Last time I spoke with Pete Curry, he was making music under his own name and running a label called Crystal Pistol Records alongside close collaborator, Justin “Saw” Black. The two friends were in building mode, creating community by curating the sounds they were enjoying around Richmond.
Fast-forward eight years, and Curry has gone from establishing a locally focused label to conjuring whole worlds with his music, and constructing a career within the geographically dispersed yet sonically cohesive electronic genre called vaporwave. In this context, Curry is known widely as FM Skyline, and 2025 is shaping up to be a pivotal year. He has decided to go full time with his music, and he’s on the verge of releasing “Music 2,” a full-length album made alongside a colleague from vaporwave’s flagship record label, 100% Electronica.
As FM Skyline, Curry has performed at festivals, sold out several vinyl pressings and formed collaborative relationships with like-minded artists in Spain, New Zealand, Brazil and far corners of the United States. “This internet music scene that I got involved in is so all over the world,” he says. “It’s been a radically different sort of chapter, but all the DIY stuff I was doing gave me a good basis for making the most out of that.”
Searching for a sound
Curry grew up in New Jersey across the border from Philadelphia, in a town called Palmyra. He moved to Richmond to attend Virginia Commonwealth University, and while he’d hoped to study composition, scarcity of spots in that program led him to focus on piano. “The piano program seemed like a way to learn both at the same time,” he says.
Shortly after beginning at VCU, he began working as assistant music director with the Greater Richmond Children’s Choir, a position he held for 14 years. “I didn’t know much about that world,” he admits. “It was just something that the founding director offered me to kind of get my feet wet working in music.”
His search for his own sound has been ranging. He played in screamo and hardcore bands in high school, contributed keys to an “insane” (his words) Richmond-based punk band called the You Go Girls and sat behind the kit for local surf rock group Deathbirds Surf Club. The 2015 garage rock album he released under his own name, “Advice on Love,” has maintained a degree of resonance around Richmond. Local jazz vocalist Kenneka Cook covered the opening track, “Don’t Ask Me,” on her 2018 album “Moonchild,” and the song’s lyrics ring prophetic in retrospect: “Follow through with everything you do / If it’s true then I’ll be seeing you.”
For “Advice on Love,” following through meant taking what he describes as “real crappy” demos he made with a multi-track home cassette recorder and expanding their scope at the Virginia Moonwalker studio with the help of his friend, Russell Lacy. While he likes how it turned out, he’d do things a little differently if given a redo. “I wish that I kept it more where I had it,” he says. “I had a vision there in this cassette world, this little bubble… I was only giving myself so much time for details back then. I was just kind of like, go, go, go, go. I can see the vision a little bit better now, in retrospect.”
[Style’s Editor remembers talking to Curry almost a decade ago about their shared love of the music of Elliott Smith, below is an example of past Curry songwriting in a similar vein from 2016’s “Doin’ Nothin'”]
Certain musical styles are especially effective at transporting you to a different time or place. Grunge unavoidably summons the 1990s. Bossa Nova might drop you on the beach in Rio de Janeiro or into a conversation pit in the middle of a midcentury cocktail party. Vaporwave, its name derived from illusory or over-hyped software, is uniquely suited to transporting the listener to a place out of time—a parallel universe that shimmers with the early information age’s pastel aesthetics and utopian hopes.
It was around 2016 when Curry began crossing over into this musical hyperreality. While spending some time in North Carolina with friends in alternative rock band the Nude Party, Curry was struck by the soundtrack to a Coneheads-parodying adult DVD the members of that (coincidentally named) band had found on the side of the road. He found the synth-heavy music to be captivatingly accessible. “It sounded like it had all been made on two synthesizers tops,” he remembers. “I’m picturing this guy in this room with the synthesizer, and there was some kind of fascination with that approach that was sparked.”
Making it real
Curry dipped his toes by recording a couple of songs to his cassette machine using a Walmart-grade Yamaha PSR keyboard he had on hand—“one of those keyboards that has all the demo songs in it and the beats built in and all the really plasticky saxophones,” he says. The rest is the stuff of vaporwave legend. Accelerating SoundCloud play counts. A 2017 debut FM Skyline full-length, “Deluxe Memory Suite,” released as a cassette on his own Crystal Pistol imprint. A pair of follow-up releases on the Business Casual label in 2018, then 2019’s “Advanced Memory Suite,” which can’t seem to stay in print.
“I talked [Blue Sprocket Pressing] into doing a rare vinyl run, and we sold it out in like a day while I was on the road with [Saw Black],” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy that you can do that.’ Who sells out vinyl records?”
That album has sold through three limited vinyl runs—the first via Business Casual, the last two via 100% Electronica. Curry had initially hoped the first pressing might find a home at the latter label, which was founded by George Clanton, a Southwest Virginia-raised onetime Richmonder who is among the genre’s defining acts. Though the two never connected as Richmond residents, Curry remembers seeing Clanton perform as Mirror Kisses here, and 100% Electronica’s well-curated combination of sound and aesthetic—and its bustling merch line—caught his eye. When “Advanced Memory Suite” was complete, he emailed Clanton the album. But the connection didn’t happen right away.
“He didn’t get to see it,” Curry says of Clanton, “which he told me he regretted later, because we could have made it bigger … But somehow Satin Sheets heard the record, which is great, because he had inspired some of it.” Curry had been admiring the work of New Zealand-based, 100% Electronica-signed producer Ben Pogson, also known as Satin Sheets. Pogson sent a recommendation Clanton’s way, and Curry entered the 100% Electronica orbit. He’s delivered a trilogy of subsequent albums, including 2024’s “Images”—yet another sold-out vinyl pressing.
Each FM Skyline release has felt like its own dimensional plane, thanks in part to the project’s distinctively angular and uncanny album art, as well as video accompaniment that Curry builds in an old version of Blender, the 3D computer graphics software. Like many musicians, Curry began self-recording early. But even his early sonic experimentation had a multifaceted feel. “I used to have a little tape player, and I had the Petey Show — it was like a variety show, just me talking to my tape machine.”
These days he’s into mood boarding as a means of collecting images that strike fascination. “Often, I’ll be working on music first, and then I’ll reach a point where the music and an image that I’ve seen click together, and I get this big hallucination of this world thing going on,” he says. “Then I try to hold onto that and build that out.”
A shared vision
“Music 2” afforded Curry the opportunity to build alongside Equip, a label colleague (real name Kevin Hein) who helped Curry launch the 2021 FM Skyline album, “Illuminations,” by performing at a release show in Los Angeles. Curry calls that “a really exciting moment” in retrospect.
“He launched this new set of his where he had done this Robert Miles, ‘Children,’ hard-dream trance thing to all of his old tracks… I love that kind of stuff.” Curry was drawn to those sounds in spite of the fact that, or perhaps because, he’d never attempted to incorporate them in his own work. “I’m really minimal in my production,” Curry says. “I use a lot of Logic stock plug-ins, and he’s got a lot of really high-end plug-ins and stuff that he knows how to use super well. He’s really brilliant there.”
Hein is another world builder, drawing on the sounds of new age and old video game soundtracks to make music that’s adventurous, ethereal and danceable. “He’s got some secret resources—industry secrets that also our label owner, George, uses that I haven’t integrated into my setup. It has to do with with the drums.” After Curry sent Hein a few ideas, the two producers decided to combine forces, and they weren’t content to work virtually.
“Why don’t I come to Chicago, bring my keyboard.” Curry remembers thinking. “I’ll start playing chords, and we’ll start building tracks.”
Multiple trips to Chicago over the course of a year or two yielded a best-of-both-world-builders scenario: nine tracks with all the wobbling swagger of an FM Skyline album and a quickened pulse made possible by Hein’s contributions. “Music 2” reflects a variety of electronic subgenres, from house to breakbeat, jungle and beyond—sounds Curry likely wouldn’t have reached for himself. “It would have felt outside of my catalog,” he notes. “But it was a perfect occasion for both of us to do that, because it’s like we’re getting together and we’re going to throw a little music party for everybody.”
His decision to pursue music full time is its own reason to celebrate, especially at a time when so many artists are struggling to wring a living out of paltry streaming royalties and slim touring profit margins. Leaving his teaching position with the Greater Richmond Children’s Choir was difficult, and he considered putting off the transition. “I’ll wait till next year, wait till next year,” he remembers thinking. “It was fulfilling in a lot of ways, but it wasn’t really something that would grow. It was a little bit of a labor of love, and in return, I was getting a [sense of] security out of it. But it was just time to move on.”
Having 100% Electronica behind him doesn’t hurt. “It’s really the DIY label dream,” Curry says. “Everybody that works with the label—they have all run labels. Kevin has run his own label. I’ve run my own label… We’re all kindred spirits in certain ways. We’ve been brought together serendipitously, and we’re all self-starters, so it works really well.”
“Music 2” comes out on Friday, March 14. To hear and purchase the album, visit 100percentelectronica.com. To hear and purchase FM Skyline’s previous releases, visit fmskyline.bandcamp.com.
