An immersive WebGL ocean for experiencing the Lost Waves discography.2025

Artist music platforms follow a familiar pattern: Bandcamp offers grid layouts with play buttons, Spotify provides playlist interfaces, Soundcloud displays waveforms. These conventions work for discovery and distribution, but they flatten artistic presentation into functional browsing. For Lost Waves, an experimental electronic music project focused on meditative atmosphere, the standard options presented a problem. The music needed an environment where it belonged, not a generic player skin.

Lost Waves is Mark Forscher's personal music project. Under After designed the digital experience to match the music's immersive quality, building a 3D environment where each release floats as a reflective plane on an ocean surface. Visitors scroll through the complete discography while a star field glimmers overhead and water ripples beneath. The interface removes conventional navigation chrome, allowing the music and visual experience to dominate.

Under After chose WebGL to achieve this. Browser-based 3D rendering through Babylon.js enabled the ocean simulation, water reflections, and spatial audio navigation without app downloads or plugins. The stack combined Jekyll static architecture for content management with real-time WebGL graphics for presentation. GSAP handled UI transitions, and Claude Code supported the technical implementation.

The ocean metaphor aligned with the project name and music aesthetic. Album covers become floating objects in an infinite environment rather than items in a list, and scrolling through releases feels like traveling across water. The approach created real constraints: custom audio crossfading, fallback experiences for devices without WebGL, and careful performance optimization. But the constraints served the goal of building an environment rather than just a player.

The site runs on Jekyll, with the static site generator acting as a content management system for album metadata while Babylon.js handles all visual rendering. This hybrid approach delivers the performance of static HTML with the interactivity of a WebGL application. Album data lives in structured markdown that Jekyll compiles into JSON, which the 3D interface consumes at runtime.

The 3D ocean scene uses Babylon's WaterMaterial for realistic reflections and refractions. Album covers render as textured planes positioned along a horizontal axis, scrolling through the scene as users navigate, with a custom skybox of gradient twilight colors reflected in the water.

Audio playback runs through a custom crossfading system built on the Web Audio API, since standard HTML5 audio lacks the overlap needed for continuous listening. Under After developed a preloading system that fetches adjacent tracks, manages playback buffers, and executes smooth volume transitions, with an audio gate to handle browser autoplay policies.

The lostwaves.com site launched in 2025. The experience positions the music project as an environment rather than a typical discography: visitors spend more time exploring the ocean interface and listening through multiple tracks than they would browsing a conventional music page.

For artists considering alternatives to Bandcamp and Spotify, Lost Waves illustrates a different approach: build the environment where the music belongs, even if it requires custom technical implementation.