Monday, July 21, 2008  8:26 am 

Orgy of the gastropodas

Recently 20jfg we have been growing. Not just in number / girth/ facial hair but in our back garden. Spinach, rocket, pak choi , basil , radishes, tomato, chilli , jerusalem artichokes and some nasturtiums (the leaves are rather good). It’s not bad for an area the size of a the back seat of a mini.

Upon returning after dark last night, after mischievous of one kind of another, 20jfs2 put on his wolf suit and ventured into the garden to summon the familiars for feeding time with the traditional call. They roared their terrible roars, and rolled their terrible eyes, and gnashed their terrible teeth, and showed their terrible claws. Once fed the familiars curled up into purring balls of fluff in their beds.

The real horror that was to await came from a much less animated source, for did my eyes deceive me or was the floor of the garden moving ?

Barrabas - Wild Safari

Like this 1972 cut from early disco-able without meaning to be Spanish drug threatened Barrabas, my heart was beating with both terrible anticipation and excitment. Fetching a torch to investigate I stared on in wonder. Wherever i cast the beam a whole army of invertebrate were moving across the lawn in a far more animated way than their sluggish (sorry) daytime behaviour. The heards of snails made our tiny garden look like the plains of America during a buffalo migration.

But why were the snails and slugs so tightly bound, climbing on top of each other and erm, eww….

I’d never seen the orgy of the snails before, must have been something to do with the alignment of the planets.

In the morning they had gone, along with most of our crops.

20jazzfunkgreats will not abide a discussion of apocalyptic events without a mention to our most beloved Aphrodite’s Child. As you might well know, Book of the Revelations’ influenced ‘666′ represented the band-breaking transition from earlier flower-power balladry to something altogether darker and, in our patchouli-allergic opinions, way more powerful, first step also towards Vangelis’ Earth, one of the best albums ever made, ’nuff said.

Aphrodite’s Child- The Four Horsemen

This is the sort of album you really really need to hear in its totality (how many of those coming out these days?), so if you didn’t know about it do continue your research after stepping through the pre-new age chiming of the Four Horsemen’s beginning, blueprint of ‘My Face in the Rain’ on a hardcore LSD messianic trip, the calm before the storm of some of the baddest breaks ever concocted by bearded Greeks, which set your soul on fire with the trascendental equivalent of the Bomb Squad’s Welcome to the Terrordrome, and that’s only the beginning.

This must be one of the most joyful songs ever written about the arrival of skeletal riders carrying inside their ragged cloaks the evils of conquest, famine, war and plague. I think that at these point of their existences, Aphrodite’s Child (or at least Vangelis, Demis Roussos was already itching for global  pop stardom) might have seen themselves in command of spiritual energies strong enough to defeat that dreadful onslaught, and who knows, maybe they did.

Surely music this furious and beautiful must, upon being devised, crafted and performed impact the fabric of the cosmos at levels difficult to understand, or even perceive, a storm in heaven over some the rocky cliffs of a Mediterranean archipielago where stormy clouds of doom where routed by the psychedelic exertions of these progressive wizards.

And after the apocalypse, what better than the post-apocalypse.

Zager and Evans’ ‘In the year 2525′ is one song that my dad had in most of his 60s tapes, so whenever we travelled around the country when I was likkle I used to get soaked on its lush mexican-psyche-sci-fi spirals and bass-drum heavy stomp, listening to a description of processes of accelerated technological progress, evolution and change that would have made Yevgeny Zamyatin, and perhaps William Hope Hodgson, proud. It was even nominated for a Hugo award, for chrissakes. That’s more than enough to justify the inclusion of anything into the Annals of the society of 20jazzfunkgreatness, so here you have this timeless classic still shining strong in all its precognitive glory.

Zager and Evans- In the year 2525

When alien creatures slender like chrysalis step out of their silvery pods in the midst of the ochre nothingness, from which the ruins of our civilisation protrude like carious teeth in the mouth of the world, covered in eroded commercials for products which have joined bones, hopes and dreams in the dust of the dead and forgotten, and they wonder what is that brought mankind’s crazed adventures to its end, maybe it will be the echoes of this song that resonate in the crazed winds.

labels >> Aphrodite's Child, Barrabas, Zager and Evans