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- [00:02]
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- [01:01]
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- [01:06]
Michael Brown
Simple.
- [01:07]
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- [01:28]
Bradley Morgan
VOD.
- [01:31]
Michael Brown
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Bradley Morgan
Hello. Welcome to New Books and Music, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Bradley Morgan and I am joined today by my guest Michael Brown. Michael is the Music Curator at the Alexander Turnbull Library, which is part of the National Library of New Zealand, and also co edited the book searches for essays on New Zealand music past and present. His latest book is Eyeliners Buy now, an installment of the 33 and a third Oceania series and is published by Bloomsbury. Michael, thanks so much for joining me today.
- [02:05]
Michael Brown
Thanks very much for having me, Bradley. Great to be here.
- [02:08]
Bradley Morgan
So, to get things started, could you share with us what your book is about?
- [02:12]
Michael Brown
Well, like the other books in the 33 and the third series, my book covers a single album by an artist looking into its background and content. The album in question is called Buy now and it comes from the New Zealand vaporwave artist Eyeliner. It's part of the Oceania series or sub series of 33 and a third imprint. So this sub series deals with albums from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region generally. That said, the album in question by Now May not be particularly familiar even to people in New Zealand. It relates to a fairly niche subgenre of electronic music called Vaporwave, which got going about 15 or so years ago. So it sort of might seem a slightly unusual choice for the series, which mainly deals with quite canonical and classical and well known albums. But my pitch for the book to the publisher really looked at this as an example of things that have been going on in music since the Internet began that might not really be as easily discussed in terms of one of those classic albums. It's a book that delves into the online subcultures of music which that have emerged with the advent of the Internet. The kind of sort of niche genres that develop and often sort of feedback on what's happening on the Internet, the kinds of aesthetics that develop there. It's also quite a good example of how an artist who's working really on the kind of global fringe of music from a country like New Zealand, which is down here in the global south. Relatively few New Zealand artists break through internationally, but with the advent of the Internet, it's really provided a way for those artists to kind of get out there and get a global reach, even if people listening to them might not really have an idea of where they're based. So these are sorts of phenomenon that have come up with the rise of the Internet. And this was a good example to look at it.
- [04:48]
Bradley Morgan
Before we dive into eyeliner and the album, let's talk about the man behind the project, Luke Rao. Before he started making music himself, Luke developed a fascination with technology at an early age. Could you tell us more about that?
- [05:02]
Michael Brown
Yeah. So Luke grew up in the small city of Lower Hutt, which is just north of the capital city, Wellington. He had a family background that was both artistically inclined, a lot of community theater siblings that took music lessons. But it also had quite a sort of a technological interest there in the family. His grandfather worked in an animation studio, his uncle went on to be a professor at MIT in America, and he himself got exposed to computers at quite an early age. So Luke was born in 1983, and when he was about 5 or 6, his father brought a Commodore 64 computer home. And he was. This is. This is a very well known and in fact the most popular home computer of all time. Personal computer brought this home. Luke was immediately fascinated with it and especially with this. In this era, people had games, consoles, they were starting to get personal computers. And games were a major feature of these for Luke and his friend group. So they would share games, they would go around to each other's houses and play on these different systems. And he kind of became enamored of the soundtracks of games that kind of eight bit, you know, quite sort of bleepy soundscapes to the extent that that really became his first musical love. Computers also, I think, tapped into a kind of autodidact or DIY feature of his, of his wider family life. The impulse to sort of figure out how things worked and kind of hotwire it and kind of make it your own. So we started sort of coding things, trying to kind of figure out how to trigger the sounds how he wanted. I mean, this. And this led on through schooling. It was sort of getting into the era when schools were starting to develop labs with kind of rows of computers. And all of this sort of fed into a general interest in technology.
- [07:37]
Bradley Morgan
Well, I'm glad you brought that up because Luke grew up in Lower Hut, which is a city just outside of Wellington. And as a child, New Zealand was going through a lot of socioeconomic changes during the 80s and 90s. And that brought the country out from a state controlled economy to a more globalized one. And with this American style of consumerism. And this was having an effect on Luke in terms of what he was being introduced to in the popular culture. Can you talk about that effect?
- [08:05]
Michael Brown
Yeah, absolutely. So New Zealand had quite a protected economy up until 1984 when a new government came in, the labor government, which immediately set about deregulating a lot of areas of New Zealand society in line with neoliberal programs that were being seen elsewhere in the world, uk, US Notably. One area of this was the deregulation of telecommunications. Within four or five years, the government had basically allowed what previously had been state monopolies on things like television to be opened up to new to new television channels and also the state monopoly on telephone and data transmission services. And New Zealand very quickly got on the Internet bandwagon, connecting through to the US Internet in 1989, which at that stage was mainly offered things like email and Internet reload chat, the very early forms of Internet communication pre the World Wide Web. So the effects on Luke were. I think you could probably narrow it down to two areas. One, deregulation of television brought a lot more American culture onto New Zealand screens, which had a lot of appeal to Luke. He was an avid consumer of American television, both children's programs and also kind of more adult viewing things like the X Files and Twin Peaks and the like. The other side of it was the Internet. So before there was the Internet, there were things called bulletin boards, which were really people running what were effectively little websites from their own servers. And you would ring up and with a modem, you would tap into these little bulletin boards and be able to actually chat with people. This then became a bit of a model for what evolved with the World Wide Web. So Luke was originally on these bulletin boards. Some of his friends were running them from school. And then once he gets. Once he dials up through his father's work connection, which he had the password for, he starts really exploring an international world of enthusiasts for computer music communities that are based in places like Europe and Scandinavia that kind of resonate with his interests. And he's able to learn from these communities how to run music making programs and start to compose his own music. He does have musical influences from Lower Hut in Wellington, through his family, through his friends. But a lot of the inspiration for it is really coming from people who are based on the other side of the world.
- [11:31]
Bradley Morgan
So the Internet comes to New Zealand and it has a media impact on Luke in terms of his relationship with culture and technology. And there's a lot of community that is building up in this, in what he's finding, including a shareware music app called Jescola Buzz. What is Jescola Buzz and how did its own online community have that, you know, further that impact on Luke's engagement and development with culture?
- [11:56]
Michael Brown
Yeah. So Jescola Buzz is a type of music making software known as a tracker program. A tracker program were originally. Tracker programs were originally invented to create soundtracks for games, specifically games on the Commodore Amiga computers. And the. The idea behind them was that memory. Computer memories were quite limited in those days. So you wanted to create music in a way that the compositions took up as little memory as possible. So a tracker program essentially was a series of sequencer instructions which triggered samples. So you had basically a set of samples and then you had a sequenced program which then played the samples, and the end result is a tune, a piece of music. Jescola Buzz was a very advanced version of this that was invented in the late 90s, advanced in the sense that it allowed for multiple layering of tracks, it allowed for introduction of vocal tracks so audio could be recorded with. Was developed within a scene in Europe called the demo scene. And the demo scene was a sort of offshoot of a lot of coding and hacking activity. And it had its own sort of community chat groups which you access through special chat applications. So there was a quite a large community clustered around the use of Jescola Buzz to create music with Luke found this community and starts getting on. On the chat, you know, many hours a day. He's learning about not only how to use this program and get the most out of it, but he's also learning about music itself. You know, he's kind of getting. He's getting listening tips, he's learning about the development of electronic music in the 80s and 90s of dance music. So he's getting a real concentrated kind of cultural introduction to the stuff. He's finding like minds. He's. He's starting to put his music out there and sharing it with the community as well. So, yeah, it's. It's really the catalyst that takes what was previously kind of more like a hobby, a kind of unrealized obsession and. And turning it into a kind of a practical proposition.
- [14:53]
Bradley Morgan
So there's another site that's really instrumental to Luke's musical development, mp3.com because by 2000, when he was finishing his final term in high school, he begins uploading tracks to mp3.com under the alias Disaster Radio. Could you tell us where that name came from and how did it capture the aesthetic of his beginning to make music?
- [15:14]
Michael Brown
Yeah, so Disaster Radio was a name that Luke came across in a library book. It was a book about transistor radios, specifically Japanese transistor radios. And the disaster radio model came in a cardboard box that had a nuclear explosion, mushroom cloud on the front. It was a radio that played, came out in the 1950s, sort of played on those fears, Cold War fears of nuclear apocalypse, which were sort of loomed over culture around the world in that time. So the disaster radio was meant to be a crystal set that you could use after a nuclear war to pick up whatever radio signals were still around that time, something that you would keep in your kind of nuclear bomb shelter. For Luke, this, I think the name stuck really because it represented a kind of camp science aesthetic, as he termed it, a kind of interest in the kind of sort of mad scientist science fiction movie, perhaps a sort of a slightly entertaining view of science in films and music as represented by groups such as Devo, for instance. So that seemed to be the perfect fit for him. And as you mentioned, he then began releasing his music, self releasing his music through the website mp3.com which was, along with Napster, one of the first main music sharing websites developed in the late 1990s. MP3.com was a website you could just register with, join up to put. Put information about yourself on.
- [17:32]
Bradley Morgan
Who you.
- [17:32]
Michael Brown
Were, what your influences were, the gear you used, and then just start uploading MP3s and people could either download them for free or you could you could charge per track. Luke tended to just put his music up for free. He wanted people to listen to it and and wanted to hear what people thought.
- [17:50]
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- [18:05]
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- [18:33]
Michael Brown
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- [18:46]
Bradley Morgan
Time at participating McDonald's after high school, Luke enrolled in computer science at Victoria University of Wellington, but he later dropped out and worked as a glazier for his father. But a few years later he re enrolled, but this time to study music, where the University School of Music has had this history of technological innovation. What impact did the music school have on Luke's development as an aspiring musician?
- [19:12]
Michael Brown
I think music school had several areas of impact and Luke also it should be mentioned he dropped out again from music school, but then re enrolled some years later. So there's sort of two periods when he was there. Firstly, there was certainly some practical learning. He picked up more information about synthesizers, he used some of the gear that was available in the electronic music studio there, and that the sounds from those synthesizers did creep into some of his Disaster Radio work. He sort of had a bit of an ambivalence about education that went back a long way back to primary school even, where he's sort of more interested in getting home to play on his computer than stay in school. So he did drop out quite, quite soon after re enrolling at Victoria University, partly also because he was starting to get gigs as Disaster Radio and and really in the mid 2000s he he really established himself as a live act on the New Zealand touring circuit, supported some quite significant local artists, and even undertook a few overseas tours. When he went back to music School in the late 2000s. The big influence at that time for him was critical theory lectures from a visiting American academic, Chris Tonelli, where he started to learn and started to pick up a few, few kind of ideas that then allowed him to reflect on what he'd been doing with music up until that point. One of the most significant of those was the situationist group concept of detournement, the idea of appropriating culture to comment critically upon it, which he then could see he had been doing all along with Disaster Radio and its various kind of samples and evocations of computer culture, particularly. So that really I think, gave it added depth, gave it sort of an element of self reflection to the music, which then leads into eyeliner.
- [21:52]
Bradley Morgan
Right. So the music school helps him grow as an artist. He goes and performs and tours at festivals throughout the country, including some gigs elsewhere. And his first five albums explore chiptune and early synth sounds. But while performing live, you write in the book that Luke was dealt, it was developing a more song oriented style. What are some examples where you can hear this?
- [22:14]
Michael Brown
Yeah, so in his albums Visions and Charisma, these are both under Disaster Radio. You can see there is a development there towards a more full fledged song craft from the earlier Disaster Radio albums, which the songs are often quite fragmentary or short repetitive. With Visions and Charisma, he's starting to develop songcraft in terms of introducing more extensive lyrics to the songs. And good examples of this would include the track awesome Feelings from Visions, which became kind of a local Student Radio hit 2007, 2008. And the album ended up being named Album of the Year in quite a significant poll run by the magazine and record Shop Real Groove. And they actually developed a series of local music compilations which they called awesome Feelings. Sort of in homage to that with Charisma, I think it's a little bit further down the track. Every song on that album is really a full fledged song as we'd understand it, with verses, choruses and hooks. And a couple of the songs on that also had a degree of viral success. So a significant song off the album Charisma was the song Gravy Rainbow for which a music video was made, uploaded to to YouTube and it became a bit of a viral hit there on YouTube in 2010 when an American standup comedian called Daniel Tosh noticed it. I think. I think he thought it was a ridiculous song. So it was kind of critical attention, if you like, but it certainly drove people to look at that song. And it is, it is a kind of A catchy and.
- [24:23]
Bradley Morgan
More of a.
- [24:23]
Michael Brown
Satirical song than it might first appear. So, yeah, hopefully that led to Luke's work being discovered in a more positive sense.
- [24:34]
Bradley Morgan
You write in the book that this maturing as an artist, as Disaster Radio was an important precursor to the vaporwave sounds that would emerge later when Luke began performing his Eyeliner. And that this stylistic change was not just simply nostalgia, but rather expressed a fascination with modern technology and how it shapes human experiences. How did that perspective influence the direction Luke's music was heading toward?
- [24:57]
Michael Brown
Yeah, okay, so there's a few points of crossover between Disaster Radio and Eyeliner, and it should be pointed out that these two musical acts do sound quite different. Disaster Radio is very much in this kind of synth pop, chiptune style. Eyeliner, as we'll get onto, is kind of vaporwave expression, which. Which looks more at areas like background music and music and hold music on a telephone. What crosses over, though, is one, an interest in the musical past. Music of the 1980s and 90s, the music of the times that Luke grew up in, and Luke's interest in technology and how this music was created. Specifically the kind of synthesizer, heavy drum machine, heavy music of that time, it crosses over too. But I think by the time we get to Eyeliner, Luke, again, is sort of going deeper into. Into really the meaning of what it means to have all that musical technology at your fingertips. These are not sort of normal instruments, in the sense of a guitar or a piano that make a certain range of sounds. They actually sort of are like orchestral in their potential. And I think that this level of detail that you can start to utilize in music is something that fascinates them on a number of levels. We'll sort of perhaps get into the specifics of that a bit later. But I think that the third thing that should be noted about the crossover between Disaster Radio and Eyeliner is essentially that Luke is picking up on music's critical capacity, its capacity to be. To make a comment on society and culture. It's not really just music for entertainment's sake. He wants to kind of build in a. He wants to build in the capacity for music to make a comment about what it is referring to. And this is very much a affordance of music that he gets from those early influences in his teenage years, groups like Devo, like Negative Land, kind of alternative musics of that time. So again, it's a sort of. On the surface, he's a live act, he's creating entertaining music, he's got a great stage presence, but he's Also sort of thinking that music can be more as well, that music can have these satirical and critical roles to play.
- [28:10]
Bradley Morgan
Elsewhere. In your book, you write that there was a feeling of predestination related to the Internet's evolution since the heyday of the MP3, when Luke began to make music. And much had changed with the arrival of Web 2.0, which is defined by social media and blogging sites like Tumblr. And the effect that all this had was that it gave users access to a more decentralized indie music ecology. How did this create the conditions for Vaporwave to begin to coalesce as a genre?
- [28:39]
Michael Brown
Yeah, that's a good question. And it's kind of a complicated picture when we look at the development of something so multifarious and diverse as the Internet. But I think that the short answer is that once users had the ability on the Internet to start to comment on things, to like things, to share things in the very fluid way that social media allowed, that websites, early web 2.0 websites like MySpace allowed it, suddenly, I think the. Not suddenly, but I think the Internet starts. People on the Internet start to sort of turn back onto the Internet as a. A subject in itself. So the feeling of predestination you refer to, which Luke saw in Vaporwave emerging in around 2011, 2012, is the sense that up until that point, the kind of avant garde electronic music he'd been listening to, genres such as hypnagogic pop hauntology, had been really looking back to pre Internet eras, 1970s, 1980s sources. But with Vaporwave, you suddenly get the feeling that people are now remembering the early Internet as well. They're remembering what websites were like in the 1990s or early 2000s, the era of Web 2.1. And this is perhaps was an inevitability that Internet culture reaches that degree of maturity where it can reflect upon itself.
- [30:25]
Bradley Morgan
So what caught Luke's ear about this emerging style? It was in part the atmosphere that it evoked. And during this time, he was recruited by a friend to provide the soundtrack to a conceptual art project called Pioneer City. But he's still Disaster Radio at this point. What is Pioneer City, and how did it provide a testing ground for Luke's developing Vaporwave style?
- [30:48]
Michael Brown
Yeah, so Pioneer City was an art project developed by his friend Bronwyn Holloway Smith. She was an artist and had been developing a number of conceptual projects around this idea of Pioneer City. Pioneer City was in part a reference to Lower Hutt, where both of them grew up, which was the first colony of European settlers. To New Zealand. But it looked to that same idea of Pioneer City in terms of the sort of futuristic plans of the likes of Elon Musk to colonize Mars. And so Pioneer City is essentially a. A series of real estate advertisements and ventures to try and encourage people to buy these fictitious lots of land on Mars in a to be built domed city with all the kind of amenities you'd expect. And this originally started as a showroom in downtown Wellington where people could go in and get information about there are lots on Mars. There were billboards that Bronwyn had commissioned. Where Luke comes in is with a promotional film called Destination Pioneer City, which was a 10 to 15 minute advertorial extolling the benefits of what life on Mars would be like. And it's produced in a way that mimics similar kind of real estate advertising and promotional films. It's kind of got quite a hectoring tone to it, really. Trying to kind of keep your attention the sort of thing you might see on late night television and a lot of stock imagery. You know, nothing's really real yet, yet. It's just a sort of a dream that the city is going to get established. Luke was brought in to provide kind of suitably chirpy music to kind of keep this thing bubbling along. And he found that he had to turn around the soundtrack quite quickly, like in a matter of weeks. And so what he decided to do was really repurpose some of his disaster radio tunes and have them all played through a single synthesizer, a Korg wave station. Just kind of use that as a sort of a single musical palette and to kind of give it some unity and also to I think, accentuate that sense of this is produced quickly, it's produced cheaply, it's advertising. The outcome is a film that really effectively gets across that flavor of a kind of an airport landing video or such like. And partly that's to do with the kind of. I don't know, in a way it's the thinness of the music that helps give it that authenticity too. And Luke found this whole experience quite revelatory because up until this point, his albums are becoming more and more complex in their production style. Taking years to produce, he basically doing all the work. This though gave him appreciation that a kind of a fast process like this could really produce something interesting and distinct.
- [34:46]
Bradley Morgan
It was only after a few months, when making Destination Pioneer City, that Luke Were would release his first album as Eyeliner, which was high fashion mood music. Musically, Eyeliner has a more paired back arrangement style than Disaster Radio. But how else did Luke differentiate Eyeliner as a new artistic identity?
- [35:05]
Michael Brown
Yes. So, yeah, this happened in various ways. So the album comes out and it doesn't get a great fanfare when it's first released, but you can see that he was thinking conceptually about this as a new alias, as a new project, if only a side project this time, but something that could be kind of conceptualized in its own right. So where Disaster Radio really is like a catchy handle for a traditional solo electronic music artist project, Eyeliner has a kind of a character behind it. And this is a character that's described in the Bandcamp press release when the album was put out in 2012. It's also there on the liner notes. And again, it taps into this. Kind of appreciation of the language of hype, the languages of advertising. So he kind of presents himself as a successful solo operator, enjoys fashion, enjoys cuisine, and here he is coming out with his latest product. The album itself is also sort of conceptually different from Disaster Radio in that it has a single theme. The idea of the album was that each track on it would be a soundtrack for a different perfume advertisement. He'd been kind of looking into the sort of the languages of this kind of advertising before that, and so you can see that it's really moving towards quite a sort of an integrated concept behind Eyeliner that's a little bit different from the sort of more organically grown solo Persona of Disaster Radio.
- [37:13]
Bradley Morgan
So this album, high Fashion mood music, it was embraced as a foundational work within the vaporwave scene, but there wasn't a term for that style yet when the album was released, and Luke wasn't even familiar with the term when he uploaded the album to Bandcamp. So could you give us a little background about where the term vaporwave comes from?
- [37:31]
Michael Brown
Yeah. The term vaporwave has quite obscure origins. It did appear on a was first used seems on a blog back in 2010, 2011. But it really kind of got put as a label onto the style of music by the English music critic Adam Harper, who published an article in 2012, just the day after High Fashion Mood Music was released called Vaporwave, or the Art of the Virtual Plaza. Pop Art of the Virtual Plaza. And Adam Harper had been hearing the same kinds of music that Luke had in the previous two years and some of Luke's associates, which seem to be a progression from those earlier genres, such as hypnagogic pop and chill wave, that we've already mentioned. And to give a little bit of an idea of the flavor of Vaporwave this music really looks back to those kinds of liminal and marginal music genres, such as programmed music you might hear at a shopping mall, or the kind of soundtracks you hear behind advertising of that period of the late 80s and 90s. And it also picks up on the very corporate style trappings that were becoming prevalent in advertising culture at that time. It often refers to the sort of technological developments of the period, the almost sort of utopian vision of computer technology that were being promulgated, and some of that early hype around the early Internet. For Adam Harper, this all sort of added up to a kind of a critique of a sort of a consumerism of neoliberal economics that really sort of showed up the kind of the shallowness of this culture. But at the same time, he recognized that there was something alluring about this aesthetically. He chose the word vaporwave, which he'd come across on various websites in quite a scattered way. Well, he chose it, but he also consulted with a number of the artists that were making this music. And vaporwave seemed to be the one that people liked the most. So it was almost sort of like a crowdsourced to him, why he liked it. In particular, I think that there was a really nice pun there on the term vaporware, which is a 1980s tech term, to describe products that get a lot of hype and get advertised ahead of time. But then something happens, developments move on, and it never actually comes out. It just becomes a sort of, you know, an idea that was going to be there, but for whatever reason, has dropped. So he liked that pun on it, but he also thought that there was a sort of the idea of vapor, of a sort of a liquidity of culture. To him, it resonated with Marxist ideas about social cohesion and tradition being kind of liquefied under the effects of capitalism. So that was his particular take on it. But it caught on. It's a catchy term. And it didn't take long, really, before vaporwave subreddits were being established. People were starting to kind of bring together sets of artists they thought fit this prescription that Adam had set forth. And, yeah, within a few weeks, Luke had added a vaporwave tag to his band camp for the High Fashion Mood Music album. And that started to be picked up as part of this movement.
- [42:09]
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Bradley Morgan
There's no Milo here who picked up.
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Michael Brown
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Bradley Morgan
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Bradley Morgan
Get my son back.
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Michael Brown
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Michael Brown
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Michael Brown
Sounds sketchy.
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- [43:10]
Bradley Morgan
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- [43:20]
Bradley Morgan
Kraft Mac and Cheese Best thing ever. Eyeliner released his Next album in 2013, LARP of luxury, which is defined as a live action role play of luxury with all nine tracks on the album named after brands from the 90s and 2000s. And you write in the book that this album reframed key aspects of the Eyeliner Persona. How so?
- [43:44]
Michael Brown
I think that one of the most important ways was that where high fashion mood music had been produced quite quickly, like with his Destination Pioneer City project, Love of Luxury is something that he put a bit more care and attention into. He really was trying to move towards creating more authentic sounding soundtracks for advertising that evoked advertising. So there is certainly a greater cohesion to that concept behind Lap of Luxury and behind Eyeliner more generally. Yeah, I think that that's probably the main one. Again, you sort of get this sense of someone both interested in the aesthetics of this music, seeing its value, but at the same time with an element of social critique there.
- [44:44]
Bradley Morgan
So let's continue on that thread of social critique because following LARP of Luxury, Luke began working on the next Eyeliner album, and that one would eventually become Buy Now. And his critique of capitalism was fueled by this growing feeling among millennials that economic prosperity was beyond the generation's reach as they began entering the workforce. And this was after the fallout the 2008 global financial crisis. But you also note how Luke was seeking a new musical direction based on his long held belief in the democratic potential of computers. And this being 20 years ago, it's kind of funny to think about where we've gone with technology and democracy now. But can you tell us more about the vision that he had leading up to making this album?
- [45:30]
Michael Brown
Yeah, I think the point about the democratization of technology really goes back to Luke's interest in computers as a tool to create things with. Create music with. In a sense that on a computer you're programming music. You don't necessarily need to be able to play an instrument. You don't necessarily need to understand chord theory when you're putting together a song. That there are affordances to the technology that allow anybody really to put together music feasibly. And I mean, I think that we see this, a good demonstration of this is a program like GarageBand, which is a sort of a standard app bundled with Apple computers now, which everybody can use and really is actually quite a powerful program. And you know, there have been some mainstream albums produced on GarageBand. You can put together rhythms, you can, you know, develop sounds, and you can create structure on this of a track. You don't need to have gone to music school to have to create that music that, as I say, it can sound quite credible.
- [46:57]
Bradley Morgan
You write that there are three ingredients that lie at the heart of Buy now. And the first is the slap bass, which is, you write, ripe for a post ironic interpretation. Could you share with us an example from the album of that?
- [47:09]
Michael Brown
Yeah. So slap bass is actually. An ingredient that's found on every track of the album. It was one of the sort of key concepts behind it. As Luke got started, he thought, why don't I create an album that's got slap bass on every track? He had been at that time getting into a new relationship, and he and his girlfriend at the time watched a lot of 80s and 90s television shows together. And one of these was the show Seinfeld. And Seinfeld, as people remember, features a really unique theme tune created by Jonathan Wolf, which uses a lot of slap bass on it. In fact, it's not real slap bass, it's slap bass that is a patch. An instrumental voice on a synthesizer called the Korg M1. So it's kind of fake slap bass, if you like, but by being in a keyboard and a computer, you can almost do things with that slap bass that would perhaps be kind of more difficult on a real bass. This. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of a particular track that exemplifies this. I mean, it could be even the opening track, toy Dog, where the slap bases comes in after a few verses, doubling the main bass line. And initially is quite a sort of repetitive bass line, but by the end of the song is starting to kind of go quite crazy, you know, with lots of little slides and kind of wild fills and things. So it's got a kind of a fun element to it. Slap bass. It's kind of humorous, but perhaps through overexposure in shows like Seinfeld. And certainly it sort of permeates so many genres of music now. It's kind of something that you can kind of be ironic about as well. It's something that. A flavor that's, you know, almost a cliche.
- [49:35]
Bradley Morgan
The second ingredient that you identify in the album is the Korg M1 synthesizer, which you write held similar post ironic potential as the slap bass. But it's the third ingredient. The Linn drum machine that you write offers a final balancing of the scales. How does the Lynn drum machine balance out the album's post ironic atmosphere? And what are some tracks that showcase that?
- [49:56]
Michael Brown
Yeah, so the Linn drum was a. A very well known and widely used drum machine in 1980s music. It's. Yeah, I think the idea that it balances out the post ironic potential of these ingredients. And what I mean by post ironic is that there is a dual recognition of the musical value of something like slap bass or the linn drum. But at the same time there is a kind of an ironic or satirical perspective to be brought on these things mainly due to their ubiquity in the music of that time, such as they become very recognizable and perhaps start to tire of their novelty. With Lynn Drum. Yes, it's very widely used. Yes, some people found that kind of tiresome after a while. And you know, a good case in point is the producer Steve Albini, who known for producing hardcore and kind of indie rock bands, known for his.
- [51:24]
Bradley Morgan
You.
- [51:24]
Michael Brown
Know, ideas about the authenticity of the recorded sound, that, that. That a band should sound like itself. That one should just be trying to capture the sounds of the instruments without any intermediary influence from the producer. And Albini really did not like the sound of synthesizers and drum machines generally and saw the Linn drum as just something that had kind of poisoned popular music along with all these other instruments too, of similar kinds. But at the same time, the Linn drum is a very iconic sound. It's a sound. It's not just a sound of nostalgia, but it's a sound that people could use to very artistic effect. And a good case in point is Prince, who used the linndrum and the LM1, which was the precursor to the Lin drum extensively in his early 80s to late 80s albums. So again, it's an instrument that you can look at two ways. And I think that makes it right for post irony.
- [52:43]
Bradley Morgan
What sets by now, apart from the earlier Eyeliner albums, is this range of types of commercial music that it explores. And this reflects an evolution of commercial music during Vaporwave's key period as a genre. In when I was reading about that, it brought to mind Simon Reynolds book Retromania, which is about how pop culture is obsessed with its own past within the Vaporwave genre. How do you account for that rapid evolution?
- [53:07]
Michael Brown
Yes, I think Vaporwave certainly fits into Reynolds critique, his Retromania critique in that it really harks back to that 80s and 90s the sounds of that time. I think where Vaporwave has something a bit different to say about that is its concentration on sort of less trying to imitate the mainstream sounds of that time, but really taking these ingredients as markers of cultural change and social change. And you refer to the evolution of commercial music during that period. And it is a very interesting crossover period. The scholar Timothy Taylor has written a couple of really excellent books on the changing face of advertising music. And he identifies this time as a shift from earlier forms of advertising music, commercial music, where advertisers commissioned jingles for their ads like fresh pieces of music, to a shift towards increasing use of licensed popular songs. So popular music was starting to kind of merge into advertising music where people couldn't license popular songs because it was too expensive. They might create things that sounded very similar or they might even be able to coax a well known artist to sing over or play on one of these new pieces of advertising music. And it was really a desire for I think brands to tap into the popularity of popular singers and popular genres to kind of associate themselves with.
- [55:16]
Bradley Morgan
Especially.
- [55:16]
Michael Brown
Sort of youth cultures. But I mean, the use of old 60s tracks, Motown tracks, was a way to appeal to baby boomers. As the 80s and 90s moved on, this kind of cross media marketing sort of grew ever closer and closer. So you had a band like Run DMC put out a song in praise of their Adidas sneakers, or Adidas as I think it's called in that song. They then sign up an endorsement deal with the footwear company. And so product marketing is starting to then merge with, with popular music on another level. And there is a song on by now that refers to this or references this, called Sneakers for Men, which is really a reference to this way that popular music kind of got drawn into these other parts of the economy of the process of selling and marketing products that weren't really related to music. It also takes some of the musical styles of that time, New Jack Swing, to kind of convey this kind of sense of Sort of upbeatness that was trying to be used by advertisers to sell their products. And as Timothy Taylor points out, really, we have now arrived at a point where popular music and advertising music are kind of almost the same thing. Endorsement deals, product related deals, the use of music in films and television and alongside product placements. It's all sort of like one ecosystem.
- [57:15]
Bradley Morgan
You closed the book saying that in retrospect, Buy now came out at a pivotal time for Vaporwave, and the album benefited from appearing on the cusp of Vaporwave's emergence as a genre. How did Vaporwave further develop that made you come to that realization?
- [57:30]
Michael Brown
Well, Vaporwave starts getting known in 2012 and it gets media coverage. A lot of people come in and start trying to make Vaporwave albums by 2015. When buy now comes out, you know, we're sort of talking about 3,000, 4,000 albums have already been produced in this style, mainly by artists, amateur musicians, people just giving away the music for free. What happens in 2015 is this just accelerates. It goes into a bit of an upward curve. We get more and more people joining these online communities such as Reddit, that are focused on Vaporwave. We get a lot of people searching on Google for this term. What does this term mean? And the number of albums just goes through the roof. There's something like six or seven thousand albums get put out with a Vaporwave tag on Bandcamp in 2016. I think that Buy now really benefited from this. Both just coming out at a time when a lot more people were discovering the genre. But it's also an album that doesn't wear the earlier sort of capitalism critical critique so much on its sleeve as the first two Eyeliner albums. And I think that as Vaporwave kind of went more mainstream, although mainstream is not quite the right term for it because it is still pretty underground. I think that that that sort of ideological critique kind of went into the background a bit more. And so people are just appreciating the album for that nostalgic aesthetic, for the kind of knowing quality it has, the love of those sounds. And so, yeah, I think it doesn't sort of push the ideological barrow too hard. But all this new audience coming in will be able to sort of pick up on the artistry of it.
- [59:52]
Bradley Morgan
So to close things out, what are some of your favorite tracks from the album?
- [59:55]
Michael Brown
Well, I'll just mention a couple, perhaps ones that are lesser known. And by lesser known, I mean less streamed. We know that one of the tracks, Pinot Noir, is the most streamed track on the Album with several million streams on Spotify, but I'd also pick up on a couple of other ones. The first is Venetian Blinds, which is a kind of homage to television and movie film noir soundtracks from the 1980s, the likes of Miami Vice, Manhunter, American Gigolo, tracks produced by. Sorry, soundtracks produced by musicians such as Jan Hammer, Giorgio Moroda and the like. I really, I think I like this track really because it took me back to all that television and movie viewing that I'd partaken in as someone a bit older than Luke back in the 80s. So there was a nice element of nostalgia to hear Luke, I don't know, kind of delving into that musical style and making his own kind of take on it. The other track that I've come to really enjoy is the final track on the album called Pictionary, which is kind of probably the most ambient track on the album. And it's, it's a study really in how ambient music, New age music, and the soundtracks of certain games all sort of share a kind of a world making quality. And I think, you know, it's just very, it's a very skillfully put together piece of work, quite subtle. And yes, again, it just is something that really leads you off into genres that perhaps you hadn't given much thought to before and recognizes the unique aesthetics they might have to offer.
- [62:07]
Bradley Morgan
Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining me today. This is not just a great book on a very interesting album, but it's a fascinating exploration into how culture and genre influence each other and I think you should be very proud.
- [62:18]
Michael Brown
Well, thanks very much, Bradley. Appreciate it.
- [62:22]
Bradley Morgan
My name is Bradley Morgan and you've been listening to new books and music with my guest Michael Brown. His latest book is Eyeliners by now an installment of the 33 and a third Oceania series and is published by Bloomsbury.
- [62:45]
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