fumi

These were originally correctly labeled, but there was a leak from the time corridor and parts one and six got swapped around.

Yeah, I know I keep banging on about this release from 2012 but it's just a classic. I sure wish the artist would release something else. I've never heard anyone quite like him/her. From Tinymixtapes in 2012: A multi-screen video advertising display loops colorful images of a pale-faced geisha pushing birth control pills gently between her lips. She smiles at the camera all satisfied, before a garish logo appears in Mandarin characters, presumably endorsing the pharmaceutical company responsible for the capsule that the young lady so contently consumes. A second female face appears, this time closer to the camera. She also places a pill into her mouth and smiles, unaffected by the rain as it falls softly across the shadowy metropolis in front of her. The scene is a perplexing one, despite its iconic status — not as a futuristic GlaxoSmithKline-fronted porno, but as a vociferous and trippy forecast from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a film that encapsulates an ultramodern and bewildering landscape illuminated by repetitive digital advertising and flickering neon Kanji. Scott’s depiction of a futuristic Los Angeles was brought to mind on more than one occasion while reading Adam Harper’s recent Dummy article on the ambiguous subject of “vaporwave,” an esoteric branch of sample-based electronic music produced by mostly anonymous artists remolding both flaccid commercial audio vapidity and hits and misses from pop music’s past and present. The glossy landscape of the so-called “Virtual Plaza” that Harper describes is a consumer-driven, pixelated realm, with pristine boutiques showcasing pop music and corporate-video soundtracks, looped, pitch-shifted, and tempo-manipulated to varying degrees of aggressiveness. Despite the fact that Mediafired is established in the vaporwave discussion and that the first official video from this release features looped images of supermodels sipping seductively from Pepsi cans in a fashion not dissimilar from the birth control ad, The Pathway Through Whatever does not fit comfortably into the Virtual Plaza. Whereas vaporwave artists such as INTERNET CLUB, VΞRACOM, and LASERDISC VISIONS/NEW DREAMS LTD. toy with the music they borrow from with lurid irony, the Portuguese artist behind Mediafired displays a sweeping degree of passion and delight in the tracks that are sampled here, which makes for a positively belting listen. Limited to 100 cassettes via Beer On The Rug and leftover stock from the Exo Tapes release, this remarkable collection blends generous helpings of 80s and 90s pop music with distorted loops and heavily treated samples à la Daniel Lopatin’s eccojams project. It embraces deflated parcels of middle-of-the-road, fragmented radio half-memories and breathes fresh life into them, allowing every tune to swell, collide, and twist majestically into the next, like a spellbinding audio ballet that leaves traces of each newly imagined piece with the listener long after the cassette spool has run out of tape. The extracts used here are delivered carefully out of their original contexts, but they appear expressively selected, consisting of remapped tracks by the bizarre likes of Kate Bush and Backstreet Boys, Queen and Inner Circle. While the material selection is certainly interesting, it’s the treatments they undergo that make the album such a charming listen. From the four-second looping of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” that comprise the entirety of “Pixies” to the thundering drum ricochets and reverb-soaked vocals of Queen’s “Innuendo” on opening track “Innuintendo,” each song is re-imagined and re-explored from new and dramatic angles that balloon entirely out of proportion as often as it shrinks back into gentle rhythmic convulsions. The samples aren’t blended with “original” material; the samples themselves are the material, and they embody a more reflective and complete sound here than in their original incarnations. Unlike the heady and meditative virtual spaces that labelmates Macintosh Plus and Midnight Television quite beautifully propound, Mediafired adopts a decidedly different approach that not only subverts the samples’ original contexts, but also redrafts each from scratch to create a shimmering can of ohrwürmer. Sure, The Pathway Through Whatever is being carried wholeheartedly by the gentle vaporwave, but it’s so aesthetically detached from it that it becomes an anomaly of the best kind.

I rewatched 'Sapphire & Steel' recently. Very odd early 80s UK supernatural drama. More unsettling than I remember it as a kid. I spent most of my time back then behind the sofa.

"Get the baby out of here." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36962133

While on the (slightly off-topic) of 'They Live', this scene could easily be talking about government. A great movie anyway.

The soundtrack to 'Julia And Julia' by Maurice Jarre.

Yeah, I knew it was from something cooler than Aladdin. John Carpenter's 1988 movie 'They Live'.

yeah, it's in Aladdin but I've heard it in some pretty famous movie from the 1980s. I'm sure it's something with James Caan.

Politics reminds me of a line from a film I cannot remember the name of. "Haven't you heard of the Golden Rule?" "No. What's that?" "He who has the gold makes the rules."

Just in case anyone was wondering, my previous comment wasn't an anti-American sentiment - it could equally be applied to anywhere. joshuatx is right. Imagine living in a part of the world with no internet?

I truly feel sorry for Americans. They have a choice of choosing between a dog or a dog with fleas. As you may have guessed, I fucking hate politics - the corruption, the inner sanctums, the elite making all the rules, the self-serving individuals with vested interests in making things better for them and not those that elected them. At least I don't live in North Korea.

The best ideas are when someone takes an existing one and alters it somehow - thus giving it a sense of uniqueness. All the best art, music, writing and films have their foundation in something already established but they then alter it enough to make it fresh and new again.

Again, I think you are missing the point of this show. But there are too many movies and shows that do this. I kinda feel like we don't need any more remakes, tributes, homages, inspired-by's for a quite a long time, as there's been no shortage of those at all lol Hollywood has become a shadow of itself. Every now and then, an original idea comes out with a decent budget, but even then amongst those small occurances, it's very hard to find those kinds of productions that aren't compromised in some major way. Hollywood has been rehashing and reinventing itself since its inception - Star Wars was inspired by the Flash Gordon movies of the 40's and the Akira Kurosawa films, etc. If anything, I think when a truly original idea does come along, it stands out and is more special. The problem is, there just really isn't many original, GOOD ideas anymore. what i get watching stranger things is that the duffer bros watched a lot of shit in the eighties and read stephen king. i have no idea who they are, what they feel, what the purpose of their work is. and then the work itself fails to entertain or surprise. it's a game of spot the reference. If you look at something like 'Breaking Bad' or 'Better Call Saul' (okay we can argue whether or not they are good shows), the writer, Vince Gilligan has obviously been influenced by different things but there is enough of him in the writing that you can watch it and get an insight into him as a person. I could watch a TV show by him without knowing he had written it and still guess it was his work because he has identifiable themes and issues that crop up again and again in his writing. Obviously not everything he's done is brilliant, some ideas in the shows are flat and uninspired but the difference is they are mostly his ideas. But with the Duffer brothers, I just don't identify with them whatsoever. They are just masquerading as King and Spielberg. The show belongs entirely to them. And Vangelis & Tangerine Dream (whose original works are mixed in with the Carpenter inspired soundtrack).

Yeah, I saw the first series of that. It was sort of Twin Peaks but with some nice twists and things that were enjoyable and sort of unexpected. It took inspiration from people like David Lynch but wove in some original elements. Stranger Things is nothing like that. It's really no wonder that lots of TV and film is so poor nowadays. The younger generation of film-makers and so forth will look at the gushing reviews of a show like 'Stranger Things' and think "Hey, no need to do the legwork, no need to dream up original ideas. Just take all the best scenes from our favourite books and movies, mix them up and call it an homage.

Again, I think you are missing the point of this show. But there are too many movies and shows that do this. I kinda feel like we don't need any more remakes, tributes, homages, inspired-by's for a quite a long time, as there's been no shortage of those at all lol Hollywood has become a shadow of itself. Every now and then, an original idea comes out with a decent budget, but even then amongst those small occurances, it's very hard to find those kinds of productions that aren't compromised in some major way. Hollywood has been rehashing and reinventing itself since its inception - Star Wars was inspired by the Flash Gordon movies of the 40's and the Akira Kurosawa films, etc. If anything, I think when a truly original idea does come along, it stands out and is more special. The problem is, there just really isn't many original, GOOD ideas anymore. that's the problem i have with this show. it isn't good. it's bringing nothing to the table to subvert or reinvent the ideas it exploits. it's just a checklist of eighties references. star wars functioned as a kind of found art object, a dream of serialized fantasy from the forties with cutting edge special effects and a well developed, universally appealing mythology of its own. one of the larger problems with nerd culture suddenly co-opting popular culture and especially movies is the tidal wave of reference laden, plot based films and television shows that reduce narrative story telling to its most basic components. there are no "original" ideas, obviously. everything is the sum of its influences. but a good artist can focus their influences into a statement that gives us some sense of their feelings about the world, some kind of self expression, even if its through the somewhat myopic prism of pop nostalgia. what i get watching stranger things is that the duffer bros watched a lot of shit in the eighties and read stephen king. i have no idea who they are, what they feel, what the purpose of their work is. and then the work itself fails to entertain or surprise. it's a game of spot the reference. this is what most films have been reduced to. either an ideological checklist a blogger can write thinkpieces about (did we have a strong female protagonist, did we subvert the patriarchal/racist hollywood paradigm, was it problematic?) or a bunch of references and techniques that a redditor can create a front page post about (here's all the shots in stranger things that reference other films). it's boring, lowest common denominator commercial art and i think we can do better. This is a pretty accurate summary of how I feel about it. The Duffer brothers don't have anything original to say whatsoever. Practically the entire series is a sequence of cut-and-paste scenes from other movies. If I was them, I'd be embarrassed with the extent to which I'd plundered the work of others. They haven't been influenced by anything, they have paid homage to anyone - they've just blatantly copied people with actual talent.

As I mentioned a page or two back, I've nothing against homages and revival stuff where the artist takes a couple of cues from older material and weaves in something else to create something new and exciting. What I really dislike is just wholesale lifting of other movie makers work because you do not have any talent or imagination whatsoever or are too lazy to try and come up with original work of your own Lots of stuff these days references older movies (particularly the 70's & 80's) but with Stranger Things I've never seen such a staggering attempt to borrow from the past without any qualms or accountability. There is a fine line between an homage and just plain stealing.

I don't know what this says about creativity for the younger generation. Don't bother working really hard for two or three years struggling to write something original like a fucking mug. Just lift scenes directly from other movies.

Netflix catalog in the UK is but a shadow of what's on offer in the US. I don't think many people in the USA realise this. They assume it's the same.

this. my fiancee and i thought the same thing. made it through a handful of episodes and it was some good stuff, but nothing enthralling enough to make us want to keep watching. And this is coming from a huge fan of stephen king, cronenberg, and carpenter. I dig some of the references, but they do feel slightly like held back safe nods rather than a full on tribute or something else completely original. But i its better than 90% of the garbage shows out there so nice work Netflix. That's the whole problem with it - an endless sequence of safe nods and nothing more. I watched nearly every episode and could not find a single moment of originality within. Younger people who are new to these Stranger familiar things might be better off just watching Firestarter & E.T.

There is no story in a true sense. It's just a endless sequence of set pieces taken from other movies and TV serials from the 1980s. I gave up when the boy was showing 'Eleven' around his house and explaining what everything did - exactly like Elliott did with E.T. And then they both get to wear wigs as a disguise. Needful Stranger Things. LOL. It's SOOO bad.

Yeah, everything in it is so utterly contrived. They even chose actors whose faces resemble the goofy kids from 80s Amblin entertainment.

I also experienced the 80s in my mid-twenties. The warm glow of nostalgia isn't enough to carry this show. It's okay to be an homage to the culture of that decade but when you don't bring a single unique idea to the table then that's another. I was frankly stunned at what they blatantly ripped off from other people. The point of this show is just to take from everyone who came before, mix it in some kind of nostalgic stew and wait for the round of applause.

I hated it because while it references so much of what has already been mentioned, it just has absolutely nothing to offer without that stuff. I'm all for 80s revival entertainment, I really love it when artists evoke that era yet giving it some unique twist. But Stranger Things has none of that. It nauseatingly borrows from almost everyone else without a single original idea of its own. There isn't a single thing in it that hasn't been done before - often much better. Looking around the internet, I cannot believe the praise it's been given. Even the main romantic lead looks like Mia Sara around 1985.

I couldn't agree more. The Pathway Through Whatever is to me, the epitome of vaporwave, and Pixies is a track I show pretty much first in order when I'm giving someone new to the genre examples of what vaporwave is.. (but always the video, as I kind of feel like that song and video exist as one). (along with Nobody Here by Chuck Persons, and usually something from Internet Club, and of course Mac + Lisa Frank). I'm familiar with Chuck Persons (OPN) but the others are new to me. Are they worth checking out?