Biography
Eyeliner is the vaporwave alias of Luke Rowell (born 1983), a computer musician from Lower Hutt, Aotearoa New Zealand. Rowell created the project in 2012, primarily through two intersecting circumstances: animator collaborator Simon Ward had introduced him to early vaporwave while he was recovering from a knee injury that had sidelined him from live performance with his primary project, Disasteradio. Discovering the genre, he said, was “a big-bang moment for me.” If live keyboard performance was no longer possible, the opposite was the answer — and the Eyeliner project was defined from the outset by its stillness. “I like the idea that the style of music implies a lack of handwork, that there are no manual gestures in it,” he said. Live, he describes his performance approach as “conducting my computer.”
Eyeliner’s music sits firmly in the vaporwave genre — an internet-born microgenre that mines the kitsch corporate ambient sound of the 1980s and 1990s: shopping mall soundtracks, TV advertising music, and the aural wallpaper of late-capitalist consumer culture. A key distinction noted by critics is that Eyeliner’s compositions are original rather than sampled or reprocessed. Rowell draws inspiration from Muzak, library music, the synth-ambient tradition of Klaus Schulze’s Innovative Communications label, and Studio Ghibli soundtracks. His own definition of vaporwave: “capitalism imagining its own eternity — a frozen time period when ‘Western countries’ were ‘it’ and the cold war had ended and everything was fine… there’s something beautiful about the fact that you’re celebrating a culture that you don’t believe in.”
The 2015 album Buy Now — initially released on US label Beer on the Rug, later reissued on coloured vinyl by A Low Hum in 2018 — is widely regarded as a classic of global vaporwave. It earned a four-star review from Tiny Mixtapes and developed a cult following on Reddit and Rate Your Music. US label Orange Milk Records’ Keith Rankin identified Rowell as “one of the most well-loved artists continuing that style of MIDI composition.” The album’s cultural reach was formalised in 2025, when Michael Brown’s Eyeliner’s Buy Now was published in the prestigious 33⅓ Oceania series by Bloomsbury. The National Library of New Zealand had earlier recognised Rowell’s significance by launching the Luke Rowell Digital Music Collection during NZ Music Month 2021 — the Turnbull Library’s first foray into archiving contemporary DAW-produced music.
Rowell performed an Eyeliner set at Electronicon, the vaporwave festival in Los Angeles, in 2019. Drop Shadow (2020, Orange Milk Records) was issued in a limited vinyl edition of 250; brb (2023, My Pet Flamingo) returned to more economical arrangements: “The thing that I learned through Eyeliner was starting with a very low set of tracks,” he said. “The new one I’m trying to fold them back down again to be a bit more economical.” All Eyeliner releases are available via Rowell’s Bandcamp alongside his Disasteradio output.
capitalism imagining its own eternity — a frozen time period when ‘Western countries’ were ‘it’ and the cold war had ended and everything was fine… there’s something beautiful about the fact that you’re celebrating a culture that you don’t believe in.
Luke Rowell, AudioCulture
Members
- Luke Rowell (all instruments/production, Disasteradio)
Discography
- High Fashion Mood Music LP (2012, Crystal Magic)
- LARP of Luxury LP (2013, Crystal Magic)
- Buy Now LP (2015, Beer on the Rug)
- Drop Shadow LP (2020, Orange Milk Records)
- brb LP (2023, My Pet Flamingo)