Wednesday, December 19, 2007  12:34 pm 

If music be the food of love, let us drink its blood and grow stronger- What went on in 2007 pt.1

You know how 20jazzfunkgreats are a bunch of happy-go-lucky jesters living in a constant spiral of delights, ah, what new kitten will be grinning at us from the delightful feed window every morning, will the Great Cthulhu have awakened today to bring this vacuous society down while taciturn packs of Cenobites chase celebrities down the streets to give their glossy skins the ultimate stretch with rusty chains to then burn their deformed bodies in the black pillar of their own shallowness? A copy of ‘In Touch‘ has found its way to the 20JFG vaults and, to be honest, we won’t abide this shit.

But if we were feeling suicidal and down and ready to shuffle gently off this mortal coil to feed the worms, or perhaps spongiform corals that shall inherit the earth, there would still have been something keeping us from doing so, a force stronger than the hyperspace drive in a Corellian gunship, it would have been music! which as you know is the magic! cast by mutants & weirdoes & geniuses & outlaws & nerds out there of whose spells we are but mere conduits, distortion flows through our veins, the palpitations of our hearts are but a humming drone and our eyes shoot laser rays of portentous synthetic neon light, how did music save our lives this year??

Read on and find out motherfuckers.

Des-tructions

-As its the custom, there’s no order to our madness, we don’t make lists because you can’t measure love, hate, power, frenzy and lust in a Roman scale.

-Also note that the live-saving themes below are unbounded by genres or formats, we put together music made with guitars and synths and pooters, sticks and stones, music you can dance to with your hips and your head, in your memory and your dreams (or nightmares), albums, singles and live performances all together in a crazy celebration of what went on, after all this is 20JFG, and this is the modern world, get on with it kids, there are no rules.

-Note we are mostly refraining from posting tunes mentioned in the list (which you will have probably heard here before anyway), but stuff newly arrived to our dusty vaults which falls inside the themes we are talking about, because we are forward looking types you see, and we can’t help ourselves from sharing our constant never-ending excitement for the steady stream of awesome releases which the true underground saber-toothed pixie tigers delivers to our argyle socks every night in what amounts to a 365-day long crimbo, JESUS WEPT.

But anyhow, as we were saying, and because it’s about time to get started, how did music save our lives in 2007?

By opening our eyes to alien worlds where the Sun sets in a beautiful cycle of foreverness according to cryptic psychedelic laws

This includes the sweet paternal love-drenched humming of Panda Bear’s Person Pitch (awesome gig too), the percussive ecstasy in the Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam (in spite of the slight disappointment when we saw them live), also warm vibrations off alien places through Black Dice’s Load Blown, as well as the mighty ponderous vibrations of all those changelling disco motherfuckers out there, particularly Aeroplane with his two astonishing EPs, Roland Sebastian Faber’s Hommage An Die Jugend Europas, Ame’s Fiori and Lindstrom and Prins Thomas, who set our veins into slow burning kosmische sorcerer fire with a panoply of tunes, remixes, mixes and, particularly, if we have to choose, a Late Night Comp which is a treasure trove of gold and jewels dug by analogue robots in the dark side of the moon.

If you wonder what we the heck we are talking about when we say beauty under an eternally setting sun, usually slowed down to mere inches from a silence that is death, but also the space and time where one has visions of blinding luminosity, you need to go no further than the utterly colossal album that mighty Earth shall be releasing in the new year, it goes by the title of ‘The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull’, which is as fitting a name as one could think of, just bask in the daunting reverberations of the title track we are humbly depositing here as a teaser, climb up magnificent staircases of a Palace whose architecture denies the principles of geometry because it was built with sheer willpower transmogrified into power chords, this is astonishing stuff which we can’t wait to have sitting in our turntable as a slab of Cyclopean vinyl.

Earth- The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull

By setting the tasers to hysteria creating a supernova of x-ray strobes which threw our crazy skeletons dancing healing into the ceiling

Here is a beam us up teletransportation feeric device space for our man total genius Dan Deacon who gave the most uplifting gig of the year at the little wee Greenhouse Effect, all bless Dan Nixon & all friends dancing sweaty & frenzied under the aegis of a dayglo skull, also at the extraordinary Upset the Rhythm xmas bash together with Gay vs You, John Maus (more on him later) and No Age (more on them later), and of course with his total boner Spiderman of the Rings album bristling with moshpit tribal squirrel mauler excitement and Steve Reich-a-like morsels of melodic circuit bending you must have in your life by now, another highlight was our seizure-induced spazzing out induced by furry troll motherfuckers Extreme Animals in their awesome gig at the MacBeth in London as put together by Alt.Delete, napper.

It seems that after the hangover of the helium-intoxicated ‘mdma’-zing moronic Neu! Rave hype, which wasn’t that neu! or that rave at the end of a shit night in Scala, we are getting to enjoy some seriously deranged off-kilter pop made by crazy kids who, as Lord Nuneaton Savage put in his brilliant appraisal of Klaxons (I never listened to the album so I can’t say what gives) and their literary influences, ‘look like they have fun being in a band’ and don’t care what you think anyway, as exemplified by Dat Politics (with their excellent contribution to Tomlab’s alphabet series), mighty Munch Munch, TheDeathSet and crazy kings of powell peralta ninjitsu Best Fwends (Vice can say whatever they want but BF rule in our hearts), all of which bristle with the same sort of hyperkinetic energy as new sweetest felines in the block Copycats, who were nice enough to send us a tune which will be undoubtedly soundtracking much wonky shuffling in the bizarro dancefloor, this sounds like Rob Hubbard covering the Unicorns under a Cassette Playa (big love to Carri) quilt den and we love it more than Hello Kitty switchblades/Gloomy Bear machetes.

Copycats- Suns/Sons

By Exposing us to the vast voids of Hades where we’d burn eternal were we to engage in the ultimate transition

More eternity, but in this case one of darkness, that’s the heavy shroud under which many of our fave 2007 acts have taken us. As you well know, the 20JFg ones are always up for sinful shenanigans in the spiritual underworld, and that’s where the masters of subversive decadence Throbbing Gristle took us with Part Two: The Endless Not, an Odyssey of sleaze, dirt and vile pleasure whose unashamed heights of epic dastardly sticky feedback where only paralleled by Sunn O))) in their absolutely dizzying skull-shattering dronefest at Sonar. Yellow Swans also continued throwing nameless shapes in the tenebrous dark side of the elipse with At All Ends (there seems to be a scatological thing going on), while their live Brighton gig was a total prog freak-out/headfuck which would have made the merry pranksters proud. John Maus slid into the haunted party at the last moment like the shadow of synthetic drama with that collection of possessed postcards from hell that ‘Love is Real’ is.

Meanwhile, in Continental Europe, the dark sounds kept unfolding like poisonous smoke in water with Turzi’s Enigmatic ‘A‘, Zombie Zombie flexing motorik muscles in their two brilliant 12” and a creepy rumbling tape-effect-tastic live performance enhanced, in Brighton, with Suspiria projections bloodsplattering behind their backs (the perfect synchronisation between their sounds of doom and that gal taking a dive in the barbed wire pool was another apex of fear, almost as good as Medicine and Duty unleashing it all as a Wicker Man full of cattle and a sanctimonious Christian singing old school anthems burned in the walls, heavy stuff), while the Bunker Records mentalists made us think of amorphous Things crawling, particularly through their Shemale and Nimoy releases. Although Joakim’s album had some moments of classy European dance illuminating the mysterious rooms of an abandoned Parisian apartment, it also shared with the previous suspects some healthy doses of Liars-indebted creepiness. Good times for bad people.

Steve Moore, of Zombi’s fame has a place of honour in our pantheon of nefarious dreams, you just need to check out his last release in Relapse, which goes by the name of The Henge and oozes with perverse John Carpenterian symphonic badness, you can hear steps following you in a dark alley and the silver shadow of a razorblade reflected in the damp pavement, heavy breathing speeding up only a notch because for whoever is standing behind you killing is a matter of routine, WACK wake up from the Argento nightmare, catch up your breath feeling safe for a moment sinking in sweaty sheets only to be immediately engulfed by a dark pool of shadows precipitating from the ceiling like a satanic manta ray of viscous ink which leaves a moment of respite for a muffled shriek, this is the sort of vibe we hope for in 20JFG, and Steve Moore fucking delivers.

Steve Moore- Infinite Resignation

TO BE CONTINUED

labels >> Best of, xxjfg

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