Monday, November 26, 2007  8:43 am 

An Oddyssey of Savagery

You know how one of the 20Jazzfunkgreats guys is engaged in scholarly investigations, lucky him gets to spend time reading academic papers and pondering about where culture is going, and the role that technology plays in it. In a way, you could say that his involvement with this little zine constitutes an example of participant observation, he gets to see what’s going on with the music industry, hunches and anecdotes that feed into his abstruse conceptual frameworks. But of course this is only one side of the story, to be honest he writes for this zine because it follows on a number of things he’s been doing throughout his life, or didn’t most of the letters he ever sent contain a mixtape inside them?

Anyhow, let me slip out of the third person and get on with it. I have just been reading an interview with Adam Curtis in the Register, where he discusses the role of public broadcasting in this new brave user generated world. He has a sceptic view of the whole participatory brouhaha and argues that instead of democratising the media, this blogging/folksonomy thing I guess 20JFG is part of gives rise to balkanisation, by creating little off-the-shelf belief systems, echo chambers/ comfort zones inside which you can live happily without ever having to question your views or tastes, or communicating with anyone else.

Niches that can be easily targeted by the money creeps too.

It’s easy to think of this kind of process applied to our own music context: whilst it is true that the interweb enables you to connect with another zillion weirdos who are into the same shit, like, a scene, the communities that emerge tend to be rather self-contained: You have everything you need here, why bother looking outside?

Which of course is the perfect recipe for endogamy and stagnation. Creativity emerges from clash and abrasion and exposure to things you don’t like so much to begin with, or to things you hate and spur you in a new direction. Good art doesn’t come from group hugs.

So how do I see our own position inside this (arguably simplistic, and simplified) critique of Internet Cultural Communities?

Well I guess we haven’t created that much of a comfort zone in 20JFG, what’s more, I hope we never become one: maybe the sharp focus on the spirit and energy with which music is created, rather than on its specific manifestation, creates a space which is broader than any particular scene . I do not necessarily like everything that goes in this zine, but I always listen to what the other guys, and our wonderful collaborators post, and sometimes get surprised by stuff I didn’t think I would like, or by stuff I didn’t know existed, or could exist. Those are the good times and that is the spirit. This also leads some people to accuse us of being wilfully obscure and too cool for school, and to special reactions in some parties where we have played records. Only time I saw a DJ get the finger was with a 20JFG ‘un behind the decks.

So yeah, in that sense I think we are a bit different, but still part of a movement, following a ‘programming repertoire’ which makes no compromises and attempts to please no crowds. Yet we hope that no matter what your attitude is you’ll love many of the things we post, perhaps hate some. If you get what we are about, you’ll understand why they are there. Choose your poison, yeah. Perhaps choose as many poisons as you can, you’re going to die anyway.

But this is enough reflection. Let the music talk, enough of the criteria, position, statement and goals, at the end of the day music is what we are about. The tunes below are as different as they can be, except that they share the intense focussed precise savagery which characterises many of the things we tend to dig, dig? I hope you enjoy both of them as much as I do.

Camera’s ready, prepare to flash.

Daft Punk- The New Wave (Full Length)

Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 is the bangness, just play it LOUD and imagine neon lights drawing psychedelic pyramids in the black sky while the robots in stage apply new concepts of mechanisation to the industrial activity of making you SWEAT. It is scary the way the mixing in this album brings together bits of Daft Punk’s history as part of a perfectly planned and coherent cycle where even the (relative) glitches make sense, Television Rules The Nation…Around the World?? Pure genius!

And to put things in perspective and pay homage to the masters, I thought that instead of posting an excerpt (check Hot Biscuits or 78s for some mp3s), I’d take this to the old school with the full length mix of their relentless New Wave debut released by Soma in 1994 no less.

Where they always perfect? Behold the pristine murderous chug of this track and see titanium limbs flexing in the interstices of techno metropolis, getting ready to tear it down, build it up. Simply breathtaking.

Athletic Automaton broke my ribs with their AIDS Wolf conflagration I had known it would come down to this, some sort of percussive noise massacre from which I was bound to come out with a satisfied smile made of less teeth than it had at the beginning: with ‘A Journey Through Roman’s Empire’. out in Skin Graft, Athletic Automaton reach levels of SPQR intensity and turn into sound the way I feel when I’m playing a Rumble Pit in Guardian and manage to get hold of the Gravity Hammer, teach American 12-year olds a flight lesson, destination Death. This is the soundtrack for the duel between Paul Atreides and Feyd Rautha in Dune if it had been written from the point of view of the knives, can there be any higher praise?

Athletic Automaton- Gladiator Sandal’s Fight

labels >> Athletic Automaton, Daft Punk, Think Piece