Following the 20JFG company outing to gaze in awe at Chris & Cosey last week, a certain amount of spring cleaning has been going on.  Emotionally and physically destroyed by the experience at Heaven we have retreated into the depths of our cavernous backlog to wait out the tinnitus.  Sorting through the selected ambient works and the brittle minimal synth melodies, we stumbled into a warm Psyche embrace.  2013 Psyche to be more precise.  Tjutjuna to be blunt.

Mousetrap, the first track on Tjutjuna’s album Westerner is nothing if it’s not coiled intent.  The gentle bobbing drone, that metronomic drumbeat, those key changes, that baseline.  A herald of cosmic angels, arriving to bathe the world in spice.  Folding the Earth over and over until the deserts break upon the sea and a deep saturation drapes over the earth like a thousand melting Instagram accounts.

Tjutjuna – Mousetrap

Westerner came out on Fire Talk on April 30th and you can get it right here.

(Photography by Kevin Baluff.)

In 2013, minimalism is making a lot of sense. Fire, too.

It’s hard to describe why brass can sometimes be such a great communicator, but certainly in the right hands and lungs a honking saxophone can be supremely lyrical. This horn’s thudding, pulsing bleats are industrial and rusty. It sounds like sunken submarines and rotting war weapons singing. Its overtones are caustic.

Weird how this voice can sound even more human when it’s forced through the factory-like valves and bends of a baritone sax, when it sounds like the very tones are corroding as they’re breathed through the machine. Maybe this description makes the music sound ugly, but that’s certainly not the case. It’s rough-around-the-edges soul music as much as anything.

For everyone who lost the faith in Constellation Records around the time every provincial support band you saw were dying to be Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Colin Stetson is a sacred enough reason to be renewing your vows.

Colin Stetson – High Above a Grey Green Sea

More beautifully unpolished diamonds can be found in 2013 in the form of Mats Gustafsson’s ferocious Fire! Orchestra. The cunningly titled Exit! is two side-long commitments to sax-as-transcendental weaponry.

You may have last heard Mats’ sax coiling itself around Neneh Cherry in our Best of 2012 rundown. Here, it’s just one of 28 separate elements swirling and stampeding in a totally live mix. Amazingly the musicians manage to avoid the common mistake in free or semi-improvisational music of fighting for every inch of space like their balls depend on it and actually listen to each other. And it just gets better and better. Where Stetson threads minimalism through his saxophone-led pieces, Gustafsson floods his with lava.

Buy Colin Stetson’s  New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light

Buy Fire! Orchestra’s Exit!

Having spent almost two weeks trapped in the throbbing FTL Drive of Stellar OM Source’s Joy One Mile has led us to develop a theory about the constitution of its sound. Here we outline this theory, contrast it with the reality of its making, and find a poetic way of integrating both things.

The theory:  There is something about the elements of Joy One Mile and how they fit together that fascinates us. Their essence is artificial but their form is organic. They define the framework for a dance, but the connection between the parts wiggle, have a flexibility and a slack; they are loosely coupled in such a way that the reality of the song mutates with every listen, like particles that jaunt when Heisenberg pays them too much attention.

We contend that the reason for this is that Joy One Mile, made as it was with machines, and encoded as it is in a more or less stable digital or analogue substrate, is nevertheless not a physical system but a (xeno) ecological one.

We have created a taxonomy of the many alien species that inhabit it purely through their noises and songs. The four to the floor rhythm of ponderous herbivores with legs as tree-trunks, the broken wail of feline-like predators camouflaged in their angular patterns, the hi-hat staccato of social insects as they build totem-like hives, the melody of paradise birds cavorting under a saffron sunset, and the pervasive hum of vegetation transforming light into growth.

Together they form, through complex feedback loops of matter, energy and empathy, a harmonious ecosystem. Each of the songs you hear in Joy One Mile is a day, a week or a season in the alien planet where this ecosystem is set – it is the sound of this place playing itself. It is a pretty place. Proteus comes to our minds, again.

The reality: The biography of Christelle Guaraldi aka Stellar OM Source outlined in RVNG Intl.’s excellent press release describes her ‘unlearning’ of the knowledge acquired in formal studies of electro-acoustics, music theory and architecture, and classical practice. Her joining of a tribe of synthesiser navigators, and her serendipitous acquisition of a mint Roland TB303 for a very cheap price indeed, the eventual deployment of this machine in live environments to generate what would become the kernel of the songs in Joy One Mile. The rearrangement of these songs by Gunnar Wendel (aka Kassem Mosse): their liberation from Guaraldi herself.

An integration: Each of the milestones in the process through which Joy One Mile came into being is a phase transition, an environmental shock inducing a mutation in the ideas and emotions on which it is founded. These mutations are path-dependent because they contain within them the history of all that came before. The outcome is stochastic, but structured, like the trajectory of a living system.

There are schema for buildings that become electronic cathedrals. The arrival of a strange technological attractor jolting the situation with its exogenous acid shock. A migration to a live environment where the instant feedback between creator and collective becomes another selection mechanism.  The induction to (invasion of) a techno civilisation.

After this odyssey, we should not be surprised to find to find the sonic manifestation of these ideas and feelings coming across and together strangely but naturally, like beautiful parts of the ecosystem we describe at the beginning. Or like music arrived from humanity’s distant future, if we save ourselves.

Perhaps Joy One Mile is not just a beautiful ecosystem, but also a history, and a prediction. We can but hope.

Stellar Om Source – Elite Excel (Kassem Mosse Remix)

This remix of Elite Excel is included in a 12” you can acquire here. It precedes the release of Joy One Mile on June the 11th. Pre-order it from RVNG here.

This is a post about mid-90s Asian cinema, late-80s cyberpunk and Footwork.  This is how it goes down.

Though Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express was often pilloried for its sentimentality, its true calling was as a mainline to a vision of Hong Kong beneath all the hyper-capitalism.  While the idea of Tokyo as a living embodiment of Cyberpunk was pretty well established as a trope by now, it was the street level bustle of Hong Kong that nailed the feel.

Cyberpunk’s appeal was never really its science.  Wetware and the Matrix were undoubtedly fucking cool but it was the characters that sprung up — as a fleshy mirror to the brutality of the trans-national corporations — that felt like the ‘big idea’.  As pulp-y as they often were, the placeless, de-socialised privateers that populated Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy were the hook.  For every conniving Zaibatsu there was a nihilistic punk destroying their body for love and/or profit (thus making them a terrible nihilist).

Chungking Express had plenty of this.  Characters spirited away from their neighbourhoods at the whim of global corporations.  Vague, disinterested and displaced people, coalescing briefly around a single place.  What the film captured was just that, an unerring sense of place and that place felt like The Sprawl.  A warren of memories and sounds and machinations and chance.  It’s opening sequence: a nervous repetitious melody and an overcast sky couldn’t have encapsulated this better.

To Chicago and a machine assisted quest towards complexity for complexities glorious sake.  Footwork could sometimes sound like dark AI’s computing the Universe but it was the street-level hacking of sound that perhaps allows it to most seamlessly slip into this patchwork.  Snatches of nostalghia over something hyper-modern.  Attempts to bend dancers to its will with varying degrees of success.  The beauty is in the game though, the battle between the machines with their programmers and the rhythmic battles that they fuel.

Sometimes all I ever want to do is listen to Footwork.

Thug Entrancer‘s Death After Life -1 is at the heart of all this.  As achingly sad and grandiose as Wong Kar Wai’s super-urban melodrama; as brutally light-footed as anything out of Chicago and as evocative of The Sprawl as I’ve heard in a long time.  The reverb heavy horns are the thing, the hook, the single sound that wrenches me back to Hong Kong, back to a childhood idolising hackers and that weird brand of fin de siecle tech utopianism.  The hand claps are the thing,  reminder that this is dance music, that dance can be attrition and war and exhilarating.

Thug Entrancer – Death After Life – I

Thug Entrancer’s latest EP, Death After Life, is out now on Laser Palace.  You can pay-what-you-want here.

(Art is by the excellent Gordan Shark.)

It’s like getting really, really close up to a Roy Lichtenstein painting – smudging your face up against the glass and crossing and uncrossing your eyes, focusing on a cluster of dots at a time and rocking your head back and forth to approximate some sort of internal zoom lens.

I wonder if that’s how Chris Smith of Fractal Skulls sees the world – like Yayoi Kusama must do. All softly flaring and then fading points of colour. His gentle, precise synthesizer poems feel lived in, like miniature, heavenly pop art worlds. They breathe.

Chris’ releases as Fractal Skulls so far have included some self-released cassettes, a split with Laurent Chambert of The Other Colors, and now a new split with Adam Willetts on the tape label Bunkland.

Fractal Skulls’ submission is a 20-minute lower-case synth-odyssey. This is perfect music: ego-less, careful, a bouquet of tones.

Chris has given us two short extracts from the full piece for download, but you’re well advised to check out the full release.

Fractal Skulls – Regenerative Systems

Fractal Skulls – You Are Sound

Buy Telepylos/Sandyford Lines from Bunkland

The debut Fantomas album – Patton’s first major release since leaving Faith No More – was intended as a literal musical transcription of a comic book, one which the listener is not privy to, but instead has to decode in the stampeding drums, electric-shock guitar-bursts and gibbered vocals – all postmodern ‘KAPOW’s and ‘KERRUNCH!’s Delirium Cordia was a wordless opera based around an implied story about surgery sans anaesthesia. Suspended Animation tried to make a sonic cartoon about the month of April – each ‘song’ another Tom and Jerry-style japefest depicting an individual day, and sounding fairly accurately like Carl Stalling or Hoyt Curtin might if Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros’ big bands had been pared down to the simple, befuddled resources of Melvins and Slayer.

Carl Stalling – Putty Tat Trouble, pt 6

Melvins – Black Betty

Listened to in isolation, Mike Patton’s soundtrack for Crank: High Voltage, the sequel to a relentlessly high-concept Jason Statham action movie, sounds a LOT like how you might imagine the Fantomas demos to sound. Everything is written and recorded by Patton, with him playing all the instruments (or mimicking instruments with his signature vocals) – much like how Fantomas’ albums are, before the music is handed over to Buzz Osbourne, Trevor Dunn, and Dave Lombardo to transmute. On paper, it seems like a bizarre choice for a major Hollywood property to invest in – Crank being the kind of action film fodder that is lapped up by the Nuts and Zoo Statham-disciple page-gluers, and kind of removed from the more ‘worthy’ genre of movies Patton now makes a living writing music for (The Solitude of Prime Numbers, A Perfect Place, The Place Beyond The Pines).

Mike Patton – The Snow Angel (from The Place Beyond The Pines)

That is until you see Crank: High Voltage.

The relentless, hyper-paced shock and vulgarity of Crank: High Voltage (sold to Patton by its directors as “Basically exactly the same as the first one. But times a thousand.”) doesn’t so much find the perfect visual counterpoint to Patton’s own Wacky Races musical shitfest – it actually completes the score as music.

In an interview prior to the film’s release, Patton described the difficulty he had in arranging music for the film. Patton is the sonic maximalist par excellence. Every one of his post-FNM albums explodes with a million detailed squiggles, poings, flutters, and explosions. It’s simply how he hears music when he composes – what are essentially an array of sound effects bouncing off each other and somehow coalescing into  melodies and rhythms. With Crank, Patton talked of being forced to rein this maximalism in, and having to strip the pieces down to much simpler configurations in order to serve the film, although the reasons why aren’t immediately obvious until you see the picture.

Crank: High Voltage, even without Patton’s OCD score, is already pure sonic overload. The foley work – all screeching tyres, gunshots, ejaculating fire hydrants, crunching bones, surgical plops, farts and other orifice-related oscillations, bomb ticks, magazine changes, fuck grunts, pukes, butt slaps, and all-round carnage – already sounds like a classic Mike Patton soundscape in 5:1! (Think Adult Themes For Voice as blaxploitation OST.) And that’s before he’s even played a note of music!

Mike Patton - Wuxiapian (from Adult Themes for Voice)

Instead, the sound editors weave Patton around the foley and diegetic sound of Crank as an extra element, so that the three strands all pull together as a particularly violent composition in itself. It’s full of all the mathematical, stomach-lurching on-the-dime stops and changearounds of Fantomas, but they’re punctuated in the film by Statham’s repeated “CUNT!!!”s, weird racial slurs, and the aforementioned theatre-hell of sound fx.

Mike Patton – Il Cielo In Una Staza (from Mondo Cane)

Although played as something in-between the splatter of Fantomas and the ersatz mania of Mondo Cane, Patton limits his sonic palette to a tormented toy-shop of Speak & Spells, children’s pianos, shakers, rattles, and other ‘joke’ instruments. When guitars do shred into the picture, they’re almost hysterically over-processed, like a weird send-up of the nu-metal FNM influenced but so despised (one of the few non-Patton contributors to the soundtrack is a Linkin Park song, and LP’s front-goon Chester Bennington has a 10-years-out-of-date cameo in the movie).

Viewed as one piece – with your brain-turned off from the genre-destroying, knowing ridiculousness of the plot and dialogue – Crank: High Voltage becomes symphonic, an extended audiovisual opera of ugliness. If Patton were to ever attempt a note-by-note live recreation of the music (as Fantomas attempted with their The Director’s Cut compendium of film themes), you’d sense that he’d only be able to truly do it justice by having Jason Statham there, hard-man frowning, and reading his “CUNT!!!”s and mockney rhyming slang off a music stand; revving engines, shrieking prostitutes, and foley artists smashing melons all strategically placed throughout the audience.

Mike Patton – Chelios (from Crank: High Voltage)

Crank: High Voltage attempts to out-vulgar itself at every turn, it goes beyond being simply ‘offensive’ into delirious surrealism. The film opens with Statham engaged in a mid-free-fall fist-fight from a helicopter before splatting onto tarmac – a direct continuation from the first movie’s ending, except the whole sequence is rendered inexplicably as an 8-bit video game. When Statham later does battle with a Triad who has stolen Jason’s heart from his own body (throughout the film he has to taser or otherwise electrocute himself in the face or balls to keep his artificial “strawberry tart” charged) amidst the pylons of a collapsing electricity substation, the film for no contextual reason switches into a Japanese monster movie parody. Patton is often credited as possessing a kind of ‘musical Tourettes’ – Crank: High Voltage actually has a slapstick character with ‘Full Body Tourettes’. Patton once described himself as “having no race”, Crank: High Voltage burns through racial caricatures as if there were no such thing as racism.

As the author of the near-mythical ‘Video Macumba’ snuff compilation, you can imagine Patton was happier than a pig in scat when he discovered this movie.

Buy Crank: High Voltage

This post is dedicated to our friend Matt.

We have long known that good science fiction isn’t really about the future but about the present. Contemporary situations, concerns and trajectories of development are stretched to fit an altered framework, and from this strange viewpoint, we reach new insights. This means that good science fiction isn’t prediction, but a reflection about today’s zeitgeist and the qualities of the new world encoded in it. Also architecture fiction, a usability test of potential realities that may help us make decisions today – is that the kind of world we want to live in – or that – and what do we do about it?

We have the temptation to interpret electronic music like the musical equivalent of that conventional notion of science-fiction as future gazing – a purveyor of soundtracks for the days to come: the frantic street-hustling of new wave cyberpunks, martial communions atop techno obelisks, or the wide-eyed exploration of alien galaxies.

But of course, it is not that, or it is that, but it not really about that. Electronic music is just a mode of expression that humans adopt when electronic technologies become available to them, because it is in the nature of humans to express themselves through whichever media exist – as if their spirit, infected by the will to communicate, was an irrepressible fluid forever looking for vessels to contain and transmit it, all of which are of course, smidgens for immortality – every song a singularity.  And what glorious diversity this yields, but also what recurrence of themes and moods, a source of great joy in its revelation of spiritual commonalities across the spaces and times that mankind inhabits.

Look at Mammani Sani et son Orgue, an avant-garde musician from Niger whose minimal electronic composition channel a millennial tradition of Saharan song-writing into tone poems wonderful like Kraftwerk’s infrastructural hymns. This is motorik music for spaces without straight lines, lands where all roads are built by the wind

He first picked up his organ in 1974, when Kraftwerk released Autobahn, and he recorded his only album, ‘La Musique Electronique du Niger’, in 1978, the same year as the Man Machine. We hear his compositions filled the Saharan airwaves, evolved into radio broadcasting drones and soundtracks for TV intermissions.

The romantic in 2JFG imagines for a moment that one night, as they sped down the Westphalian motorway, our favourite man-droids were reached by radio waves supernaturally amplified, over the Sahara and the Mediterranean, by the sheer gorgeousness of their content and their need to be heard by kindred spirits. But the truth is simpler, and more beautiful. Mammani Sani et Son Orgue and Kraftwerk converge in the human (and reflect the human’s wonder, exhilaration  – and sadness – as he gets on the road, leaving home behind), because they start in the same place, in the human.

And that connection across spaces suggests continuity over time, a sharing that gives us hope and consolation in the face of strife, suffering and transience.

Mammane Sani et son Orgue – Bodo

La Musique Electronique de Niger is out in Sahel Sounds. Buy it here.

Peter Gordon and Factory Floor‘s Beachcombing is a chimera and a mirage that confounds our expectations about what is warm (the saxophone), and what is cold (those electric machines). The synths ululate like creatures of the dark forest, or cruisers creating their own zone of perversity in a forlorn park under the shadow of an squadron of leprous high rises. The saxophone is a relay releasing mega-bursts of information like the last escape pod from a moribund civilisation, or the final stage in the evolution of communication technology, when mankind transcends the digital.

Engineering mutates into mysticism, techno into jazz and everything becomes birds soaring in that awesome zone or genre that could well be called “Psyche Out” as un-defined by Optimo, who are aptly putting Beachcombing out, a moment we celebrate with Peter Gordon’s and Nik Void’s very own choices of inspirations and influences.

This is basically what we are about, we are so honoured to be featuring this post. Enjoy, and buy the record here.

John Coltrane – A Love Supreme part 1: Acknowledgements

Peter: “As a kid, I used to listen to this every night as I would fall asleep. This record opened me up to the truly transcendent nature of music.”

Love of Life Orchestra – Condo

Nik: “Condo is the first track I heard by Peter and sparked off our initial conversation on-line that let to our collaboration. I personally refer to Peter’s work in my head as compositions rather than tracks. I love this fade in, I love the ethereal vocals in unison, the slowed down metronomic cowbell beat.”

The Mothers of Invention – Plastic People
Peter: “Totally opened me up what was possible regarding use of studio, collage, genre mixing, smart writing, incredible musicianship yet totally irreverent.”

Nico – Frozen Warnings
Nik: “Again another track with an ethereal quality. Her vocals ride the track, and the track ride her vocals. There are no rules here, just feeling.”

Terry Riley – In C

Peter: “My first experience with what would be called minimalism. I was transfixed by the hypnotic sound and fascinated by the structural implications.”

Throbbing Gristle -Distant Dreams (Part Two)

Nik: “When Gabriel played me the synth line for Beathcombing it reminded me of the same dream like quality of TG’s Distant Dreams Part Two. Journey tones mixed in with a hypnotic undercurrent.”

It is not everyday that 20JFG gets to feature contemporary politicised Serbian electro-body-pop music of a beauty and energy such that it flares over the cardboard industrial complex of the nouveau fashion zombies turning them into statues of ash which are then projected against concrete walls, like the nuclear shadows of humans caught in the midst of a party, a political rally, or both (they can be the same, or be made to be the same).

Zastranienie are the real deal. Read their manifesto and access their releases.

Ponder on the idea of pop as a dual use technology that can work as the framework for a debauch, but also a Samizdat for the transmission of subversive ideas and emotions. Also on the idea of industrial music not as a fashion statement or perversity token which is chosen or even surrendered to, but a reflex against authoritarianism, and the manifestation of a love/hate affair with technology developed while growing-up in the ground zero of a highly probable mechanised holocaust.

Get your cerebral cortex scraped by the wild convolutions of the most paranoid roland-burst we have had the pleasure of contending with since the halcyon days of Adult.

Find an outlet to discharge the energy outputs thus generated. Heat. Dance. Friction. Action.

Zastranienie – Izdvojeno Iz Konteksta/Abeceda Straha

Acquire Duh Vremeni here. We’ll be writing more about Zastranienie in days to come. This was simply our first instinctive reaction.

We assume the name of Norwegian group ‘Three Winters’ is inspired by the disruption of the seasons that, it is said, will be an omen for the start of Ragnarok. Their Atrocities EP certainly has a sense of foreboding and dread that, in becoming dominant and routinised, connects it to the romantic ballads beneath a gunmetal sky of the cold wave desperados, and the noises that can be heard outside of Le Hague’s electro-torture bunkers.

We rejoice in the Italo tropes butchered in the title track – the gothic throb and the operatic excess, the synthesised chanting unforgettable like the Morricone theme for a Mexican stand-off at the dead zone, that four to the floor rhythm that mimics the pulse of a chase and the metronomic swing of the back-alley stabbing which is its culmination.

If Atrocities looked like something, it would be Venise’s Playboy after an eternity spent in the House of Usher, falling, decaying. We’d take him back to ours, without a doubt.

Three Winters – Atrocities

Acquire the Atrocities EP from Swedish post-apocalyptic pop label Beläten.

It took a million whirling machines to fashion the simple electronic waves of the past.  In a race to circumvent analogue’s unwanted, granular detail; their future was hard won and noiseless.

Kit Grill transports us to a world where the simplicity of Laurie Spiegel‘s electronic experiments are gospel.  These are pure smooth tones, clustered like islands around a well defined, tireless drum machine.

Prism (Part 1) exists only in a research facility populated by the finest minds of Detroit Techno, briefly abducted from that city at the height of their powers.  Furnished with the bleeding edge of digital technology, they set to work, constructing a landscape for Prism (Part 1) to inhabit.  A space where minimal synthetic compositions could thrive, a muscular lattice on which to grow its melodies.

Kit Grill – Prism (part 1)

Prism (Part 1) is taken from Kit Grill’s wonderful Expressions EP, out on Primary Colours Records.  You can (and should) buy it here.

First thought was an unpleasant one: Ariel Pink. I know that might be considered blasphemy, especially from one of the several mouths in the giant mercurial Cerberus-face that is XXJFG, and yeah that Tascam Portatudio sound was a smear of loveliness in itself, and Pink did had an entire genresworth of back catalogue committed to C60 before even the first of the many Haunted Graffiti imitators paid over the odds for a vintage 4-track machine on eBay. But he just always seemed like such a douche. He’s not going to lead my vision quest! But then, hey, I still rep for Megadeth – the band fronted by the King of Douche that is Dave Mustaine – so what do I know?

Second, third, fourth, and fifth thoughts: Jimi Hendrix, The Zombies, Funkadelic, Van Halen.

Six, seven: Pavement, R. Stevie Moore.

Eight: Bobb Trimble!!

Because Rich Ristagno is no hipsteroid, he scrappily recorded a delicious, delirious classic (What Would It Be Like To Be Rich) back in ’81, with a bunch of under-rehearsed and over-high players employed at his cheapest local studio. His only influences were allegedly Aerosmith and Fleetwood Mac, but what came out was something much more interesting. The guitarist is maddeningly OCD, he totally over-plays – and by that we mean he shreds ALL THE TIME. It’s perfect. Especially as the general tone of the songs are so Hall & Oates-restrained that they become monotone. The cognitive dissonance between the wailing, cheaply-recorded, almost toy-like guitars, and the soft bounce of Rich’s vocal is beyond even Stephen Malkmus or Spiral Stairs.

Detroit steelworker Rich made up 100 copies of his little LP at a vanity pressing plant, but never got around to distributing them – they stayed in his parent’s basement, until Dirtbombs drummer Ben Blackwell stumbled across an old radio promo, and pimped the recoding out to Drag City. At least that’s how the legend goes. It probably will turn out that this whole thing is a goofy Electric Six side project or something, and that the handsome dude with the moustache was just an old photo of one of their dads, but hey ho. As it stands, What It’s Like To Be Rich is a gentle and fascinating little document, that reads as genuinely – if accidentally – psychedelic.

Plains Druid can’t compete with that kind of backstory, and why should he? There’s nothing accidental about this occultist synth-psychedelia. This track, Telescreens, seems to tilt forever, like it’s heard something magical happening just past the sun and needs to bear down on it in ever-slanting orbits. You think we’d be bored of being blissed out by now, but let me tell you a secret:

XXJFG IS NEVER BORED OF BEING BLISSED OUT.

The space between our ears is our one sacred protest against the modern world and all its hard edges and petty cruelties. And this is what that space sometimes sounds like.

Plains Druid – Telescreens

Buy Plains Druid’s To Be Without Judgement from Bandcamp.

Buy Rich Ristagno’s What Would It Be Like To Be Rich from Rough Trade.

The press release for the Vision Fortune ‘Mas Fiestas con el Grupo Vision Fortune’ (MFCEGVF) could be the best that 20JFG has ever received – it describes its songs by reference to the Parable of the Ox written by John Kay of the Kay Review of Equity markets and long-term decision making fame. In fact, MFCEGVF is loosely based in this paradox, ‘itself a thinly veiled allegory for unbridled capitalism’ (in the press release’s own words).

As awesome as all of this is, we don’t totally agree with this interpretation of the parable, or more accurately, we sort of agree with the interpretation of the parable but we also think that there is scope for greater precision in the description of the subject of the parable, in a way which will help us convey the sensations that Vision Fortune, MFCEGVF and their live show provoke in us.

Let’s get started.

So, the Parable of the Ox tells of a country fair where they stop weighting the ox to be auctioned, and instead decide to measure its weight using averages of the buyers’ guesses, which, according to the idea of the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’, will be quite close to the real weight.

These guessers start to second guess each other, and a whole infrastructure is created to regulate this process. Computerised models are developed to estimate the weight of the ox when there aren’t enough buyers guessing (since the idea of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ only works when there are actual crowds).

In the midst of all this frenzy of guessing, everyone forgets to feed the ox, and the ox dies.

This is indeed, a thinly veiled allegory for unbridled capitalism of the ‘Anglo Saxon’ (or ‘financial’) sort. But more specifically, it is a commentary on different ways of measuring and – perhaps – predicting the prices of shares (i.e. the weight) of companies (i.e. oxes) in the stock exchange (the country fair).

The parable contrasts those who look at the ‘fundamentals’ (financials, investments and economic activities) of a company to gauge its future potential with those who look at the evolution of share prices using mathematical models of their historical performance, or that of similar share prices. This second group doesn’t really measure the weight of the ox, but looks at what everyone is guessing about the weight of the ox (or a cow) in order to evaluate what is its probable weight.

When the second group becomes dominant, the financial economy detaches itself from ‘the real economy’, and  we move from investment to trading… and speculation. We move to a world where it doesn’t really matter what a company does – e.g. whether it has a bunch of incredible products in the pipeline (if it is a fat ox). What is important is how has its share price (the guesses on how fat it is) performed recently, and what it means for its future evolution.

Here is where the complexity scientist and the behaviouralist raise their bony fingers. The idea that, somehow, the financial analyst looks at the data from “nowhere” (an ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ position) and can identify patterns that allow her to beat the market have some big problems. For starters, the analyst is not alone. There is an army of would-be rocket scientists and wizards out there with her, and their actions impact on the movement of prices. Moreover, no-one in this army is rational. Everyone is afflicted by cognitive biases that shape the signals it gleams from the data, and how it makes decisions – status quo and confirmation biases, and an inability to conceive situations where things that have never happened may indeed happen – like, say, a crash in the housing market.

The biased guesses of thousands of analysts don’t average each other out, but interact like an equilibrium-less game, generating instabilities and weird cascades and bubbles. They pollute the purity of prices as a signal of what is and will happen. This may justify paternalistic interventions to protect these people (and innocent bystanders) from themselves.

Someone is needed, to keep the ox alive.

Which is where Vision Fortune come into the picture.

To be clear, Vision Fortune aren’t here to save the ox. If anything, their music pounds with the murderous thrust with which the quasi-ox (bull) is slaughtered at the end of Apocalypse Now. It is this murderousness plus a mystical something else that helps us make the connection between VF and the paternalistic solution to the cognitive biases which can send the marketplace in a bizarre economy-busting spiral, as outlined before.

Why?

Because Vision Fortune’s music harnesses with an ability not born of practice or premeditation a set of behaviours and body rhythms hardwired into our nervous system and simian-derived psyche – i.e. those biases that set us apart from the rational agent of economic modelling, and link us to our hunter-gatherer totem worshipping ancestry. Theirs is the beat with which the old tribes scared their prey out of gnarly woods, and the beat with which these tribes beat on their wooden shields before heading into battle with their neighbours, theirs is the light of a storm experienced in a barren peak, illuminating what could well be the face of the God in the clouds, frowning like the knots in the bark of a tree, before she speaks with the voice of thunder.

Every time Vision Fortune do their unleashing they create a demonstration pure like mathematical proof but written with sledgehammers, of the plethora of brutal heuristcs and biases that survive in mankind and its markets, manifested in bulls and bears from which we may need defending.

Their demonstration does however also illustrate the problem with that ‘paternalism’ that seeks to protect us from ourselves with its superior knowledge– because attending a celebration by Vision Fortune, entering the force field of their industrial stroboscope, getting tangled in their distorted quagmire, and celestially battered in their merciless roguelike, is something that is not going to make us live any longer, or make us better adjusted citizens, or more respectful of our elders (at least not the immediate lowercase ones, the uppercase millennial ones are a different affair altogether).

It is not good for us in any conventional, societally agreed way, but we’d like to see you, benevolent dictator, stand in the way between us and it to protect our very own health. Watch out, we say, because in this village we don’t let the oxes starve, we carve them.

Vision Fortune – XX

You can pre-order Vision Fortune’s ‘Mas Fiestas con el Grupo Vision Fortune’ from Faux Discs here.

The sun’s stumbled drunkenly through the door, muttering incoherently about being late. How it’s very sorry; lost track of the time; won’t do it again.  And we sigh and forgive it because with the windows open and the heating off we can indulge in late night communiques with the stars.  The most ethereal of music can flourish without the wind ripping it from the sky.

The arrival in Brighton of the sun can do funny things to a city built around the summer.  Tables bud around pubs and artisan ice cream shops visibly relax on their foundations — once again confounding nature by making it through the winter.  Everything is as it should be for the next six months and 20JFG goes cosmic.

[PHYSICS] continue a long line of essential electronic works from Digitalis.  It is Ultimate L, the last track on their album that concerns us here.  A symphony of falling galactic dust clouds.  Their vast shapes dancing around nebulas in infinitely slow motion.  The light of a billion stars picking out endless new, twinkling forms.  A soundtrack to the heavens in all its angelic glory.  Faint voices of Earth travelling through it on abandoned radio waves.  It is music that is at its best when the world is still and the sky is clear and all earthly conditions are controlled for.

[PHYSICS] – Ultimate L

[PHYSICS] album Spectramorphic Iridescence is out now on Digitalis.  You can get it from Boomkat here.

Kwaidan (or ‘kaidan’) is an old-fashioned term for a Japanese horror or ghost story. It’s also the name of a magical 1964 cinematic anthology of supernatural Japanese myths and legends, directed in 1964 by Masaki Kobayashi. Although you wouldn’t think it to look at it – with its simple, but elegant and highly-stylised painted backdrops, Kwaidan was one of the biggest budget and most elaborate Japanese film productions of that time.

As such, it’s a beautiful anomaly. It resembles theatre, really, more than any film that springs to mind. It was advertised as “a protest to modern society”. The producers seemed to think of legends as nurturing “the essence of the Japanese”, which was essential for their survival as a people. As we mentioned in our recent piece on AKIRA, the Japanese revival of traditional Imperial music forms such as gagaku in the 1960s seemed to have complicated resonances within the context of post-war Japanese culture.

Kwaidan is equally complex in this respect, and the film’s composer – Toru Takemitsu – was one of the musicians to whom the resurgence in gagaku was attributed. Takemitsu was initially a longstanding enemy of Japanese musical tradition. He was known for destroying his works in panic if he found he had accidentally strayed into a traditional Japanese scale. He shunned traditional Japanese instruments, because for Takemitsu, the very sound they made was too deeply entwined with his memories of the war, and with nationalism and militarism. Originally a contemporary of Iannis Xenakis and John Cage, Takemitsu san developed an early musique concrete in synchronicity with Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments in 1948, although the two were in ignorance of each other. Igor Stravinsky and Karlheinz Stockhausen were fans.

Nevertheless, despite his early advances in musical science, throughout the 1960s Takemitsu would become more and more fascinated with traditional Japanese instruments and until, by Garden Rain, in 1974 he had assimilated the tones and modes of hogaku and gagaku perfectly into his own self-taught style, creating a new musical language out of something ancient.

20JFG – Takemitsu Context

We made a mix of music from other parts of the world in 1974 – listen how other musical artists were psychedelicising, parodying, or subverting ideas about their national identity and history in sound. On this score, Toru arguably had as much in common with Kraftwerk or Brian Eno as the long-dead wraiths of gagaku who he drew breath from in Garden Rain.

Anyway, wraiths!! That brings us nicely back to Kwaidan. I hope this pondering on identity and expressions of it in music hasn’t put you off investigating this piece of work, because, really – first and foremost – Kwaidan is just an absolutely cracking ghost story. Well, four ghost stories. All beautifully choreographed.

Our favourite is the third story, Hoichi the Earless. In this one, Toru Takemitsu practically becomes a character in the story himself, as the biwa which he hacks much of the Kwaidan score out on becomes a major narrative point. Hoichi is a blind monk whose biwa skills are unparalleled. His talent goes largely unrecognised as his only audience is the dusk, to whom he nightly recites a suite of over 100 sequential arcane hymns. A mysterious samurai is drawn by Hoichi’s playing, and invites him to audiences with his master – an unnamed nobleman.

Every night Hoichi is led away to play and sing for the nobleman’s court, who request one lament in particular. The Tale of The Heiki is a moving piece of war poetry, depicting in literal terms a mighty battle which led to the fall of the child Emperor Antoku. In the film’s greatest scene, Hoichi kneels with eyes closed and face contorted by the tones pouring out of his mouth as he performs the 11-minute ballad.

Toru Takemitsu - The Tale of The Heiki

Around Hoichi, scenes of fire and naval battle swirl on the floor and walls, as it is revealed that the noble court is none other than the spirits of the deceased Emperor and his warriors, and the venue is the cemetary that holds them. The acting and singing are engrossing, but Takemitsu’s own biwa playing is genuinely stunning.

The biwa isn’t an obviously pretty sound, like similarly-aged and designed instruments such as the Chinese pipa – the delicate, tumbling arpeggios of which require virtuoso levels of fingerpicking skill. The biwa is a lute played harshly and intuitively by a huge sharpened plectrum, about the size and shape of an afro comb. Takemitsu fills the piece with equal parts void and noise. The biwa sounds like jagged thoughts.

Bill Orcutt – The Visible Bosom

Mesmerised by the scene, one comparison which drew to mind was the way former Harry Pussy Bill Orcutt now tears unfathomable, visceral sound out of his acoustic guitar. But where Orcutt’s playing and Tourette-like vocal tics almost seem to act as a barrier, turning away everyone but the most forgiving and intense of listeners, Takemitsu’s playing works superbly as an elegy. It’s hard to define why, but it sounds genuinely communicative in its sparseness – each slash of the biwa sounding like it’s a splintered piece of some poor devil’s soul. Each tone sounds like a thought that has just occurred in the mind of the player, but weighted with impossible meaning and the gravity of history. In this sense the playing is truly meditative.

It’s almost ironically soulful for a composer who once claimed: “There may be folk music with strength and beauty, but I cannot be completely honest in this kind of music. I want a more active relationship to the present. (Folk music in a ‘contemporary style’ is nothing but a deception.)”

Anyway, that’s our favourite scene from Kwaidan. You should watch it and find your own favourite scene – there’s more than enough to love. And check out Takemitsu’s other works, which vary so much from year to year and symphony to symphony.

Toru Takemitsu – A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1963)

Toru Takemitsu – Vocalism A-1 (1956)

Buy The Film Music of Toru Takemitsu from Nonesuch

(Artwork of the Bernal Sphere by Don Davis/NASA via Astrona)

We can pinpoint each of the three moments when The Cargo is transmitted by three spaceships whose trajectories comprise the three segments of a journey which is the complete journey of The Cargo they carry, a weapon to start the counterattack against the forces of moronic dance music which are the manifestation of a Hegemonic Swarm, a locust-like horde of self-replicating Von Neumann devices intent on transforming mankind into a pink homogeneity of pumped up spring-breaking abominations.

Moment 1 occurs ca. minute 2, as Spaceship #1 displaces The Cargo to Spaceship #2. Having fulfilled its duty, Spaceship #1 decelerates to the speed of the galaxy orbiting at its own rhythm, which is barely a rhythm yet is most banging, like the echo of a Goddess humming an old folk tune to herself, as she gets on with the job of giving birth to new stars.

Moment 2 occurs ca. minute 3.30, after Spaceship #2 is invaded by a squad of algorithms enslaved by the Hegemonic Swarm. For a moment  your 20JFG observers at mission control fear that mankind is doomed, yet this fear is unwarranted. Spaceship #2 has trapped the algorithms in a Virtual Reality environment where the energy with which they fight a hyper-realistic simulation of herself is co-opted to further the speed of her transit – the joke is on ‘em. It is at the point of  maximum speed when her coherence starts degrading into an arpeggiated-drone for philosopher-king-headbangers (a.k.a. her infamous crew) when she transmits The Cargo to Spaceship #3.

The last segment of the journey is gloves-are-off time. Spaceship #3 is a bad black wolf that cuts through the Hegemonic Forces around Earth with a sweaty nightmare of antimatter-fuelled columns of fire that slap and zap its foes like Thunderclaps from Valhalla, but alas, they are too many, its energy is depleted, its arsenals emptied and its defences pierced, it just about crashes into our ionosphere and burns out, moment 3 is when it releases The Cargo into Terran skies, a moment before going mega-phoenix.

A gasp, a tremor, is all lost, all this sacrifice for nothing? Wait! The Cargo precipitates like Nemesis, a fire in the blue, it strikes the ground, conflagration of smoke, activation, the Cargo has arrived, what is The Cargo? The Cargo is the journal of its own journey, elevation, acceleration, trepidation, a prettily martial boogie to shuffle smartly under a constellation of strobes, it is the danced meme with which our brains are vaccinated and the forces of the Hegemonic Swarm vanquished.

Night Angles has done it again, Mankind is safe for now.

Night Angles – Wolf

Here is the soundcloud for Night Angles, and here is the facebook page.

This time… they’ve really gone.

This is not a sequel. There has never been anything like it.

The world is fill of them, the super-octane girls who are old at twenty. If they get to be twenty.

Please enjoy, as normal there is no tracklist but we trust in you dear readers to suggest one in the comments box.

xxjfg podcast : This is my Happening and it Freaks me Out!!!

It amazes me that, in the face of industrial indifference, people can still sit down and create pieces of music as fragile and downbeat as this.  As if the safety net of a musician’s wage still existed to catch their psyches as they fell through the blackness of their own work.

Mayerling‘s La Mort Ne Dira Rien contains a vocal that perfectly captures the blues imprinted in the very foundation stone of Metal.  A chanting: clipped and earnest.   A sporadic sermon in a hushed church.  The majority of the time, the congregation seeing only a hunched, robed back.

A strange, nostalgic beat is pulled from the same hazy avant garde that Boards of Canada mined.

An ambient, organ-led backing holds within it a nostalgia for the nostalgia of the late 90s.

A wormhole where an imagined 70s seeps through cracks to bring fertile patches of beauty to subsequent decades.

These fragments orbit each other, slowly compressing into what you hear below.

Mayerling – La Mort Ne Dira Rien

This is taken from the album ‘Cut Up’ which will be out on Hands in the Dark on May 14th.

(Art is by Frank R. Paul)

If, like me, you have been reading this blog for some time, then as well as finding comfort in the reassuringly regular infobombs of ectoplasmic synth goo, post-nuclear pop, and technocratic techno, from time you time you probably wonder: what exactly IS the selection process for the MP3s the xxjfg creatures so lovingly yet obsessively curate? More than ever, the amount of available music now resembles a raging data sea, unfathomable and infinite – how do the xxjfg decide which particles of this bitstorm are the ones worth keeping, worth displaying proudly to other human-types like strange and precious minerals?

Well, to begin with, there’s the ovipositors.

Gallons of raw sonic data is shovelled betwixt the mandibles of the Great Selector, where it is masticated over the course of an eternity (that’s in blogging years, in human years I guess that works out at about four months). The process of digestion is said to be so acid-drenched, so unforgiving, so… teethy, that little truly emerges unscathed. What does is squirted out into crude sigils of tunejuice by the ovipositors.

We then refer to the Arch-xxjfg (we call him Stu), who turning his back on the unholy muck, flings a tarot deck over his shoulder. This process is repeated until one of the clusters of eggstuff and symbolism begins to resemble – vaguely, kind of – Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe. (One time we got something that looked a bit like John Corabi, that omen didn’t work out well for anyone involved let me tell you. We couldn’t get the Spawn of the Ametabolous to sleep for weeks.)

After a couple of feverish days and nights and much chanting, the thing that wobbles out of all of this great splurge of bio-matter and bytes like some adorable drunken tribble is patted on the head, parcelled up in HTML, and ejaculated into the blogosphere like so much unloved wordsperm. We call these things ‘blogposts’.

The blogpost then trills a little hymn to the cosmos. This one sounds like this:

wim (ウィム) – lillie’s blanket

(Jeez, we know you don’t read this stuff and just scroll down until you find the MP3. Don’t feel bad about it. Just nod and smile and don’t get too close when we start getting excited. This beautiful little work of art is from the awesome Talk Midway/wim (ウィム) split on Already Dead Tapes, and you can get it here.)

The Coombe’s self/titled EP on Mannequin has invaded the screen of our psychic radar like a flotilla of aeroplanes loaded with ghost-drugs that add extra layers to our sensory input.

Depending on the song, this may be the muslin-like textures of the ectoplasm of Victorian mediums, iridescent bubbles dancing past the dada architectures of a pacific reef, or the chalk-scribbled formula for organic compounds which always come to our minds whenever we think of those daring sonic explorers toggling with unstable radio-phonic apparatus deep in the vaults of the BBC.

All of these scenarios are Hauntological obsessions that 20JFG shares.

Their gestalt is soft-edged and blurry, their shape was assembled with arcane techniques and technologies sufficiently obsolete to be indistinguishable from legend.

They arrive from a dead world, transforming their creators – here, Karen Sharkey and Samuel de La Rosa – into vehicles for a possession, and their users – us and also you – into necromancers à la Joseph Curwen.

These séance-like attributes of the moment that starts when we press play contribute to its eeriness. That and the thematic obsession of this dead universe we are tearing into with the paranormal and the occult, with the unpredictable implications of scientific experiments where you travel far away and come back, accompanied by a strange shadow.

Which is what we just did, oops.

All these impressions and hidden forces lurk under the surface of Tierra Amarilla, the song that we are posting today. The macabre is however overwhelmed, in this case, by an aura of gossamer beauty, strange like the violations of gravity & refractions of light that occur underwater, made stranger by their use to describe New Mexican valleys (the Yellow Land), like those from which according to alternative folklore, the Ancient People (Anasazi) sailed into the constellations, never to be seen again.

The Coombe – Tierra Amarilla

Do purchase the EP here. Go here to watch more short films by Karen Sharkey, like this wonderful oddity sound-tracked by Samuel.

Beppe Loda is a legendary Italian DJ, who made a name for himself in the early 80s with an Afro sound (having been DJing since the early 70s).  He started a mix we posted (in June last year) with Bionic Boar, a track we wrote about last week.

Seance Centre is a collaborate between Loda, and Brandon Hocura and Naomi Hocura of VOWLS. Brandon described the thought process behind recording one of the tracks wonderfully:

…the song was named after Emil Zatopek, the greatest long-distance runner in recorded history. I edited the track down…from live jams in an attempt to capture some of the off-kilter mechanical expression of form that Zatopek was famous for. He was also known for running faster and faster during his final laps and not appearing tired at the end of extraordinarily long races.

Our tendency (rightly or wrongly) to anchor people who create culture to their heyday makes this particular collaboration seem temporally confused.  In a good way of course, not in a Bing Crosby and Bowie way (that’s for another post).  Zatopek certainly seems to emanate from the same synth-wave era that was flinging out tapes and cassettes to all corners of Europe.  Yet Naomi’s words seem pulled towards the more melodic, more emotive Italo that was a camp compatriot to synth/minimal-wave’s blank earnestness.

This transatlantic collaboration between an Italian and a pair of Canadian’s doesn’t simply fold time then; it draws together within itself several musical moments that co-existed in a world that wasn’t ‘always online’.  The geography — that added friction to music moving around the globe in the early 80s — is gleefully disregarded.  An almost psychedelic synth breakdown sits among the (seemingly) simple drum programming that defined the DIY electronic music coming out of the northern European countries.  A vocal that’s in some moments as icily practical as Kraftwerk’s machine noises and at others, the source of soft club incantations; not the excessive siren call of Italo but somewhere in between.

When we were sent this it was compared to Klein + M.B.O. another transatlantic collaboration of producers and musicians.  A bridge between Italo and proto-House in Chicago.  Which seems perfectly apt to us.

Seance Centre – Zatopek

You can listen to the whole EP on their Soundcloud.

Post title taken from this, if you were wondering.

Brandon’s been in touch to clarify that Loda wasn’t actually involved in this track.  Rather, after working with him in the studio Naomi and Brandon kept working and created the 4 tracks on the EP.