Eyeliner’s Buy Now

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.

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).