Following the release of a new box set celebrating Saint Pepsi’s earliest works in vaporwave, Enzo and Rob caught up with the New York producer to reflect on their legacy; and just how much the genre has changed his life.
It’s worth noting, right off the bat, that Ryan DeRobertis rarely uses the name Saint Pepsi ‘officially’ these days. Not because he no longer identifies with the genre or his brazenly sassy moniker, but rather because of an “anything but friendly” conversation with lawyers from a well known carbonated, cola-flavoured soft drink.
That call came not long after signing to Carpark Records, following the release of a t-shirt design to coincide with the release of Fiona Coyne and Fall Harder – tracks that would win DeRobertis new ears, and a fresh legion of devotees. The episode prompted a swift rebrand, to Skylar Spence; a portmanteau of Skylar Dandridge and Holden Spence from the Woody Allen film Everyone Says I Love You.
DeRobertis, when we catch up with him, is quick to establish that it was never a conscious decision – or an attempt to distance himself from the vaporwave scene that he still very clearly loves:
“I always intended Prom King to be a Saint Pepsi album, and I made Fiona Coyne and Fall Harder as Saint Pepsi songs, because I saw the future of the project merging my interests in sampling and writing more traditional pop songs.
“I never wanted people to think that I was removing myself from the community and turning my back on the music that I made that I still feel really strongly about.”
It was the runaway success of his seminal mixtape, Hit Vibes, that put Saint Pepsi on the radar of record labels, with other iconic releases following in his future funk-leaning canon including Empire Building and, the more traditional vapor collaborative albums Winners Circle and Late Night Delight.
However, it’s fair to say that outside of vaporwave circles, his earliest works are less well known. Something that could be about to change with the release of ‘The Choice of a New Generation’ – a new box set that curates his earliest work and captures a remarkable burst of creativity from an artist discovering his distinctive voice in real time.
Produced on consecutive days, Laser Tag Zero, Triumph International and New Generation capture the rapid evolution of his production skills and signalled the emergence of a bona fide vaporwave icon.
According to DeRobertis, the ‘Saint Pepsi’ project started almost as a cathartic release from the pressures of college and a Political Science degree that his heart wasn’t in. On the verge of dropping out in December 2012 and having left his instruments behind for the Christmas break, he set out to work on a vaporwave album for the first time. Thus, writing the origin story of this hugely influential producer, and an early outlier in the genre that refuses to die (despite continued proclamations).
“That was a difficult time for me emotionally, but discovering the vaporwave scene provided an escape”, he says, reflecting on a turbulent but transformative period in his life.
“But it pretty much saved me too, having a new project to sink my teeth into. It was just nice to be falling in love with something!”
LASER TAG ZERO
Laser Tag Zero was the result of this necessity-born creativity – produced in just 12 hours on what us Brits term Boxing Day, and US residents just refer to as 26 December.
“I didn’t really have a strong concept when I started Laser Tag Zero”, admits DeRobertis.
“When I came home from College, I just downloaded something like 150 songs from old 80s news groups, and I went to town. I started by blatantly ripping off people I was listening to at the time. People like Vektroid, who would sample a lot of commercials; specifically Japanese commercials.
“I really liked that take because it reminded me of what I loved about the internet as a kid. This idea that there were websites where I could find all these crazy videos and just learn about pop culture in a way that wasn’t possible otherwise.”
Whilst less technically ambitious than Saint Pepsi’s later works, Laser Tag Zero is by his own admission an album that came together as part of a learning process – experimenting with sampling techniques and concocting his own flavour of the popular brand vaporwave sound.
For DeRobertis, the skill of sampling is in curation, and the idea – as he puts it – that an individual phrase or passage in a song can be more than just a “little breath in a bigger piece, it can be the whole heart”.
‘浮浪者’ is a perfect illustration of the concept, featuring a sample from his beloved Prefab Sprout’s track ‘Bonny’ (a band that he couldn’t convince his peers to listen to). And the whole album is littered with beautifully nostalgic ideas and sketches.
You can already hear the signature Saint Pepsi sound emerging even in his earliest work.
“My samples were primarily influenced by things that I wanted to turn other people onto. I know at that time that was my justification for sampling in that way.
“I feel like I was really trying to reinterpret music that meant a lot to me growing up and twist it into the world of vaporwave so that people could discover new stuff from forever ago.”
TRIUMPH INTERNATIONAL
Triumph International came a day after Laser Tag Zero, as he began to delve deeper into his archive for potential new source material.
Highlights would include the instant classic ‘Top Gun 2000’, future funk banger ‘dream supreme’, and the wistful ‘never change’.
“With Triumph International I started really getting a knack for what I was doing. I took the name from an old advert that I found, and I sampled it on the album.
“At that point vaporwave was rooted in soul samples and 80s music, and New Wave. So, I tried to look beyond that for inspiration as well and I was sampling a lot of 90s R&B as well as some Sophistopop stuff I was into.
“I started with things that I was super familiar with – stuff that I grew up listening to – and as the albums progressed, I started digging into more, similar artists, and the creation process became a discovery process in itself.”
NEW GENERATION
That intuitive formula of evolution and discovery continued with New Generation, by which point DeRobertis had (by his own admission) become completely immersed in his new alter ego – ‘Saint Pepsi’.
There’s a growing confidence exuding from DeRobertis in New Generation, which features the seminal future funk anthem ‘ビッグバンの祭壇BANGALTER’ and offers the clearest indication of a path towards the sound he’d hit the sweet spot with a few months later with Hit Vibes.
“By this point I was completely deluded. I felt that Saint Pepsi was not only a real person, but he was speaking through me.
“That third album was the biggest album of Saint Pepsi’s’ career up to that point”
“In my imagination, he had done such work that he had put together a whole group of, not so much ‘disciples’, but like-minded musicians that were referred to as The New Generation. It was supposed to be a showcase of what Saint Pepsi could do.”
It’s fascinating to listen to these albums consecutively years later, with the ring pull opened; and now exposed to the context in which they were made.
No audience, no pressure, and no expectations. These were experiments being made in the safety of obscurity, but admits DeRobertis, “I was so unprepared for the hold it would have on my life just six months later”.
“Vaporwave was all I thought about that Winter and there are so many songs on the first few releases that bring me right back to this period of my life.”
So, rise Saint Pepsi – a halo of soda pop dreams circling his head. Together, Pepsi and My Pet Flamingo invite OGs to rediscover these early classics as they build sonically on one another. And, of course, we hope members of a brand New Generation hearing these albums for the first time find infectious hooks, and a crack through a window to a time less burdened by gatekeeping and self-limitation.
A time when you could call yourself: Saint Pepsi.
Written by Enzo Van Baelen and Rob Dyson
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Saint Pepsi’s ‘The Choice of a New Generation‘ is available to pre-order on vinyl and cassette via My Pet Flamingo, with limited copies of the three LPs available individually. The box set is remastered for vinyl by J.Sabourin, with additional artwork by Enzo Van Baelen.
You can purchase Saint Pepsi’s back catalogue on Bandcamp and check him out in the recent feature length vaporwave documentary, Nobody Here.
