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 latest, irrepressible nostalgia cult. The cult was conceived in the late-night bedroom haze of a thousand post-post-rock junkies, but by 2009, it had worked its way into the mainstream. What still bubbles beneath the mainstream is fanatically obsessed with re-living eighties yore in faithful detail. There are people out there, musicians and their followers, who have been attempting an almost spiritual connection with synthesised soundscapes, Californian sunsets and a decade that represents the birth of digitalism as we know it.

Researching this piece was a transcendental experience. A bit of methodical journalism never hurt anyone until I realised it was three in the morning and I had spent the last five hours watching reel after reel of 1980s TV commercials on YouTube and snacking on pop-tarts. No pain, no gain. It turns out that this is one of few truly effective 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 celebrated and perpetuated 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 yesteryear.

The founder of Valerie and the man behind another electronic nostalgia outfit, College, is David Grellier. Grellier discovered electronic music in the mid 1990s, playing idly with synthesisers on his friend's laptop. Today, he's been able to turn those early experimentations into a discerning micro-movement thanks to 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 what sort of potential was staring him in the face, he promptly put together the Valerie blog. Not long afterwards, last year's widely-lauded Valerie compilation was on the shelves and download charts.

Grellier, under the guise of College, has just released a new EP, 'A Real Hero' which features a collaborative number 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. What character traits did eighties culture champion the most? What sort of lives did eighties heroes lead? Once they discovered their mutual interest, the rest was (literally) history and said EP was born. What separates the most sincere nostalgists from casual dabblers 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 stimulates 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 are particularly 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 platforms 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 italo, but was produced by certain guys who were involved with 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 realised 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 Horror's authentic imitation of MTV originals which was deceptively 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 who aren't specifically nostalgic (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 eighties-influenced electronic music scene and noted how successful artists from the Valerie and Binary collectives have been in creating an aesthetic standard (often 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, encouraged to travel time by the unfathomable reach of the internet. Spinning the (traditionally analogue) wheel of time is for some a no holds barred experience. Merely casual enthusiasts, it could be said, only end up heading back to the future.