Pagan war drums at some Midwestern call to prayer. Battered metal PA’s affixed to crumbling desert buildings blaring out heartfelt pain and anguish. Crows perched atop the adobe walls, watching the deserted streets below. The first moments of Irma Vep‘s Executioner Blues is all these things.

Rusty guns fusing with their rotting holsters. Lightning rolling over Dales rendered deserts by some primitive cataclysm. Scarred vistas and snatched memories of tribal terror. Executioner Blues is all these things too.

Irma Vep make evocative music, it seems. Evocative music that taps into the axis of Cormac McCarthy’s dusty despair and the thundering beat of hooves that herald the scratchy wail of the damned. They have a CDR out on Manchester label Icecapades called Goodbye 33, Hello Plastic Furniture which is available now in a tiny run of 50 handmade copies.  Run!

Irma Vep – Executioner Blues

Wrong-footing us with a Suicide by way of Factory Floor synth loop, Maestro’s, psychedelic, intimate vocal wraps its velvet clad arms around you and motions inside Kenneth Anger‘s well adorned garage. The vocal melody, sliding between notes like some idealised invocation, woozy guitar riffs, like blue flames licking around a satanic bust. This strange potion, one part strung out psychedelia, one part early electronic abuse bound by the incongruously modern analogue synths that bubble up and spill over the edge, hint at the malevolent forces contained within.

Maestro’s Devils is taken from Tigersushi‘s 10 year anniversary comp that came out earlier this month. It would be simply impossible to untangle the countless ways that Hagelsteen and Bouaziz‘s Tigersushi has grafted itself to the xxjfg subconscious over the years. Perhaps their Kill the DJ comps (especially Optimo’s), perhaps their pre-empting of the Cold Wave revival with 2004′s seminal So Young But So Cold or most probably the commutative efforts of a organisation dedicated to the gloriously undefinable in a way after our own genre agnostic hearts.

Maestro – Devils

This Saturday we’ll once more be transporting ourselves northward to Thee Old Blue Last for our monthly attempt to play weird music to bemused people. It’s 8-1:30 if you fancy stopping by to say “hi”.