Photos courtesy of death’s dynamic shroud
Any list of the greatest vaporwave acts of all time would lose all of its credibility if it didn’t include death’s dynamic shroud near the top. Since 2014, James Webster, Keith Rankin, and Tech Honors have helped push the niche and often misunderstood genre towards the spotlight of internet music fandom. From the recent career-reinventing epic, Darklife to the most famous vaporwave album of all time, I’ll Try Living Like This, every DDS album is wholly distinct and inimitable. This consistent level of quality is also what makes their release of four albums and 12 projects for their NUWRLD Mixtape Club last year all the more impressive.
I got the opportunity to talk to James, Keith, and Tech about their incredible 2023 run, the mysterious world of copyright strikes, and their ten year band anniversary plans.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes
Interviewed by Ethan Kung
Ethan Kung: Can you guys explain your three main aliases [death’s dynamic shroud, death’s dynamic shroud.wmv, Ghost Diamond Collective], and the differences between them?
James Webster: Ghost Diamond originated with me and Tech back around 2009 or 2010, when we first started making music together. We had been friends and making music in bands since high school, so we decided, “why don’t we just have anything that you do, anything that I do, and anything that we do together put under this umbrella of Ghost Diamond?” That way, if anything that either of us does ever gets successful, we can both share that benefit and double our chances of making it as artists. So it was like a “best friends forever, total trust, go all in” kind of thing. We used to make a lot of music under tons of different aliases, so the idea was that Ghost Diamond would be this label with all these bands, but all of them were really just two people.
As far as the difference between death’s dynamic shroud and death’s dynamic shroud.wmv, that matters a little less. death’s dynamic shroud without the “.wmv” is what we consider “mainline”. Then, when we started doing the Mixtape Club, it was like, “we can do whatever we want, and distinguish that from the mainline by putting in the ‘.wmv’ from back in the day.” But the short answer is that it doesn’t really matter, because nothing matters anymore. So it’s kind of a commentary on that. *laughs*
Tech Honors: Also, “.wmv” is subject to being retconned. Things have had “.wmv” attached, but the other times that we release it, we release it without the “.wmv.” So it’s not really meaningful.
James: But what is? Name one meaningful thing in 2024!
Ethan: Last year, you guys released 12 albums for the Mixtape Club and four mainline albums. And they’re all really, really good! Can you guys explain how you’re able to consistently pump out so much music?
Tech: I think it’s just working as a team. DDS albums can be made by all three of us. They can also be made by two of us. Or they can be made by just one of us. I feel that this would be impossible to do if it was always just one of us, at least while maintaining any level of quality. But if I release something in January, and Keith releases something in February, and James releases something in March, then James has a couple months to work. So we have time to work, although it’s not a ton of time. We also need to shift tapes and do other things like that, so we are very busy. But I think that makes the Mixtape Club possible.
As far as the four mainline albums, technically, none of them were recorded last year. Three of them, Midnight Tangerine, Keys to the Gate, and Transcendence Bot were all originally recorded in 2022 as part of the Mixtape Club, but we worked on and expanded them.
James: Well, Midnight Tangerine was pretty new, I feel.
Tech: Yeah, Keith and I got together and recorded a lot of extra stuff. We even made a new song! But the point is that we had a solid foundation to work from, so it wasn’t like we were recording from scratch. And with After Angel, eight of those songs had been previously released on EPs that we made in the run-up to releasing Darklife. The other four songs also already had a foundation laid, because we recorded them as part of the Darklife recording sessions. So we’re able to do these things because we’ve recorded a lot of music, and we can pull from it at any point to expand on it further or build it out.
Keith Rankin: It’s also basically our main jobs. Even we’re still doing nonmusical stuff, but when you think about how much time people spend working, just in general… If we were just doing music, then an individual releasing 40 minutes of material roughly every three months is not that outrageous. That’s about natural to me, I would say. Maybe that’s a little bit too quick, but I just feel like it’s all the other bullshit that prevents people from doing that.
Tech: Yeah, it’s really hard to gauge how productive the average person is with recording, because any metrics you use are still going to be rooted in the fact that they’re working a regular job, or going to school.
Keith: I remember in an interview from like, 2012, I made a dig at some popular band for taking six years between albums. And I keep going back and forth on whether I still agree with myself or not! Because once you get to a certain level of popularity, so much other crap enters into your life, to the point where if you’re not making music, you’re still doing all that other shit too.
James: And if you’re in a band, and you’re touring, that requires so much energy.
Keith: We’re in a spot right now where we’re focusing so much on recording. Wouldn’t you say it was more difficult to do the Mixtape Club when you two were on tour?
Tech: Yeah, 100%.
James: We were literally sitting in the tour van with a laptop, writing music while we were driving to the next stop. But that’s fine, because we recognized a long time ago that I’m not the most virtuoso guitar player that exists, or the greatest songwriter ever. But we can write a lot of music that isn’t bad or phoned in – at the very least – pretty fast. And here we are at this stage of our lives, and we still haven’t run out of ideas! So I think that means that we’ve chosen the right vocation for whatever it is that drives us.
It’s crazy – Tech put out American Candy about a month ago, this huge mixtape that’s taking the DDS world by storm. And just three days ago, Keith dropped this crazy beat tape [You Like Music]. And here I am, in the stu’, recording stuff on the acoustic guitar! So in this three month span, there’ll be three more albums for the Mixtape Club. I love it, because the longer it goes on, the more ridiculous it gets – just trying to imagine someone joining and being confronted with 41 albums that have come out in a three year span of time. So it’s like, “oh yeah, it’s 40 minutes every three months, that’s no big deal!” But when that consistently happens for years, that’s when it gets epic and hilarious.
Ethan: I think it can be hard to get in, as a new fan. But at the same time, you have that split between Bandcamp and streaming, where I think your discography is definitely more accessible. That’s how I first started listening to you guys – with the albums that were on Spotify. Now, a lot of those albums aren’t even on streaming anymore, so it’s even easier to get into your music!
Tech: I appreciate that. *laughs* That makes me feel like we made a good call.
Ethan: Well, I remember there was a bit of a controversy over [removing some of the albums from streaming]. But there was a reason for that, and it genuinely does make it easier to get into you guys’ stuff on streaming.
James: Yeah, we got a strike on Spotify for using the name “Shenmue”. It wasn’t even for a sample! It was just for using that name, and Sega came after us. If we got another strike, we were gonna lose an extremely crucial revenue stream. So fuck it, we can take down the old mixtapes!
Keith: I just watched a YouTube video about people getting their whole catalogs scrubbed from streaming because of “bot activity.” But it’ll not even be true – it’s random people who are getting accused of bot inflation, and none of them were actually doing it!
James: The more centralized things become, the more it sucks for everyone. That’s the bottom line.
Ethan: Well on YouTube, people can get copyright struck for literally anything. We’re living in this very strange copyright landscape when it comes to things like YouTube and Spotify.
Keith: A few months ago, I recorded a huge Studio Ghibli tier list video that I was gonna put on YouTube. It had the quietest snippets of music from the films, and it got a copyright strike instantly. So I never published it – I was just like, “fuck this.”
Tech: I don’t fully understand how it works, because people release AMVs all the time with full songs and it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Keith: I think the way it works is that the first level is just an AI detection algorithm. For instance, with Studio Ghibli, they have it set up to be immediately blocked at that level. But for Orange Milk [the record label that Keith co-owns], for instance, there’ll be a block or a detection, but we would have to pursue it for it to be a strike.
Tech: So it’s just however the copyright holder has it set up. Interesting.
Ethan: I feel like you guys have a lot of experience, as longtime vaporwave players, with copyright and sampling. If there had to be someone to be able to deal with all that, I imagine you guys would have the correct responses.
Keith: I mean… kind of…? *laughs*
James: Well, we’ve always been big on asking for forgiveness, not permission. But as DDS has become our careers, that’s why we began to pivot. We also lost interest in doing long-form sample stuff, because we’re all musicians who make music with instruments. In the long run, it’s just better for everyone in the group to make more original music. If we do use sampling, it’s in a way that’s either less detectable, or more textural.
Tech: Yeah, a little more removed from the way that we’ve used it in the past, or the way that it often gets used in vaporwave.
Keith: It’s also easier to sample, like… Ariana Grande. She’s too big to care, in a way. The only way that it’s gonna come to a head is if the record label that she’s on decides to start cracking down. But I feel like for a lot of those huge artists, it’s just a bad look to go hunting down samples from artists on our level.
Tech: It’s also likely that it would cost them more to pay their lawyers to send cease and desist letters than they would get from us. *laughs*
Keith: And I feel like Spotify doesn’t want that either, because they’re making literal vaporwave playlists. Why are they doing that? All they care about is the money. They don’t give a shit about anything else.
Ethan: You guys have sampled a lot of soundtracks in the past. How have you guys come to master their sound?
Keith: It was just from listening and being fans of it!
James: I’ve said that our secret advantage when we started death’s dynamic shroud, against the other vaporwave artists from that time, was that we were a little bit older, so we had actual memories from the ‘90s. One of the reasons I wanted to make vaporwave was because I wanted to sample things like Phantasy Star Online and Shenmue, these games that meant so much to me, before someone who didn’t have that experience and just thought it sounded cool started sampling it. If I wasn’t the first person to sample the forest music from Phantasy Star Online – which is a song that changed the whole course of my life, because it got me into new age and synthesizer music – that would be a great personal injustice! So it was this big scramble in the early days to sample all these games that we actually remember, because they may be a little off of the mainstream of whatever YouTubers are talking about when they’re educating young people about the history of video games.
Ethan: Well, James, you just recently released Meoto Iwa [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] with Golden Living Room, and it’s a soundtrack to a fictional anime. I was just listening to it – it’s really cool! Where did that premise come from?
James: We originally started working on that way back in 2018, when I still had a full time job. So I was just flush with cash – it was awesome! I used to go to Japan and Korea a lot, just on weekend trips. I was out of my mind, in retrospect – I can’t imagine having that much money now. Anyways, I was just really enraptured with traveling around Asia. I was making a lot of friends, and one of them turned me onto this Japanese romance movie from the early ‘90s called Between Calmness and Passion. It had a soundtrack by Enya, and I got really into it. I was talking to Joel of Golden Living Room about it, and I said, “what if we made our own soundtrack to a romance movie?” So we ended up hashing out this whole plot – it was kind of a soundtrack, but also kind of inspired by the incidental music from Shenmue, because that’s something that we both share a love for. Joel’s super cool because he’s a classically trained musician – he’s a fulltime music teacher, so we were able to nerd out, and make more traditional compositions and synth music. It took years to actually come out, but I’m really happy that it finally did.
Keith: Why did it take that long? Were you just trying to finish it up?
James: No, it was basically done around 2019. We wanted to release it on the Midwest Collective [a prominent vaporwave and electronic label], and they’re not super active, but they really wanted to do a vinyl for it. It was just gonna take time, and then there were delays, and then finally the vinyl order went in right before I moved to Los Angeles. So that was about a year and a half ago, and it took 8 months for the vinyl to finally get back.
Keith: That’s sick that they did the vinyl. I didn’t realize they were gonna do that.
James: My wife actually did the back art, and the front cover was done by Lisa Ngo – it was worth the wait. We thought, “it’s gonna take years, but let’s do this right. There’s no rush here, so let’s just take our time and get it out on LP.”
Ethan: Speaking of new music – Keith, your new DDS mixtape, You Like Music, just came out. It’s kind of crazy – I’m loving the sound of it! Where did the idea come from to make this faster, more broken up dance sound? That feels like it’s been a lot less present in recent DDS music.
Keith: That’s partly why! I was thinking, where are the gaps left in the mixtape club? *laughs* What’s left to fill? Partly also wanting to do high BPM – I think most of it is like 162 BPM, kind of arbitrarily.
James: Nah, I feel it, that seems about right!
Keith: It was also a collab with me and my friend Galen Tipton, who lives near me in Columbus. We’ve been playing music for years, and the mixtape club has become the outlet for those kinds of things. It was used as an opportunity to finally finish something, which the Club does a lot – you’ll have all these ideas, and the Mixtape Club forces you to finish them. Which is very helpful for me, personally.
Ethan: It feels like a broader direction you guys have been going in is a more rock influenced sound. Tech, it seems like you’ve helped bring that side to the band, from what I can tell…
Tech: Well, I like melodies and chords, and all of that comes from my love for rock music. But all three of us like rock music, and I feel like there’s a stronger urge from all of us to do original composition now. Since we all have a history in rock bands and playing instruments like the guitar, there’s also a natural inclination to get into rock.
I feel like rock music got pretty boring for a while. I was actually just watching a video with my girlfriend last night, where it was playing six seconds of a different rock song for every year from 1955 to 2023. You’re supposed to guess what song it is, and it was pretty easy for the majority of it, until it got to the mid to late 2000’s. It’s not that I haven’t had my finger on the pulse, but it was embarrassing! 1975 was “Bohemian Rhapsody”, 1991 was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – they’re supposed to be the biggest rock songs. But the last 15 years were just like – The Black Keys repeatedly. Foo Fighters repeatedly. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers repeatedly.
James: It’s whoever’s still trapped in the machine! *laughs*
Tech: Yeah, these bands were in their primes fucking 30 years ago! One of them was AC/DC.
Keith: Jesus Christ.
Ethan: That’s crazy. From the 2000’s?
Tech: Yeah, it was like, “what the fuck is this?” Just really bad. It feels like part of that has to do with the splintering of music and genre, and the way that people listen to music now – not siphoning it through a single radio station. But the point is that rock music was out of vogue for a while. We were all really interested in electronic music, and still are – but maybe there’s a rekindling of some of that spirit now.
Keith: It’s sound palette stuff – there’s mini trends and longer trends. Trap music has been the primary mainstream sound for a long time. But things phase in and phase out. You feel it personally – like, “oh, I wanna explore different sounds.” Then, you feel it more culturally – like, “oh, everything around me is veering in that same direction as well!”
James: Like what Keith was saying about the gaps in the Mixtape Club – as a guitarist, sitting down at a keyboard and trying to write a song requires a certain compositional or mathematical headspace for me. But when I pick up a guitar, it’s all visceral. It’s so much fun, because I can just sit down and bang out a shoegaze track in 20 minutes!
Keith: So when you’re playing chords, it’s more automatic than when you’re on piano?
James: No, the same theory is happening in my brain, it just happens with visual patterns instead. Because on the keys, I’m always thinking about which notes I’m actually playing. But on the guitar, it’s more the shape of the chord, and where all the other chords in that key appear as these colorful blobs… it’s just different! And it just rocks!
Ethan: In closing, what can we expect from death’s dynamic shroud in the near future?
James: We’re marching forward, because this is the ten year anniversary of death’s dynamic shroud. So it’s the NUWRLD Decade, and we have a lot of projects in the works that will celebrate the entire catalog of death’s dynamic shroud. So please look forward to that.
Keith: Well, we can just tell you that we’re going to be putting out three beloved mixtapes on LP for the Mixtape Club.
Tech: We also hope to get together later this year to start working on the proper follow up to Darklife.
James: And who knows how that’s gonna go! We’re just gonna bring a bunch of instruments, go out into the mountains, remove ourselves from civilized society, go full Lord of the Flies, and make an album. I’m really looking forward to that.
Tech: Lord of the Flies? *laughs*
James: Because we’ll be removed from society! And y’know, Tech, Keith, and I are kind of the id, ego, and superego – we’ve got the whole allegory going on. So it’s gonna end in bloodshed… and tears!
Ethan: Ok, that sounds good! That’s got me way more excited than I thought I could ever be about Lord of the Flies.
You can listen to death’s dynamic shroud’s streaming catalog here:
And their Bandcamp catalog here:
