by Roy Chalkevski

music by Matt Waldner

Palm trees line southern California’s suburbs.

From his desert dwelling in Arizona, </body> produces vaporwave beats that take listeners back to 1995 booting up their family’s new computer for the very first time. “I probably won’t be doing vaporwave in 5 years,” said Matt Waldner, the one man phenomenon behind </body>, but that was five years ago, and Matt’s vaporwave project is still going strong, consistently releasing albums since it’s conception in 2016.

Matt’s unique approach to creating the soundtrack for the world’s first vaporwave movie, Yucca Fest, spawned a collection of songs hanging out in the realms between vaporwave, lofi, synth, and psychedelia. The resulting blend lends itself perfectly to the scenes they occupy, and completes the stylistic choices made in the film’s edit. Even if fans of the genre don’t appreciate the high concept/low budget filmmaking ever present in Yucca Fest, surely they’ll appreciate the music endlessly flowing throughout the world’s first vaporwave film, a movie that should prove to be an early cult classic.

Listen to a track from Yucca Fest’s soundtrack below:

I sat down with Matt and talked about approaching his first film score, how he juggled vaporwave with the other influences on the soundtrack, and if we’ll hear more of Matt’s specific sound in future movies.

Pete, Summer, Zach, and Kevin (Jey Reynolds, Monroe Cline, Nicholas Harsin, and Dale Van Slyke) look over their heist plans.

So how’d you first get into music anyway?

I picked up piano when I was around 10 and guitar shortly after. I started messing around recording stuff when I was 15 or so, and went on to play in and produce a handful of shitty but fun punk bands over the years.

How long has </body> been active? How did it start?

</body> started in August of 2016, just after moving back down to Arizona for my third year of college. At the time I hadn’t heard much vaporwave, other than some Saint Pepsi and Macintosh Plus, but the more I dug into the genre the more attached to it I became until I hit a point where I just had to try making some myself. I figured the project would be just be a short introduction into producing more electronically based music, I remember even saying “I probably won’t be doing vaporwave in 5 years”, but here I am 5 years later and still going strong with it!

Yucca Fest is full of vaporwave aesthetics like this one.

This is your first time doing a film score, right? How did it differ from your usual process of creating music?

Yeah, this is my first time doing a film score, discounting an “experimental art” short film I did in college haha! It was a drastically different process from how I normally produce in a number of ways. The biggest was going from using samples and heavily using that for the base of a song to creating that same sound and vibe from scratch. In a lot of cases, pieces were much less structured than I’m used to in order to fit what was happening at the time in the scene. Though there were a few instances where I was able to create an original song and “vaporize” it like I would a sample to achieve that classic, slowed down, vaporwave sound.

Another difference was that, it being for a film with a plot and development throughout, the entire score needed to be able to tell a story as well. So I had to adjust from making songs and start thinking in terms of themes and of ways to incorporate leitmotifs that would drive alongside the movements the film makes.

Brady told me he sent over a lot of references that weren’t exactly vaporwave, how did you find the right balance for the score?

When Brady gave me his list of references for how he wanted the score to sound, I put them all into a playlist and listened to it nonstop for a few weeks. I could tell he was looking for something a bit more lo-fi feeling, synth heavy, and had a touch of psychedelic to it; with a vaporwave twist to it too of course! Brady was awesome to work with throughout the production of the score, we vibed really well off of each others' ideas and visions which made composing for the film that much easier and so much fun!

I think there was only one time where he wasn’t really feeling the composition of a track I gave him and even then I was still able to take the track and turn it into what he had envisioned for the scene. He gave me a lot of creative control with the score and in the end I know it’s something we’re both psyched for people to hear.

Pete and Summer (Jey Reynolds, Monroe Cline) look out over a gloomy Los Angeles morning skyline.

There are fourteen very unique tracks from this soundtrack, which is your favorite?

There were a lot of really fun tracks to work on, but the one that was my favorite was "Tickets, Plural" for the standoff in the desert scene. It was a blast melding together a synthy 80’s vibe with a tense spaghetti western sound, two things that in theory sound like they definitely don’t work together, but turned out sounding really fresh and complimentary. I even got to use an ocarina I picked up on my last trip to the Grand Canyon for some flairs that added authenticity to the overall southwestern sound of the piece!

Detective Hayward (Cazimir Milostan) surveys a car as it passes by the festival exit.

Creating a soundtrack can be tricky process for a lot of composers. How do you decide where music should and shouldn’t be?

Honestly a lot of it came from gut feeling and reading the situation of each scene, but I feel like this is what I struggled with most since this was my first time working on a film. And Brady was amazing to work with for this aspect of the project - a lot of times I’d give him a cut with a track on it and while the placement of the track itself was fitting, sometimes it’d bleed a little too much or too little into the space around it so he’d give a time he felt it best to start playing or stopping a track based on the composition and the scene it was in and I’d be able to cut it or rearrange it to fit his vision.

There was also a scene where I told him I purposefully didn’t put music over it because I felt it would distract from the interaction going on in the scene and he totally agreed with me which, once again, it was a joy working with Brady because of how much respect we had for each others ideas and how well they meshed together in situations like that.

Kevin (Dale Van Slyke) stares into the souls of his friends.

So now that you’ve got a little practice is scoring, can we expect to hear more of your music in future movies?

As of right now my future in film is wide open but I’m hoping this will be a great stepping stone into the industry. In the meantime, I have a lot of ideas for </body> that I’ll be working on and ideas for other projects in different genres I’d like to try out. But I’m always going to be down to compose a score for another opportunity like this should it come up in the future!

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It’s all part of the plan as four friends in southern California (Monroe Cline, Jey Reynolds, Nicholas Harsin, and Dale Van Slyke) decide to rob a music festival. The only problem; someone else has their eye on the money.

The film stars Monroe Cline, Jey Reynolds, Nicholas Harsin, Dale Van Slyke, Zachary Zarvos, Enrique Oseguera, and Cazimir Milostan.

YUCCA FEST is directed by Chelsea Murphy and written by Sunshine Green. The film is produced by Brady Trainor, Walt Roseboro III, and Jey Reynolds. Michael Huffington serves as the executive producer. The film is produced by meddle media.

Listen to more music by </body> at bodyendtag.bandcamp.com