The sci-fi TV show Stranger Things was successfully pitched with a remix. Its creators, the Duffer Brothers, cobbled together a fake trailer featuring clips from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. with its soundtrack replaced by the menacing synths of horror king John Carpenter. The effect was, according to Matt Duffer, “really fucking cool.” That integration of the vaguely familiar with the eerily sinister would power the show like it did for 2011 pastiche film Drive, itself working like Tangerine Dream put over Death Wish II.

Together, they served as a rebuttal to 30 years of the received wisdom of “’80s nostalgia,” the gags about asymmetrical haircuts and Rubik’s Cubes that permeated slop like The Wedding Singer and The Goldbergs. It was a way of communicating through vibes instead of hack references, a Proustian madeleine for survivors of an America scarred by nuclear anxiety, exploding space shuttles, Satanic panic, Chinese stars, lawn darts, and Punky Brewster’s friend getting trapped in the fridge. Do you want new wave or do you want the truth?

The Zoltar machine that predicted all of this was a 125-second YouTube clip of the obscure 1983 arcade game Laser Grand Prix soundtracked by a loop from Chris de Burgh’s saccharine 1986 ballad “The Lady in Red.” Uploaded in the summer of 2009 and currently standing at 4.3 million views, the video—titled “Nobody Here” after its cycling, haunting refrain—would serve as something like an a-ha moment for people who craved something deeper than A-ha references, a big bang for a generation of musicians attempting to live on the edge of memory and imagination.

“Nobody Here” would reappear as the untitled 12th track on Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, a profoundly inauspicious release—put out on a cassette, limited to a mere 100 copies, no text on the shell, no text on the back of the J-card. The artwork, borrowed from the box art of the tranquil Sega Genesis game Ecco the Dolphin, was close-cropped to feature a frowning shark instead of the playful cetacean. It would become the most influential cassette tape of the 21st century.

Released in 2010, Eccojams was a collection of 15 remixes all with the same concept: the dross of radio’s past, slowed down, echoed, and run through some dream-logic computer effects. Songs both familiar and unfamiliar transmogrified into a sleep paralysis slurry of half-remembered traumas. Putting Toto’s “Africa” in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City conjured the cool ��’80s of Don Johnson blazers, neon lights, and DeLorean doors. Putting Toto’s “Africa” in the Eccojams funhouse conjures the lived ’80s of wainscotted hallways, dust-caked mini blinds, station wagon interiors yellowed from cigarette smoke, lawns speckled with white dog shit and cathode ray TVs that play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at 4 a.m.

Chuck Person was not a real person (though the actual Chuck Person, the 1987 NBA Rookie of the Year, was naturally, a piece of ’80s ephemera). “Chuck Person” was Daniel Lopatin, better known as Oneohtrix Point Never, a Brooklyn drone merchant who had spent the previous three years processing and reconstructing the abstract dreamscapes he culled from his Roland Juno-60. He was at the vanguard of the American noise scene in the hazy years when it retreated from feedback-soaked harshness into an unkanny kosmische. Alongside artists like Emeralds, Yellow Swans, Skaters, and Carlos Giffoni, noise music was starting to sound less like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and more like Tarkovsky’s Stalker—and Lopatin was quietly training to become the house DJ for the “Zone.”

“[T]he entire point of Eccojams was that it was a DIY practice that didn’t involve any specialized music tech knowledge,” Lopatin said in a Reddit AMA, “and for me it was a direct way of dealing with audio in a mutable, philosophical way that had very little to do with music and everything to do with feelings.” Like rope making or basket weaving, the Eccojam is a folk art requiring very little in the way of equipment or natural ability. He started doing it as a way to amuse himself at his job at a Boston textbook publisher. “I was nothing,” he said about the gig. “I was a piece of furniture. I could just feel the life draining out of me.” In his boredom, Lopatin ripped songs and videos from YouTube, slowing them to narcoleptic speeds using GoldWave and editing little films in Windows Movie Maker.

The first taste of Lopatin spelunking the collective unconscious was a 2009 DVD-R leadingly titled Memory Vague, a 33-minute mash-up of his music set to evocative detritus: ’80s commercials for VCRs, golf balls, and Russian cassette players; creepy video logos; primordial video art and computer animations; obscure 1980 TV movie The Arrival; trippy 1985 new age curio Pilot Video Presents California Images: Hi-Fi for the Eyes and more. It included the first two released Eccojams—both posted to the YouTube page “sunsetcorp” that summer. “Angel” was a skipping, pitch-tweaked, highly phased reimagining of Fleetwood Mac’s 1982 album track “Only Over You.” The aforementioned “Nobody Here” would become the “Blitzkrieg Bop” of phantasmal fuzzies.

Of course, Lopatin did not invent slowing down music to discover its hidden pleasures. Belgium’s hedonistic “popcorn” clubs of the ’70s featured popular American soul 45s spun at a sensuous 33 1/3. Perennial hip-hop breaks like the Winstons’ “Amen Brother” and ESG’s “UFO” were pitched down substantially when they appeared on the sampling bedrock compilations Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Pioneers like Ft. Lauderdale’s Jam Pony Express and Houston’s DJ Screw made hundreds of molasses-speed DJ mixes ideal for slow-motion crawls on Southern highways. Slowed-down cumbia records, renamed cumbia rebajada, were popularized by sonideros around Monterrey, Mexico in the ’90s. English turntable artist Philip Jeck culled sooty fogs of dubby melancholy from crackling thrift-store vinyl that crawled along at a snail’s pace. Lopatin himself credits DJ Screw and “plunderphonics” outlaw John Oswald for the genesis of the Eccojam. You can hear the bones of the Eccojam in Oswald pieces like the frenetic Madonna montage “madmod” and the stuttering Michael Jackson reconstruction “dab,” the latter released before the ’80s had even concluded.

However, it was Lopatin’s Eccojams that would strike a singular nerve in an era where it seemed like the bones of “the ’80s” had been picked clean. Xennials like Lopatin had already lived through the emergence of quirky new-wave replicas, which had been around since the ’90s. In the 2000s, every ’80s subculture was given a light coat of paint and rebranded: Post-punk became “Brooklyn dance-punk,” obscure hip-hop songs became “random-rap mixtapes,” electro became “electroclash.” Nostalgia was the new normal and Eccojams arrived roughly concurrent with other critically overdissected microgenres all supposedly evoking the childhood of an era: UK “hauntology” (the eerie ’70s), synthwave (the decadent ’80s), hypnogogic pop (the wistful ’80s) and chillwave (the blissful ’90s). Everyone was feeling it all around, but Lopatin was the closest to actually touching it.

Unlike the music of, say, Ariel Pink or Washed Out, Eccojams are inextricable from their source material. Nearly 70 percent of the material on Eccojams Vol. 1 is constructed from actual music from the actual ’80s: past-their-prime boomers going soft rock, R&B softies navigating the production techniques of quiet storm era, the adult contemporary ballads you’d hear at the grocery store. Most of the remaining 30 percent—including bits of a Byrds album track, Radio Disney balladeer JoJo, Belgian trance act Ian Van Dahl and Michael Jackson’s mostly forgotten ’90s remix album Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix—had their own ephemeral appeal.

Lopatin’s real feat with Eccojams is not his ethereal production techniques, but his curation. The crates had been dug, the reissues reissued, so Lopatin found the dollar bin records that hadn’t been looted. And he didn’t even have to leave YouTube to get them. His choices were unorthodox but prescient. Fleetwood Mac (“A2,” “B2”) would begin a new life as a Zoomer fave and meme soundtrack after a Glee episode that aired in 2011. Kate Bush (“B1”) would re-enter the Billboard singles chart at No. 4 after “Running Up That Hill” was used in a Stranger Things episode. Womack & Womack (“B7”), Alexander O’Neal (“A8”) and Teddy Pendergrass (“B2”) would all receive critical reappraisal once R&B became the new indie rock. Toto’s “Africa” (”A1”) had an absolutely insufferable second life that’s not worth going into here.

As a selector, Lopatin pillages these songs for their most forlorn and cryptic moments, exploding their hidden melancholia: “Hurry, boy, she’s waiting there for you,” “It doesn’t matter anyway, you know it’s just too little too late,” “I know that door that shuts just before.” “The key,” said Lopatin, “is if everyone can do it, then each piece reveals something about what its producer likes about it. So I’m always searching for the juiciest moment in a pop track to sample…and get into this hypnotic state with it.” Take the 1978 smash “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. Director David Fincher jumps right to that iconic sax line to score a haunting staredown in 2007’s Zodiac. Lopatin finds a sour lyrical shard of despondency, forcing Rafferty to repeat over and over again in what sounds like an opiate-saturated daze, “Another year and then you’d be happy.”

The album briefly created a small army of Eccojammers, most notably Laserdisc Visions and New Dreams Ltd., both pseudonyms of Portland-based producer Vektroid. However, this would quickly metastasize into “vaporwave,” a slowpoke collage-art music that plundered the ’80s and ’90s for R&B, smooth jazz, Japanese pop, muzak, video games, and Microsoft sound effects. Though many will cite chillwave or hypnogogic pop as the birth of too-online music, vaporwave was truly the first internet microgenre, a self-sufficient community ignored by any critical establishment larger than e-zines and vloggers. The vaporwave community instead blossomed in subreddits and Last.fm scrobbles, serving as the test kitchen for the next 15 years of weird little microscenes, from the fleeting (“seapunk,” “mallsoft,” “dariacore”) to the tectonic (the Haunted Mound/Bladee/TeamSESH axis of white trap that’s breaking containment after nearly a decade in the internet’s margins).

After Eccojams, the dustiest, most overlooked corners of Goodwill were rethought and re-appreciated. Drafthouse Films exhumed kitschy ’80s genre films like the 1981 3D Western Comin’ at Ya! and the 1987 karate musical Miami Connection. Reissue label Light in the Attic moved from Betty Davis and Rodríguez to successfully recontextualizing soft rock, adult contemporary, new age cassettes, and Japanese AOR. The “uncanny ’80s” was explored in films like weirdo comedy Brigsby Bear, psychedelic horror Mandy, and nü-slasher MaXXXine. The “uncanny ’90s” is next at bat with films like Skinamarink and I Saw the TV Glow. The folk tradition of the Eccojam lives on nearly unrecognizably in YouTube videos called “slowed + reverb,” where slowpoke versions of Hindi love songs get views in the tens of millions.

Critics and theorists mostly paint Eccojams and vaporwave as a critique of the market, with Simon Reynolds saying it reveals “the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities” in his essential 2011 nostalgia screed Retromania. That reading, while popular, fails to see the forest for the pixelated palm trees. “I think a lot of those Eccojams are just cathartic for me,” said Lopatin. “I make them when I hear something in pop music, and I’m just like, ‘Fuck, I just wanna hear that over and over.’” An Eccojam is a celebration of the ineffable. Like ASMR, horror movies, cat videos, rage bait, or pornography, it’s a functional medium painstakingly calibrated to evoke a specific sensation. An Eccojam or a vaporwave song gives a listener a sense of placelessness, with the knowledge that “placelessness” is still an interesting place you want to visit.

“The sublime is located in all times and across all brows at once,” Lopatin told The Wire, railing against the “timbral fascism” that won’t let synth musicians use chorus effects without seeming cheesy. With Eccojams, Lopatin uses the bit-compressed technology of the present to extract the sublime from the trash heap of the past, and provides instructions on how to access it in the future. Hurry, boy, it’s waiting there for you.