This post is definitely not about cat parasites.

This post is definitely not about the fact that each member of 20JFG is surrounded by at least one cat on a daily basis.

This post will not postulate what the cat parasite wants with us.  It will merely point out that we are all from (marginally) diverse backgrounds and ideologies, brought together by some strange force to promote our love of occasionally popular music; to draw around us those who have also been inexplicably attracted to these strange, hypnotic, sometimes discordant, sometimes sexual, sometimes devoid of all meaning and direction…

This post will not deal with exactly why this blog was created to draw people to a DJ night.  What drove our two founders to want to meet like minded people, in a public place, where there was touching.

This post is all about the music, oh yes.  Certainly not about that cat up there.  We have no idea what it wants.

Terminal Muse: Blue, the new release from Atlanta, Georgia’s Lid EMBA (Sean Moore, if you’re the Feds), is the second in a trilogy dedicated to the cost of persistence in art. Literally. Far from being a gift, the concept posits that the creative urge is actually a curse, a disease, an incurable infection that both drives the artist while draining his or her life-force.

Reagan-era-ish apocolyptic sci-fi has an awful lot to answer for in terms of formative music experiences.  Those endless pastel deserts and synth drones, forever linked in at the fulcrum of A Boy and His Dog / Miracle Mile / Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds.  Lid EMBA seems to tease these out, dragging a mollasses slow theme from a tape damaged coma.  Distortion radiating out from a hazy ground zero.

As a musical vision of the vampyric qualities of creativity it’s devastating.  Industrial repetition buried under the throb of synths as a battle damaged metaphor for making.  Like Goya setting up a Tangerine Dream covers band.  Probably before his black period though.

Lid EMBA – Iscariot

Iscariot is taken from the album Terminal Muse: Blue out last year on Stick Figure. Go get!

Mannequin records continue their admirable exercise in Italian noir archaeology with their reissue of Central Unit’s ‘Loving Machinery’, a landmark exercise in robotic ennui that was released thirty years ago but sounds like tomorrow.

Saturday Nite dissects the bathos of weekend expectations disappointed with a withered surgical dance device whose synths doppler-effect like the sirens of an ambulance roaming the city for heartbreak victims (it always arrives too late), it’s P-funk telegraph tries to lure our despondent protagonist into the dancefloor, but instead he walks into the winter without, alone with his self-consciousness.

Central Unit – Saturday Nite

Go and get it here.

(Our post was given some colour by Philip Caza via 50Watts)

Our genotype mutates slowly, its dominant components a mostly stable tarot deck of archetypes of literary, visual, digital-graphic and subcultural derivation – things that hit us hard in the head when we were being formed, things that perhaps we shouldn’t have been exposed to. Because, as if through osmosis, they penetrated our skin and attached themselves to our soft nervous system. There they remain, never to be dislodged, we return to them again and again in a Nitzschean drone…

Which may explain our stationary state in stats, but also gestalt, we hurl our criteria of validity at the face of the postmodernist gorgon and the spectacle churning cultural-industrial complex like maladapted simians, and run back into the jungle with trophies and relics which we hang in the ruinous gallery of our obsessions, here.

Demdike Stare’s Elemental is a probe exploring a planetary system once inhabited by a civilisation whose culture we cannot fathom, it pans past strange rama-like cylinders enveloping the crimson sun (our analytics software reports that their purpose appears to be ritualistic rather than industrial), it zooms into the surface of one of its deserted planets, and follows a circuit of cyclopean autobahns across which advance brutal crab-looking trucks in mysterious autopilot.

All is quiet, save for a furious wind, and their dubby rumble.

Demdike Stare – Ishmael’s Intent

Go and pre-order Elemental from Boomkat.

Baldruin’s Nachtfalter approximates the Machean ideal of a ramble through wild woods leading our protagonist (say, Mary) to the summit of a hill covered in stones scattered with a hidden logic, like a game of chess left unfinished by long-gone giants. Undine is the love song that the forces simmering within this strange configuration (or beyond the portal that it represents) sing at Mary’s soul, and to which she surrenders, thus becoming the corrupted wife of the dreadful God Pan.

If you had been there, you would have done the same.

Baldruin – Undine

Nachtfalter is coming out in tape at the end of February, through Brave Mysteries.

Welcome Ashley Marlowe aka Donga aka curator of the very excellent Well Rounded / Individuals family with a 100% vinyl  shagged needles and ailing mixer very friendly mixtape which is “kinda house but with a more psychedelic edge”.

Top class, as ever.

Donga Very Friendly Mix

Tracklist:

1. FLOETRY – ‘Say Yes (Remix)’ (white)
2. LINKWOOD – ‘?’ (SHEVC004)
3. ROBERT OWENS – ‘One Tear’ (Tevo Howard Recs)
4. VIDEODROME – ‘Temptation’s Daughter (Donga & Blake Remix)’ (Well Rounded Housing Project)
5. BELL TOWERS – ‘Private Time (Dub)’ (Hole In The Sky)
6. DARKNESS FALLS – ‘The Void (Terje Bakke Remix)’ (HFN)
7. JULIO BASHMORE – ‘Well Wishers’ (Futureboogie)
8. VAKULA – ‘Sun S Truth’ (Leleka)
9. CONNAN MOCKASIN – ‘Faking Jazz Together (Michael Mayer Mix)’ (Because)
10. DNTEL – ‘Anywhere, Anyone (Silent Servant & Regis Mix)’ (Sub Pop)
11. Luke Abbott – ‘Brazil (Slow Version)’ (Border Community)
12. THE BAYARA CITIZENS – ‘Bambara (Tribes Of Distortion Dub)’ (Sacred Rhythm)
13. SENSORAMA – ‘Exil’ (Ladomat 2000)
14. DARLING FARAH – ‘Grace’ (Civil Music)
15. PIRAHNAHEAD – ‘ConScience’ (Third Ear)

Week 4 and Exile is turning into residence.

Two cascading pieces of electronic music.

RxGibbs‘ Proxy falls through the hazy memories of a Kompakt future: a land of brushed metal and milk.  Where reclaimed architectural units of the past; are put into service as the unblinking backdrop; to the entropy of elegance into decadence.  The crisp frame to the final moments of a 48 hour binge.

RxGibbs’ Proxy continues to fall.  Straight through the part 4AD , part Gainsbourg ecstatic/mournful signing of a female voice.  Falling back to the ghostly wireframes of piano house — a dubby place now populated by breeding pairs of Minimal House-oids (a northern European species).

Falling through the synth strains that sound rather like a choral rendition of the metal on metal of banking trains.  Falling through the glorious repetition.  Falling eventually to a pillow soft stop that belies its mechanical reproduction.  Blissful.

RxGibbs – Proxy

Proxy is taken from the Futures EP which is out on February 21st on Cascine.

Crisne returns to 20JFG after Monday’s excursion, this time with Antonio Gallucci in…Architeuthis Rex.

Sometimes, when listening before reading, we stare up at the laptop screen — after hearing something particularly amazing — to make a note of the song title.  This is both in the expectation that it will shed some light on what we’re hearing and so we can find it easier later.  As the brutal looping assault began we knew we in love and, glancing up to see the object of our affection we saw it, there, in grey and white: SpaceMetal#1.

We should have known.

Beginning with the (universally recognised) modulating sound of space’s vacuum, under the pulse of a beacon: we are in space.  A deliciously ominous loop replaces our beacon and metallic shuffling replaces our modulating space sound.  And it grows.  It grows in that creeping way that only a very gradual curve can, almost insidious in its oozing volume.

And lo, there was Metal.  Compressed into the narrowest of beams; a million shreds crying out as one and then refracted.  The pulsating loop obliterating any semblance of structure and time and space.  It’s as if Slayer were placed near a singularity, drums slowed down, guitars accelerated to the point of drone, a human voice desperately clawing its way back from the event horizon.

Architeuthis Rex - SpaceMetal #1

Architeuthis Rex’s album Urania came out on Utech last year.  Go get!

And finally, a plug for our brothers and sisters at Ad Hoc who launched their Kickstarter this week.  Head on over and see if anything takes your fancy or, of course, if you’re feeling altruistic…

This is still up for grabs if you feel that Crabcore is a genre in need of critical reappraisal.

(Post title off China Miéville’s stunning Embassytown, go read).

Dear 20jazzfunkgreats,

Last night I had a dream. I dreamt of a blue orb spinning in the unfathomable blackness, over a turbulent ocean governed by invisible forces.

It shone like a candle about to be snuffed out, the shining I saw was that of life spread across this orb, one that illuminates, however feebly, the quadrant of space it has been allocated. The light’s shifting frequencies contained the fractal complexities of the ecosystem that fuels it.

I feared for the orb, entering the terra incognita of its very future, forces of darkness threatening to envelop it with a still kiss. There be dragons here, some of its own making, and some exogenous, curled chaoses envisaged by a weird prophet and his scions. In my dream, the identity of the killer was undisclosed, the identity of the victim, all too clear.

Like an Argento slasher, playing out at a cosmic scale.

Watch out guys.

Faithfully yours,

The Sentinel.

Masaki Batoh – Eye Tracking Test

Masaki Batoh of Ghost fame (check out their Hypnotic Underworld, one of the HEAD albums of the millennium so far) has is releasing ‘Brain Pulse Music’ in Drag City. It allegedly ‘harnesses the bio-electric output of the human brain’ with a device resembling a guitar pedal. We suspect the subject of this experiment in particular was progressing through Ligeti’s wormhole, at nil asymptotic speed. Nice sights.

Pre-order the album here.

FYI: The Upset the Rhythm Kingdom tour beckons.

Featuring Peepholes, Way Through and Gentle Friendly. We shall be there at the kick-off in Brighton on Friday. Here are the dates:

Friday 3 – BRIGHTON – Green Door Store / 7pm

Saturday 4 – MANCHESTER – Kraak Galler / 8pm

Sunday 5 – CARDIFF – Undertone / 7.30pm

Tuesday 7 – LONDON – Café Oto / 7.30pm

Wednesday 8 – LEEDS – Brudenell Social Club / 8pm

Thursday 9 – NEWCASTLE – Teasy Does It / 8pm

Friday 10 – GLASGOW – Nice N Sleazy / 8pm

Saturday 11 – LEAMINGTON SPA – Leamington Assembly

The dystopian scenarios of the cyberpunk literature explore the distributional outcomes of a winner-takes-all tech-powered economy, where the powerful get their kicks out of implementing convoluted conspiracies, meddling with drugs, perversion and crime as a the only channel to reintroduce uncertainty in their sheltered and spoiled lives. Creativity and innovation still thrive in the forlorn street, that street that finds its own use for things, but it’s all hustle, a far cry from the utopias imagined by Vannevar Bush and the sapient pioneers of the Golden Age. Sentient constructs swim under the data surface of this world, threatening the status quo with their own special brand of otherness.

This otherness permeates the post-human scenarios depicted in hard sci-fi, where we fast-forward past the singularity to populate the stars. The material mess is done away with, abstracted under a rug decorated with complex systems of equations, over which our own echoes hover alien like jellyfish in a philosophical migration to the outer walls of the universe.

Synthetic music we call synthetic because of the tools with which it is made, perhaps also because it articulates the possibility of synthesis, a balance between the perfect logic with which waveforms flow across a circuit to alter sound-states, and the emergent, never completely self-aware, always failure-prone being-in-doing instinctiveness of a flesh-full operator.

This synthesis represents the state of Man Machine, a moment of grace where the born and the made stand in loving embrace, not as individuals but as societies, alas, not ecosystems, for positive feedback loops and chaotic effects will always conspire to decouple them, into either of the local optima we referred to above.  And if they didn’t, stagnation would ensue anyway.

We can’t win, but we can listen to wonderful synth songs that capture the integral and the ascension, like tableaus of longing stretched across the silicon dome of an uncompiled basilica.

The text above may have caused the incorrect impression that synthesis can only (only!) convey breath-taking vistas of grandiose neon canyons, or the formally beautiful ballet of an android coterie.

Nothing further from the truth, synthesis is also the gestalt of a roller-skating jog down a Californian seafront late in the summer. Coolio Franco’s  lazy boogie in your Walkman blue-bites an alternate reality application in your wraparound sunglasses to create a moment of pastel-powered synaesthesia as thrilling as any angelic epiphany.

Coolio Franco – Song for David

Go and retrieve the rest of the album at Bandcamp.

Crine’s Albedo is a psalter of sepia hymns blown across the moors of our consciousness, ectoplasms of moments that we know we never lived, but nevertheless miss as phantom limbs.

Its Hall of Wisdom rises in front of us, holographically, and we step through its baroque gates Alice-like, Flynn-like, Valerie-like, seeking the original substrate of this girl revenant that haunts us.

A perceptual interruption after, we stand on a beach of white pebbles encroached by geometrical waves of liquid crystal, they pulse to the metronome of a cosmic microprocessor. She stands in the distance, a faint shadow, we walk towards her but we get no closer.

We know we will die here, and robotic crabs will devour our corpse, and she will stare for a bit, and then be gone past the dunes. We also know we will return, caught in the loop of a memory of a memory.

Crisne – Hall of Wisdom

Order ‘Albedo’ from Phantasma Disques.

The Head Technician from Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services made us a mixtape, which we are very happy to share with you today.

Pye Corner Audio – A magnetically aligned ferrous mixtape from The Head Technician

Tracklist :

1. Kuedo – Ant City
2. Stratus – Look To The Sky
3. Ekoclef – we march triumphant over your bones
4. Walter   - Dinner in Trieste
5. Walls – Raw Umber/Twilight
6. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Jumblegloss
7. Balam Acab – Apart
8. Ekoclef – wait a minute mister postman
9. The Advisory Circle – Modern Through Movement
10. Billy Green – Eco Blue/Toadstrip (Demdike Stare’s Double Drop Crash Edit)
11. Pye Corner Audio – Pathway Seven
12. Holy Other – Yr Love
13. Jackal’s Doom Disco – Klatterbox
14. Throbbing Gristle – Hot On The Heels of Love
15. Kassem Mosse – Enoha
16. The House In The Woods – Mountains Of The Sea
17. Mark Shreeve – Assassin

Buy : Pye Corner Audio’s Black Mill Tapes Vol​.​3 

Dear 20JFG,

The banality of familiarity has kicked in.  Sorry.  

Those simple stereotypes of home are becoming more believable the more the memory of the complexity fades. It’s all rock, new media companies and hen nights, no?  No?

The music we post always has a pretty fuzzy chronology and we’ve always had an equally fuzzy approach to reading press releases.  For the last week or so the baroque Italian-English of La Bambola Del Dr Caligari has been soundtracking our morning commute along the chalk lips of southern England.  And the idea that it was recorded over 25 years ago was completely alien.  And thus Cold/Synth/Minimal-Wave eats itself and is born anew.  Except in this case, when what we’d mistaken for loving recreation is actually just meticulously preserved.  Ooops.

This changes our relationship with the music only in the way that there’s now a disconnect between the people responsible and us, the listeners.  They’re not living in the world of Merkozy but that of Reagan.  Their shuffling downtempo deployment of simple synth sounds: a retreat from crushing economic inequities…simplistic economic parallels: lol.

La Bambola Del Dr Caligari’s languid shuffle through Deep Skanner forms the centrepiece of their Forced Exposure curated split with Vazz.  Where Twin Peaks had the angelic Julee Cruise taking up residence at the Roadhouse, the voice of La Bambola Del Dr Caligari’s Judy Asquith crawls around the decaying ritual spaces of purgatorial bars.  The remorselessly simple synthetic snares pulling you round and round, a aural tracking shot, synths occasionally obscuring your view of the unfolding anti-drama at the centre of the apocalyptic stage.  Those nuclear weapons were always an easy metaphor for the socio-economic devastation unleashed then, as now — although disarmament has sucked the drama from the end of the world.  Damn.

La Bambola Del Dr Caligari – Deep Skanner

Deep Skanner is available on the split LP Whisper Not / The Wrong Holiday available on Forced Exposure from the 30th January. Boomkat, in their wisdom, have made it album of the week.

(More here)

On the 19th of January 2012, a zillion innocent songs faced obliteration. They had been caught in the middle of a battle pitting a Mount Rushmore of severe lawyerly faces, pockmarked with threatening takedown tendrils, and the khaki lords of the cloud, bloated by the windfall of a thousand network effects.

 No-one cared for the songs. They had long lived miserable existences locked in the zip cells of a cybernetic prison, crammed between adverts for scantily dressed ladies and pills supposedly able to convert their takers into outrages worthy of Frank Miller’s latest fascistic delirium. In the face of oblivion, some of the songs felt relief.

 But as the servers shut down, a new hope.

 Envoys from a digital land had arrived, heralding the possibility of a different future and a better life in a secret network joining half empty servers and underutilised corporate pipes, the quantum void in the interstices of humanity’s body technologic, home to strangely looped intelligences yet to be revealed. A digital land untainted by dishonest grubs seeking to monetise them, either as core assets, or complementary ones. A place to live and grow as songs, await until mankind learns their true value, a value which cannot be counted, but cannot be leveraged either.

 So there they went. Nowhere and everywhere. We can feel them around us, as we sail across the straits of the data atoll, spectral dolphins watching us, and over us. We experience the odd hallucination of their strange society, convey it to you here.

We hope we are doing right by them, for we won’t be whole until we have them back.

We don’t know if these musical refugees of the content wars have a religion, but if they do, then this must be their prophet.

Cybotron – El salvador

Cybotron’s Enter exists in that most exciting of spaces, a crossroads, where revolutionary funk and disruptive technology fuse, their supernova originating a spider web of energy and potentiality. We sit in one of the branches, and shudder shaken by the electric voltage of its soul and beauty.

The manoeuvres of their militaristic faction adds a µs to the lag that first person shooter aficionados experience as they shoot each other in the face with high-powered ordnance across the global network. It is a small tax to pay for the savage splendour of the, alas, rarely glimpsed march of our protagonists’ regiments.

Here you have a prototype, in the shape of Windbreaker’s Suicide-class battle cruiser. The cruelty of its distortion torpedoes is balanced with the chivalrous aspirations of the squadron of magnificently moustachioed Hussars crewing it.

Windbreaker – astral projected gunship

Pre-order their 12’’ split with Gelset from SEEHRS.

As you may know, one of 20jazzfunkgreats’ favourite fantasies concerns mankind’s eventual reckoning against vastly superior alien forces whose judgement about our survival will be informed by a choice slice of our cultural output.

The musical migration that we report today may increase our chances of survival, as the inhabitants of the digital interstices we have described above will experience contact with those alien intelligences sooner than the self-obsessed so-called muppet civilisations of meatspace, and present a more palatable face to our alien overlords/Earth-wreckers too.

What music says about mankind, and how that weights in the ultimate decision, is a different question, given the way we have treated it. We can only hope.

Expo 70’s Moon Raga is an accurate approximation of the significance of that eventual rendezvous with the forces beyond, say, as skimmed over at the end of Neuromancer, and an example of the best we have to offer for our salvation.

It pounces with a primeval Vangelis-ian drone the likes of with we haven’t witnessed since International Feel blew our socks off with its Coptic Sun, and coils with violence barely contained under a hermetic veil of noise, the mutterings of a nocturnal force whose seductiveness won’t be resisted, by ourselves or our much mightier destructors.

And therein lies salvation.

Expo 70 – Moon Raga

Buy: Expo 70’s ‘Hovering Resonance’ 12 in Sound Cobra.

Where to now? – Jan 2012 xxjfg mixtape

Tracklist :

1. creature lab : he calls himself the seeker (part 5) (forthcoming. where to now?)
2. kyle bobby dunn : dropping sandwiches in chester (desire path)
3. apemoth : time lock (forthcoming. where to now?)
4. jurgen muller : sea bed meditation (digitalis)
5. mist : mist house (spectrum spools)
6. das ding : h.s.t.a. (reissue. minimal wave)
7. bernard szajner : welcome (to deathrow) (initial recordings)
8. chevalier avant garde : blue plate (forthcoming. where to now?)
9. creature lab : he calls him the seeker (part 3) (forthcoming. where to now?)
10. andy stott : submission (modern love)
11. vita noctis : expose (camera obscura)
12. PDP : crime wave (where to now?)
13. leyland kirby : the arrow of time (history always favours the winners)
14. moon gangs : sea (where to now?)

Links : Where to now? online shop & tumblr

Dear 20JFG,

The portal that you provide back to my former life — all glittering floors and narrow streets — continues to be very much appreciated.  

I have made repeated excursions this week, attempting to pierce the membrane that keeps me from you; a needle repeatedly stopped in time, on the verge.  But to no avail.  I remain idealising from afar and plotting my eventual return.

Without the ‘penguin huddle’ that your city’s wayward building practices provides I have been repeatedly blasted by sea-fresh winter weather.  It has not been fun.

Thanks once again for the parcel.  Its boundless energy paints the streets with looping joy.

Whatever the collective noun for celestial brand Casio keyboards, they descend from on high to kiss the balearic shores before pushing off back into the sky to dance loops against the clouds.  Moments of grace amongst the alluring cliffs of a tidal breakbeat: washing over the dancing, specular flecks of light that flake from the treble heavy melodies.

What would have made for a very respectably brief running length for a 60s pop single here contains all your dance music food groups.  A beautiful intro a danceable series of peaks and troughs a breakdown and a triumphant return.  Maybe not enough drops to satisfy your average Skrillex fan but nonetheless, an impressive feat for a track barely out of 2 minutes.  2012 will bow before brevity in dance music (although we’d have still liked this to go on forever).

Lord Boyd – Shark Dad

Lord Boyd’s Beyonce EP is out now via his Bandcamp, here.

120 Megabytes – Episode 19

brought to you in association with @markbrown and our friends over at Network Awesome

Songs like black cats, we cannot fathom whether they exist superimposed to our surroundings, or shadowlessly embedded within them, spilling through their invisible channels like ink on water, love or corruption. We link this peculiar effect to the continuity of their shape, the smoothness of their flow, their coating in a cloak of velvet and fuzz, which blurs them into the background, from where they machinate unacknowledged, counsellors of our subconscious.

Alenka Sottler illustration via 50Watts.

Logosamphia’s Passage Omni is a wake for long-forgotten gods of the ocean celebrated at the bottom of the abyss, within barnacled wreckages, by the spectres of the drowned. Or the echoes of a mass at the church of our past, where we worship, and from which we are barred. In its solemnity, it stretches across a whole galaxy of mournful instances, in its beauty, it gives meaning to our bereavement.

Logosamphia – A1

Buy: Logosamphia Passage Omni will be released on February by Enfant Terrible Productions.

The logic of subtle manipulation from a camouflaged vantage point that we outlined above is also applicable to social environments, say, a nightclub, where a song with the right features acts as Maxwell’s Demon, sorting the behaviour of participants against the forces of entropy. This is the way dance happens.

In Organs of Love’s case, dance may in fact occur, but only as a socially acceptable version of the much darker effects suggested by its suicidal throb/dissonant keyboard graffiti combo, and its pervy glam stomp.

And what are these, you ask? The primeval triad of Sex, Drugs and Crime, all those bad things that the night was made for.

Organs of Love – Let’s Talk to Bobby

Buy: Organs of Love’s Bone is being released on the 16^th of January by Optimo Music.

Imagine a 3D model of someone’s bedroom containing every single object within it, and every single bit of information concerning that object. Where it is positioned, how it arrived there, what was done with it, what was felt about it. Imagine it as a digital version of Georges Perec in Life: A User’s Manual.

Photographs, t-shirts and books, disintegrating sneakers and second hand furniture, posters and fanzines, chunky red toys, piles of papers, train ticket & gig stubs, discarded packets of cigarettes, coffee mugs embossed with novelty slogans. The cause of that smear in the sofa and the distant psychic echo of whoever stayed in that bed. Everything captured in its splendid, damaged, lived-in imperfection.

And records. Every sound within every record and its emotional significance, the identity of those it was listened with. Every single scratch in its black (or coloured) surface and why it happened, scars from skirmishes in far-away battlefields.

The capacity of the database populating this model rivals those used to describe whole swathes of the galaxy. Data mining algorithms can recognise patterns in its chaos and disentangle a trajectory from the detours. But still, there is an absence. A music generator of a sophistication as yet unreached could perhaps compress all this embodied experience and define the contours of that piece which is missing from the heart of this existential puzzle. The day to day of a rumbling drone, romance as fractured melody, the highs and lows of a personal epic that can’t be wholly put into words, and which that way is shared with/by others.

We don’t have that generator, but we have songs. We have the Velvet Underground and Young Marble Giants, The Beat Happening and Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. We’d place Royal Limp, in a non-hyperbolical way, in that same zone of low-frequency, subtle and honest beauty.

Royal Limp – New Ennui

Royal Limp is Andy Auld of Sex is Disgusting. He will be releasing a cassette, and playing some shows in the near future. We’ll keep you posted about it.

(And here’s Andy Auld himself with a great review of Vision Fortune)

Vision Fortune opened a show I put on for Maria Minerva in Brighton last year.

I booked them based on the Eastern promise contained in a cryptic email, sounds beamed straight from Sun City, and reports of a transcendental live show drenched in feedback. It is the feedback that gives the first indication that Vision Fortune’s set has began, the main room of the venue being obscured by a black velvet curtain draped across the entrance; perhaps to intrigue the casual drinker in the main bar, perhaps to alienate. What We Do Is Secret.

The next indication is far more intrusive, as bright white light beams through the gap in the curtain and cuts sharp lines across the floor of The Green Door Store. I abandon my post on the door, walking into a room besieged by harsh strobe light and a wall of sound. Bewildered audience members struggle to adjust to the light as prolonged drone gives way to swelling psychedelia. Vision Fortune could comfortably sit alongside psychedelic contemporaries such as Leeds’ Hookworms but their hypnotic stomp comes from elsewhere; evoking influences as disparate as tambura-led drone and Eyeless In Gaza, less Spacemen 3 and more Blues Control.

Their set works as one continual composition, songs such as ‘Black Coral’ and ‘Void Of The Valley’ weaved in between menacing drone and feedback. Some audience members falter, driven to respite from the persistent abrasive strobe, others remain, drawn closer, reaping the rewards that a hardened resolve can provide.

Their recent single on Mannequin record distills their live show into a two-track psych burner; ‘Void Of The Valley’ is a personal highlight, drenched in saxophone and held-together by spiritual incantations, taking Vision Fortune ever further from Southern England and into the void.

Vision Fortune – Void of the Valley

Pick up the record from Mannequin now.

Oxidised gears have started turning at the industrially revolutionary 20jazzfunkgreats manor. Our haphazard mixtape series welcomes 2012 with ‘a bunch of weird stuff no one listens to’, as our curator today, the excellent Speculator, master of WT Records, puts it. Any seeker out there knows that when uttered by the right person, the stream of words before mean ‘awesomeness’, and you couldn’t find a righter person than Speculator to utter them.

Flying over the phantasmagorical streets of New Los Angeles, I glimpsed her. You can imagine the rest.

 Speculator’s Sophisticated goth mix

Artist list:
david harrow
fatal charm
stephan eicher
nash the slash
john etnier
david linton
rupert hine
crawl away machine
shadows of dreams
pas de deux
du du a
edgar froese
pysche (carl craig)

In the same way in which the heroes of the Cyberpunk underground jack into the platonic data perfection of the Matrix through their custom-made Ono Sendai consoles, we shift from the collage of romance and dystopia above into a simulation of  nature now ravaged by the hounds of history, guided by an AI of liquid mercury which recites Paradise Lost (what else) in beautiful Detroit patois.

http://vimeo.com/33317810

This Shawn O’Sullivan (who we posted yesterday) video was produced by Jordan Levine.

Dear 20JFG,

Streets are quiet, sporadic interactions with residents have been friendly.  Skies are large and blue.  The sea is far beneath us.  The world is full of comforts, like a trap.  A bit like that bit in Labyrinth in where Jennifer Connelly thinks she’s home but…she’s not!

…have attempted communication with the cat, in his language.  Cats are stupid.

Everything is single storied.

…internet: patchy.

Thanks for the parcel.  I shall use its foreboding rhythms as a breadcrumb trail back to you.

Shawn O’Sullivan – Free Flight
For it is a Techno ritual: the soft cloth of synthetic tones gliding between the monolithic pillars of throbbing bass and their gargoyles of snare.  The mere playing of its file, a portal to the half-remembered temples of bass.  This is cavernous dance music that requires a concerted level of spiritual submission that would put various theisms to shame.

Shawn O’Sullivan (of Led er Est fame) is responsible for this slice of salvation.  Coming very soon on WT Records.

120 Megabytes – Episode 18

brought to you in association with @markbrown and our friends over at Network Awesome

Thankfully Born Bad records have seen fit to rectify this with the Bebey comp ‘African Electronic music 1975-1982’. i know i have this more than likely massively romanticised image of Bebey sitting around his pad in France jamming out to the early stirrings of Guerre Froide, ADN’ Ckrystall & the like, and these all feeding into his own vibe….whatever though, the track ‘Black Coffee Cola’ is a perfect example of Bebey’s willingness to experiment with the burgeoning European minimal synth waves appearing at the turn of the 80s whilst never straying from his african roots.

Francis Bebey – The Coffee Cola Song

Buy : Francis Bebey : African Electronic music 1975-1982

Poly Rythmo’s considerable discography has been neatly compiled in recent years by the Soundway and Analog Africa labels but alongside their own recordings they led a life as backing band and interpreters of many more Beninese composers outside the immediate circle of the group. This material is as rich, diverse and wonderful as anything they wrote themselves but as yet remains untouched by modern labels. The tracks could be in any number of styles, from Beninese folk styles, Afrobeat, Highlife, heavy-duty Soukous and amalgamations of these and more but all would have the Poly-Rythmo blueprint.. This track, composed by Assa Cica, is a juggernaut of marauding horns, fleet-footed syncopated rhythms, weaving guitar lines and hypnotic vocals. The horns burst out of the crackle of the record and pin you in a corner, then giveway to a light dancing rhythm with sinewy guitar lines and faint synths in counterpoint. It is dancefloor gold!

Assa Cica et L’Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou – Yokpo Wa Non Kpo Hami

Boma Liwanza were based in Nairobi, Kenya & led by Congolese musician Shango Lola. I don’t know when this album was made but I think around 1980. It has a picture of Nelson Mandela looking particularly stoic on the front & he could well be in his 60s, I like how chill the other cover guy is in comparison. a perfect example of soukous drum production where they make the hi-hat & kick predominate in the mix, especially effective when they’re creating these massive releases of tension at the end of a cycle. In fact the whole feel of the rhythm & guitar break in this track explodes with a gargantuan energy every 16 or so bars. The guitar lends a lush padding to the sound with truly mind boggling technical ability, finesse & addictive gratifying loops of joyous melody over an energetic, snaking bass throb. I should play it twice a night.

Boma Liwanza & The International Orchestra - Sina Mambo

YE YE FEVER 2012 – JANUARY 13TH
HIGHLIFE & SOUKOUS TO AFROBEAT & KWASSA KWASSA

11PM-4AM
£FREE
THE GREEN DOOR STORE
**MUSIC TO MAKE YOU SWEAT**
**LIGHTS DOWN LOW // VIBES UP HIGH**

facebook.com/yeyefever

Dear Santa,

Thank you for all the treasures that you hid across our Deep Labyrinth of Madness last year. We had a great time finding all of them, and conveying them to our wonderful readers. We do appreciate your commitment to this way of doing things in spite of the high casualty rate amongst the elven guards that accompany you, and your traditional loss of fingers at the Pit and the Pendulum replica room. We could tell that one was yours because of the golden spider ring in it, how come you left it there? Will you ever learn?

Anyway, we look forward to whatever it is you may regale us with this year. Just a couple of ‘low hanging fruits’ for you to work on– we’d greatly appreciate it this time around there were less high-concept songs describable in a couple of catchphrases. They never work for us. Also, we are rarely compelled by bland press release blurbs, or lame references to previous features in vaguely renowned Internet outlets. Ditch those. We like to interact with humans, or Turing approved AIs.

And we want more politics – the world is going down the drain, and we need music addressing the dynamics of this descent. We know that you are a corporate-affiliated mythical creature, but also that your security measures are feeble to say the least, so you better deliver, or else. And please please please, give us at least another gig as great as the Factory Floor Chris Carter thing at Primavera last May.

Oh, there’s Ortho (do you remember Ortho, the Adept Necromancer we hired to take care of the Halls of the Penumbra of Despair?), he just arrived with some of your goodies, first of the year! Really excited! Thank you!

All the best,

Your threatening 20jazzfunkgreats pals.

What better way to start the 20jazzfunkgreats calendar than with another treat from our comrades at Dramatic Records? There is none, believe.

We are proud to introduce you to the leading anthropologist of explorers Gabo Gulbenkian, who has a valise of goodies coming up in the aforementioned label. Today we tease you with ‘Baron Muenchhausen’, an apology of that German nobleman and raconteur whose most famous innovation was, perhaps, the use of the cannonball as a medium of travel.

Here we fly with the man, through a 18^th century sky, past clouds of Goyan filigree and into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere where the mighty fist of gravity becomes the sleight of hand of a Zingari trickster, we float delighted under the benign gaze of the Queen Moon and the rest of her stellar court, an army of selenites salutes sternly from her pockmarked and mysterious face. We will be claimed back and fall, into silence. Until then, we dance with the silvery ghosts that inhabit the gates to our world.

Gabo Gulbenkian – Baron Muenchhausen

After such an exercise in proto-astronautics, nothing more advisable than an excursion under the warm crust of convalescent mother Earth, if only to equilibrate our verticality karma.

Guided by the astounding Chicagoans Fielded, we spelunk into a Cave of Forgotten Dreams like adventurous figments in the imagination of Jules Verne’s psychedelean doppelganger. This is a Four-dimensional experience across space and time that culminates at the hollow core of our planet, where metallic dinosaurs reign supreme, and the lost tribe of Kobaia choreographs a set of complex rituals around the wooden framework of the Horse, forgotten totem of propulsion, motor of our spaceship’s furious journey.

Fielded – The Horse

Buy: Alex Barnett/Fielded split from the excellent Nihilist Records.