October marks the return of Vaporwave Alive, //CHILDRENOFVAPOR’s premier autumn URL festival. Streaming live from October 23–25 on twitch.tv/DJNightleek, the three-day event showcases over 15 hours of vaporwave, signalwave, and experimental internet music from artists who truly carry the heartbeat of the scene.
This year’s theme, ‘Gleaning the Harvest,’ invited creators to dust off abandoned project files, revisit interrupted demos, and craft fresh audiovisual sets to bring new life to the showcase. From glitched-out retro gaming sets, to late-night ambient drone and custom video art, the scope of this year’s showcase has doubled in scale compared to last year’s inaugural festival.
Every festival possesses its own distinct energy. As a member of //CHILDRENOFVAPOR (CoV), having a peek behind the curtain makes it clear that the collective remains deeply rooted in a forward-looking vision for experimental music. Vaporwave Alive II captures that exact intersection of classic roots and emerging talent. The roster bridges celebrated scene staples like ｔｅｐｈ ｃｏ. 愛, OceanCountyMall, and E Z R A ゴーバー alongside exciting, fresh voices such as 本物NoreMac and УВБ-76.
Beyond the stellar lineup, the festival maintains an undeniable DIY authenticity. The production workflow includes custom visuals and full stream renders recorded directly to physical VHS tape, which are then rebroadcasted live to capture that unmistakable analog CRT texture. It is a testament to the passion that makes modern vaporwave so vibrant when spearheaded by dedicated communities.
Ahead of the broadcast, I sat down with event organizers Pool Plants and Nightleek タマネギ to discuss the festival’s origins, its evolution, and what viewers can look forward to next weekend.
Looking back to the start, what was the original catalyst or spark that birthed the first Vaporwave Alive? Why was a virtual, URL-focused space the right home for this community?
NL: I remember Pool saying something like, we should do a URL fest and I thought, that’s too much man, are you crazy, but then I went to i2k 2025 and came back a changed woman. I knew that live shows had to happen, and the URL format was great because that gave people time to show themselves off without having to get plane tickets and hotels, plus I have a few years of streaming under my belt already.
PP: I also thought it was too crazy to do a festival until all of a sudden it didn’t seem that crazy. By mid-summer 2025 we had a decent number of members, we were starting to make connections in the larger scene, and we had a killer streamer in Nightleek to host it all. I personally was really enjoying attending live URL events during the year or two prior. In fact it was at Beats for a Broken World that summer where I first connected with Ishiiburidai while mutually enjoying some dubstep. And then our collaborative set that came out of that was sort of the genesis for this whole thing, for me at least.
This year’s theme is “Gleaning the Harvest.” What does that phrase mean to you in the context of vaporwave, signalwave, and digital art right now?
PP: We were talking about the theme for this year and wanted to lean more into the fall season. But Halloween is already pretty well represented in the scene so we started thinking “harvest festival.” I’m not really sure why but my mind turned to the concept of gleaning, the ages-old practice of letting people go through the fields after the main harvest to gather the leftovers which are still good.
Everyone has projects that fizzled out or were interrupted, ideas that never made it out of the brain, things like that. I wanted to offer an opportunity to revisit an old idea or an unfinished project that is worthy of full realization. For me this meant getting to finish off a set of songs and visuals that Robin Circle and I had first started working on towards the end of last year and it felt stalled at points but this ended up being the perfect venue to finally premiere it.
Now that you have the first festival under your belt, what did you do differently this time around? What was the biggest lesson from year one?
NL: Last year we pushed very hard and I ran myself ragged, because I’m the kind of gal who is used to doing everything on her own. I wanted everything to be perfect right from the get-go. We sent a ton of emails and DMs to get certain people we wanted, we hunted our friends down, made exceptions for cutoff dates, I got everyone’s song titles and time codes and put MTV-style lowerthird title cards on EVERY song people did, etc. Everyone said it didn’t feel like it was our first rodeo, and that was the point. There are some things I wish I’d done this year in that regard but due to my work schedule and health issues I just couldn’t. The biggest lesson I took away was that I don’t have to do everything on my own anymore, and I can look to this awesome collective we’ve built together for ideas, help, energy, and support. This year I’ve been just focusing on the final result, and letting everyone else handle the other elements along the way. I’m really grateful to the collective and the committee and everyone who volunteered this year. We couldn’t have done this without everyone’s enthusiasm and help.
PP: I did a lot of the organizing and background work last year and I was ready to take that on again but I knew that if we were going to go bigger that we would need more help at some specific points, especially regarding promotion and things like that. So we got a proper committee of CoV members this year and that has already resulted in some really excellent promotional flyers and a much wider canvassing for submissions than we were able to do last year.
I also knew we were going to need more help with visuals. I’m really proud of having brought together a lot of excellent visual artists to help out and ultimately nobody had to do more than two visual sets for other artists despite getting a lot of audio submissions. And I built up my own skills in the last year as well so I’ll be taking on more of the video production side of things this year.
In what ways is Vaporwave Alive II bigger or more ambitious than the inaugural stream?
NL: As far as I can tell it’s going to be pretty much the same scope as last year, but maybe a little bigger, I’m writing this before the submission deadline and you know how it is, we might get an influx of last-minute goodies that extend us to TWO VHS TAPES instead of just one.
PP: I’m happy to contradict Nightleek here and say that it’s quite a bit bigger this year. As I said we were able to cast a much wider net for submissions compared to a year ago. In fact, last year we did not do open submissions because we wanted to keep things manageable compared to what we had seen with some of the larger festivals. But for the reasons I said above we felt confident about seeing how big we could make it. And we have more members, more friends and connections in the scene, and we’ve also been reaching out to other scenes and subgenre communities through personal connections. So yeah I think we might be… twice as big as last year when it’s all counted up.
NL: I’m happy to come back and edit this document to agree with Pool Plants on this, I’m blown away by the sheer volume (pun intended).
Can you tease a few artists or styles that viewers should be especially hyped to see?
NL: You know me, I’m a slut for WVSQD so the sets submitted by those cats are what I’m gonna be screaming over. Also I’m excited to premier some new late nite lofi along with my first ever rap singles. I still can’t believe we got Renegade Cut to join us. He’s new to the vaporwave scene, having pivoted his massive youtube channel almost entirely from video essays to vaporwave in the past year or so, and I’m excited to see his meandering, heartfelt style.
I don’t watch submissions in advance, though, so I have no idea what anything is gonna look or sound like yet! I save that for day-of so I can give my honest, raw reaction during the hosted segments. It sounds corny, but I’m excited for ALL OF IT.
PP: I can’t shout out everyone, that would be silly. There’s so many really cool ideas that are coming through… There’s a really cool glitched up Mario 64 set that caught my eye immediately. Solodolo84 has delivered a solo set which is truly amazing and inspiring to me personally that I won’t spoil. ako is someone who I didn’t quite connect with in time last year so I’m really excited to have a set from him this year. We have a few contributions this year from the Cities Aviv discord community via CoV member Camcorder Ambient so I think that will be a fun addition. If I keep going I’ll just have to name everyone!
Thinking back to the first Vaporwave Alive (and the submissions coming in for II), what are some of your favorite visual sets or moments that stood out to you personally?
NL: I remember the BORT/EZRA colab being especially fucking good. The overall feeling of everyone coming together and pouring their heart into the project really made it special.
PP: Again it’s hard to pick but I want to specifically shout out a few folks who I originally connected with through r/vaporwave for this festival. BAИSHI, Toys From Taiwan, and Stop, Look, Listen all caught my eye at the end of last summer and I just cold called them to invite them to submit and I was so glad that they said yes. And now BAИSHI is a CoV member and the other two released guest albums with us this summer and we’ll get to see sets from all three again this year so I’m just really glad it all happened.
When the three-day stream wraps up, what do you hope viewers and participating artists walk away feeling?
NL: I hope that this event is life-affirming for everyone who gets to see and hear it. I want people pumped and clicking these artists’ links and giving them follows, likes, and money for their hard work.
PP: I want viewers to have fun, to have their minds expanded, to see and hear some new things that they couldn’t have imagined before. I want the people who are watching that make art to feel inspired, to connect with each other in the chat rooms, to maybe feel challenged to try something new. And I want the participating artists to feel like this is a supportive stage for their art and to know that we at //CHILDRENOFVAPOR really value and appreciate their involvement.
For anyone reading who wants to dive in on October 23–25, where should they go, and how can they best support the creators involved?
NL: I’ll be streaming it on my twitch page, username DJNightleek. After this event I’ll be building up a new website for the radio station and I’ll air it on there for a while too, and the source VHS will be uploaded to my youtube (same username).
PP: If you see something and you like it, go support that artist! Follow their accounts, like their videos and listen or buy their albums on Bandcamp, and TELL THEM that you like them! We’ll be posting links throughout the whole festival so go ahead and click on that shit. We very much look forward to seeing you!
EVENT AT A GLANCE
- Event: VAPORWAVE ALIVE II: Gleaning the Harvest
- Dates: Friday, October 23 – Sunday, October 25, 2026
- Primary Stream: twitch.tv/DJNightleek
- Archives & VODs: YouTube (@DJNightleek)
- Presented By: //CHILDRENOFVAPOR (CoV)
- How to Support: Artist Bandcamp, social, and store links will be broadcast live in the Twitch chat throughout the weekend!
If you enjoyed this article and want to stay updated with our latest content, subscribe to our newsletter !