The scene that's formed around Dream Catalogue is home to nascent subgenres—dream music, hardvapour and ghost tech—and exists mostly on the internet. Though physical releases are becoming more common, live performances are rare, with HKE making only tentative moves in the festival and DJ circuit. That's in part because of his shyness, and partly due to the scene's geography—Russo is from Liverpool and lives in London, while Telepath (AKA Luke Laurila), his key partner in the label, lives in Ohio. wosX, who created hardvapour and drove Dream Catalogue towards more beat-oriented sounds, lives in Montreal. Russo has also released music from producers in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Portland, Manchester and Chicago. Plenty of others keep their location secret or claim a fictional place as home.Dream music was a reaction to what Russo and his longtime friend Halo Acid (who now runs the label Tekres) saw as the increasing functionality of electronic music. They felt that in the late 2000s, the electronic music they liked was moving away from the more ambitious, album-oriented days of '90s electronica, and they wanted to take a more thoughtful approach."A lot of it is conceptual—trying to create a picture in the listener's mind through suggested ideas, rather than there just being a tune or whatever," Russo explained. "Halo Acid started linking me to vaporwave stuff around 2013, and I saw some similarities between what we had been discussing and what was going on in vaporwave at that time. Vaporwave, even though it has a lot of weaknesses—it's amateur music—I found it engrossing how conceptual it was, the same idea of creating a vision in the listener's mind."Russo tends towards big gestures and lofty ideas. Much of his music is unabashedly grand, and on Twitter he speaks of it in self-aggrandizing terms, though in person he's much more humble. Then again, there's no denying his prolific talent: Russo has released over 100 albums in just a few years, with over 20 different aliases, all of them with their own theme or specific angle.Russo found vaporwave late in its existence (it was popularized by Oneohtrix Point Never's Eccojams in 2010) but the formula hadn't changed much. You take samples of '80s pop, muzak and other genres, slow it down and loop it into something hypnotic. From the outset, Russo's method was different. He would record samples and then write original melodies on top of the loops, because he assumed that's what everyone else was doing. Since he started making beats on a Playstation as a teenager, making music and writing melodies came naturally to him.Russo's idiosyncratic take on vaporwave gave his earliest releases—under aliases like Hong Kong Express (the excellent 2047 album especially), AIR Japan, Penthouse Apartment and Subaeris—an otherworldly quality that a lot of other vaporwave music lacked. It was obvious that there was something special and more considered about Dream Catalogue than your average vaporwave label."I love stuff that's escapist, in a sense," he said. "A lot of the albums I've released are my ideas for films or even novels that I just put out through music instead. My DARKPYRAMID project was actually based on a book I started writing years ago but never finished. And Wong Kar-wai was a huge inspiration to me, especially for my Hong Kong Express project. He does the same thing in his films—he'll use a lot of abstract imagery, and music, to suggest things, rather than be direct about it. Through his films he creates a certain mood and message through abstract ideas. I try to recreate that style with music."Unable to get a label off the ground with Halo Acid, who was dealing with personal issues at the time, Russo found a kindred spirit in Telepath. The Ohio-based producer specialized in lengthy ambient compositions that split the difference between celestial new age and vaporwave's sample flips. Russo described his music as unusually "genuine," a quality that goes a long way in a scene known for layers of irony.Dream Catalogue's early releases were an ethereal take on vaporwave, turning the genre into something beguiling and emotional. But the label did a complete 180 less than a year into its life. When Russo and Laurila first teamed up as 2814 and put out an album made entirely without samples, it signalled the start of an ideological shift for Dream Catalogue. It transformed from a late-period vaporwave upstart into an internet music trailblazer."We wanted to show that you could push the same idea without having to fall back on just ripping music off YouTube and slowing it down," Russo said. "It was so easy for people to get into vaporwave, so you had a lot of artists who had never made music before just ripping songs and retitling them, saying it was their own work. The laziness was off-putting. So in 2015 there was definitely a divide between those of us who wanted to get better as musicians, and those who just wanted to keep doing the same thing over and over."The leap in quality was staggering. Listen to albums like I Am Chesumasuta by Russo, or Pyravid's GooglePlex Bionetwork , and you'll hear music that inhabits its own fully-formed world, largely untouched by other contemporary electronic music genres and made with stellar sound design. Every few weeks, Dream Catalogue released something new that explored a different facet of dream music. Its output ranks up there with any other contemporary ambient label, complete with beautiful artwork, whether you were buying tapes, CDs, vinyl or digital.In 2015, even the label's more traditionally vaporwave music became ground-breaking. Nmesh and Telepathe's split album ロストエデンへのパス was a watershed for the genre, warping layers upon layers of samples into something genuinely like listening to a feature-length film, fulfilling Russo's dream almost literally. The new direction wasn't without its detractors, however, especially in the surprisingly prickly world of vaporwave and post-vaporwave music, where people get into heated arguments over Twitter and occasionally rip off each other's work. This climate, Russo explained, led to the creation of hardvapour.