Kiwi vaporwavers explained in revelatory tome

You’d think that it might be hard to justify a 149-page book on an album by a boutique electronic music project that’s hardly well-known, even amongst self-appointed popular music aficionados. Although I’d fleetingly heard of Wellington-based act Eyeliner (aka Luke Rowell), it was news to me that his 2015 album, Buy Now, was considered one of the most satisfying examples of the vaporwave genre. But this must be so, because there’s now a book testifying to its greatness, not only in great detail, but with a convincingly thoughtful narrative by author Michael Brown, whose day job is Music Curator at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

It’s Brown’s access to the minutiae of Rowell’s work through the video screencasts – amounting to over 22,000 words of commentary – the artist provided to the library that help to make the book quite unlike any other in the long history of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series or its more recent Oceania titles. Proximity to an artist can often cloud a writer’s perspective, but Brown’s lucid critique and explanations are a revelation for anyone keen to see inside a parallel universe of music creation.

Had Brown simply sought to trumpet the greatness of the Buy Now album his book may have fallen flat. Instead, he piques the interest of the curious with a potted history of electronic music and the way both technological advances and the consequent changes in lifestyle and contemporary aesthetics led to the all-digital genre known as vaporwave. This makes for a fascinating and often eye-opening read, even for a music dweeb like me.

The vaporwave movement, Brown explains, is distinct from past electronic music movements in that its exponents are millennials whose attitude and music is post-irony. Where previous micro-trends in electronica have utilized 1960s easy listening so-called bachelor pad tropes in a wink-wink fashion or grainy samples for their nostalgic value, by the time vaporwave became a thing around 2010 obvious samples were being eschewed in exchange for ultra-digital work stations. The sampladelia of the ‘90s had been replaced by the laptopica of the ‘00s leading to a point where artists like Rowell created exclusively with infinitely malleable (and freely available) sounds via plug-ins. In a sense, these were still samples but infinitely slice’n’diceable, allowing Eyeliner to create a perfectly plastic world of vaguely dance-oriented music that avoided the implied value judgements of previous generations while playfully experimenting around the edges of genre and style.

Buy Now is represented as the ultimate flowering of the vaporwave genre and its crowning achievement, its success appropriately measured not in sales figures or critical acclaim but in streaming statistics and the noise around the release on forums dedicated to the genre.

Chapter 4 is a track-by-track examination of the album and Brown’s near-forensic prose unlocks the recording’s secrets in a way that a mere streaming service audition won’t achieve. For instance, his examination of ‘High Heels’ reveals the piece as a dig at genderizing in shoe advertising. Rowell himself explains that: “It’s about this really strange view of femininity that I grew up with in advertising where all women need to be easy-breezy… this sort of ‘professional’ woman. But it was all sort of naïve and kinda gross.” But then Brown expands on the nuts and bolts of the piece: “Luke’s duty of musical care is most evident in the track’s highlight, a chromatic harmonica solo, played with the M1 OnTheRoad patch, inspired by Stevie Wonder’s solo in the Eurhythmics hit ‘There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)’ (1985). Slowing the pace to half-time, Luke guides the 18-second solo through opening swoops into a series of pedal-point figures. The MIDI programming is impressive: around 200 tiny adjustments were made to replicate the harmonica’s sour-sweet quality.”

It’s this kind of informational/analytical overload that blows the mind of this reader, and makes the book such a compelling item for musical fetishists and those fascinated by the way changing technology together with the changing attitudes of new generations is morphing music into strange new shapes.

So much of modern life is under-explained, a kind of “you don’t know unless you know” confusion paradigm and one of the reasons modern technology defeats older generations. Helpfully, Brown uses his book-length opportunity to clearly explain the factors behind the specific trends that led to vaporwave and ultimately, Buy Now, and it’s not a dull read. He writes, for instance, that vaporwave “is a kind of lie that tells the truth… vaporwave’s fake soundtrack exposes consumer advertising’s own deceptions for what they are” but also “liberates such music from its original function.” Central to the rise of computer musicians/creators like Rowell/Eyeliner is, of course, the punk-like DIY nature of the vaporwave scene, which mostly avoided traditional means and outlets like record companies and other control devices and proliferated simply through chat forums.

Having now waded through a fair proportion of Rowell’s online recorded music catalogue, both his more dance-oriented Disasteradio and Eyeliner releases, I understand Brown’s contention that Buy Now is at the summit of the vaporwave genre. As with a lot of sequence-based electronic music, vaporwave can sound rather static and unchangeable, but Buy Now is positively packed with tiny tweaks and added detail, which enrich the listening experience.

The one slight omission in the history of easy listening’s storied integration into electronic music is the ’80s group Yellow Magic Orchestra and the Japanese scene around them, which was ahead of its time in appropriating and affectionately commenting on and expanding upon the themes of vaporwave decades before the genre crystallised. But then again, vaporwave’s exponents may not have been directly influenced by YMO and its extended family.

A brilliant example of a book that’s worth buying even if you’re not a fan of the work it describes, Buy Now (the book) makes for illuminating reading.