──『 CHAPTER ONE 』_ Mysterious Past ──

R23X, otherwise known as VHS Stills, Video-20XX, or just simply Marc Junker, is an award-winning artist, composer, musician, producer, clothing designer, and avid cyclist based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. Best known for his incredibly atmospheric and vaporwave style tunes, Marc has accomplished a lot for himself and the community that he has helped to cultivate. As an artist and producer at The Yetee, Marc has a deep connection with the world of video game music vinyl, and nothing less could be said about his involvement in its growth over the years. Being an avid gamer himself, Marc is intrinsically connected to the work he creates and shares with the world. As a vaporwave artist he has completely woven all of the things he loves most into an expression of his passion for gaming as an art form. Marc shared with me the sheer happenstance that led to his wonderfully artistic renaissance.

“I think it was around late 2012 or early 2013... I had discovered a box of VHS tapes on the side of the street. There were some classics in there but also a bunch of home recordings. Sitting on the top of the pile was a tape with ‘FFVII Aeris Death Scene’ scrawled in mechanical pencil on the spine. I was immediately interested and biked to a thrift shop and picked up an old RCA VCR, sat down, and watched the entire tape. It was basically all the good cutscenes from FF7, 8, 9, Chrono Cross, [and] Parasite Eve: the classic PS1 era. The dullness of the VHS visuals/sound and the early high-concept 3D was too beautiful... so I started the VHS Stills Tumblr (http://vhsstills.tumblr.com) around this time and started just posting pics of the TV [with] that tape. I eventually decided to plug in my Wii and PS3 to the VCR and start making my own captures of NEW and OLD games on VHS. Zelda: Skyward Sword, Journey, Tales of Destiny II, [a] bunch of classic FF games; I went on a rampage replaying classics and discovering games that I'd missed. I was making lots of recordings while playing. I guess this is what got my blog attention [in] the vaporwave community. It's actually how I discovered vaporwave in 2014. People were very interested in my raw, glitchy VHS aesthetic. And they were even more keen that it wasn't a filter... that it was actually analog. So I had a lot of people approaching me, and the blog gained a lot of steam. During this time I started avidly making video game-centric beats -- R23X was born; my first 3 releases OST(1).rar, OSV: Original Sound Version, and SOUND_TRACK ~ [MP3].torrent were all made back-to-back in the 2014-2015 range."