The girl walks down resurrected streets, under white arches and past refracting temples enveloping nothing. Through a bridge whose pathway is wastefully curved, over a river transformed from industrial carotid into aesthetic device. History plays alternate reality games with her eyes, smokestacks crash through the boutiques and nouveau cuisine restaurants like the limbs of an awoken Anime juggernaut. A Stuka squadron drones in the background of the symphony of urban renewal.

She thinks about all of this, while sipping on an optimally configured cup of café cortado, in a terraza of knowingly retro white metal, surrounded by the carnage of memories obliterated, and the leering ghosts of murdered children.

Through which reverie he crashes, in his perfectly tailored suit, five minutes late, a smile that could melt a firing squad. It wouldn’t, of course, but then it doesn’t need to. Which may well be the cause of this insufferable sensation of lightness, and the reason why, even as she stands up to kiss him, she pines for the night.

2 Ways 4 Speakers act like the black sheep of a German Engineering dynasty, designing, manufacturing and installing a stainless steel elevator that takes Neubauten’s modern classic from a dark and brooding basement into a skyline-defining penthouse of Michael Mann blue and Environ pink, in whose central swimming pool we watch a coterie of beauties swim, kiss, sink, drown.

2ways4speakers – Ume&meU

2 Ways 4 Speakers debut album has been romantically (disco) rocking our space for a couple of weeks, in a way unheard of since Kelley Polar’s beautifully decadent ‘I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling”. We will give you a shout when it’s finally released.

Many modern-day Pharisees besiege that dance temple of which 20jazzfunkgreats are such devout followers. Most of these are turned at the gates, electrocuted by the furious gaze of a black & proud & bald titanic Jesus, hurled into a purgatory where they twitch in blank abandon, or much worse, stand in the outskirts of the dancefloor, thinking themselves cool when they are simply lost.

Innergaze levitate over this turgid sea like an enigmatic Joan of Arc possessed by the same man machine dancing ghosts as Chris and Cosey and other chasers after the essence of the night and why it contains love, most pointedly operational in1970s New York and 1980s Chicago.

But Nostalgia, no matter how exquisite, is not enough. Like Factory Floor (maybe the angular dagger to their shadowy cloak), they are their own men & women, uniquely motion-blurring, focusing & defocusing their songs into an etiolated space of no-lines, mesmerised swooning & liquid moves, a seance whose poltergeists and stigmata are distant & muffled echoes of a wondrous party happening elsewhere.

We have no other option but to try to get there, through this mirror, darkly.

Innergaze – Autumn

As included in their 20JFG already-ROTY ‘Mutual Dreaming’ album, out in Cititrax/Minimal Wave.