It's Austin and Bronwyn from Electric Youth!

"The way Austin feels about certain music can't really be put into words. He'll do things like take Valerie Dore's 'The Night' and listen to it like 40 times in a row. There's definitely a big love there. He's said it brings back memories of being very young, like three or four years old in late 80s downtown Toronto. Good vibes."

These are the words of Bronwyn speaking about the other half of her band, Electric Youth. I ask whether any other media has a direct influence on EY's sound. "Movies. Definitely movies. We always have an eighties flick playing on a screen when we record. Like during the last thing we just recorded, a collaboration with Grum, we had Hardbodies and Lords of Dogtown on repeat."

SHN has been picking apart the workings of electronic music's irrepressible nostalgia cult which worked its way into the mainstream last year. But what's beneath the mainstream is even more fanatically obsessed with re-imagining days of 80s yore in faithful detail than you might have thought possible. There are people out there (musicians and their followers) who have been trying to make an almost spiritual connection with synthesised soundscapes, Californian sunsets and a decade that represents the birth of digitalism itself.

Let me say to begin with that researching this piece was a truly transcendent journey. A bit of method journalism never hurt anyone. So I thought - until I realised it was three in the morning and I had been watching reel after reel of 1980s TV commercials on YouTube. There are few better ways to shroud yourself in a long-lost world of triumphant commercialism and colour. The electric soundtracks, earnest voice-overs and soft-focus - they're like a dream. A searingly vivid, but beautiful dream. I concluded that this was the exact experience immortalised and stimulated by bands like Electric Youth. EY are part of something called the 'Valerie Collective' - a culmination of nostalgia and internet-inspired connections with the past. Web technology, it turns out, has been the key component in enabling members of the Valerie Collective to plug in to the past.

The founder of Valerie and man behind electronic nostalgia outfit, College, is David Grellier. Grellier discovered electronic music in the mid 1990s, playing with synthesisers on his friend's laptop. Today, he's been able to turn those early experimentations into a full-blown collective thanks to more contemporary technology. "Social networks like MySpace and Blogspot created the right conditions for artists to meet each other," he explained. "It was a unique and fantastic opportunity and it inspired me to create a network of artists and musicians connected through music and imagery." After Grellier realised the potential that was there, he put together the Valerie blog and not long after, the widely-praised Valerie compilation was released last year.

Grellier, under the guise of College, has just released a new EP, 'A Real Hero' which features a collaboration with none other than Electric Youth - a joint effort which he described as the sort of meeting musicians experience "once in a lifetime." Electric Youth in turn commented that working on the record allowed them to be "part of something special." It so happened that both College and Electric Youth had been thinking about the same general theme of 1980s representations of 'heroes' for some time. Once they discovered that, the rest was (literally) history and the EP was born. But what's different about the most sincere nostalgists is their unflinching dedication to reliving childhood sights and sounds. Like Austin in Electric Youth, David Grellier explained a near ineffable love of retro media.

"Our movement and the music of College is mainly inspired and influenced by American TV. Take the example of V (the visitors, 1984) from Kenneth Johnson who is my personal favourite. I remember the plot and the heroic characters of course but also a lot of the more intricate details like the colour of VHS betacam which was used to shoot the series. It creates a need for musicians like me to recreate the good times.

"When you're ten years old and you see Blade Runner, Brazil or Escape from New York, it's a unique experience. I love talking about movies like that with my friend Stephen Falken (the other half of The Outrunners). We adore old sci-fi movies like Mondwest and Coma. The director, Michael Crichton, was a genius, really."

Electric Youth in particular are inspired by a little-known phenomenon called Italo Disco which experienced its first revival during the 1990s and is now, like 80s commercials, back with us thanks to outlets like YouTube. Bronwyn remarked, "The italo interests in our youth were really on Austin's side and via his parents, not so much italo as an entire genre as much as certain music from the 80s that had that sound. Like early Madonna for example. It's not usually considered as italo, but was produced by certain guys who were involved in italo records being made then both in North America and Europe so naturally the sound carried over into that mainstream synth-based pop of the earlier 80s."

Electric Youth are a product of Canada - a country which was responsible for many an Italo Disco classic. But Bronwyn explained that it was only through the internet that they discovered the truth in that. "We never realized that a lot of italo, like Lime or Gino Soccio, was even Canadian until a couple years ago! It's really only since information like this has become available online that we've been able to find it. Even asking Austin's mom, who was there when it was playing in the Toronto clubs of the early 80s, and had the tapes at home, had never actually heard of the term Italo Disco until the internet."

Anoraak, College and The Outrunners hard at work.

Their commitment to rediscovering as well as reliving the past has started to reach epic proportions. Dreamwavers are creating a world which Davie Grellier refers to as a "musical and visual universe." Check out Miami Horro's authentic imitation of MTV originals which was produced only a year ago. And the same enthusiasm, importantly, extends among fans as well. Have a look at Uncle TNUC's babe-filled blog, for instance. Heck, just try searching Google for 80s blogs and look at the swathe of results it spews back at you.

"People like feelings of nostalgia and security because we're at the end of mass consumer society," suggests David Grellier. "Today we have to be a lot more responsible and our behaviour has changed as a result of that. Maybe that's why the 'nostalgia' movement in movies, music and TV is so prominent in rich, western countries."

We also spoke to Clive 'Crash' Lewis of the Electronic Rumors blog who said, "Dreamwave will always have a dedicated fan-base because it speaks to people who grew up with the electronic music soundtracks on their video store rentals in a way that no other genre does." But Lewis wondered whether Dreamwave can fully develop beyond its cult fan-base thanks to its myriad of obscure references, despite the influence on other electronic artists like Rex the Dog (see this track). He added, though, that the idea of packing such references so faithfully into every EP was a "completely new take" on the 80s-influenced electronic music scene and noted how successful artists from the Valerie and Binary collectives have been in creating an aesthetic standard (mainly courtesy of graphic design groups like The Zonders).

Bronwyn mentions mainstream artists like Empire of the Sun and La Roux when I talk to her about how the nostalgia cult has spread its wings, but Clive Lewis is probably right in suggesting that Dreamwave's real home is within a like-minded community of die-hard fanatics, spurred in their time-travelling by the powers of the internet. But if you really want to be part of it, you better crack open a giant stereo, dig out your VCR cassettes and spin the analogue wheel of time. Once you cross over, there's no going back - to the future.