This post is definitely not about cat parasites.

This post is definitely not about the fact that each member of 20JFG is surrounded by at least one cat on a daily basis.

This post will not postulate what the cat parasite wants with us.  It will merely point out that we are all from (marginally) diverse backgrounds and ideologies, brought together by some strange force to promote our love of occasionally popular music; to draw around us those who have also been inexplicably attracted to these strange, hypnotic, sometimes discordant, sometimes sexual, sometimes devoid of all meaning and direction…

This post will not deal with exactly why this blog was created to draw people to a DJ night.  What drove our two founders to want to meet like minded people, in a public place, where there was touching.

This post is all about the music, oh yes.  Certainly not about that cat up there.  We have no idea what it wants.

Terminal Muse: Blue, the new release from Atlanta, Georgia’s Lid EMBA (Sean Moore, if you’re the Feds), is the second in a trilogy dedicated to the cost of persistence in art. Literally. Far from being a gift, the concept posits that the creative urge is actually a curse, a disease, an incurable infection that both drives the artist while draining his or her life-force.

Reagan-era-ish apocolyptic sci-fi has an awful lot to answer for in terms of formative music experiences.  Those endless pastel deserts and synth drones, forever linked in at the fulcrum of A Boy and His Dog / Miracle Mile / Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds.  Lid EMBA seems to tease these out, dragging a mollasses slow theme from a tape damaged coma.  Distortion radiating out from a hazy ground zero.

As a musical vision of the vampyric qualities of creativity it’s devastating.  Industrial repetition buried under the throb of synths as a battle damaged metaphor for making.  Like Goya setting up a Tangerine Dream covers band.  Probably before his black period though.

Lid EMBA – Iscariot

Iscariot is taken from the album Terminal Muse: Blue out last year on Stick Figure. Go get!

120 Megabytes – Episode 19

brought to you in association with @markbrown and our friends over at Network Awesome

Jimmy Savile sat on the train to Leeds, his head in his hands.

The night before he had been playing records at the Roxy in Bradford. It had possibly been the most life changing experience in his life.

After a particularly heady does of acid while playing a rather long version of some Engelbert Humperdinck song – let us call it ‘x’ – his playlist dictated he must play ‘y’ record next. This wasn’t in any way a deviation from his normal crowd pleasing set but what happened next was.

Jimmy began to think about the disc he was spinning.

He began to imagine the beats on the record as points in space each orbiting an object with a huge gravitational force such as the sun.

Jimmy began to theorise that if there were two objects in space with the exact same parameters in a different dimension, but orbiting the same point, they would essentially always be at the same point in space at all times. But did he possess such a record with similar enough characteristics to ‘x’ as to make it orbit at a perceived same place as ‘x’?

Luckyly Jimmy did, and the rest is history.

Jimmy’s vision had been inspired by the taxi journey to Bradford which that night placed him alongside another cab containing Noel Edmonds.

However much Jimmy pressed his driver to go faster, Noel’s driver also increased his pace so as the distance they travelled from their departing point was not important, merely their relative position in space, which was to always be at the same point, next to each other at the traffic lights on the way to Bradford. Jimmy knew Noel Edmonds was a total cock.

And that, dear readers, is how Jimmy Savile invented djing & mixing before anyone else and why Noel Edmonds is a cock - and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

20jazzfunkgreats mixtape – Savile’s Travels

We are not nearly as clever as Jimmy. We understand the concept, but our grasp of what feels right as ‘x’ and ‘y’ is often more dependent on their dissimilarities of character than any shared behaviour. We travel. That is – as they say – how we roll. Sometimes ‘x’ and ‘y’ fit and if they do so its purely determined by a butterflies wings.

Jimmy Savile dies on 29 October 2011. Jimmy Savile was the first person to mix two records together. Jimmy  Savile is perhaps more famous for his image. Jimmy Savile dressed in heavily branded tracksuites and trainers with loads of gold jewelry. Sometimes coincidence is stranger than anything you could possibly imagine.

As usual in this mixtape – there is no tracklist – but we believe in you, and your ability to leave the tracklist in the comments box.

So here we are, caught up in an epileptic epiphany lighting up James Brown’s drug-addled brain as he dances around the burning wreckage of his automobile like a Balinese finger puppet lucubrated by a Dionysian necromancer, police sirens Doppler-effecting closer and closer.

And what does this epiphany concern, you ask? It concerns the realisation that we spin at great speed through the black nothing, and that a never-ending rhythm keeps it all together, and that’s the rhythm of funk, the furious gospel of a vitalistic religion we are all born into, under punches, we fight back.

Funk Police – Back Inside You

This FUNK POLICE reeks with a pungency we hadn’t felt since the Make Up/early Jon Spencer era, and its metronomic rumble echoes the Silver Apples if they had targeted their oscillator at the satanic swamp instead of the heavenly ether. We can’t fathom whether it deals with sexual intercourse or demonic possession. Silly question, they are one and the same.

FUNK POLICE’s Hot We Are Funk We Play is out on AVANT! Records on the 25^th of this month. We couldn’t find a link for the band (actually, our internet search led us to very evil places you can check for yourselves), sorry.

Ray & The Prisms, Hans Tanza’s foremost competitors in the field of analogue-cryptic management consultancy, recently launched ‘astrograph’, a distraction channelling API for business service providers in the creative industries – particularly product design houses and boutique architecture studios. Astrograph transforms the flow of information generated by social media networks, e-mail systems and behaviouralist web-browsing (which has been shown to decrease average employee productivity in the range of 20-30%) into a steady stream of warm & fuzzy trinkets.

Not only are these delightful in their own particular & self-standing ways – they can also be assembled into a consistent gestalt that some users have compared to ‘a guided tour through an 8-bit astral zone that intersects with Bruce Haack’s palace of trickery’ and ‘a visit to the lair of the inner child who resides on a rarely visited province of Hauntology’s subconscious, followed by an introduction and subsequent jaunt with his imaginary friends’.

Ray and the Prisms – Astrograph

We thoroughly recommend you try Timelapse in Colour via Datagarden.

Isaac Asimov argued, in a 1963 article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that children should be tested for their ‘creative scientific aptitude’ on the basis of their fondness for ‘high quality science-fiction’ so that, we suppose, they may then be nurtured in special academies built following the blueprint of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, or Ender Game’s military academy (sans the homophobia).

Along similar lines, we’d like to call for the educational authorities to broadcast curiosity and awe-affirming synthetic compositions on a daily basis through the Power Amplifier systems of kindergartens across the land.

Teachers should seek for the following reactions in the children subjected to the experiment: mild levitation, telekinetic episodes and holographic projections; scribbling of genetic sequences and organic chemistry structures; design and implementation of makeshift spaceship replicas using available materials. Those who display such symptoms should be referred to the Bureau for Terrestrial Exodus for induction in the Unified Theory of Everything Child Prodigy Programme (strapline = your species needs you).

*And so it begins*

Roland Sebastian Faber – Renaissance

Roland Sebastian Faber has done it again – another collection of sounds found far away, pristine and elegiac like a mathematic proof through Reductio ad Magnificum. We notice, in this case, the heart-expanding echo of a Morricone epic, vast Western vistas replaced by a majestic representation of the cosmos where the orbs continue their clockwork waltz, silent & pensive like weathered cowboys in an existential pilgrimage.

Renaissance is included in his new Gegen Den Strom 12’’ in Aube.

Questions?

• If the devil has all the best tunes, why is gospel so great?
• Can music really be good or evil?
• Is it different for different listeners?
• Do such absolutes exist at all?

This compilation tape – Azreal – attempts to answer none of the questions above.

20jazzfunkgreats mixtape – Azreal

Tracklist?

As normal, we leave all you falen angels to provide it in the comments box.

mock rock :)

20jazzfunkgreats mixtape – The old dark matter whistle test

Just for fun, there is no track listing available, but you can crowd source it in the comments.

music blog :)

meta :)

See you next time.

xx
xxjfg

(Where we share some bits from the diaries of future curmudgeon extraordinaire & gallic cyber-problematiser Alfred Tessier-Guilleme, moaning about what life is like in 70 years or so. We can totally get away with it because he hasn’t even been born. All hail H.G. Wells!)

We have reconstructed the concept of love for our new era.

Life stretching technologies have obliterated all aspirations of intimacy and permanence. Every single assumption underpinning the religious cliché, ‘til death do us part’ has been violated.  We have killed death, and in doing so we have killed life.

In an infinitely connected world, there’s no telling between me and you, or between you and them.

Sexual intercourse, the last redoubt of pure physicality for the future shocked inhabitants of the pre-singularity, is now preceded by systems engineering foreplay, as the compatibility between cybernetic enhancements is assessed, updates downloaded, firewalls lowered, virus suites activated.  It feels like an awkward merger between the IT systems of two lumbering corporations.

Pornography has reached its logical conclusion, the metaphorical pump to which the old priapic colossi aspired has become the standard in the business. At its most abstracted, it reminds us of those old videos of shuttles coupling in their orbital boudoir, before we gave up on space.

Romanticism is a lost craft, gone with the old world and its obsolete, irretrievable media formats. A few nostalgic tribes scour the Net and dusty archives in ruinous libraries for evidence of the way we used to feel or, at least, what we said about what we felt . Some of them even try to recreate, using archaic technologies, the kind of sound content that used to be the backdrop of love. Music, they call it. Another ghost from the past.

Trust – FTF (Trustmix)

Trust hail from Toronto. No, scratch that, Trust hail from some twisted edit of 1980s Europe, where bubble-gum tastes of fear, and the freaks dance under a grid of shadows cast by squadrons of strategic bombers on never-ending patrol. Aesthetically, they know that their synths are the only possible source of colour in this defcon 2 world. Clairvoyantly, they anticipate the holocaust and sing accordingly. Their ballads live in a fragile limbo between here and the aftermath.

FTF is included in their Bulbform 12 on Sacred Bones.

‘Find out for Yourself’ closes the savage exercise in versatility which is Balaclavas’ Snake People album in a surprisingly pastel note. It sounds like one of those moody 1980s soul ballads, perhaps even a Sade instrumental, vomited back by a clan of ghouls shacked up in a gristleized industrial park, trying to hang on to their love all the same.

Balaclavas – Find out for yourself

The record is out on the 18^th through Dull Knife.

We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here said the bartender.

20jazzfunkgreats mixtape – Slower than light

A neutrino walks into a bar.

This mixtape was produced while reading Arkady & Boris Strugatsky’s ‘Roadside Picnic’ (famously adopted by Tarkovsky as Stalker), and it may have been influenced by it. although not consciously. We’ll let you to it to sort our the tracklist once again. Whoever names the most gets a nameless price. 

Tips: it begins with Rene Hell and finishes with Led Er Est doing a legendary cover.

Countdown is over: Here you have the tracklist. Suffer!-

1-Rene Hell – Chamber Force
2-Borden, Ferraro, Godin, Laurel Halo and Daniel Lopatin – Twilight Pacific
3-Three Fields – Like Vortices
4-Warning Light – The Universal Rewrite
5-Steve Moore – Primitive Neural Pathway
6-Vangelis – Pulstar
7-Ashra – Midnight on Mars
8-IFeel Studio – Morgengruss III
9-Paul Giovanni & Magnet – Willow’s Theme
10-Golden Birthday – Eqlipst
11-Horrid Red – Horrid Life (Burial)
12-Lumpen Nobleman – Scaling the Yablonois
13-Teeth of the Sea – Cemetery Magus
14-Led Er Est – A Darkness in My Soul (Solid Space Cover)

20jazzfunkgreats – Souvenirs from the Zone

And yes, that’s Darth Vader up there in case you were wondering.

(Image by Ian Miller)

In our own special way, we recreate the cliché of the lone resuscitant marooned in a post-apocalyptic scenario– the current affairs perceptual chasm explained by a Purification Festival where we retreat to the innermost vaults of our manor and listen to hermetic discographies for months, we flip tarot cards too, disconnected from the outside, our posts scheduled in advance or drafted by a Lovecraft-conditioned coterie of winged monkeys with a penchant for ‘something wave’ premieres (and not used to replying to e-mails, that explains it all).

Everything is gone when we return, wide-eyed and cleansed. Our domotic AI recounts a heavy-duty redux of the financial crisis, traders doing trampoline jump from the top of their golden cathedrals, riots and mob violence, chaos, eventually Plan Omega is implemented. The government releases a harsh cocktail of tranquiliser drugs into the water supply to cool things down.

However, there is an unexpected chemical reaction. Vampirisation, mutation and amnesia. The knowledge base of the human race is wiped out. New gods step into the breach. Emergent tribes configured around random mythologies, brands and memes. Cricket furies, groupon zombies, twitter bees, Kiwanis bastards, frappucino hurling Apple fanboys and k-pop elfs, they fight for territory and devour each other, they can smell us. We gaze from our ramparts and count the ammunitions.  We see their fires burning in the hills, we gasp at their rituals, we blow their heads off, two at a time if Dan’s shooting.

The worse ones in our neighbourhood we call the bowlers because of their haircuts. They are worshippers at the altar of the original harbingers of the altered state, riders of the satanic storm and wearers of the Mysterian tunic. Their life is a creepy Ghost Box stolen docudrama, their game is chicken. They play it when night is at its darkest, burning asphalt around our booby trapped perimeter, shouting gibberish at each other, over the sixties charivari that blasts from their speakers, they illuminate the night with their cyan lightning bolts and hypnotic holograms.

We know they are just playing, they are only naughty kids. Naughty kids with a wild attitude backed up by psychic guns. They are ineffable romantics, and soon they’ll be coming to get us, culminate their sickly courtship with terminal defilement. There’s little we can do about it. We will burn in their inevitable bonfire of explosive plastic, transfixed by the mighty vibration of their unimpeachable drone, they will feast on our charred bodies, and our flesh will dissolve in their lysergic bloodstream. Which is where we were headed from the beginning anyway, it could be worse.

Tropical Popsicle -Always Awake in Shadows

Where Tropical Popsicle display, over a velvet sheet, an array of souvenirs from certain legendary spots along 20jazzfunkgreats favourite psychedelic route – most specifically, mementoes from the Velvet Underground’s funeral of dissonance (also attended by Spacemen 3 and Suicide), skulls off the garage gothick boneyard (pumping up the bass for that extra-syrupy feel), and lumps of satanic coal such as those that power Wooden Shjips stoned locomotive. Name your price!

Their ‘Beach with no Footprints’ 7 is being released by Volar Records (get it there!)

…or perhaps we escape, like Ken Foree, not up into a rattling helicopter,  rather, inside the amniotically flooded belly of a mothership where le ballet codeinique is the only possible dance, protected, warm and safe, aimed at the convergent point past the gate where space and time began, a disintegrating beach where the last survivor of a mirror universe hurls pebbles into the pond of nothingness we are leaving behind, to spawn the stars which are our origin.

Future Shuttle – Rain Source

Future Shuttle’s ‘Water’s Edge’ is a cosmic tapestry, or map, where subtle shifts in tone, pitch, harmony and melody mark the many spots where  a multitude of life-forms will incept in perfect synchrony when the time is ripe, aeons away from each other, so many of them, as many and variegated as pastoral, curved and soft, and also blinding wonders await within this EP, which is also a radio, to stave off their loneliness until they are reunited.

If Espers had orbited Solaris, and listened to its revenants, they would have sounded this way.

‘Water’s Edge’ is out in Holy Mountain.

And may we reiterate our appeal there for the good people of the world to get this creative with the words as well as the music – it surely makes it a better place. Below follows a letter from Rasmus Folk himself explaining the piece on offer today – so switch off that reverb unit, press pause on the Paw Tracks folder, read on and be inspired. Together we can stop humanity xeroxing itself into an unreconisable smudge at the bottom of a recycling bin in what used to be Coventry. Thanks.

Dear 20JFG,

Of my time at Endless House, and of the various personalities who slipped upon its stage, I have – in truth – very little recollection. Schnaffs, yes, was somebody whom I remember respecting to a degree, admirably rather than likeably earnest I recall. I caught three of four minutes of his “Phillips Pavillion” piece, and that was probably enough.

My vision was blurred, you see. Blurred by too much gelato with Marcello M, too much production work for RAI Due early evening erotica, and far too much time spent chasing – and being chased by – one Sylvia Kristel. We loved to swim together, Sylvia and I, amidst the hostile ‘spuma’ of the Adriatic or the bracing green of the Hampstead Ponds.

Anyway, I had intended to keep this characteristically brief. So brief it shall be.

Enjoy the record. We may yet make a success of this blasted thing…

Con amore/Mit Liebe/With love,

Rasmus

Rasmus Folk – Sylvia Kristel

Your less-than-on-it infoportal reveals that the Folks/Schnaffs EP came out last week on Dramatic Records.

Another xxjfg blatant no mixing skills garageband compilation tape, it’s been a while.

20jazzfunkgreats – All watched over by machines of loving grace jones

There is no tracklisting available, but you readers can crowdsource it in the comments box yeh?

Marsha Hunt – Oh, no! Not the Beast Day!

Being of a generally positive disposition he went about his day as if this were a normal occurrence, which would eventually dissipate.

The first signs of something inherently different began to stir inside Stuart’s hand during the Royal Wedding. Although a staunch anti-monarchist Stuart could not help but raise his arm whenever the Queen appeared or was mentioned. His normal gut reaction to the monarch’s cake on head hat was replaced by a warm glow and feeling of love and protectiveness for her and her offspring.

In an effort to check reality he bought a copy of the Daily Mail, customarily guaranteed to launch the liberal broadsheet reading Stuart into a hopeless pit of sadness for today’s society. Instead he found himself discharging his load over a picture of some ‘European Muslim Eggs’ which happened to be positioned vertically underneath a beaming picture of HRH, in her cake hat.

Stiff upper lip aside, Stuart now realised it was probably time to seek some professional help and rang the hospital.

The carriage which arrived to collect Stuart had the traditional markings of an ambulance, but was somehow more akin to a VW disco / camper. DJ Harvey rang the bell and announced, “Get in, Locussolus“ – by which Stuart knew it was very much time to leave.

It is autumn, and coming up to dusk. As Stuart reclined in the back Harvey plugged him into a series of drips and began to administer an intravenous space funk medication to ease the mind.

Locussolus – Little Boots (An Emperor Machine Special Edit Version)

“Here we are,” Harvey says as the ambulance stops on a lovely avenue, beneath a tree – they are plane trees – in front of some sort of small private home which can be seen nestled between the courtyard and the garden, the type of small private dwelling one finds along the East Coast of Sussex. The street lamps are some distance away, and it is fairly dark inside the ambulance. Outside it is raining. Harvey whispers – “it’s on international feel dude…” and Stuart made a mental note to purchase said album as soon as his transition was complete.

“Listen,” Harvey says. “Now you’re ready. This is where I leave you. You’re to get out and go ring the doorbell. Follow whoever opens the door for you, and do whatever you’re told. If you hesitate about going in, they’ll come and take you in. If you don’t obey immediately, they’ll force you to. Now run along.”

Pink Fairies – Do it

The doctors explained to Stuart that apomorphine acts on the ant bite to regulate the metabolism and normalize the blood stream in such a way that the enzyme system of normality is destroyed over a period of twenty jazz funk daze.

Once in the any bite is regulated apomorhine can be discontinued and only used in case of relapse. Stuart agreed to undergo treatment and entered the hospital. Stuart was somewhere around Rotingdean on the edge of the cliffs when the drugs began to take hold. He remembed saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…”

[To be read in a Barry White voice]

Stripped naked Stuart was now firmly secured to his hospital bed by an army of uniformed worker-nurses, and their treatment began in ernest….

[Cue soft lighting]

Herb Albert – Rise

[To be continued...]

(Otoman architecture via 50 Watts)

As we descend parallel to the spike that impales the heart of the province over which our tower rises we reach a damp oubliette whose walls are covered in mysterious scribbles, the descent continues into the darkness, but we have never gone further, for an old man of foreboding countenance lives here, and his dire warnings about the dangers that lurk beneath are rather convincing. When in doubt, it is this blind oracle that we approach for counsel.

-We salute thee, old blind man who scribbles hermetic nonsense in the fungous walls.

-And I salute you back, dim and scrawny minions of the multifaceted beast who coils in the pool accreted from the dark dreams of a myriad psychics. What is your plea?

-We live in doubt o sage, for these are confusing days. We hear some respected commentators say that the culture that feeds us is devouring itself like a nostalgic ouroboros of past-dipping tail, we fear that our fetishism for the uncanny sounds of yore may be somewhat contributing to this outcome. What do you say to this, you who lives closest to the viscous pools that nurture our broadcasting?

-You think of yourselves too highly, and the Gods beneath laugh at your childish impudence. But I’d advise you not to worry. I have been watching you for long, and I’ve seen you trash in the turbulent winds of your racial culture like the chromatic fool of ancient pagan processions. I know you mean well, when you instinctively seek to stitch together a gestalt tapestry of fantastical reverie, and understand that it leads you to tap on certain sources of antique genealogy with metronomic frequency. That’s your schtick, there’s nothing wrong with that.

-But aren’t the Gods sick of our constant kneeling at the feet of handlebar moustached, leather gloved totems, analogue alchemists and cruel divas of sirenic pitch?

-Ha, how quaint you are. The Gods don’t listen, they speak, and you listen but you don’t understand, most of the times. All I can say is that they care little for your futile exertions, or your polysyllabic drone. But neither will they disapprove, for as long as the tribute that you pay, and the tribute that those you are the vessel of pay, is true of heart and in the direction of the psychedelic Mecca, not some egotistical altar of yourselves and themselves, or undertaken with that ironical sneer which truly is the canker which dulls the apex of the Manslowian pyramid. The intent of the effort you run along with is serious, but you shouldn’t be. Avoid sliding into the pit of meta-analysis, which is the death knell of fandom. Now run away back to your twisted playroom, I’ve got some gobbledygook to graffiti, shoo!

(The becloaked 20jazzfunkgreats cult climbs in sniggering procession to its sound chambers, where it will continue its Warhammer 40K campaign to the tune of some bombastic synthetic symphony)

20jazzfunkgreats has been seriously considering changing its name to ‘Steve Moore Stalking Club’, which is understandable given how much do the Z-series kosmische glidefests that the sage of Pittsburgh effortlessly delivers agree with our own inclinations towards the weird and the astronomical.

The always admirable Moon Glyph label is now releasing in tape format some work of his which goes back to 2004, we listen enthralled as ever.

Steve Moore – Cepheid (Original Version)

The original version of Cepheid (which was included in its definitive form in the wonderful The Henge EP) is our choice pick.

It rewinds the journey of a chaotic alien lifeform, back from its landing spot in Antarctican seracs and through the millennial trajectory that took it there from an apocalyptic battlefield galaxies far away, whence it was routed by an Eldar army whose Banshee champion wore a tunic covered in golden runes that flowed over the black fabric according to a mysterious whim. These runes contain the unsung lyrics of the SETI project disco headbanger that Cepheid is, and you can hear them if you listen hard enough.

Demon’s Souls has been our definitive video games experience this first half of the year, followed closely by Portal 2. If you have a PlayStation 3, enough trust to slide back into the ravished infrastructures of the PlayStation Network, and a few days to spare, we advise you to pay a visit to the lands of Boletaria where demons, dragons, ghouls and the odd hero await for your blade most eagerly.You will die a lot, and you will like it.

Sunshuke Kida’s soundtrack delivers the goods too, as the astonishing mutant strain off Ennio Morricone’s Exorcist 2 compositions that accompanies the video below demonstrates. But today we are leaving you with the theme tune for our guilt-ridden battle against Maiden Astraea, charitable mystic who dwells at the bottom of the valley of defilement, knee deep in a poisonous pool teeming with ghastly plague babies. It comes across like John Carpenter’s Christine Attacks if it had been produced by some 1970s (probably) French prog classico weirdo  (Massiera?  Goraguer? I say Vannier). Fantasy battles with cosmic repercussions don’t get any better than this.

Sunshuke Kida – Maiden Astraea

(You know which Boris)

Arthur C. Clarke once said that ‘Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology is Undistinguishable from Magic’. Let us work this aphorism backwards, and apply it to Zombi’s corpus, as manifested and further advanced in their latest release, ‘Escape Velocity’.

For what does something that sounds like black magic tell us about the technology causing the effects that this magic is? That it is a sufficiently advanced technology, for sure, whose sophistication is directly correlated to the power of the magic to which we are subjected.

Is it a human technology? Is it an alien technology? Is it a crude technology reconfigured in some deft exercise of will?

We asked our crypto-engineer/interdisciplinary wiz kid in residence, Wilhelmina Vincenti to look into this matter in detail. She has spent the last few days in her laboratory, parsing Zombi sound-sequences with high-end scientific equipment smuggled from the former Soviet bloc; we now report some of the hypotheses coming out from this effort:

• Software: I have reverse engineered the sound waves from the Escape Velocity album to produce a sequence of instructions that can be transformed into machine code. When run, the program evolves into a neural network that after a handful of iterations shows clear signs of consciousness. It speaks solemnly in a dead language, both in the lab and in my dreams.

• Hardware: The 3D engine crashed when I attempted to visualise the geometrical structures that underpin this music. I edited some of the files to incorporate non-Euclidean assumptions into the analysis, and now it works. I have sent the output to some colleagues, including people at NASA. They say it looks like the blueprint for a self-replicating space probe powered by an energy source that generates wormholes for instant transportation across vast expanses of space, perhaps time too.

• Wetware: I have decrypted the output of the frequency heat-map by allocating pitch buckets to DNA bases, producing a snippet of genetic code that when injected into a bacteria dish rapidly takes control over the population, improving the efficiency of its nutritional processes, and generating new organic structures. The slit-eyed, leather winged aberration that has evolved through this process is getting too big for its cage.

We suspect that these are different aspects of the same phenomenon. Mina is at her chemistry lab right now, synthesising an organic compound with some of the information codified in the analogue chains of ‘Escape Velocity’. We are planning to take a small dose of this organic compound later, while staring at the clear night sky. We will let you know how it goes.

Zombi – DE3

Escape Velocity is a new instantiation of our manifesto: numinous motorik disco for emergent shamanic cults, party music for the post-singularity hivemind, the blueprint of an interstellar motorway for sexy silver machines piloted by a suicidal priesthood accelerating towards the ultimate event horizon. Go get.

Having gone so high, we needed to come down, and what better way to come down than into a damp cellar where a sweaty crowd bobs in synch with the exalted pulses of a lost italo classic? None, I tell you.

Only this isn’t a lost italo classic, but a new production by the Alba Project (Alba featuring the mighty Fred Ventura) forthcoming in Aube records, with sweet artwork by Syd Brak. It has all the signature elements of that synth-pop variant of 1980s eurodance that your 20jazzfunkgreats scribe is in particular thrall of, put together with technical accomplishment and emotional integrity – a melodic freestyle exploration of that pastel space somewhere in between heaven and hell where the freaks dance, rolling over an evil bass and a sexbot beat.

The Alba Project – Without You (Dub)

Check the original version here.

A savage comment on the soviet regime that covered much of Eastern Europe at the time, ‘Reggae Against Communism’ pits a super-powered Rocksteady band against Communism’s head honcho – and the man who started it all – Joseph Stalin. We’ll spare you it’s turgid plot and get straight to the gripping finale – a symbolically complex idealogical battle to the death. This idea was entirely Preston’s work and should not be confused with the political movement of the same name.

Reggae Against Communism p36.

(Copyright Preston G Parallax 1986)

…..Commander Joseph Stalin sat chuckling upon his throne of red skulls. He was thinking about how we were all the same, and what he was going to do to those people who weren’t – when suddenly there was an explosion in his Kremlin throne room. Startled, the realisation that his evil scheme had been thwarted was thrust upon him like an ideology was thrust upon his people. Through the smoke he could make out the silouhette of King Tubby Rootsmon mercilessly slaying his Soviet henchmen. Somehow they’d managed to penetrate the virtually impenetrable sanctuary of his inner sanctum. But how? He’d once found that Desmond Dekker album in Luitenant Agafonov’s quarters, but it couldn’t have been him. Surely not.

It mattered not now how. Commander Stalin drew his weapons and turned to face his assassin. ”So King Tubby, we meet again. Nice of you to drop by”, “It ohhver Joseph” said King Tubby “Ye can come nice and irie or me can lick off ye head top, iz up to ye mon”. The commander let out a blood curdling laugh “You’ll never take me alive rastaman!!!” and with that he leapt 12 feet into the air and flew straight for King Tubby’s chest. Stalin pinned King Tubby to the ground with his sickle, and before he delivered his trademark deadly hammer blow direct to the King’s skull, he had a few words to say.

“Last chance for redemption King Tubby. Will you or will you not embrace Communism?” he asked. “Never mon! me got too much love for de Reggae music, das whas in me heart” said King Tubby. “Then, DIEEEEEEEEE!!!”, but just as the commander’s hammer of justice was about to deal its final blow, King Tubby dealt his secret weapon – a cloud of deadly Marijuana smoke breathed directly in Stalin’s face. “MMUAUUAAAAAH” yelled Stalin as he stumbled backwards “I CAN’T SEEEE”, as he stood up , King Tubby paralysed him further with the sweet chord progression from ‘No Woman No Cry’.

As Joseph’s vision began to clear he could now make out four men in front of him. It was all 4 members of Blood and Fire and Wine. All was still for a couple of seconds, until King Tubby gave them all an order. ‘BUN IIIIIIIIIM!’ he commanded and their collective power of redemptive fire came firing out of all of them until it burnt the commander to a crisp.

It was over. Reggae had won, and over time replaced communism as the dominant ideology of Europe and beyond. People sang Peter Tosh songs and all children learned Patois in school, eventually replacing English as the language of Europe. Everything was nice and irie.

THE END

This week yr 20 Jazz Funk Greats funkateers were lucky enough to spend an undisclosed period of time in the unapologetically psychedelic presence of Daniel Emmanuel

JD Emmanuel – Evening Devotional

Anyone who managed to pick up the reissue of Wizards on the equally heady Dolphin’s into the Future’s label  - Hometime Taped Sounds, or last year’s reissue on Important Records will know that JD is an infinite sage, able to show our aching conciseness the door to the next big movement in human perception. 20JFG longs for that day JD’s friendly face appears upon our conference room plasma screen and his mind-opening pulsations fill our daily meetings (which are mainly about world domination, the destruction of sub-continents etc…..but shhh don’t tell anyone, we’re supposed to be hippies). Taken from his non-reissued tape ‘Ancient Minimal Meditations’, ‘Evening Devotional’ is truly a pulse wave juggernaut rolling through the desert of mundanity, collecting all parched travellers in its wake. Let’s ‘ave it!

JD Emmanel we salute you. We wholeheartedly recommend digging in the crates for his back catalogue.

Also knocking around in the 20JFG psychotropic locker next to a blackening banana for some time, is this video by Ben Butler and Mousepad. Aside from being some seriously safe dudes, Ben Butler an Mousepad also produce the oddest shapes in music since Keith Emerson discovered he was quite good at the piano. ‘Design’ ups the Frank Zappa intake of Nik Kershaw’s youth to the point where he grows up into rabid prog mutoid topping the charts with his new single ‘uqnoeueonuwhuwibgiwebguebgiwb’. Watch all the way through and you will find a canny link to unearth the rest of their recent fine album, available now on Loaf recordings.

Once upon a time, in the days before the ’chill wave’, there lived a genre know as ‘Ambient’.

‘Ambient’ lived happily in the mind of Brian Eno, until one day he got sick and it floated out of him on a cloud of Vick’s Vaporub (TM). The genre of ‘Ambient’ became very popular since then, enjoying many incarnations such as ‘New Age’, the popular ‘Chill Out’ and of course the contemporary ‘Chill Wave’.

Once upon a time, in the days before ‘Hypnogogia’, there lived a most innovative ‘Dubstep’ producer named ‘Boxcutter’. He wowed his peers in the genre of ‘Dubstep’ with future classics like ‘Sunshine’ and ‘Tauhid’. His new album on Planet Mu – ‘The Dissolve’ – is like a screening of Miami Vice in a 100 ft Echo chamber, soundtracked with riddims created by the Radiophonic Workshop (which you can enjoy in the video for ‘TV Troubles’ above).

To celebrate its release, Boxcutter sent us this beautiful mix of 1st generation ‘Ambient ‘classics. If anyone else out there knows how to mix this kind of music so seamlessly, then 20JFG would love to hear from you. Incredible mix!

Boxcutter – Early Morning Mix

TRACKLIST

1. Fripp & Eno – Evening Star
2. JD Emmanuel – Sunrise over Galveston Bay
3. Eero Koivistoinen Music Society - Bells
4. Bruce Becvar – Mysterious Journey
5. Todd Dockstader – Pond Dance
6. Francoise de Roubaix – La Frite Équatoriale
7. Yutaka – Haiku
8. The Inner Space – Dialog Zwischen Birken
9. Dorothy Ashby – Soul Vibrations
10. Dual Unity – Mr J
11. Harmonia – Ahoi!

Ariel Pink and his Haunted Graffiti: Before Today. News at 11. Pop prophet transforms utopian fish into crumbling DIY bread, masses flock  to worship at his bedroom temple.

Ariel Pink & His Haunted Graffiti- Fright Nights (Nevermore) (Posted on April 21)

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Arp – The Soft Wave.  Cluster and Eno and Rilley and Georgopoulos.  Ringside seats in an amphitheatre at the edge of time.

Arp – Pastoral Symphony: I. Dominoes II. Infinity Room (posted September 3rd)

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Arp and Anthony Moore: FRKWYS Vol. 3. Lullabies for wide-eyed children destined for polymathematic stardom.

Arp and Anthony Moore- Spinette (posted on April the 5th)

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CFCF: The River. Mies Van der Rohe built an exquisite Canal de Amazonia to make Fitzcarraldo’s job easier.

CFCF- The River (Piano Version) (Posted November the 8th)

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Delia Gonzales & Gavin Russom – Track 5.  In everyone’s life there’s one album that has a disproportionate pull on you.  Something that, ‘objectively’ is very good, but which has an almost supernatural hold on you above and beyond that. An album which can evoke pure moments of transcendent bliss.  Imagine if, after five years a missing piece was released.

Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom – Track 5 (New Post)

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Hounds of Hate: Head Anthem. Organic ghost machine music that circles the sleeping victim like a shadow pygmy tribe armed with ancient spells of compelling abstraction.

Hounds of Hate- Purple Stuff (Posted November the 2nd)

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Hunx and his Punx: Gay Singles. Nuggetbagging, rather than teabagging. John Waters would be proud.

Hunx and his Punx- U Don’t Like Rock and Roll (New Post)

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Hype Williams: Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Reel.

Perchance the last addition to these terminal celebrations, and a timely one. Hype Williams have animated 20jazzfunkgreats séances with feeric liquors over which glide pixies imported from Chicago and Kingston, shouting their wares in a cloud of voodoo tags. Their gift is a graphic novel of panels that blur in Steranko fever. Sade drowns in an ocean of pavement syrup, while the chaotic transmissions of a thousand pirate radios converge in the neon sky above, like a Batman sign for much darker heroes

Hype Williams- The Throning (new post)

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International Feel: The Coptic Sun.That apocryphal chapter of Invisible Cities that Italo Calvino wrote under the influence of a particularly strong strain of Peyote, or the destination point of Conan’s pilgrimage if Thulsa Doom was only a conduit into the psychedelic stargate, rather than a dirty reptilian worshipper.

International Feel: The Coptic Sun (Posted September the 30th)

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Male Bonding: Nothing Hurts. Mixtape fodder for teenage punk heroes.

Male Bonding- Weird Feelings (new post)

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Mi Ami: Steal your Face. A growing crescendo calling out across decades of electric guitars, rusting in the salt heavy sea air.

Mi Ami- Dreamers (Posted April the 9th)

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Paul Rosales: Wonder Wheel I.  ‘Crimes’ is exactly the sort of thing we wanna hear when we’re selling out, its unselfconsciously wrought unplanned energy is our 20 inch rims, its atonality is our leather dashboard which we caress whilst cruising illicit streets to do deals with shadowy figures who hand us parcels full of the highest grade low fidelity shit which we now sell to you at the vastly inflated price of £0

Paul Rosales- Crimes (Posted July the 8th)

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Plug: S/T. This is our minimal wave. DIY electro-pop to take over your life.

Plug- Don’t Forget It (New Post)

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Pocahaunted: Make it Real. Block rocking beats that Big Daddy Kane could have freestyled over as delivered by the Shaggs’ feral skull faced reverse.

Pocahaunted- Make it Real (posted May 17)

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Skeletal System – s/t & Small Talk.  This is our dream-pop: full of watery ill defined shapes and haunted guitar lines.  Will surely be placing highly on Peel’s Festive Netherworld 50.

Skeletal System – Dialogue (posted April 23rd)

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VA: Deutsche Elektronische Musik. The sounds that rebuilt Germany, and built us.

Gila- This Morning (Posted May 11)

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As a bonus, we leave you with Harrison Owen’s video for Excepter’s Anastasia, included in The Late EP in Woodsist, riding the razor edge between sex and violence in the best tradition of the Psychoterrorist squad that taught us all, and the most fucked up of all transcendental meditators (circa Nadja, and pumped on colour).

We wish you a twisted transition across the no-man’s land between Christmas and the end of the Year, we shall be waiting for you on the other side.

In last week’s gripping installment of this post, we introduced you to our newest contributor  - Preston G. Parallax. He is one of 20JFG’s all-time favourite Sci-Fi authors, but his shockingly ahead-of-their-time-novels made less money than Granny Parallax’s rock cakes at the church fayre, and he was thus relegated to the stinking dungeon of unbearable obscurity by his hawkish publisher.

Over the next few months we will be attempting to relaunch Preston’s mollified literary career, showcasing his visionary scribbles on 20JFG and beyond. We begin today with his entry into New Scientist’s forgotten futures competition – a story entitled ‘Endorphins into the Future’ which we culled from a stack of old writings found in his apartment. This is a special world exclusive premier, not seen before anywhere else on the internet.

Endorphins into the Future

In 1974, Mr. Reginald Bovis of 56 Peartree Lane Sidcup Kent received once received a letter on a cloudy April morning. It said;

‘Dear Reg,

This is Reg, I am you, writing to yourself from the future. You have to help us, the world is currently controlled by an evil right-wing dictatorship. Times are hard and everyone is so depressed. The government has also banned all activities and objects that create Endorphins, to ensure that everyone stays depressed and can do nothing to overthrow them. All I need to you to do is make a time capsule containing objects that create Endorphins, and bury it the back garden next to the laughing Gnome. It’s the only way to smuggle these items into this time. I really hope that you get this letter.

Sincerely,
Reg Bovis

The letter was dated 18th November 2010. Figuring that he could trust himself, he filled an airtight box with everything his future-self had asked for and buried where he was told.

The next day he received another letter with a 2010 postmark.

‘Dear Reg,

Thanks for the parcel, you’d buried it right where i told you. Unfortunately, though nice as the dolphin pictures, dolphin ornament and dolphin-print duvet covers are, they’re not really making anyone happy enough to conquer this all encompassing depression. What we were really after was chocolate, dumb bells chilies or pornographic magazines. It’s my fault, I should have realised that Endorphins weren’t discovered until 1975. I will write to you again in a couple of years. Sorry to waste your time.

Sincerely,
Reg Bovis

Copyright Preston G. Parallax 1978

We cannot wait to see what Neil Gaiman thinks about this…

In his spare time, Preston is also something of a synth-boogie hobbyist, and was recently asked by the Bananamania label to compile an anthology of his favourite home-recorded-funk peers. One of the track contained therein was by a very talented man named Jeff Phelps.

Jeff Phelps – On the Corner

‘Magnetic Eyes’ is an astonishingly futuristic electronic soul LP recorded by Jeff in his bedroom in 1985. It was privately pressed onto only 1000 gorgeous pieces of wax and became the stuff of legend amongst vinyl collectors, soul traders and frankly anyone who digs the home-recording narrative. When we finally got to indulge in its cordial entirety, its not hard to see why people like Dam Funk and Nite Jewel wanted to parent its offspring – what beautiful children they grew up to be.

‘On the Corner’ might seem like a bit of a departure from your regularly dark-hearted and blood-spattered 20JFG picks, but even we have souls and nowhere have we seen them reflected so clearly, than as in the intimate magic of ‘On the Corner’. Using the same sub-zero tools and techniques as his cold-waver contemporaries, Jeff invests them with a warmly incisive vibe, and creates an infinitely enveloping noir-soul memory, which reaches into our fragile auras in a way that nothing else has before. And when Magnetic Eyes’ also contains such unbelievable warm-wave space-boogie cuts like ‘Phase Shift’, its place atop the shimmering obelisk which is the 20JFG hall of fame is assured. Trust us, this is the craft of love pure and simple.

Magnetic Eyes has been expertly restored and reissued by Tomlab.

And whilst we peruse the dusty corridors of days gone by, it would seem all the more relevant to draw your attention to this awesome collection of stylistic anomalies that occurred in the soundtracks of the ‘Kollywood’ genre of movies. ‘Kollywood’ refers to Tamil movies produced in the Kodambakkam area of Chennai (formerly called Madras) in Southern India, but if we refer to the liner notes of ‘Play that Beat Mr. Raga’ we find that this is actually more of a general term to describe a complex interweaving of film industries in the southern states of India. A lot of the composers were heavily influenced by western pop music and experimental electronic techniques – and nowhere is this more apparent that on the joyous absurdity that is ‘Vikram Vikram’ by Illaiyaraaja.

Illaiyaraaja and Kamal Hassan – Vikram Vikram

Beginning steadily like a half-remembered version of Wordy Rappinghood, ‘Vikram Vikram’ is incredible, vitalic patchwork of styles sounding at one moment like Munich Machine conducted by Mr Bungle instead of Georgio, another like an eccentric Bappi Lahiri, if minimal wave had happened in Southern India and he recorded onto the same warped C90 as the Human Ear records posse. In fact, the whole of ‘Play That Beat Mr Raja #1′ contains so many supreme micro-compositions that it would be a re-editors dream, were it not for the fact that each track is so enjoyable under its own terms of accordant miscellany.

‘Play That Beat Mr Raja #1′ is out and about on Parisian label ‘Cartilage Cartilage’. Highly recommended. Their blog is also well worth checking out.

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Hold the press, there’s even more hot shows in Berlin tonight. This time it’s our very own Prince Rama…….

And coming soon to a German capital near you……

and one in Brighton:

Respect going out to Dolphins into the Future.