about New Waver
New Waver is a long-running culture-jamming project based in Melbourne, Australia.
It began in the late 80s, in the realm of print, with the production of Loser magazine. This compendium of despair recontextualized articles from tabloids in a 'magazine for losers', clarifying the politics of mainstream media. The zine was widely distributed and achieved some notoriety, becoming for example, ironically, the subject of articles in Melbourne's 'Truth' newspaper.
Moving into music, New Waver began to rework the lyrics of pop songs to reveal the machinations behind that industry and the myths it depends on. They released their first cassette in 1990 and by the early 90s were performing live in Melbourne indie venues. NW remained a live act until 2000 and supported such luminaries as TISM and Snog. After ceasing live gigging NW have gone on to release several albums, contribute to many compilations, and produce printed material, stickers and videos. The more recent stuff is downloadable from this website.
New Waver's most recent album 'Bohemian Suburb Rhapsody' reworks a series of classic rock tropes to tell the tale of the Australian inner city and its transformation from slum, though boho village, to upscale shopping zone and real-estate bonanza.
'New waver' is 80s slang for the demographic that, more or less, is now called 'hipsters'.
There's more information about New Waver in:
- Wikipedia
- Sticky Zine Institute
- Priest (ed., 2009) Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia
- Kouvaras (2009) "Hissing at the margins: Postmodern mainstream positioning in Australian sound art", in Strong and Phillipov (eds) "Stuck in the middle: the mainstream and its discontents"