I asked the incredibly talented Chris Pell for some of his awesome illustrations, and lo and behold the astonishing triad he has summoned specially for us as they illuminate these black spaces in all their sublime and twisted glory. The strength of their psychedelic imaginery has dispelled the pseudo-writer’s block that afflicted me, imagine my scrawny soul contorting pulled furious by a cruel mesh of barbed wire, convoluted pink tongues and the bristling hairs of a primeval spider, from the metaphysical saucepan of nothingness into a labyrinth of flames dancing in intricate bliss.

Like Weir said, Hell is only a word. So is inspiration.

We can’t wait for Chris to make some tees.

Blue lightning Bolts stretch like the phosphorescent limbs of emaciated giants outside my window, trampling the tatty buildings of Brighton town with the fierce stomping of their electric shock, in the darkness of this room it feels as if we were being subjected to God’s own Blitz.

If only.

The pilgrimage of these tendrils of power across the black gulfs of the turbulent sky shines with the same epic fractured heartrending beauty of Sun City Girls as they open their cyclopean jaws to engulf us whole, so we can feel Noah’s predicament, drowning in acids distilled through esoteric processes of alchemy, strangled by warbled spirals of distortion cruel and portentous like aztec snakes, Sun City Girls make non-euclidean rock music for coyotes that know more than you, they make music that always leaves a taste of peyote in your mouth, and the mirage of desert dawn in your eyes, they lay there somewhere in between Leone and Jodorowsky, we couldn’t think of a better place to be.

Sun City Girls- Sev Archer

This song is taken from ‘You Are Never Alone with a Cigarette’, a compilation of long-lost 7”, unreleased gems and never heard before versions.

Plastique de Reve has been going on for a while, you can imagine him lounging in a sofa of the gigolo manor, picking bits of meat from between his teeth with a switchblade while the asymmetric crowd got down under a rococo chandelier, yeah, whenever Plastique de Reve appears in our radar we know it is time for dancefloor carnage. We have fond memories of sweaty headbanging to the classic hip hop acid styles of ‘Do it’ as played by Optimo in Primavera 05, and we have been known to wiggle wobbly to their jacking remix of Future Forward’s ‘Welcome 2 Chicago’, just to mention a couple. No overcompressed bullshit or concessions to the beat de jour, no respect for genres, just pure unadulterated sweaty energy flash and speaking in the furious tongues of tribal dance mania.

Plastique de Reve doesn’t do disco, he does the disco in, vicious.

But don’t take my word for it, juts listen to the stonking Lost in the City/Resist, out in DFA’s import imprint Death from Abroad.

Plastique de Reve feat Radical Cheerleaders- Resist (Original Mix)

Resist isn’t classy. Resist cracks the floor mercilessly with a beastly rhythm exterminator somewhere in between Giorgio Moroder and Nitzer Ebb, while Radical Cheerleaders shoot their fists in the air in true old skool Baltimore style, abnormal arpeggiated bleeps tumble upon us like random mutterings from a deranged god of technological thunder, all coming together layer after layer of sublime mind-numbing simplicity so that all those kids in the dancefloor who walk the walk can lose their shit, and crack their knees, in true no-style style.

Astrological Straits, the new album from Hella Drummer Zach Hill out on Ipecac is an inebriating a brew as I would have expected, and then some. 20JFG have a winter demesne whose entrance is guarded by a pack of grey wolves trained not to gore visitors that arrive bearing messages such as these, they can recognise the scent quickly, something about Oneida.

We show them across wooden halls and into a vast room where we sit on the floor, sip a preparation of vinum sabbati from a golden chalice while the fire devil whistles delighted in the hearth, we break the seals of scrolls that unfurl covered in geometric schemata telling of odysseys across furious seas populated by mythical beasts, close our eyes & listen to the music hidden in the colours and lines, staccato drums pound like obelisks of ice precipitating from a ring of fire in the sky, concentric circles of rhythm that culminate into an altar covered in glam rock splatter.

Then’s when we gore them.

Zach Hill- Dark Arts

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with moroder optimo