Thursday, November 20, 2008  12:05 am 

Trance Trees

Image by Tommy Boy

In it’s original incarnation Give Me Your Love by Barbara Mason is a seductive slab of classic string drenched disco soul that sounds like it’s being sung by a woman who can barely contain herself, reduced to a trembling lustful whisper, and which circles your heart with all the sensual intensity of a panther on the prowl. 51717 transforms this honey dipped confection into something truly odd and mystifying that’s far more likely to be played beneath rows of dripping stalactites than the reflections of a mirror ball, as it sashays around the brain with primitive pagan charm.

51717 - Give Me Your Love

Spooked drums that talk in tongues and distorted voices, wailing and sighing, that trip over one another as they lay down hypnotic incantations combine to create something that could accompany a funeral procession for woodland creatures, lurching and jerking through the undergrowth, mournful yet sensual. If ten years ago Timbaland had slowly begun to lose his mind awhirl in the mathematics of rhythm and had opted to hide away in nature’s embrace, finding a nice cave where he could have cultivated a beard for himself, disrobed of all his precious gold, and gone back to the true origin of the drum track, banging on anything he could have gotten his hands on, rocks, wood, bones, he might’ve crossed paths with a young ingénue, lost and impressionable, who he could’ve stolen away from society forever to make music with, and he might have made something like the twitchy forest funk of 51717.

Perfectly blending the darkly deviant metronomic throb of Turzi and the dizzying crash-bang-wallop- sonics of Caribou, Athens based Fantastikoi Hxoi have crafted in Eidiko Varos a motorik epic akin to some of Giorgio Moroder’s soundtrack, but infused with more of a state of emergency type urgency, a song that would be perfect if used in some kind of high concept futuristic thriller to score a frenetic chase scene through a rain soaked dystopian cityscape built up with skyscrapers that ominously disappear into the clouds as if to conceal the secrets of the bad men above from the minions below.

Fantastikoi Hxoi- Eidiko Varos

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Just to remind y’all, XXJFG is hitting up NYC again. It’s this Friday at OULU which is just off of Bedford in Williamsburg. Come, get merry and dance to some drum odysseys with us.

labels >> 51717, Fantastikoi Hxoi, clubs