(these are review that our fellow conspirator Matt wrote as part of his jazz funk greats participation- he’s been the first Jazz Funk greatster-night-guester and he did amazingly, it couldn’t have been any other way. All our respect and love to him, we hope he writes more for us because this is simply brilliant!)

Nick Nicely- Hilly Fields

Ah, the summer. Robots playing tag on Hampstead heath. Your psychic sister in law falling down rabbit holes and somewhere, lost in the bushes, an old inventor can’t find his way back to the time machine. Yup, it’s a psych record, but, oddly enough, recorded in the mid-eighties, before the Dukes of Stratosphere were a glimmer in XTC’s ever-growing brain, while the Style Council were making moving targets cry and thatcher, (she doesn’t deserve a capital letter), was doing it to everybody else.

This track is a superb argument for the abolition of the concept of linear time. A chugging, multilayered, breathless shimmer which resembles nothing so much as the Doc’s time machine from ‘Back to the Future 3′.

It’s got clanking analogue keybs, stratospheric eyes-wide-open vocals and even a little girl voice-over ala ‘Hole in my shoe’. Simultaneously intricate as a carriage clock and vast as the sun, in the tradition of all great psychedelia from Kaleidoscope to Spacemen 3. A shining arcadia ruled over by the benevolent ghosts of Syd Barret, Michael Moorcock and Aubrey Beardsley. It’s creator’s fate, sadly, unknown. His place in the ranks of the great visionaries of Albion assured.

Silver Apples – Ocillations

Some folks will try and shuck you that this record is in some way “futuristic” or perhaps “retro-futurist”, or even (hhnnggh) “Ahead of its time” (try it, I bloody dare you).

This glistening third eye operator’s table is about as futuristic as two 16th century alchemists trapped in a brass cannoned airship, orbiting the pyramids of Mars. Yesterday.

It does what great music (notice I didn’t say “pop” or “rock”. A plague on both your houses) should do, exists in its own time zone altogether, a glorious and terrifying nether region where red Indians dance on the fossilized remains of aluminum pterodactyls and Victorian inventors rule from behind the crystal gates of giant glass bubble cities. I believe the term I’m looking for is Otherness.

No, it is not as other tunes. For a start the awesome drumming (and believe me, tribal is not sufficient for this Herculean proteanism) makes you dance with your UPPER body, (remember the last time that happened? Drum’n'bass, mate), while the disconcerting bloops and whorls of Simeon’s home made keyboard (the Simeon, natch) generate a mass-mind fear of those very aforementioned pterodactyls attacking in packs and snatching away your loved ones before you can shriek.

The fact it was released in 1968 is rendered utterly obsolete in face of its imaginative assault. Simeon’s keyboard being made out of bits of junk, telegraph keys and cheap oscillators is even more of a gift horse to the writer/temporal investigator: gold from shit, yer actual alchemy.