New Waver

New Waver is an Australian satirical musical project, the brainchild of Greg Wadley. New Waver grew out of one of Wadley's prior projects, a zine named Loser, and shares the same pessimistic outlook, underwritten with Darwinism. New Waver's music consists of electronic elements (from synthesizers, samplers and drum machines), along with samples from TV nature programmes, advertisements, interviews with suicidal patients and audio books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, selectively chosen to reinforce the bleak, fatalistic message, coupled with dark humour. The New Waver world view extends the survival of the fittest theory to the social ladder present in modern urban/suburban culture. New Waver's songs feature both covers/parodies of well-known songs with lyrics altered to reflect New Waver's world view, as well as instrumentals populated with samples and loops.

The term "new waver" is 1980s-vintage pejorative Queensland slang for a male who is interested in music, rather than football, and thus deserving of harassment or violence.

The term "new waver" also became a term for those who liked New Wave music in the early to late 1980s.

There is an interview with Wadley in the first How To Make Trouble And Influence People book.

Discography

• Middle Class Man cassette (1990)
• Hard Drivin' Beat cassette (1991)
• Perverted By Wheat cassette (1991)
• Low Self Opinion cassette (1992)
• Live 'n' Lossy cassette (1993)
• What A Man cassingle (1994)
• Aspects of Loserdom cassette (1994)
• Mr Loser-Boozer Goes To Town cassette (1996)
• Darwin Junior High vinyl EP(1997)
• The Defeated cd (1999)
• Computer World mp3 album (2001)
• Neuters (2006)
• Bohemian Suburb Rhapsody mp3 album (2010)

External links

• http://www.spill-label.org/nw/ - Official web site, including downloadable music

References

• Breakdown Press (2009) "How to Make Trouble and Influence People"

• Kouvaras, L. (2009) "Hissing at the margine: Postmodern mainstream positioning in Australian sound art", in Strong, C. and Phillipov, M. (Eds.) "Stuck in the Middle: the Mainstream and its Discontents. Selected proceedings of the 2008 IASPM-ANZ conference".

• Priest (ed., 2009) Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia