Central Florida's Black Wick and Dylan Houser team up to push vaporwave to the outer limits

Oh, you don’t know what vaporwave is? You’re not alone. But if ever there were a good primer on the niche genre, the new joint by Dylan Houser + Black Wick is it. The extended 18-track album V △ L E N C I △, PART III pairs two luminaries of Central Florida’s outer-limits music frontier. Dylan Houser is a noted noise scene figure, and Joshua Rogers, the mind behind Black Wick, is also the boss of the Illuminated Paths label, one of the leading purveyors of vaporwave.


This collab between the two experimental giants is a textbook odyssey that epitomizes the 1980s fantasia of vaporwave in all its left-field allure. Houser crafted the tracks and Black Wick completed the aesthetic through hours of hand manipulation and layering through vintage cassette stock. The result is the beau idéal of vaporwave.

Bathed luxuriously in soft retro synths and filtered through lo-fi ether, these songs hover in the consciousness, warm and warped, like a neon mirage. Even amid all that ambience, though, this album is one of the more melodically memorable vaporwave collections out there, a quality not always guaranteed in this genre. V △ L E N C I △, PART III. is available digitally or on super-limited-edition cassette through Illuminated Paths’ Bandcamp.

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