Download Now… Free!

Preserving New Zealand’s music production heritage

In recent years the Archive of New Zealand Music at the Turnbull Library has turned its attention toward New Zealand’s music production heritage. Our focus has included preserving the master tapes of labels such as Flying Nun, Viking and Ode, and artists such as Chris Knox and Ian Morris. Now we are venturing into the challenging domain of contemporary music productions which use digital audio workstation software.

Introducing the Luke Rowell Digital Music Collection

Today we are very excited to cut the ribbon on a new born-digital collection donated by Luke Rowell, one of New Zealand’s foremost computer musicians. Over the last 20 years, Luke has performed hundreds of gigs around the world and released over 15 albums of popular electronic music, either as Disasteradio or Eyeliner. Among Luke’s best-known tracks is the synthpop hit ‘Gravy Rainbow’, while his Eyeliner albums are considered among the essential works of the vaporwave movement.

Buy Now audio files

Jump straight to an index of Buy Now remix resources

What’s in the Luke Rowell Digital Music Collection?

The Luke Rowell Digital Music Collection (ATL-Group-00554) is the product of over a year’s work. At this stage, it comprises a comprehensive array of digital production and master files relating to his acclaimed vaporwave album Buy Now (2015). And, by year’s end, another album’s worth of digital material will be added.

Our excitement is based partly on the amazing material to be found in Luke’s collection, also on the fact this collection can be accessed online by anyone... anywhere... anytime. And what’s more, Luke has generously granted a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence, so you can download the music for remixing and other creative reuse.

The Remix Album

The release of Free — Buy Now: Remixes is another reason for our excitement today. All the tracks are based on material from the Luke Rowell Collection. From Donor Lens’ take on ‘Toy Dog’ through to Monster Munch’s version of ‘Payphone’, the superb remixes on this album were created by artists from around the world and demonstrate just what is possible with a Creative Commons resource of this kind. Huge thanks to the artists for generously lending their talents to the cause of digital music archiving. Needless to say, Free is… well, free: download the album from Bandcamp now.

Embedded content: https://disasteradio.bandcamp.com/album/free-buy-now-remixes

Watch Luke Rowell talk about Eyeliner’s 'Buy Now'

So, whoever you are — a teacher giving a class on digital music, a student with a remix assignment, a musician wanting to try some MIDI arrangements, a researcher studying the history of EDM, or somebody just plain curious about electronic music — the Luke Rowell Collection is here for you to explore. Read on for more details, and also check out Luke’s video about the Disasteradio Project.

Digital audio workstations

“It is hard to think of another field of cultural practice that has been as comprehensively turned upside down by the digital revolution as music,” write the editors of the 2018 Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture (1). During the last 20 years, in particular, the ways music is made, distributed, and consumed have all been utterly transformed.

One of the benefits of music’s expansion into the digital realm is that musicians, composers and producers have adopted a wide array of new tools. While not necessarily obvious to the wider music-loving public, digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Pro Tools, Logic Pro and Cubase have become central to music production, affording almost unlimited scope for creating, editing, transforming, and mixing recorded music. Ever used the Apple programme GarageBand? Then you’ll have a reasonable inkling of what a DAW looks like and does. By introducing so many creative possibilities, DAWs have also fueled the development of new styles and genres, especially in areas such as dance music.

Archiving DAWs productions

At this stage, you may well ask: why is it desirable to archive DAW productions? If the eventual music product (vinyl record, download, stream) is readily available and preservable, why would a music archive want to keep a record of all the fine creative carpentry that precedes it?

One answer is that research libraries such as the Turnbull Library have traditionally sought to collect primary sources which help us understand music as a creative process. These sources include manuscript scores and sketches, live recordings, and demo tapes (such as pictured above), all of which help trace the progress of a song or musical work as it’s reworked and refined.

Archives may also collect studio master material — multitrack tapes, outtakes, alternate mixes — which show us how recordings were constructed in the studio context. All this material helps answer basic research questions, such as: where did the musical idea start? What was changed, cut, added along the way and why? What is the role technology plays in creativity? How has the compositional process itself changed over time?

DAW software replicates and extends many techniques that were first developed in an analogue world, such as multitrack recording, tape editing, studio mixing and effects chains. DAWs also offer entirely new possibilities around audio sequencing, synthesized instrumentation, and signal processing. Essentially, the backend files generated by DAWs offer the digital equivalent of what music archives have always collected in analogue form.

Unfortunately, for the reasons discussed below, DAWs also present major digital preservation challenges. The objective of working with Luke on the Disasteradio Project has been to develop sustainable ways to archive the information contained in his DAW productions. We’re hopeful that this research might also prove useful to music creators who want to secure long-term access to their music.

The challenge of digital preservation

What is digital preservation? According to Sarah Slade, David Pearson and (NLNZ’s own) Steve Knight: “Digital preservation combines strategies, policies, and actions to ensure access to both digitized and born-digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change”. (2)

The ultimate goal, according to the American Library Association, is “the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time”.(3) The digital preservation team here at the Library have written extensively about what this means in theory and practice (check out the National Digital Heritage Archive section on our website).

A key challenge facing digital preservationists is technical obsolescence. As Riccardo Ferrante writes:

Born-digital objects require particular hardware and operating systems in order to be accessed and rendered with integrity. As technology evolves, parts of these technical environments are replaced with newer, faster, smaller components. The hardware and software necessary for a 10-year old object to operate as designed are often no longer readily available; neither is the skill set required to maintain that environment. Innovation in the marketplace is itself a risk to the cultural heritage it produces.(4)

Technical obsolescence

Technical obsolescence can be caused by changes to; the file-format standard of a digital object, the software that opens the file, the computer operating system upon which the software and file format depend, or the underlying hardware architecture that the software and OS were designed for. Ferrante further notes that “Standard-based, open, or non=proprietary [file] formats tend to have an increased life span.”(5) This is why standard audio files such as .wav or .mp3 are currently deemed to pose a low preservation risk.

Session files

DAWs, however, present a far greater level of digital complexity. A DAW production is centred around a session file that stores transformative decisions,for example, editing points, volume and EQ adjustments made to audio assets and/or coded sequences. The session file thus involves dependencies on other files which must also be preserved if the session file is to make sense; a DAW may also generate new audio assets alongside the originals. Some of the signal paths may also be routed through sound modules, external hardware used to generate particular sounds or effects.

Plugins

Adding further complexity are plugins. These third-party software components extend the DAW’s functions to include audio effects (reverb, compression, delay, etc.), virtual instruments, sound libraries, and other functions. Plugins are essential in contemporary music production: a single music track may incorporate a dozen or more. Creating further complications is the proprietary status of most DAW applications: each has its own session file format which generally lacks interoperability with other DAWs and lacks open-source coding which would help understand how it works. All these factors present a massive digital preservation challenge.

Preservation action for DAW sessions

Several forms of preservation action could be attempted to ensure a DAW session created in 2021 can still be accessed in 50 or 100 years. These include:

1. Maintain the original technical environment: i.e. the musician’s computer hardware and sound modules, OS, DAW and associated plugin software, plus the asset structure unique to each project;

2. Replace the original software, relying on the development of new software which is backwards-compatible for older session files and plugins;

3. Emulation: create a virtual version of a suitable technical environment.(6)

All three of these strategies have been deemed impractical by the Library’s digital specialists, given the ongoing resourcing they would require. And attempting to collect DAW files from different musicians would only increase the archival commitment, given the different permutations of DAWs, plugins, OS and hardware that would be encountered.

Lots of people are grappling with the challenge

Needless to say, music archivists are not the only ones grappling with this challenge. Canadian musician and academic Colin McGuire describes his experiences accessing some of his older tracks for use on a compilation album:

[A] few were lost to corruption of the media they were stored on, as well as lack of access to the technology to play them back or recreate them. Amongst some of the surviving tracks, I found a couple that I thought could use a bit of remixing. One of them had only raw audio recordings of the main vocals and synthesizer parts to work with because the rest of the track’s sequences and mixing belonged to software that had long since become obsolete.(7)

McGuire here identifies another important reason to preserve DAW sessions. Music is an intrinsically iterative artform, whether in terms of ongoing performances of musical works or recordings of cover versions. Preserving DAW productions enables other iterative processes to continue, such as remixes, mashups and remasters.

The music and film industries have also recognised some of these difficulties and attempted to find their own solutions. In his article ‘Exporting and Importing Between DAWs Without Losing Your Mind’, Matt Vanacoro outlines several strategies in ensuring access to DAW session information over time. These include exporting data in the form of OMF (Open Media Framework) or AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) files, container formats that preserve both editing decisions and source media assets. These formats have been developed to ostensibly allow sessions to be opened in different DAWs on an ongoing basis. While appealing as a concept, there is, unfortunately, no guarantee these complex digital objects will be viable in the long term. From a digital preservation perspective, they represent a risky bet.

More general advice is available from the US Recording Academy, who provide Delivery Recommendations for Recorded Music Projects and for Hi-Resolution Music Productions (pdf, 1.25MB) . While not addressing the DAW obsolescence issue directly, these documents contain valuable guidance around preservation elements, folder structures, and naming conventions for music production archiving — and we found them useful to consult with the Disasteradio Project.

Disasteradio Project

The story of the Disasteradio Project goes back to 2018 when the Turnbull Library announced Flying Nun Records’ donation of its master tape library. On the Library’s Twitter feed, Luke reached out to ask: “Can we submit our own multi-tracks and sessions and MIDI files?” It was fortuitous timing, as we’d already been pondering the DAW obsolescence issue.

By mid-2020, after some brainstorming sessions with Luke, we had a proposal ready: “we” including the Library’s digital archivists Valerie Love and Flora Feltham, and AV conservator Zach Webber. The goal of the Disasteradio Project would be to archive two of Luke’s albums, develop some new digital-preservation approaches along the way, assess what resourcing future projects might need, and explore what outcomes made it a value proposition.

The two albums chosen were the Disasteradio album Visions from 2007, and Eyeliner’s Buy Now. They were created, respectively, on the DAWs Jeskola Buzz and Steinberg Nuendo.

As a stark illustration of the challenges faced, Luke quickly discovered that the Buzz Visions files — only 13 years since they were created — were proving too troublesome to open, even using a Windows 98 virtual machine. Hence another Nuendo album, 2010’s Charisma, was swapped in.

Disasteradio Project approach

The Disasteradio Project approach has been for Luke to create a “package” of production components for each track using only readily-preservable file types such as those found in the UK National Archives PRONOM registry.

If a Nuendo DAW session file represented the native digital object, then essentially we have looked past its archival authenticity and found alternative ways for the information content to be expressed. Some of these alternative expressions will be very familiar to musicians: a final mixdown exported from a DAW session, for instance, or sets of audio stems (individual tracks within a mix).

Importantly, all the files are preservable and the manifest for each track is standardised across the entire collection. So, here is what you can expect to find for every track in the Luke Rowell Collection, with links given to examples for the track ‘Sneakers for Men’:

Description	File type	Example
Track stems (dry) without effects and automation	.wav	Stems (dry)
Track stems (wet) with effects and automation	.wav	Stems (wet)
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) types 0, 1 and General	.mid	MIDI
Working mixes	.wav, .mp3	Working mixes
Final mixes, mastered and unmastered	.wav	Final mix
Spreadsheet of technical information	.xlsx	Technical data
Screenshots of session settings	.jpg	Images
Screencast with commentary	.mp4	Screencast
Music videos and promos	.mp4	N/A

This material will provide multiple avenues for researchers to investigate the “nuts and bolts” of Luke’s music. Technical data spreadsheets feature a forensic level of detail about every stem, including VST instruments, effects, plugins, MIDI quantisation and swing, all cross-referenced to the archived assets in the collection.

Even more granular information can be gleaned from screenshots showing the settings for every plugin used for every stem. As far as reuse is concerned, both audio and MIDI-orientated musicians are catered for, with two iterations of 24-bit audio stems (dry and wet), and three versions of MIDI — all downloadable.

A selection of stems from ‘Sneakers for Men’ including effects and automation

Don't be alarmed if at first you don't hear anything. Due to the arrangement, some stems include periods of silence.

LinPlug RM-IV Drums (combined percussion)

Korg M1 Bass (Club date)

Korg M1 Bass (Slap ‘n’ Thump)

Korg M1 CoolPiano

Korg M1 HarmoBell (Short)

Korg M1 HarmoBell (Soft)

Download the full set of stem files for ‘Sneakers for Men’ Ref: MSDL-4661

Final mixdown of Eyeliner, ‘Sneakers for Men’ from the album Buy Now

Have a listen to the final mixdown of ‘Sneakers for Men’.

Migration — a digital preservation action

From an archival perspective, the process whereby Luke creates the file “packages” is effectively a digital-preservation action in its own right, what is known as Migration or “the process of converting digital content from its original file format into a new format that can be accessed.”(8) Migration is an alternative to the other actions discussed above (e.g., replacing original software, emulation).

Having Luke perform this work preemptively is a major advantage of the overall Disasteradio Project approach. Normally, digital archivists at the Library would manage the migration process following receipt of the original files, work that can involve a lengthy process of research and file conditioning to convert the material into stable formats.

The Disasteradio Project represents a major deviation from this archival orthodoxy, migration being undertaken before transfer and by Luke, probably the person best placed to understand his own setup and efficiently accomplish the task.

Discover, research and re-use

The Luke Rowell Collection can be discovered most directly through the Turnbull archival collections database Tiaki, as well as via the National Library website and Digital New Zealand.

The Collection is arranged hierarchically, with an overarching description at the top. At the bottom of the Turnbull archival collections database Tiaki screen, you will find a series of "Child records" that correspond to the album Buy Now.

Clicking on a child record will take you to a page with each individual track listed at the bottom.

Open one of these and you will find item records for each set of production components. To access the actual digital files, follow the links, which open a separate browser tab.

All the files can be viewed, listened to or watched in the browser, from anywhere. Most files — including the audio stems, MIDI, mixes and spreadsheets — can be automatically downloaded, by clicking on a button in the top right of the screen. MIDI and Excel files will automatically download.

For the others, you may be presented with two options. “Download File” enables you to download the single file that is currently playing in the NDHA player. For situations where multiple files are available, such as stems, click on “Download Derivative Copy” to download a ZIP file containing all the files. Please be patient with the download: the ZIP files can be large (1GB or more) and take up to 30 seconds to prepare.

Download the Luke Rowell Digital Music Collection

Access and download the Luke Rowell Digital Music Collection — Turnbull archival collections database Tiaki.

Creative Commons licence and attribution

Downloadable material is available for anybody to reuse under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. This means that you can remix, resample, mashup, and rearrange the music, and even upload the result if you wish. The main requirements are that:

• BY: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made,

• NC: NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes, and

• SA: ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Examples of what you could do

To give just a few examples of what you might do, consider the MIDI files available for each track. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and is a method of digitally encoding musical compositions. Much of Luke’s music as Eyeliner is composed using MIDI sequences to trigger simulations of classic synth keyboards such as the Korg M1 or Fairlight CMI.

This approach gives his work its immaculate surface which, as with vaporwave more generally, nostalgically and ironically evokes the popular cultural soundscapes of the 1980s: the ambience of shopping malls, elevator music, and half-remembered television themes. Take the track ‘Pinot Noir’:

Eyeliner, ‘Pinot Noir’ from the album Buy Now

The MIDI for this track could be reprogrammed with different instruments or perhaps stripping back some instrumentation and adding entirely new layers. To give a sense of the possibilities of MIDI re-arrangement or stem remixing, here is ‘Pinot Noir’ remixed by Misled Convoy (a.k.a. Mike Hodgson of group Pitch Black):

Misled Convoy, ‘Pinot Noir (What does wine sound like remix)’, from the album Free

Export sheet music

Using certain DAWs or a scorewriter programme such as Sibelius, you can also import MIDI and, with a little bit of tinkering, export it as sheet music. Here is ‘Pinot Noir’ decanted as a piano arrangement:

Visualisation engine

Or getting a bit more fringe, one could pour the ‘Pinot Noir’ MIDI into a visualisation engine such as Scott Haag's MIDIJam 1.12 (2007) playback software, available here via the Internet Archive:

Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=mZ0SA4KPV1s

To be continued...

So there you have it: Buy Now… Free!

As noted above, the Disasteradio Project is still in progress and we hope to have materials for the Disasteradio album Charisma available in the next few months. This will also be followed by some more reflection on the process, and hopefully some guidelines we can share with the music community.

For now, have fun exploring and reusing the Luke Rowell Digital Music Collection — and check out Free – Buy Now: Remixes for some free inspiration.

And please feel free to share your comments, questions, and links to any remixes you come up with, either in the comments below or on our social media feeds, Facebook and Twitter.

Buy Now remix resources

Track	Dry stems	Wet stems	Other	MIDI Type 1
Toy Dog	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Sneakers for Men	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Pinot Noir	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
High Heels	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Payphone	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Venetian Blinds	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Showbiz	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Windchimes	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Chit Chat	Dry stems	Wet stems	Samples	General MIDI
Private Hospital	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI
Pictionary	Dry stems	Wet stems		General MIDI

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Disasteradio Project team (Flora Feltham, Valerie Love, Zach Webber, Jess Moran); to Kirsty Smith, Mary Hay, Jay Buzenberg, Sholto Duncan, and Chris Szekely; and to Jay Gattuso, Michael Norris and Kane Power for discussions that have fed into this project. Appreciative thanks, of course, to Luke Rowell and everybody involved in the remixes album Free:

• Ako

• Amamelia

• Donor Lens

• Eventual Infinity

• ice Likely

• Misled Convoy

• Monster Munch

• OSC (Opus Science Collective)

• Stevia Sphere

• Liam K. Swiggs

• Timeshare 94

• Vylter

• Billie McGuinness (cover art)

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Endnotes

1. Nicholas Cook, Monique M. Ingalls and David Trippett, ‘Introduction’, in Nicholas Cook, Monique M. Ingalls and David Trippett, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p.1.

2. Sarah Slade, David Pearson and Steve Knight, ‘An introduction to Digital Preservation’ in Lisa Elkin and Christopher A. Norris, eds, Preventive Conservation: Collection Storage (Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections et al), p.811.

3. American Library Association quoted in Slade, Pearson and Knight, ‘An Introduction’, p.811.

4. Riccardo Ferrante, ‘Care of Born-Digital Objects’ in Lisa Elkin and Christopher A. Norris, eds, Preventive Conservation: Collection Storage (Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections et al), p.832.

5. Ferrante, ‘Care’, p.835.

6. Sarah Slade, David Pearson and Steve Knight, ‘An Introduction’, pp.823-824.

7. Colin McGuire, ‘The Concrete and the Ephemeral of Electronic Music Production’, Dancecult 6/1 (2014).

8. Sarah Slade, David Pearson and Steve Knight, ‘An Introduction’, p.823.