Eyeliner's Buy Now

(Hardback)

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A study of Eyeliners Buy Now, a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 80s and 90s. Brimming over with fake wind-chimes, dreamy synth pads, and hyperactive slap-bass, Eyeliners Buy Now is an ebullient homage to the kitsch sounds of the 80s and 90s. Self-released in 2015 on Bandcamp and on cassette by US label Beer on the Rug, the album has come to be regarded as a vaporwave classic. The perfect product for an anxious, hyperreal world, Buy Now poses the question: what is the appeal of the fake and uncool sounds of the past Born in 1983, New Zealand computer-musician Luke Rowell came of age as the digital revolution upturned the music industry and helped shape the outlook of the millennial generation. Buy Now epitomizes a new kind of album for our times: DIY, all-digital, free, licensed as Creative Commons, and belonging to a virtual genre, an internet-based scene without geographic center. Drawing on the albums production archive and interviews with Rowell, this book argues that Buy Now offers both musical pleasure and mental survival-training for an era when sincerity and irony can appear dangerously indistinguishable.

Author Bio

Michael Brown is Curator of Music at the Alexander Turnbull Library, part of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa. He has published widely on New Zealand music, including co-editing the book Searches for Tradition: Essays on New Zealand Music, Past and Present (2017).