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the-au-collector · 2 days ago

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So I’ve been rewatching season 1 of The Promised Neverland again while waiting to reread the manga (I’m like 10th in line for the library hold 😭😭😭) and I’ve just thought of a new LU AU:

The Promised Neverland x Linked Universe

Basically, the idea is the Links are all kids escaping from various farms. Idk what the names would be but they’d be stand-ins for TPN’s main locations so... As for now the Links and other characters! (Since I don’t want to use TPN’s names, the escapees means Grace Field, game hunt is Goldy Pond, and the bunker is the bunker)

Time, Malon, Warriors:

I feel like they would be the Yuugo and Lucas of the group. Time and Malon would be in Lucas’ place in Goldy Pond, while Warriors is wasting away in the bunker and is found by the escapees. Wars obviously feels a ton of guilt for leaving the rest of his fellow escapees (OoT’s sages, Time, Malon, and maybe some of the fighters you meet in HW) to die. And of course he keeps beefing with Legend, who would be like 13 in this AU.

Meanwhile, Time and Malon are taking care of the game hunt kids and teaching them to survive. Time is a TANK, amazing at fighting the demons. Malon is more of a medic and naturalist, very good with plants/animals/wildlife.

Oh yeah and THEY MAKE IT OUT ALIVE (yes I’m still crying over the bunker dads leave me aloneee)

Twilight, Wild, Champions, Sages, Flora, Dusk:

The said game hunt kids. Twi mostly takes Oliver’s place as Time’s mentee and the oldest that isn’t an adult. I’m debating whether or not I should give Wild amnesia still, but the Champions are dead. They all grew up on the same farm and all got shipped to this Goldy Pond-equivalent. Same with Flora, she’s the technician of the group, really good with mechanical things. The Sages are still alive though. (And Teba and Tulin are not related/have a brotherly relationship instead of being father and son)

As for Dusk, she’s there because Twi is there. I thought of adding Midna here too but having her be dead but since I want the LoZ antagonists to be demons, I might end up making her the Mujika-equivalent. I’ve yet to decide for Midna, all I know is I want her to somehow have a connection to Twi eventually.

Legend, Hyrule, Four, Wind, Sky:

These four feel the best to be the equivalents of Ray, Emma, Gilda, Don, and Norman (yes in that order), trying to escape their farm and such. I feel like, though, it would be Hyrule, Wind, and Sky (or some combination of them) who would end up going to the gate to give the forgotten toy (idk who it would be that would be shipped off, maybe an NPC or minor character from one of their games). Legend would already know the truth, and because he does, Fable would too since I can’t let go of the twins headcanon.

Given these 5 are in the same farm, their respective Zeldas (Flora, Dawn, Aurora, Dot, Tetra, and Sun) would also be in the same farm and because y’all know I can’t help myself, I have to throw Shadow and Ravio in there too. I might make some of these guys Lambda experiments though (I’m especially side-eyeing Sun there…)

Also yes Sky becomes Minerva.

Hylia and First:

Isabela and Leslie. That’s it.

Oh and Hylia is Fable and Legend’s mom like Isabela is Ray’s.

But yeah that’s what I’ve got so far. As I keep writing this I keep getting more ideas (Shadow is Ayshe instead, maybe? We don’t meet Ravio until Paradise where he’s decided he can run the business empire of his dreams? AoC link is in there somehow?) so I’m going to call it here. If I didn’t add anyone I either a) have no ideas for them or b) have an idea but that means they would die and I don’t want them to die (cough, Lullaby and Artemis, cough)

But yeah. TPN on the brain.

(FINAL THOUGHT I SWEAR: The one who gets shipped away and found by Hyrule, Sky, and Wind is Marin… perhaps…)

#linked universe #lu time #lu twilight #lu legend #lu wild #lu wind #lu warriors #lu hyrule #lu four #lu sky #lu malon #lu au #collectors miscellanious au #the promised Neverland fusion #the promised Neverland

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cloudydamage3 · 6 years ago

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Stereolab: Switched On / Refried Ectoplasm / Aluminum Tunes

In the 1990s, being an indie fan required a deep familiarity with the blank tape. Much of a band’s activity took place on singles, EPs, compilations, and other formats extraneous to the long-playing studio album. For die-hard listeners, that meant compiling miscellany on cassette and sequencing it into a form that didn’t require hours crouched over a turntable, changing records every few songs—an early form of today’s playlisting.

Chief among the groups helping fuel the decade’s sales of Maxell XLIIs and TDK SA90s were Stereolab. The UK band’s first decade played out like a game of hide-and-seek across scattered black (and yellow, pink, clear, and marbled) discs: 7"s, 10"s, flexi-discs, split singles, tour-only souvenirs, oddball one-offs. Throughout the ’90s, Stereolab averaged a new album every 15 months. But as they evolved from the jangle and crunch of lo-fi indie pop to a knottier amalgam of krautrock and easy listening, much of their development happened between albums.

Keeping up with the band could require a significant cash outlay, though they made good on their Marxist ethos by intermittently compiling all that material for the masses who didn’t have $60 for a rare Nurse With Wound collaboration in its reflective silver sleeve. To revisit those anthologies—1992’s Switched On, 1995’s Refried Ectoplasm, and 1998’s Aluminum Tunes, all newly reissued through the group’s own Duophonic UHF Disks—is to retrace the development of one of the era’s most creatively dynamic bands.

Switched On is the simplest of the three. Released in the fall of 1992 five months after Stereolab’s introductory album, Peng!, it compiles Stereolab’s first three singles from 1991—Super-Electric, Stunning Debut Album, and Super 45. The band was still a tidy quartet: drummer Joe Dilworth (of th’ Faith Healers), bassist Martin Kean (formerly of the Chills), multi-instrumentalist Tim Gane, and Laetitia Sadier singing sweetly in French and English about topics plucked from a grad student’s dog-eared textbooks. The band’s sound was fuzzier than it would soon become, brimming with stompbox abuse and two-chord rave-ups; the drums and guitars of “Brittle” and “Contact” are but a stone’s throw from shoegaze. Even then, the outlines of their sound, and the roadmap to their future, were fully realized in intricate detail.

In the first three tracks here, Stereolab leap from the thrillingly linear and hard-charging “Super-Electric” to the more wistful, Farfisa-powered “Doubt” to the shuffling study in vocal counterpoint, “Au Grand Jour’.” On the eight-and-a-half minute “Contact,” they morph from a demure shimmer to the kind of airplane-roar climax that made their early concerts so exciting and deafening. And though Sadier’s dulcet voice seems to float, her lyrics—easy to miss by ear, but impossible to forget once you’ve deciphered them—are prescient. “Is it enough to show/How the nightmare works/So the people will wake up/Is it enough?” she sings during “Doubt.” The observation feels more apropos than ever now: What is doubt if not the defining quality of the post-truth political era?

In 1993, Stereolab shifted into overdrive, releasing three major works before 1994 was up. The Groop Played “Space Age Batchelor Pad Music” is a mini-LP with a dreamy mood. Their sophomore album, Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, is heavier than its predecessor. Mars Audiac Quintet, their third, is the crown jewel of their early, motorik phase. Released 11 months after Mars, the collection Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2) captures the run-up to that peak.

Stereolab are clearly testing the proportions of their sound, balancing the rough, the smooth, and the sly. “Harmonium”—a 1992 single by the power trio of Gane, Sadier, and Dilworth—is a grinding slab of maximalist minimalism in full Suicide mode. “Lo Boob Oscillator,” a 1993 Sub Pop single by a six-piece, marries crisp 1960s pop hooks to metronomic drumming and coruscating drones. They’re sometimes refreshingly straightforward here. On “Revox,” they pummel away, channeling their live intensity through chords that shift up and down, like the gearbox of a sports car hugging mountainous curves. “Revox” reveals the outlines of an increasingly raw sound and shows signs of growing lyrical daring, too. The sweet ba-ba-ba harmonies are actually a series of French verbs: “To pine/To quiver/To die/To moan … To suffer/To sleep/To appear/To vomit.”

But Refried Ectoplasm also documents Stereolab at their experimental best. The 14-minute “Animal or Vegetable [A Wonderful Wooden Reason...],” a collaboration with British avant-garde trickster Nurse With Wound, begins with several minutes of backmasked vocals. It veers into dirge-like psychedelic stomp before ending with an explosion of haywire musique concrète—gunfire, barnyard animals, rehearsal tapes spit out by a malfunctioning machine.

The biggest shift of Stereolab’s career came after Mars Audiac Quintet, as the band fully embraced unusual time signatures, ultra-vivid production, and the record-collector winks that distinguished 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup and 1997’s Dots and Loops. This is the ground covered by 1998’s sprawling Aluminum Tunes, which collects music from 1994 until 1997. The 25-track set begins with the six-song Music for the Amorphous Body Center EP, created as the complement to an exhibition by the sculptor Charles Long. If amoebas could dance, they’d waltz to this burbling, squelching suite. “Iron Man,” an exotica-inspired and breakbeat-driven single from 1997, is the better indication of where they were headed. The wordless vocal samples and elastic pedal steel are kitschy and cartoonish, while the rolling drums suggest the extent to which the group was keeping an eye on what the era’s DJs were doing. There are two more explicit nods to DJ culture in the compilation’s two remixes.

Not everything here is essential, of course; an anthology sourced from 7" B-sides will, by definition, contain some filler. My personal C100 of Stereolab rarities would not include “One Note Samba / Surfboard,” their flute-laced collab with Herbie Mann. But Aluminum Tunes’ best songs, like the unexpectedly lovely “One Small Step,” rank among their best material, period. And “Speedy Car,” a 5/4 escapade with Afrobeat touches that cycles endlessly upward, offers teasing hints at paths not taken.

It’s in these mutations, so close to but so far from Stereolab’s album material, where it becomes clear why fans could be so obsessive about tracking down these rarities as they trickled out, one 7" at a time—and why, somewhere along the line, even the nice-price anthologies themselves became collectors’ items. With the band’s sneakily seductive protest music feeling more necessary than ever, now’s the perfect time for these reissues.

Source: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-switched-on-refried-ectoplasm-aluminum-tunes/

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