A love letter to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 80s and 90s
In the early 2010s a cohort of millennial artists re-imagined the musical soundtracks of 1980s and 1990s to make a new musical genre - among them was computer musician Luke Rowell.
Music curator at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Michael Brown, takes a look at the genre known as vaporwave in his new book Eyeliner's Buy Now.
The book is part of the 33 1/3 Oceania Series, each book deep-diving into a significant album release.
Eyeliner is the alias of New Zealand computer musician Luke Rowell (a.k.a. Disasteradio).
Luke Rowell as Disasteradio
RNZ
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Buy Now was a new kind of album for the internet age, a DIY production using Creative Commons licenses and released for free, Brown says.
Eyeliner mined the kitsch, background music of the 1980s to make an entirely new kind of sound, Brown says.
“There are a few distinct developments to vaporwave. Essentially, it's a musical style that looks back to certain music of the 1980s and 1990s, often musical genres or styles that you might not think you'd be nostalgic about.
“Things like the music of TV advertising, or a soundtrack you would hear as you're wandering through the shopping mall, or the kind of production music that would be running underneath an infomercial channel, the aural wallpaper of this world of the 80s and 90s.”
The music has a vein of utopianism running through it, he says.
“That the sort of hyper commercialism of the time was often couched in this very aspirational, affluent imagery.
“We had all that new tech coming on. So, the household appliances and devices and the early internet. There was a sort of a buzz about that era.”
Michael Brown, music curator at the Alexander Turnbull Library, among the music collection holdings at the National Library.
Mark Beatty / National Library of New Zealand
Vaporwave is nostalgic for the time, but aware that this “utopia never really came to pass,” he says.
Rowell himself has described the genre as “the sound of capitalism imagining its own eternity.”
He emerged at a time when technology was democratising music, Brown says.
“Previously, there was a cost barrier, an economic barrier to producing music. You had to hire a studio. You had to go through the, the whole long, expensive process to produce music of the quality you'd hear on the radio.”
One of the ideas he explores in his book, is that vaporwave was part of a post-ironic culture that emerged in the 1990s.
“They want to kind of get away from that sort of dead end of irony that they felt was in the culture, but at the same time they are reacting to it.”
While there were many other albums he could have delved into, Brown was fascinated by this somewhat obscure genre.
“I got intrigued with this whole genre and how it was looking back to this music of the 80s and 90s, music I was familiar with, but had moved on from.
“I saw it as an opportunity to really look at the some of the broader issues around the development of music since the advent of the Internet.”
