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.

Looking through the eyepiece of his skull-castle to see it surrounded by keepers of treasure, his only opportunistic synapse ordered its electrical secretary on an urgent errand. Milliseconds later the secretary arrived in a dusty room full of long-forgotten and yellowing papers. The sign on its decaying door simply said ‘Ideas’. With no time to spare it grabbed as many sheets of as it could and headed straight to the mouth department of Preston’s brain. Having just consumed enough vodka to kill a small rodent, he headed straight for the richest and most influential person in the whole room.

Unfortunately for multi-billionaire retail mogul, Sir Richard Milton, that was him. Suddenly he was confronted with what appeared to a tramp dressed by a myopic Doctor Who wardrobe assistant  - who was untimely sacked for making Colin Baker look ‘too eccentric’. Though he was amiable enough, the conversation took a discomforting turn when what appeared to be a pitch emerged from the oscillating hole in Preston’s face. Prophetic as ever, Preston had come up with a new idea for a chain of discount stores that predated Britain’s colonisation by rampant pound stores by several years.

The idea was simple. You had a shop that undercut all the other shops in town. Simple. But the real gimmick was that you made a real point of telling the customer how much money they were saving, so each item would be labelled with the original price and the discount price. The idea could have made Preston a millionaire several times over, had he just have given it it a different name. He scribbled down his design for the label on a serviette and handed it to Sir Richard. It looked like this.

(to be continued)

Click upon the Opal below marked Ben Butler and Mousepad, and ye shall find a back catalogue of progressive wonders – a research/development program illuminating the forbidden no mans land between opulentprog and squashedfunk virtuosities, a place into which brave moog warriors of the 1970s took a right of passage, never to come back alive. Soon cometh the BBMP debut album on LOAF recordings, but first there is the offerring of kaleidoscopic skew-pop hit ‘Infinite Capacity (for love)’ featuring the Niallist.

Ben Butler and Mousepad – Electric Bamber Boo

On the flipside lies their live finale favourite ‘Electric Bamber Boo’ – a melee at molecular level that describes a future piano rave, an analogue fiesta populated by helium inflated space hoppers that worship a new kind of bounce pop idol . ‘Electric Bamber Boo’ is the fanfare that prepares them for particle acceleration into a hyperspeed vortex, where we get to see the very joyous face of infinity himself.

The Infinite Capacity (for love) EP is coming soon on LOAF recordings.

Ga’an are a band from Chicago containing ex-members of Coughs.

Ga’an – Servant Eye

They offer a 4-man Magma re-evaluation service of the most unspeakably epic proportions. In Servant Eye, crimson mellotron oozes under elysian doorways, to form an image of Christian Vander beating out a 16/9 rhythm on the transient skulls of long-defunct gods. Silently we watch, bathing in celestial voices eons old, waiting for the peerless crescendo that will take us into ominous new realms of reptilian beauty.

The thoroughly amazing Ga’an by Ga’an is out 25th Jan on Captcha records.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a blogger. As the 36-times recycled air in your netbunker begins to scald your already desacated lungs, one starts to ponder what life is like ‘out there’. When the unshorn proportions of your yellowed nails prevent you from downloading that next zipfile, one begins to wonder if time spent outdoors with a beautiful lady, might be more exhilarating than owning some douchebag on a Chillwave message board. Trust us, we were once that bearded wretch with an RSS feed hooked up directly to the vein, and even though the sun tears through our retinas like some long-banned form of medieval torture, it’s good to get out once in a while.

But it’s not easy to meet girls in this day and age. This is why, in our continuing stream of cynical money making schemes, we have started a 20JFG dating service. Already we have filled a 1TB gigaserver full of the details of gorgeous women you can meet, and some of them even gave us permission to do so. Sign up free (for a limited period) today and our highly advanced algorithm will pick you a guaranteed life partner on the basis of having 3 superficial facts in common. Not only that, but using next-century Musicblog (TM) technology, our mainframe will also be able to select the perfect record with which to woo your date, should you be lucky enough to get her back to your place.

So let us introduce a couple of the lovely ladies you could meet today. Female readers worry not, part 2 of this series is coming as soon as we have finished compressing all our Hunkdata into easily uploadable Manfiles (.MAN).

Meet Wendy. She’s 26 and works in the accounts department of a small law firm. Her hobbies include badminton and fine wines. She says her ideal date would be to spend an entire day stalking the living, followed by dinner by the river. She would like to meet an intelligent man with a good brain and warm, tasty flesh. Let’s see what tune A.L.A.N. (that’s the name of our server, no idea what it stands for) has picked for guaranteed seduction.

Ben Butler and Mousepad plot an uncharted course between the spare time experiments of bearded Open University maths lecturers circa 76 and a strain of synth funk that’s so illicitly wonky that it can only be practiced by Norse clerics in remote scandinavian villages. Oh, and did someone say prog? We already brought you BBMP mark one some time ago. Now they are 2 with a ramped up live show that’s akin to watching Yes had they listened to Remarc and replaced Rick Wakeman with Herbie Hancock in an unrelated move. ‘Future Tent’ comes skweeing in from a slightly mellower plain, skewing our dancefloor into a very definite 45 degree angle, sending all manner of airbrushed pastel solids and pixelated 8-bit robo-warriors sliding into the disco lights of the hired DJ on the other side. Future Tent is out now on Norwegian label Dodpop, a split 7′ with Sprutbass.

Ben Butler and Mousepad – Future Tent

Of course, if things don’t work out with Wendy, she does have a sister.

Ben Butler and Mousepad – Future Tent (Genuine Guy remix)

In fact she has six. Ben asked many of his favourite craftsmen to rebuild his Tent in the way they thought best providing A.L.A.N. with 6 suggestible tracks with which to woo Wendy’s many siblings. Visit the BBMP Bandcamp to pick them all up for free. All of them are or course, awesome, but here, because his sinister presence lies behind the shadowy cover of this post,  is a low-res version of the Genuine Guy mix. Let us here no more about it.

Meet Jane. She’s 41 and is the regional manager of  a well-know retail chain. Her hobbies include bell ringing, spells and the occasion game of Bridge. Her ideal man is someone who enjoys being strung up by the feet and tortured mercilessly for hours on end before being sacrifice to some obscure, inverted pagan demigod. A tough one but we programmed A.L.A.N. to be infallible so let’s see what he’s got for us.

Both Rocha and International feel have had offerings made upon this scuffed-up webslab before. IFEEL appear to be absolutely hellbent on peppering the entirety of 2010 with unbelievable spacejams that we can never resist sharing and the new Rocha is no exception.

Rocha – Feel the Love (Joakim ‘Its’s so Real’ Remix)

Joakim turns the original into an rave odyssey muted by baroque disciplines where clavinet players 200 years apart do battle across time, their analogue stares meeting to create a window through we can see scenes from a cybernetic remake of Dangerous Liasons where Aristocrats faces to reveal a mass of sparking circuitry after being slain by a troupe of time travelling disco hippies who weren’t too keep on their bourgeois styles. Joakims’s mix of Feel the Love is being released amongst a plethora of other amazingness upon 2 x 12′s very soon. Pick em up here.

Not too many moons into the near future the good people at Absolutely Kosher will be releasing Revenge, The Rollercoaster Project’s debut album which has seriously knocked us all for sixxx. A positively awesome mindmelt of crystal chamber compositions, bleeding wire computer balladry, and shards of black metal noise filtered through the mind of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and transformed into ethereal synthesizer blossom, that sounds like the sonic imagining of a particularly hazy-eyed, pastel dew saturated John Hughes melodrama stuck inside a Philip K. Dick universe of angst ridden androids troubled by thoughts they were never programmed to have, broken animatronic beauty queens who lay atop giant scrape heaps hidden away in silver forests crying chrome tears looking for meaning in the star maps of the night skies, and loners with vesicle pisces signs in their eyes that refuse to fade away with the passing(?) of time, who aimlessly wander vast neon expanses consumed by seemingly unanswerable questions of the demiurge. In other words…seriously vital stuff.

The Rollercoaster Project – What Happened

With one foot in a cold and violent dystopic tomorrow and another in the dirt of a yesteryear consumed with mystic practice and native traditions, off in the backwoods clattering and banging away with fervent primitive abandon we find Peace In, making the kind of shamanic dance racket we’ve come to love the likes of Raccoo-oo-on and Liars in witching mode for conjuring up in the past.

Peace In – Pyramid of Sun in the Heavens

Committed in the name of necromancy, death drums pound a pagan beat and an electronic battle siren siphons into the sky at dawn, for feral spirits incapable of rest, their beings rooted in the earth, but their arms forever outreached for the cosmos, to emerge from the ground and the trunks of ancient trees to partake in the frenetic broken bone-rave that shakes birds into blizzards, creating the type of devotional dancefloor where we wish we could spend an eternity.

Ben Butler &  Mouse Pad continue speeding down the luminescent neon lanes of a chromatically over-stimulated utopia, we would be hard-pressed to find music so simultaneously epic and good-humoured anywhere else in the vast swathes of land which we behold from our tower of old comic-books ad discarded technology, Electric Bamber-boo is like the hyper-muscular shadow of a Boris Vallejo character skanking across the neat lanes of a 2-dimensional 1950s boulevard illustrated by Hergé, surely the unhinged telepathic projection from a deluded genius in a Philip K. Dick novella, i.e. tune  (and second reference to the man in the post, it’s a good one).

Ben Butler and Mouse Pad- Electric  Bamber-Boo

Ben Butler is looking for a record label to publish wonders such as this, get in touch with him if you have any tips. Also, you can purchase a similarly sweet tune, ‘Super Motion’, from ten tracks.

And before we finish, here you have a message from our friends at Sex is Disgusting records, who have a bunch of super-sweet things ready to you this year: help out, spread the word.

We need a label logo. Help.

We need a versatile, simple, striking design that will work well large or small.

Look at old punk and hardcore labels/bands/flyers etc for inspiration. Check out the bands we’ll be releasing (Human Hair, Graffiti Island, Mazes, Thee Pharoahs).

Your design will feature on many different formats…website, records, posters, badges, t-shirts etc.

We want one black and white version and one two colour version of your design and we need it asap (deadline first week of February).

As well as invaluable respect, love and worship you will receive a prize if your design is chosen.

Level * is a bitch. Basically you have to fly the Dude Troll through x2mega crunk-space and jack it all forward dodging crystal missiles left and right, been there done that you say cocky, well, all your past missions were a piece of cake compared to this, psychedelic ace fighter, you are going to be manoeuvring in delta mode, in the intersection between everyday physical dimensions (stretched by gravity like play doh in the hands of some feral child) and the green blue yonder, so expect all sorts of hallucinatory shit flying around you, we are talking phosphorescent noodles coming out of your eyes and Schrodinger Cat sitting in your lap purring space dub basslines, all of this on top of the usual enemy superiority and random debris floating around waiting to smash through the plexi and splatter your slimy equation hustling nova missile pumping brains all over the cockpit. The life of a transcendental jockey is a short and messy, but you get to see such colours…

Extreme Animals- Booty Melt

Extreme Animals’ new album, ‘Let the Music Take you There’ is coming out tomorrow on Vicious Pop records. If Paper Rad had been in charge of the visual styles for GTA IV, the game would have sounded totally like this, tres banging sandbox rave chaos and a mindblowing live show. MEAOW.

Forget everything you have learnt, Left-up-strike-a+-gamma combos and the kinetic eel fist are totally useless against him, he’ll just cast the scaly glamour spell and hover in the air fiddling pensively with his glasses while a dragon flies out of his electric sleeve zig zagging vertiginous like a dream of falling to eat up the energy of your attacks & top up his prog power levels. Typing the underworld mantra to poison him with telegraphic hate force is another waste of time, he can channel that shit through the paths of the fairy folk, turning it into something wholesome and nutritious like fresh goat milk. And then, as you are standing there, panting and wondering what the fuck to do against his colourful resources, he’ll wiggle his bony fingers drawing the shapes of epic dreams transformed into spirals of arpeggiated power, luminescent bars of a gold-gilded cage in which he shall trap you forever, another colourful wild-eyed trophy hanging from the high ceilings of his enchanted castle. The life of a post-gestaltic wrestler is sweaty and cruel, but you get to see such colours…

Ben Butler & Mouse Pad- Mouse Pad Demo

Welcome new lectric sorcerer in the block Ben Butler and mouse pad, who lands in our spot brandishing a ream of schemata describing keyboard configurations to soundtrack a bad mother of a party with Rocky Balboa, Bootsy Collins and Triumvirat headlining. Step in, this is a blast.

Once you sail past the thick mists of the Magenta Sea, and after answering the three questions posed by the Queen of the Sea Snakes (remember the clues you got from the Bodenians), and offering a karma sacrifice (look up ‘karma sacrifice: mild’ in the silver Bible), you should be able to reach Ho-Du-Du island. The hilt of the golden sword lies in an altar in the centre of the abandoned temple at the summit of the spluttering volcano, but before you are granted access you need to convince the witch-doctor of the gentle small people who live in the forests that you are an adventurer of pure heart, in order to do this you need to learn their language and take part in a lunar festival. This is a fierce rhythm game where, through the coordinated articulation of vocal sounds and percussions the Ho-Du-Dus create spiritual threads which are then thrown into the sea and latched into the silvery reflection of the moon. If you do this the right way, the threads should be strong enough to bring this reflection ashore, and its soothing glow will restore your health levels, you should then be ready to face the horrors which await in the labyrinths of the temple. The life of a psychedelic navigator is full of danger and strife, but you get to see such colours…

GOA- Les Étoiles Tombent du Ciel

Montreal highlanders GOA come up, in ’3′ with something both strange and delightful, abstract landscapes endowed with El Guincho’s invigorating tropical power and Mi Ami’s polirhytmic zest, if Les Georges Leningrad had got lost in luxurious forests of a blinding emerald, they would have come out speaking this language.

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And if you haven’t gone to Awesome Tapes from Africa yet, I think you should, now. One of the best music blogs out there.