FROM LILBURN TO VAPORWAVE

MICHAEL BROWN & CHRIS SZEKELY

1 DESCRIPTION

Performance by Disasteradio at Bar Bodega, Wellington, 14 March 2012

MAKER / ARTIST Wendy Colling

REFERENCE PA-Group-00914: PADL-000958_038_20120314

2 DESCRIPTION

LP album cover for Charisma by Disasteradio, 2010

MAKER / ARTIST Cover design by Christina Hroch. Cover photography by Simon Ward, Don Brooker, and Ian Jorgensen

REFERENCE Phono q6671 Disasteradio distributes his work via websites such as Bandcamp and YouTube, but it has also been released on analogue vinyl, which is experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

Whatever the genre — techno, house, dubstep — electronic dance music is ubiquitous, served up at clubs and festivals, streamed online, and layered into computer games, social media and online interactives. Of course, there are New Zealanders who excel in this global scene, which means their work has a place in the Turnbull Library collections.

The library holds the largest trove of New Zealand music in the world, including every commercial recording produced and every musical score published within Aotearoa. Thanks to the initiative and donations of composer Douglas Lilburn (1915–2011), elder statesman of New Zealand music, there is also an extensive music archive of papers, photographs and unpublished recordings. This archive has recently expanded to include master tapes, like those of pioneering labels such as Ode, Viking Sevenseas and Flying Nun.

But how do you archive the myriad digital threads that comprise electronic dance music? Answer: with difficulty. Enter Disasteradio, the performance alias of New Zealand musician Luke Rowell (b. 1983), who, with more than a dozen albums to his name, is a veteran of the scene. The Turnbull holds all his albums but wanted to explore how to preserve a digital music production in its entirety. Rowell offered his albums Charisma (2010) and Buy Now (2015, released under another alias, Eyeliner) as experiments.

Charisma and Buy Now are very much twenty-firstcentury cultural artefacts. Aside from the vocals, they were created entirely on a home computer in Wellington, their synth-pop and vaporwave styles reflecting Rowell’s global influences and networks. For every track of these albums, the Turnbull Library has preserved the constituent parts: stems (audio tracks) for each digital instrument, MIDI (digital instrument encoding) and mixes. Music is an iterative artform, and archiving these elements will expand the palette for future reworking, remixing and resampling. Researchers can delve into screencasts, spreadsheets and screenshots that document how Rowell used software to create the music.

Charisma and Buy Now are released under a Creative Commons licence: a form of copyright licensing that assists propagation and reuse of digital culture. This enables anyone to download the archived materials from the National Library website to remix, learn from and play with.

And there’s even a connection, of sorts, between Luke Rowell and Douglas Lilburn. In 1966, Lilburn established the electronic music studios at the School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington. They are still used today, renamed in his honour in 2015, and were where Rowell developed his craft when studying music at Victoria.

3.5-inch floppy disks awaiting digitisation. To preserve digital content, the Digital Collections team transfers digital files from their physical media carriers to the National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA). The library has a variety of hardware, software, and tools available to accommodate the wide array of digital files they receive.