Popul Vuh need the barest of introductions on these pages that have held so many electronic love letters to a certain period of Germanic Rock. Their euphoric, transcendent soundtracks for the incomparable Werner Herzog have in many ways overshadowed their own independent musical output. The melding of Herzogs desperate, often primal imagery to Popol Vuh’s…
Long gone are the shocking days of the unauthorized remix. Z-Trip’s work is done as mashups have gone from underground to the driving force of mainstream radio (at least here in Los Angeles). Even the video game DJ Hero only makes sense in a post-mash up world. Cultures no longer clash, but rather swirl together…
Pional’s Another Room is minimal techno for a world with an alternative history where instead of adopting its proverbial reactionary stance, the Catholic Church had embraced all that’s cool and all-encompassing and nature loving about the old time relijuns, leading us down a totally different evolutionary path where hedonism became not the last refuge of…
Agape’s Autocathe has been bidding its time, scratching with 8inch curved claws the walls of the corridor where the greasy detritus of last year piles up, growing, breathing through its shiny nostrils so that oxygen can be transformed into energy infecting blood pumped from a vicious heart and through a fractal spiderweb of capillaries into…
Balam Acab, like Salem and oOoOO (who included a Balam Acab song in their XXJFG mix below), traverse the same shadowy territories that seem at once sensual and unnerving. While Salem continue to burrow further and further into their crunk cave, saturating themselves in the sounds of an increasingly nightmarish parallel universe Hot 97, and…
Well Rounded Records keep going from strength to strength, after Deadboy’s luminous future soul shuffle, enter Ultrasound with a chunky piece of jacking Chicago proto-house with a British twist. This is our party music: primitive drums pummelling like a crack squad of voodoo phuturists, or Armando’s gremlins at the height of their perfectly logical madness,…
And as promised, here you have the mixtape that Teeth of the Sea have put together for us in order to celebrate the launch of Hypnoticon Viva, their new 12”. I am listening to the record (which you can, for example, fetch here), 2 minutes into the title track and a simmering halo of progressive…
Cast adrift, bobbing, gently atop thick black waves. Discordant guitars drifting in from some No Wave fight between their angular selves and James Chance’s rejected saxophone – still smarting and throwing her weight around. Stars fill the loft’s decaying rafters. The building creeks with the mass of the black waves; crashing apologetically into its crumbling…
Hi there. Genuine Guy here. On occasion, my merciful masters at 20jfg allow me a self-indulgent, first person persona in order to recount to you the real life yarns of my missionary adventures, and to bringeth ye the musics of my real life friends. When not firing around their hive mind as series of electrical…
In the No Wave book by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley, there is a photo of Glenn Branca and the dudes from Liquid Liquid trying to squeeze into a rickety lift and up to a house-party in some controlled rent loft in Manhattan circa 1979. This is what happens after: Skinny hip urchins as they…
Patience, patience dear reader, there are so many things you could do in 20 minutes, you could capture the secrets of the Zeitgeist in your feeble fist, like an ephemeral firefly whose wings are loaded with the power of the now, indeed, you could skim the surf bubbling at the top of the wave before…
Parallel to the crowded streets runs a secret network of back alleys, cul-de-sacs and labyrinthine corridors that would make you believe, upon stepping on them, but a few yards from the worldly bustle, that you have suddenly been transported to a different city altogether. Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft were masters of the ghost drift…
Two of 20JFG’s favourite purveyors of deadpan disco return to our feral colony of off kilter pop. While the spectre of nu-disco continues its retrenchment the shoots established at its last beachhead continue to flourish, embedding themselves in future-pop experimentation while still drawing wistfully from a synthesised past. Fan Death‘s new EP plays across a…
Dispatch from the land of whirlwinds: ‘I hope this message finds you well. I just discovered this triad of songs so mind-melting, I couldn’t resist writing about them. I have chosen to arrange them all under the theme of “Resurrection”, as I feel each one dances with this concept in some shape or form’ Taraka…
World Class People’s fierce stomp and power horns getting down like it was 1992 etch a crypto-constellation of neon voodoo signs in the back of your skull, glowing graffiti containing the address of a post-apocalyptic Baltimore Basement party you can’t possibly miss. It is the primitive tech soundtrack for an alluring video game sitting in…