGRET
Derelict Megatower (DERELICTメガタワ) as well as the album Lost Time Regret (失われた時REGRET) played a huge role in inspiring a lot of the effects work that goes into my tracks. The subtle world building of DERELICTメガタワ also gave me tons of inspiration for how I want to approach the story of the universe that my music and art centers around. The distortion, delay, and often drowned out in reverb and compression techniques that are applied to these DDS projects are something I strove to replicate when I first started out making vaporwave, and is something that can be observed with plenty of songs throughout my discography. The HEIGHTS series as well as partially the MEGASTRUCTURE series were fairly inspired by both DERELICTメガタワ and 失われた時REGRET, giving me the desire to inject Science Fiction into my universe of the mystical and esoteric.
猫 シ Corp. – Palm Mall Mars
Exploring Palm Mall Mars led me to play into the idea that a company’s expansion, given enough time, resources, and support, could extend to the stars. In the ｔｅｐｈ ｃｏ. 愛 universe, the timeline proceeds way further in time and much farther out into space than Mars (heavily implied throughout my stories) into the darkest depths of the cosmos. I think the main thing that stuck with me is how sanitized the experience feels; that feeling of a nice breeze on a perfect day, yet you are indoors. How is it possible to be inside and still feel a breeze like that? And even the sunlight on your skin. The smell of the beach is also permeating through the air somehow, but you don’t question it. You enjoy the music and the ambience, letting the various store signs and display windows guide your shopping trip. Did you even plan on ending up here? Well you’re here anyways, might as well buy something. Albums of mine like Future Shopping Experience, Nagoya Mall Date 1985 (w/直子coed), and Amor En El Trabajo capture this sort of feeling and recontextualizes them to fit within the grander story of my universe.
The Caretaker – Everywhere At The End Of Time
If you’ve listened at all to my Tephra alias, you’d definitely recognize the Caretaker inspirations within the discography. Hell I created an entire 7 album fan project directly inspired by EATEOT, which definitely helped me through some things personally in my life. The rest of my discography on that alias is definitely inspired from his other various albums as well, and for sure carried over to my ｔｅｐｈ ｃｏ. 愛 alias in terms of energy, atmosphere, and ambience. Everywhere At The End Of Time in particular, though, left such a deep impression on me, it genuinely was a sort of spiritual journey of regretful, eerie, and uncanny nostalgia which widened my perspective on life, art, people, and things that transcend those things. I’ve listened to that album many times all the way through as well as pretty much all of The Caretaker’s albums, and whether you’re hearing the eerie horns and strings or the melancholic piano echoing through vast vistas of time and memory, you will get whatever feeling the artist intends for you to feel. The way the tracks in this album speak to me is what I strive to replicate through my music and art, in order to affect change, no matter how miniscule, in someone’s heart for the better. Enduring through this long album is beyond words, with or without context, it is truly a listening experience unparalleled by any in my humble opinion, and is one that I think I will remember for the rest of my life.
phlyingphrogphilmz – Bars For You
This one is interesting, even though it’s not an album, but a single, it still has had a massive hand in inspiring the general vibes of my music/art. It’s particularly interesting because it’s actually the earliest known Vaporwave video on YouTube! Yep, that’s right, it’s older than the infamous “nobody here” video by sunsetcorp (Daniel Lopatin) by just under a year! Bars For You was uploaded on July 30th, 2008! While nobody here was uploaded on July 19th, 2009. For many years it was stuck at less than 100 views, as only a select few individuals in the community watched it and remembered its existence. About 2-3 years ago, I was tripping on shrooms, and a random user on the r/Vaporwave sub reddit (of all places) posted a link to the video, and I was lucky enough to be one of the first viewers of that video almost 15 years or so after it was posted. While the original artist never labeled it as vaporwave, as the term hadn’t been coined yet by this point, if you watch the video you can certainly see how the music and visuals most definitely coincide with what vaporwave ended up being. The sample, a slowed down and reverbed/delayed version of The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You” matches perfectly with the visual of an SMPTE Color Test Bar Image being distorted, zoomed in and out of, and otherwise messed with using various trippy visual effects. This precursor to the genre has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what can be done with any sample within this genre, and I will forever be thankful for it. I wanted to include this one to bring more attention to it, as I think the artist deserves it 🙂
Thank you to ｔｅｐｈ ｃｏ． 愛 for playing along with the exercise. If you don’t know him yet, I highly encourage you to check out his music especially the album ｆｕｋｕｏｋａ 日本, which recently got a new release on B O G U S // COLLECTIVE, featuring four brand new exclusive tracks! And if you have a bit of money set aside, why not grab the remaster of his album 横浜 HEIGHTS, available on cassette via egoscapes ?
You can follow him on those link :
Bandcamp : https://tephco.bandcamp.com
BlueSky : https://bsky.app/profile/tephratephcomusic.bsky.social
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/tephradubstep
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