In the iconic pantheon where the members of the 20jazzfunkgreats sect light candles every night surrounded by a swarm of green-eyed black cats of such nimble countenance that in the midst of the darkness their liquid silhouettes could be easily mistaken for the endlessly extending pseudopodia of a cthonic megalodon, Rammelzee stands in a central altar of power where we lay to worship.

He played a key role in the birth of Hip Hop, and some would say that most of the crew hasn’t still caught up with the mad afrofuturistic shit he was pulling with K-Rob in the early 80s, Beat Bop nuff said. He was also one of the seminal grafitti figures, and not just from the visual point of view but also in terms of the development of a philosophy where letters are seen as weapons in a war between unhinged creativity and mind-numbing standardisation, hence Ikonoclast Panzerism. All of this fits, with Philip K. Dick style psychedelic coherence, into a mindblowing cosmogony populated by heroes and monsters clashing for control over the Alpha Bet, and therefore, and as any post-modernist would surely agree, the freedom of mankind and the evolution of the universe in which it is destined to make its mark.

What’s this? Imagine William Gibson circa Count Zero burning hieroglyphics on the breastplate of a Ghost in the Shell Mech and you’re not there, you’re accelerating between shining stars, or nodes interlaced in a reticle spanning light-years over the black surface of a chip whose pattern is God’s thumbprint, this is the space where thr creatures identified by Rammelzee dwell and plot, the tunes we are posting today are hymns that resound across dimensions as they march into battle.

Her Bad Habit- Do

Manuel’s got an ear of gold, so his label Citinite is one of the best out there, their latest release is Her Bad Habit’s ‘I Don’t Know What You Are Doing to Me’ (out last Monday), and inside it you find IDM wiz kid Jimmy Edgar skating intrepid down the neon avenues of the synth boogie metropolis hot on the heels of Axel F’s sexy ghost, the velcro straps of his McFly sneakers are adjusted tight so you know what’s going to happen my man, an orange meltdown of funky synth basslines illuminating a geodesic dome under which chromed-up androids jack riotously, this is very very fresh.

Clone Machine-Clone Machine (DXR Mix)

Clone Machine is a rather definitive electro super-group including The Egyptian Lover, Alden Tyrell, Jamie Jupiter and Dexter, and their self-titled debut 12” tears down the place with a vocoderised godzilla of old skool pumpin’ bass music packing enough punch to make our man Drop the Lime go WOAH. Egyptian Lover does his megalomaniac voodoo witch MC thing on top of a merciless sci-fi chugga-chugga beat barrage, and the 20jazzfunkgreats bots head toward the floor turned into brainless zombies bound to fracture their joints whilst attempting to accomplish ridiculously acrobatic dance manoeuvres, battle us bitch, it’s your ass on the floor.

Arbeid Adelt- Death Disco (Todd Terje Edit)

Adelt Arbeid covered PIL’s Death Disco live to come up with the definitive paranoid post-new-beat industrial aggro anthem, you could imagine an army of leather-clad euro-ravers getting down and dirty to it in a Rotterdam warehouse circa 1987, climbing on top of each other in order to create a pyramid of flesh, muscle and hate sweaty enough to make Jesus weep. Well, this is being re-released now with some edits, and Todd Terje has had a gone at it.

As always he gets it right by fucking around with the masters quite respectfully- although the abrasive clanging of the original is very slightly smoothed down, the tune still comes across like the soundtrack of that geezer in Manhunt laying waste to hunters left and right with the help of a nail-ridden baseball bat, and we wouldn’t expect it to sit comfortably in any dancefloor not populated by fucked-up maniacs, which is the way it should be.

The Hasbeens- Make The World Go Away

Let us finish this post on a suitably epic note with The Hasbeens’s new 12”, ‘Make The World Go Away’, an electroid space trip into the mysteries of the void beyond undertaken inside a silver cruiser crewed by homoeostatic artificial apparatus but following a course drawn by an astrogrator who is human after all, and in love too. We are really digging its metronomic progression and gorgeous romantic melodies, which infect the back of the brain like an alien parasite brought back from the Nebulas of Andromeda. They make us think of a secret world covered in obsidian coloured waters full of heart-rending vistas to be patrolled in a sci-fi hovercraft so as to recreate the opening credits of Electroma, if only Daft Punk were chasing the beautiful mermaid who stole their hearts of chrome and leather with her beautiful vocoderised chant.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with prog rave