By K.E. Roberts
Anyone who was watching TV in the late 1980s remembers the commercial: probing personal questions appear in white text on a black screen as a Tangerine Dream-esque synth riff pulsates in the background. ”How can you increase your mind’s potential?”…
The Sears catalog was, by the outset of the 1980s, an American institution nearly a century in the making, providing an A-to-Z inventory of mail-order household goods for even the most far-flung consumers in the United States…
By The Mutants
Jesus, 10 years. Launch date: August 29, 2016. Since then we’ve published almost 600 articles: many of them, in my opinion, are important contributions to cultural history and culture at large…
By K.E. Roberts
The comic foregrounds Chick’s particularly virulent and extremist brand of Christianity—many of his tracts have been rightly classified as hate speech—and marks a very early foreshadowing of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early ‘90s…
To interested observers in the 1970s, Ira Einhorn was the paragon of the bleeding-edge, Age of Aquarius thinker. He founded free classes on psychedelics, conducted one of the first “Be-ins” on the East Coast…
Grimy, esoteric capital of the ‘80s North of England, post-Thatcherism Leeds was a peculiarly dual-natured place. An increasingly moribund industrial economy still haunted by the atrocities…
Fans of fraternal Scottish music duo Boards of Canada could be forgiven for being a little overexcited when news of the feverishly anticipated fifth LP, Inferno, the group’s first new music in 13 years, arrived through a series of postal packages stuffed with VHS tapes…
The work of 24-year-old Sicilian musician Francesco Leprino, Integrati… Disintegrati is a suite of music and sound that constantly oscillates between euphoria and anxiety, blending the “organic” sounds of “real” instruments like acoustic guitar and flute, with Moog synths…
By K.E. Roberts
Unlike most library music, Aquarius is a complete work in itself. It’s like a soundtrack to an imaginary film, and Williams uses both traditional and experimental arrangements to tell the story…
A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought for a moment, ready to dismiss the fictional world’s bog-standard fantasy feudalism as nothing of the sort…
By K.E. Roberts
Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…
Incredibly, it took only four years for the spectacle to regurgitate the absurdist nightmare future that George Miller had assembled in 1982’s Mad Max 2 as that most inane and transitory of commodities: a children’s board game…
First released in 1978 by Archon, a publisher based in London’s Soho district, UFOs gains some added legitimacy from the fact that it was written by Brit Bob Rickard, who in 1973 founded what would eventually become the Fortean Times, a monthly magazine devoted to…
The suggestive commonalities of these disparate MUFON presenters does seem to buttress the now-common view that the entire world of postwar American ufology was a giant blind alley meant to distract from and obfuscate top secret U.S. military programs…
By K.E. Roberts
There’s a lot going on here, but let’s start at the beginning: did Voyager I and II really collect sounds from the outer planets and their moons as they passed by? Yes, in a way. Each of the probes was equipped with something called a Plasma Wave Subsystem…
