Our main man Steven was packing for a trip to the Lake District last week and he asked us if we wanted him to bring us a sheep skull. Apparently there are many of those over there, as a consequence of a Sheep apocalypse Aeons ago. Or at least that is what we thought.

But we know the truth now.

Because I was reading the Unausprechlichen Kulten by Von Juntz the other night, as I always do before going to bed (Sanity loss 1D8/2D8) when I stumbled upon a ghastly description of the incredible events that took place in that god-forsaken area in the cold winter of 1346, I know you are curious about this because you’re all a gang of misfits and miscreants, and cats, but I will hold my tongue, I would rather not expose your innocent minds to the horrors of the spatial void and what lies therein, and what came herein, and the truth lying hidden in the enigmatic grins and the hollow eyes of those so-called pale sheep skulls, ah fools, if you only knew the truth, then you would abandon all hope as I have already done (listening to the finished version of that new Justice single hasn’t helped), and we at 20jazzfunkgreats do not want that, we think that the world is in enough of a sorry state as it is without our readers, as everyone knows the brightest and bestest (not necessarily the fittest, no offence intended) specimens of our puny species being demoralised to the brink of terminal desperation by abominable revelations from the dark side of the elipse.

Ignorance can be bliss our friends, but only as the first step of the ladder that leads to absolute knowledge, which is the knowledge of our own powerlessness, or the power to do nothing, which is absolute and useless but true. We have therefore decided to, how would I say, initiate your descent by posting a couple of songs which should illustrate sonically the sort of barren vistas of infinite space to which our calloused eyes have been subject, clues about what goes on beyond the thin veil covering our five inadequate senses, there is a desolate beauty to them which we hope you’ll find as compelling as we do, you know how Nietzsche once said that if you stare for too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you? Well, he forgot to say the void speaks too, you only need to listen.

Astronaut sent us an e-mail with a reference to our (insert name of leading social networking/spam platform here) tagline (which says ‘do something magical and disappear’, a Liars quote which fits our philosophy like a sexy medieval gauntlet), the formula was right ‘we did something magical’, and true, they got us hooked now.

Astronaut- Prayer for Mitnick

These people don’t make music, they craft drone-scapes of cyclopean beauty which spread in more dimensions than Euclid had time to dream of, engulfing you with the hypnotic power of SPACE so vast it cancels TIME, did you ever see that very lo-fi Super-8 recording of Zombi chasing the dragon past alpha centauri? Well, just listen and be there, ‘where they are taking you you don’t need eyes’. That this song namechecks Kevin Mitnick only adds a handful more black crow feathers to Astronaut’s cap.

But if The Thing taught us something, it is that space can come down and hide in the snow too, wait patient for some warm creature to come close, leap and invade it, the rest is an explosion of animatronic pyrotecnics and glorious shark jaws snapping femurs like dry sticks, blood showers in the Arctic.

Grobbing Thristle decide not to bite yet, they just grin, the effect is scary enough, Polish sex noise staring at you from the black corner of that cell which is your life, or the soundtrack for Twin Peaks as orchestrated by Wolf Eyes, there is a quiet beauty to this tune, a warm embrace of darkness, Grobbing Thristle know it is not something to be scared of because it lies inside every heart, it is just a bit closer to the surface in theirs, and it beats strong.

Grobbing Thristle- Song Number 5

And if we are going to say something about darkness, well, some would argue that’s all we do, what better way to end, or perhaps to start, depending on your point of view, than with a visit from our parents? Yes, it is Throbbing Gristle making the sort of comeback we had nightmares about, wake up to find it’s all true, what joy!

Part Two the Endless Not, which comes out today is a zone (in the Tarkovskian sense) of fear, loathing and sick beauty, where abstract chunks of rhythm slide with the wobbly cadence of a collosus too big to avoid, toxic atmospheres unfurl like the smoke and dust of a (dis)controlled demolition of the soul leaving the listener aghast, not any less seduced, it’s not often that you come out at the end of a record feeling physically and spiritually dirty, but of course you’d suspect TG had it in their black guts to do just that. Nasty stuff you enjoy every minute of, it makes all the noise kids out there sound a bit like what they really are, kids, which is not a bad thing, I don’t think I’d like to live in a world full of bands able to pierce my skin with the sheer lascivious wickedness as these, shall we call them people, do.

And then there is the ballads, the sort of thing you’d expect tortured souls to shriek in a dingey cabaret in the seventh level of hell, ‘you fit me like a shrunken glove’ says/sings Genesis in ‘Almost a Kiss’, I think it sort of summarises what this record sounds like, a pale scrawny torso full of scars, bursting in the seams, collapsing into itself and disappearing into the shadows, you might not like it but that’s the way we all end.

Throbbing Gristle- Almost a Kiss