Michael Brown undertakes a thorough study of Eyeliner's BUY NOW, a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 1980s and 1990s.
Eyeliner's
BUY NOW (2015) belongs to a new genre for our times: vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s on the internet, vaporwave originated with a cohort of millennial artists who reimagined the musical soundtracks of 1980s-1990s consumerism with an adroit mixture of irony and sincerity. One of these was Eyeliner, the alias of New Zealand computer musician Luke Rowell (a.k.a. Disasteradio). For his vaporwave masterpiece, Rowell harnessed computer software to craft a unique album, a catchy, funky, and witty tour through the utopias of advertising at "the end of history."
BUY NOW epitomizes a new kind of album for the internet age: made DIY-style, all digital, free, licensed under Creative Commons, and released to a "virtual" community, an online scene without geographic center.
Drawing on original interviews and the album's production archive, this book uses
BUY NOW's story to investigate what it means to create, distribute, and consume independent music in an era of global networks and digital technology. It places the album in both the real-world and online contexts of Rowell's life and career, from early websites to the Spotify era, from Lower Hutt to the world.
Brown, Michael: - Michael Brown is Music Curator at the Alexander Turnbull Library, part of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa. He has written widely about New Zealand music and co-edited the book Searches for Tradition: Essays on New Zealand Music, Past and Present (2017). He lives in Lower Hutt with his family.
Dale, Jon: - Jon Dale is a writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches across a number of fields (popular music, experimental writing, media studies, criminology, sociology, screen studies) at a number of institutions. He also writes for the English music magazine Uncut, and contributes liner notes and essays to a number of record labels and other publications. He is currently working on several books about DIY and post-punk music, and texts on experimental film and diary film making. He also runs the record labels Tristes Tropiques and Rose Hobart.
Stratton, Jon: - Jon Stratton is Adjunct Professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia and a member of the university's Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre. Jon has worked at universities in the UK and Australia and held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 1998. His areas of interest include Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies and Media Studies. He is the sole author of 12 books and has co-edited four. In 2002 he published Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music. His most recent books include Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (edited with Nabeel Zuberi, 2014), When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945-2010 (2014) and An Anthology of Australian Albums: Critical Engagements (edited with Jon Dale and Tony Mitchell, 2020).
