Wednesday, August 20, 2008  12:07 am 

Bleeding but breathing

The 20JFg crew would like to apologise for the lack of updates in the last few days, but we have faced clouds of stress, been entrapped by chains of commitment, wrath and fury, survived the attacks of gremlin saboteurs and erm, something, so before those devilish tongues stretch cruel from the pit to swallow us again into the limbo of absence where we wage a war against the tedious forces of reality, we’d like to leave you with a few words and sweet music, which is what it’s all about.

Back to normal real soon, word.

Masters of kosmische doof Growing take us, in ‘All the Way’, surfing on the tail of a mystery comet which upon being detected by those massive radars trained upon the starry night, finds itself represented in glimmering waves of cubic sound, if Fuck Buttons blew a hole in the sky with their colossal onslaught, it is Growing that came from inside it, spreading all over our space like a rainbow gradient of alien love. There is a constellation in the shape of a Big Ship above you, and this is the music of its distant and beautiful glimmer.

Growing- Innit

Fucked Up’s new album, ‘The Chemistry of Common Life’ is claustrophobic like being buried alive as a sacrifice to the gods of thunder, and exhilarating like clawing out from that grave into woods bristling with life reincarnated into something akin to a god yourself, there must be some sort of chemical transformation occurring as the body returns from the grounds where it went to rest, and we couldn’t think of a better music to soundtrack it than their collision of spaced out stoner power, higher state metronomic Boredoms style transitions and damaged psyche folk ululations.

Fucked_Up-Royal Swan

This is the equivalent of a phantom deer jumping over the headlights of your car in a lonesome road, crashing through the wind shield and out through the back window like a nocturnal dream of righteous violence.

Now, things:

When in Berlin tonight, go and say hi to our main man G£nuin£ Guy. He rocks the party to standards unknown.

When in London on Friday come to Pacific Hotel, one of the 20JFG will be getting down with the winners, it’s going to be a total ball.

labels >> Fucked Up, Growing

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Friday, August 15, 2008  12:05 am 

Yo, Tanhauser Gate

It is with an apocalyptic feeling of anticipation that we await for the activation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. Of course our puny brains cannot even start to elucidate the sort of physics involved in the experiments that are to be conducted there, so we have decided to think about all these portentous matters drawing on our readings on the arguably relevant fields of science fiction, video games and horror films. According to these sources, we should expect some sort of catastrophe resulting in the invasion of our planet by alien species from other dimensions (get your crowbars ready), the discovery of a parallel realm where the philotic connections underlying physical and spiritual reality lie, together with the mysteries of faster than light speed travel, or the arrival of hell to Earth, you know, lots of men pulling their eyes out and reciting mantras in latin.

All of these alternatives sound more desirable than the current state of affairs, so we do eagerly invite our laboratory coat clad stern overlords to pull that lever so that our species can achieve transcendence, either shining stronger than a budding supernova, or exploding in a gross mess of blood and viscera.

Bosons like to party you know, and whenever they have a ball it is Ron Geesin’s music that soundtracks the majestic ballet of their integer spin across infinite distances, derviches of the atomic realm in constant transmogrification between quantum states, or little dots blipping in a computerised brain to the ultra-abstract equivalent of acid house pumping psychedelia, jacking the spaces between spaces is where it’s at kids of the dance revolution.

Ron Geesin- Syncopot

These days it would seem like a trivial matter to input a few Bose-Einstein statistics in your music generator software to come up with microscopic symphonies of alien beauty to rival Black Dice’s outer space transmissions, but kid, Electrosounds was made in 1972, this synthetic sorcerer had all this stuff in HIS HEAD! He rules!

If worse comes to pass, and the activation of the Large Hadron Collider creates a micro black hole gateway between our world and outer dimensions of chaos and madness inhabited by Azazoth and his brethren, don’t bother trying to convince me to accompany you to the closest refuge, walls covered with scribblings of primeval signs, the holy ritual of the exorcism and the triforce, nay, I shall be in my room listening to the malevolent sounds of Steve Moore as the sky fills with bat-winged snakes, and thick and bristling pseudopodia cover the asphalt of the streets below like a black tide of simmering evil.

David Rubato- Circuit (Steve Moore Remix)

David Rubato’s new 12” on Institubes is rather banging, particularly the Aeroplane and Steve Moore remixes. Regarding the latter, you do of course know that the sinister mind behind the forever astonishing Zombi and the new shining star of Satanic italo grace Lovelock is perhaps the most accomplished apprentice of the dark lords Carpenter and Goblin, so you should be aware of what lurks beyond as you press play in your stereo: music to soundtrack the corridors of an abandoned hospital basement scenario of nameless experiments, music to soundtrack batallions of clouds of impossible colours advancing over the barren landscape of a mercifully forgotten nightmare, music to dance to as you spin in the carousel of the damned, beautiful death funk wiggling with a bassline that sounds like a bag full of human bones being shaken by Johnny Jewel’s and Asenath Derby Waite’s secret daughter, music that makes us smile eerily, momma always used to say we were a bit weird.

labels >> Ron Geesin, Steve Moore, xxjfg

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Thursday, August 14, 2008  12:01 am 

Wail-Vomit

Aside from the fact that they have a name which is all kinds of awesome and which never fails to put a smile on my face (note: a t-shirt needs to be invested in), Pocahaunted are a pretty rad proposition. To be completely honest before I’d even heard a single note of their music I was already relatively sold on them anyway. There was just something about the idea of two girls coming together to create scuzzed out, shamanistic drones inside a Thunder Fortress they made out of burnt clay, adorned with coloured beads and feathers and buffalo bones, and built on the exact sight of a native Indian burial ground that oddly enough happened to strike a cord with me.

Pocahaunted - Gehetto Ballet

Soon to be re-issued, ‘Island Diamonds’ is Pocahaunted’s dub record which could possibly be described as the sound of a sweat soaked séance taking place deep in the belly of a remote tropical forest; an hypnotic conjuring of spirits who emerge from beneath the ground carrying and cradling their own bones to dance and sway in a circle around their callers whose hands are bloodied from incessantly scraping them back and forth on the dirt they sit on, as if had been persistently knocking on the door of a friend reluctant to reveal themselves. Dangerous stuff when you come to realise that once it starts the scraping never ends. Just watch as the spirit dancer’s grins widen with sadistic glee.

If anything could have snapped those unfortunate souls out of their doomed trance right before their bodies were about to be covered and consumed in ants and reduced in to a pile of bones, I’d hazard a guess that New Flowers might have done the trick quite nicely. After the invocation comes the good time, congo synth party which gives us all a nice and nifty insight in to an Africa immersed in the sounds of high-life if cheap Casio keyboards had come to be known as the principal instrument as opposed to guitars.

Tanlines are half of production duo Brothers, who you may remember were responsible for the ring tone generation friendly, gonzo shanty town re-jig of Telepathe’s “shoulda been” international pop smash, ‘Chromes On It’, the one that made the already brazen sex jam that the Spice Girls never got around to making, sound like it had been recreated by a bunch of rambunctious kids high on sugar rocks, let loose in the electronic toy section of the Early Learning Centre. Some day soon this should be used to soundtrack the kaleidoscopic, acid fried Sunny Delight advert of our ADD riddled dreams.

Tanlines - New Flowers

labels >> pocahaunted, tan lines

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Monday, August 11, 2008  8:25 am 

Love your hunter

I asked the incredibly talented Chris Pell for some of his awesome illustrations, and lo and behold the astonishing triad he has summoned specially for us as they illuminate these black spaces in all their sublime and twisted glory. The strength of their psychedelic imaginery has dispelled the pseudo-writer’s block that afflicted me, imagine my scrawny soul contorting pulled furious by a cruel mesh of barbed wire, convoluted pink tongues and the bristling hairs of a primeval spider, from the metaphysical saucepan of nothingness into a labyrinth of flames dancing in intricate bliss.

Like Weir said, Hell is only a word. So is inspiration.

We can’t wait for Chris to make some tees.

Blue lightning Bolts stretch like the phosphorescent limbs of emaciated giants outside my window, trampling the tatty buildings of Brighton town with the fierce stomping of their electric shock, in the darkness of this room it feels as if we were being subjected to God’s own Blitz.

If only.

The pilgrimage of these tendrils of power across the black gulfs of the turbulent sky shines with the same epic fractured heartrending beauty of Sun City Girls as they open their cyclopean jaws to engulf us whole, so we can feel Noah’s predicament, drowning in acids distilled through esoteric processes of alchemy, strangled by warbled spirals of distortion cruel and portentous like aztec snakes, Sun City Girls make non-euclidean rock music for coyotes that know more than you, they make music that always leaves a taste of peyote in your mouth, and the mirage of desert dawn in your eyes, they lay there somewhere in between Leone and Jodorowsky, we couldn’t think of a better place to be.

Sun City Girls- Sev Archer

This song is taken from ‘You Are Never Alone with a Cigarette’, a compilation of long-lost 7”, unreleased gems and never heard before versions.

Plastique de Reve has been going on for a while, you can imagine him lounging in a sofa of the gigolo manor, picking bits of meat from between his teeth with a switchblade while the asymmetric crowd got down under a rococo chandelier, yeah, whenever Plastique de Reve appears in our radar we know it is time for dancefloor carnage. We have fond memories of sweaty headbanging to the classic hip hop acid styles of ‘Do it’ as played by Optimo in Primavera 05, and we have been known to wiggle wobbly to their jacking remix of Future Forward’s ‘Welcome 2 Chicago’, just to mention a couple. No overcompressed bullshit or concessions to the beat de jour, no respect for genres, just pure unadulterated sweaty energy flash and speaking in the furious tongues of tribal dance mania.

Plastique de Reve doesn’t do disco, he does the disco in, vicious.

But don’t take my word for it, juts listen to the stonking Lost in the City/Resist, out in DFA’s import imprint Death from Abroad.

Plastique de Reve feat Radical Cheerleaders- Resist (Original Mix)

Resist isn’t classy. Resist cracks the floor mercilessly with a beastly rhythm exterminator somewhere in between Giorgio Moroder and Nitzer Ebb, while Radical Cheerleaders shoot their fists in the air in true old skool Baltimore style, abnormal arpeggiated bleeps tumble upon us like random mutterings from a deranged god of technological thunder, all coming together layer after layer of sublime mind-numbing simplicity so that all those kids in the dancefloor who walk the walk can lose their shit, and crack their knees, in true no-style style.

Astrological Straits, the new album from Hella Drummer Zach Hill out on Ipecac is an inebriating a brew as I would have expected, and then some. 20JFG have a winter demesne whose entrance is guarded by a pack of grey wolves trained not to gore visitors that arrive bearing messages such as these, they can recognise the scent quickly, something about Oneida.

We show them across wooden halls and into a vast room where we sit on the floor, sip a preparation of vinum sabbati from a golden chalice while the fire devil whistles delighted in the hearth, we break the seals of scrolls that unfurl covered in geometric schemata telling of odysseys across furious seas populated by mythical beasts, close our eyes & listen to the music hidden in the colours and lines, staccato drums pound like obelisks of ice precipitating from a ring of fire in the sky, concentric circles of rhythm that culminate into an altar covered in glam rock splatter.

Then’s when we gore them.

Zach Hill- Dark Arts

labels >> Plastique de Reve, Sun City Girls, Zach Hill, xxjfg

  6 Comments »  

Friday, August 8, 2008  12:01 am 

Over Ice, After Dark

Just over a year ago, your fiendish 20JFG writers got all excited about a track called ‘Love Reaction’ by Lovelock that was passed to us on a blood-flecked CD by a backwards-talking multi-tentacled demon from a frozen purple dimension. It was a tale of neon infused trysts between shear cheek-boned society girls with too much hairspray and well built Calvin Klein models with too much hair gel, all spurred on by cocktail glasses filled with Tia Maria and fast rides in a red Porsche that followed the streaming street-lights and cut a tyre mark slice across the backdrop of LA amidst a night time lightning strike. Those dramatic power chords partly inspired a secret project yet to be revealed.

Lovelock is Steve Moore of Zombi - you know Zombi, they are the black light and glitter-blood disco main act that follows the stormtrooper procession in the main hanger of Darth Vader’s Death Star, a time for the red cloaked imperial troopers to look good striking moves reflected in the glass chrome flooring - but where Zombi exemplify Argento’s luridly stained-glass gorefests, Lovelock are more about the action moments to a Driller Killer remake if the psycho-murderer had been a Robert Blue girl wielding a laser gun instead of a DIY tool.

Lovelock - Don’t Turn Away (From My Love)

Eskimo have a Skinny Joey compiled mixtape coming out in September, ‘Cosmic Balearic Beats, Vol.1′ featuring unreleased slowdisco from In Flagranti, Coyote, Maelstrom and more. ‘Don’t Turn Away (From My Love)’ ends the mix like a closing credits track, as if the mix you just heard was a movie of decadent porn and blood soaked slasher horror set in space. But then its so much more than that, its sincere but cheesy lyrics that spiral and echo around shadowy caverns under Innsmouthian mountains, and the synths evoke giant shimmering pirate ships cruising through blackest space on a sea of laserbeams bursting forth from crumbling suns.

And now credit where credit is duly due, Tommy Boy, the owner of the bestest myspace gallery EVER, has turned us onto Sally Shapiro’s successor (*gasp of dramatic shock*) in the form of italodisco nymphet, Odessa.

Odessa - Polar Intrusion

Once the needle cuts into the groove on the ‘Polar Intrusion’ 12″, Odessa’s hometown of Rotterdam is transformed into a glacial landscape of relentless disco snow streams, slow-motion flexing polar bears swing heavy clawed paws at translucent dragonflies spiralling around in the still air. A giant metallic husky, icicles shattering from its joints as it lumbers forward, blasts phosphorous blue columns of frozen flame from its mouth, covering the skyscrapers in thick layers of ice that resonate the central vocodered mantra. The husky rears up roaring, and slams its chrome paws through the frozen shelf covering the Nieuwe Maas river and falls through to a cavern where Odessa sits on a neon blue throne and Alden Tyrell spins retrograde Italian dance records for vampires and ghouls that gesture majestically in the swathes of dry ice.

labels >> Lovelock, Odessa, disco, ice

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