If you are one of those kindred souls who delights in the mysteries of the uncanny, willing moth floating in the periphery of the psychedelic no-light, then this will be a year you shalt remember. With many arts have wicked sorcerers enchanted our souls in 2009, their eerie and powerful melodies flexing like psychic tendrils to pry open portals scarred with grimacing faces past which a blinding light shines. Because life is nothing but a sort of animated death, so by staring into its hollowed eyes, we remember what makes us human and rejoice, illuminated.
In this post we go into these Gothic lands and beyond, to embrace the propulsive spirit of true progressive music, which races past and above the warbled notebooks of the mundane and take us to a world where everything is possible. Pegassus takes the star child on its stride and into the land of epsilon, we are riding shotgun. There is room for more, there is space for all, step in.
Belbury Poly– From an Ancient Star- In a house made of paper, a girl named Marianne, distracted by a glowing screen and it’s analogue warnings of dirty water fails to notice the ancient stones closing in outside.
Blues Control– Local Flavor- The chalk drawing of a mandala in the brick wall of the basement opens the door to a dimension where snakes with leathery wings twitch to the tune of a mad organist.
Boredoms – Super Roots 10 – n hallucinated odalisques whisper into the ears of the God of Thunder tempting him so that he can get the Dyonisian party rolling, why don’t we get Lindstrom involved in this bitch?
Cloaks – Versus Grain – When the bass speaks it coughs up ash and broken bone first.
The Detachments – The Flowers That Fell (Thee Four Horsemen remix) – One of our own stalks The Detachments original through blue lit corridors and across tranquil woods, its collar turned up on its impeccable rain coat, its hand hidden until the glorious moment at 3:48…
Emika – Drop The Other (Scuba Vulpine Remix) – As it beats and pounds inside her chest, watch out for the smile on her face when “it” finally breaks through those fragile ribs.
Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport- We couldn’t put it better than HEALTH: ‘prog music for 13 year olds with beards’
Factory Floor – Lying -A rain slick 24 track Loop in the church of Neu! bring preached at from beyond.
Gatekeeper – Optimus Maximus EP- Diamond tipped Giallo talons scratch the stony face of Nitzer Ebb, the ensuing trashing is something to remember.
Hind Ear – Coconut – Rolling organic waves of pastoral beauty. The 70s Agfa to Fever Ray’s b/w Ilford.
The Horrors – Sea Within a Sea – A love letter to a more metronomic time. One of the most pleasant surprises of the year.
ΤΗΞ LΔΖΣ– Spacetime Fabric Conditioner- Sexy stories that the Alpha mother dwarf recounts in her catacomb while the gods crack mountains in the barren surface of a demon-ridden world Mahavishnu Orchestra didn’t dare to tell you about.
Oneida- Rated R- I crafted bow and arrow with the bones of my forebears, and climbed up the snowy the mountain to hunt the Pterodactyl.
Prince Rama of Ayodhya – Zetland- Cinnamon scented snuff for Ennio Morricone to clear his nose before getting on with the soundtrack for the Holy Mountain.
Teeth of the Sea – The space disco soundtrack for the sex bits in God of War, if they had been shot by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Throbbing Gristle – The Third Mind Movements – Back in the kidneys of our creators. Filtering out your life and leaving you meat. Pure, grinding, bliss.
This is the year when that unholy union and grim phoenix of obsidian which Zombi are reached, with Spirit Animal, the apex of their transversal trip towards the abyss where all our nightmares meld lascivious into each other. Alas, it seems unlikely they will populate our nocturnal path home with invisible, unimaginable horrors again.
But despair we shouldn’t, because both Steve Moore and A.E. Paterra are to continue tormenting our feeble minds with macabre melodies in their own separate and wild-eyed ways. You have heard your fair share of remixes concocted by the former in these pages, now check out the hellish motorik cavalcade which is Teleforce, as included in ‘Timespan’, a one and half (or double if you dare play the slab of esoteric geometrics) sided album recently released by the latter”s incarnation, Majeure, in Temporary Residence.
Analogue banshees cry for your soul, surrender.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s Zones Without People was the point in the sky where the red clouds of dusk touch the glistening sea. Russian Sea is the energy of the primeval forces, physically embedded or configured as networks of hungry potentiality which swarm and twitch under the surface, waiting to devour the unwary listener with jaws made of light.
Oneohtrix Point Never- Russian Mind
Order some more psychotropic synth symphonies from here.
Our last addition is something which we heard this year but will actually be released on a 2010 which is already looking swell- it comes from the always excellent vaults of Permanent Vacation, and it goes by the name of Mandarinen Träume- it is an absolutely mindblowing compilation of kosmische musique produced in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik between 1981 and 1989, as put together by Florian Sievers.
The excellent press release we received with the album frames the compositions herein contained as ‘escapes into the above’ from the claustrophobic confines of a totalitarian state, and we couldn’t have put it any better than that, just slide between the perfect sheets of heart-achingly beautiful 3D soundscapes projected from your speakers in Reinhard Lakomy’s Eswachst Das Gras Nicht Ãœber Alles, and visualise mankind’s struggle for liberation from a concrete planet of brutalistic architecture dominated by shadowy forces as directed by Rene Laloux and soundtracked by Jean Michelle Jarre at the Moonwalk epic style height of his powers. And surge.
Reinhard Lakomy- Eswachst Das Gras Nicht Ãœber Alles
Some of the images for this post were provided by masters of things that perhaps should not be but thankfully are Tommyboy.
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For those of you rattling around London this Friday, one of your faithful XXJFG brothers will be DJing in the basement of Jaguar Shoes from around midnight. Come and shake bones. Obligatory Facebook event here.
