Daniel Lopatin (Chuck Person / Oneohtrix Point Never)
Released Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010), the cassette that established vaporwave's foundational technique: loop forgotten commercial music, slow it until voices become wordless, add vibrating echoes until repetition creates trance states. Lopatin described it as "a simple exercise in looping a slowed-down segment of a song while adding vibrating echoes"—minimal technical requirements but results that taught a generation you could make art from cultural detritus. Previously uploaded proto-vaporwave clips to YouTube as sunsetcorp in June 2009, drawn from his audio-visual album Memory Vague. Called himself "an amateur musician" but "a professional recordist," someone who built music intuitively rather than from theory, as he told The Creative Independent: "I'm doing something intuitive. If you're doing some painting, you have a big white wall in front of you. 'Well, what about this? And what about a couple of things here? Oh, no, that didn't really work.' You just don't really know why." Later became the person pop stars call when their records get predictable—scoring Safdie brothers films (Good Time, Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme), producing The Weeknd's Dawn FM, serving as Super Bowl halftime show musical director. The underground electronic musician who influenced an entire subgenre through a cassette of slowed-down loops.