His YouTube channel features visual mixtapes, combining underground hip hop, phonk and lo-fi tracks with nostalgic anime and movie visuals. Trappin in Japan, which began in 2017, is among the channel's most popular series.
Screenshot of a Ryan Celsius YouTube video, showing a first-person perspective of a Japanese highway
Based in Washington, D.C., Ryan Celsius began producing music and making videos in 2005.[1] The same year, his production hardware was stolen, and he lost all the music and videos created.[1] Celsius stated that the event made him stop producing music for eight years.[1]
In the early 2010s, Celsius got interested in the vaporwave culture, including vaportrap and simpsonwave.[2] He opened his YouTube channel in 2011 as a "personal project".[1] The channel's video mixtapes combine underground phonk, trap and hip hop music with nostalgic visuals from popular anime clips and movies.[1][3] Most of Celsius' tracks come from independent artists.[3]
The Trappin in Japan series, which began in 2017, is among the channel's most popular,[4][5] featuring visual mixtapes with first-person footage of people driving or walking through Japanese streets,[3] coupled with clips from nostalgic films such as Akira,[3] and imagery from The Simpsons.[5] He cites YouTube channel Emotional Tokyo as an inspiration for the series.[2] The series, among others, was key to popularizing the phonk genre.[6] Celsius' channel also holds 24/7 live streams of visual mixtapes.[4]
In January 2019,[1] Celsius was hired by indie record label Amuse to build their lo-fi music division.[7] In summer 2019,[8] Celsius' YouTube channel was demonetized and several videos were "shadow banned" due to "misleading thumbnails" in his videos.[3] Celsius stated: "the YouTube policy team cannot understand the link between Japan, trap music, anime, The Simpsons, so since they don't understand my content it must be misleading".[3]
In 2020, Celsius worked with Westbrook Media to create a lo-fi mixtape for Will Smith's YouTube channel.[9][10] In 2021, he performed with Flying Lotus in New York,[11] and was the visualizer maker for the official music video content of the TV series Yasuke.[12]
