Friday, January 28, 2005  2:28 am 

Hug a machine today

Here at xxjfg we have on numerous occasions been known to get quite deliriously excited by multilayered abstract electronic music that oddly seems to be mostly made Germans.

M83 really confused us by not being German (not even a German grandmother or aunty as far as we are aware).

Jeans Team are German (phew not too confusing) and fit most the cliches I could list about the electronic form of Krautrock. If your going to fit any cliche, can you think of a better one? Norwegian Dwarf Doom Metal doesn’t count.

They do some other stuff like giving electroclash its best anthem with MJ Lan’s remix of the DAF like Keine Melodien, Bontempi Hawaiian House music, being mad multi instrumentalist dancing party fools in winkle pickers, having the greatest difference in heights between band members that we have seen in ages, lush Gainsbourg disco love songs ect, but mainly they just make fine music we admire and love.

The best thing about Jeans Team is that they have a new album out called Musik von Oben and for the purposes of xxjfg we will pretend you are all from Skandinavia just so we can say its released on the wonderful home of the lovely Pluxus, Pluxemburg.

From Musik von Oben, here is Wunderbar.

Jeans Team - Wunderbar

Wunderbar comes from a soft repeated vocal melody to emerge as an understated epic. Just when you think all the melodies and sounds have emerged another one grows up and says hello. Its so warm and alive sounding, it makes me want to hug each and every one of their lovely synths.

Was going to post another multi-layered song by German people, erm, Harmonia’s Notre-Dame or something off Justus Kohncke’s lovely new album, but then I thought why not Brian Eno experimenting with synths as featured in one of our readers’ comment earlier this week? So maybe this is not early Eno, I mean, not early-early Eno, it’s taken from ‘Another Green World’, the third album under his name (1975, check it out), but I think it fits today’s bill quite nicely: a breathtakingly beautiful piece of sedate electronica by the man himself, at the height of his powers, when he could do no wrong.

Brian Eno- The Big Ship

It’s a small vignette, one of those tiny old paintings in thick wood frames of some abandoned bay somewhere you’d like to be in. You can almost see the ship sailing into the sea and slowly, kind of matter-of-factly, rising up and disappearing into the cloudy sky, I don’t have much more to say, just listen, it’s magic and the feelings it creates is what we are about in this blog.

Have a good weekend!

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