Glistening vistas of crystal lakes and lush purple mountains fringed by the light of twin suns bombarding their far sides with life.  The cool moist air drifting up from the scattered lakes and brushing against the concrete bunkers rupturing the ground along a long grassy mound.  The mass of troops laying on their backs staring at the orange sky listening to the faint hiss of ghost tapes emanating from their concrete holes.  It’s all so wistfully out of reach, as if a narcotic slumber has descended upon the short-term memory of their bolt-holes.  One by one they sink slowly under the smooth blades of grass, the earth reaching up invisible figures, gently sucking them under.  Yet concrete, earth and far of voices are all lost under the perpetual stare of the orange sky.

Horrid Red’s MySpace location rather wonderfully mirrors the most obvious touchstones for their sound, Germany (Aachen) and the West Coast (San Francisco).  A watery blissed out guitar snakes through the fuzzy austere bass and Cold-Wave hand claps all knitted together with German vocals recorded in the red.  Easy point of entry #2: I wrote the above Sci-Fi fever dream before discovering that the lead singer goes by the name Bunker Wolf. You can find out a fraction more about the band here and thanks to Matt from Where To Now? for the tip.

Horrid Red – Transparent Streets

Diamond Vampires return to the pages of 20JFG once more to remind us all of why we lavish so much of our time on the celestial tones of neon flecked streets and the theological enormities of intergalactic physics.  Well, the soundtrack to those things…

The Mineral Room revels in the pleasure of the build, each element beautiful, sliding into place like Cunningham’s robots to form something greater, cumulative, beautiful.  Looping synth pulses slide around the space that’s carved out with every layer of sound, every filtered vocal breath.  It’s a rush, there’s no kickdrum to relieve you, the pleasure of the build is all.

Diamond Vampires – The Mineral Room

Diamond Vampires have a 12″ of different songs out now on Amateur Recordings which you can get from Phonica.

Bonus vid: Xeno & Oaklander playing Sex is Disgusting‘s 17th show at Brighton’s incomparable The Cowley Club.  If you haven’t, we humbly recommend you see them (and their label mates Led Er Est).

Though we have not visited them for a while, Glass Candy are still leading the IDIB pack into further uncharted territory of moonbeam disco prowess, with Desire forging a new companion galaxy where planets take the form of giant stalactites spearing an orbit around a chrome sun.

Remixing Glass Candy is much like remixing LCD Soundsystem – you don’t really need to as the originals are mostly always expertly formed odes to the stars, the real phosphorous bundles of burning minerals in the nite sky kind or strings of fairy lights snaking around the ceiling of a downtown NYC houseparty. But when its done correctly it can reflect the song in an ornately gilded mirror of alternate beauty, such is the remix of “Life After Sundown” by Diamond Vampires, who apply a sheen of cosmic space dust to the track in the formation of a pointillist painting that depicts a high class murder, this vision pulling it through to another dimension where lightning forks upwards from the earth to the heavens and spheres of white light are slowly dragged into a black vortex from whence the sound emanates from.

Glass Candy – Life After Sundown (Diamond Vampires Remix)

Here is the sound of an awakening landscape, a place at first desolate and void of anything to be labelled living, where shards of light refract in pools of water and splinter away into the shadows illuminating forgotten corners of time, the light unfurling robotic creatures from slumber and sparking the growth of great towers of ancient architecture like vegetation fading upwards to the dark skies.

Lazer Crystal creates a perfectly seething creep of a synth line and then add more on top to sorcerize a macabre modulation that transcends mere mortals and speaks only to the creatures that dwell within the ether and snake through the winds brushing across soft focus lens captures of shimmering cityscapes, asymmetric icecaps and sleepy half-lit harbours.

Lazer Crystal – Love Rhombus (Instrumental)

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(image conjured by TommyBoy)

Padded Cell’s head demon Richard Sen has melded together all the precious metals from the Milky Disco stable to construct a seething creature of a mix that is perfectly represented by the above image: a bio-mechanical disco droid stood still, staring into The Dark beyond the dark on a laser scorched dancefloor full of invisible revellers swinging limbs to the sound of flaming bass and synths that crunch like the gnashing of teeth:

Richard Sen – Milky Disco Mix

Tracklisting:::
1. RICHARD SEN + CAZBEE – Sour 24 Hour
2. BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB – Is Sorrow (Brain Machine’s Lucifer Rising Dub)
3. PLASTIQUE DE REVE feat. GHOSTAPE – Lost In The City (4O Thieves Remix)
4. THE EMPEROR MACHINE – You Clapper
5. EXPANDING HEAD BAND – Sound Of Breaking Glass
6. SOLID STATE – Space Boogie
7. BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB – Free For The Girls (Richard Sen’s Sumerian Fix)
8. RICHARD SEN + CAZBEE – Mad High
9. SOFT CIRCLE – Don’t Just Stand There (Eric Broucek Mix)
10. RICHARD SEN + CAZBEE – Playback

Richard is also DJing at T Bar in Aldgate, London – 11th June 7pm-3am FREE ENTRY

In all seriousness what would you have expected of an X-rated disco dolly update of
Frank & Moon Zappa’s “Valley Girl?” Something ridiculous, hilarious, warped and scary all at once, right? Right! Castro Boy may very well be the fruitiest record ever put to vinyl, but this isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to sate the appetite of the drunk, sweaty party boys looking to indulge in a little bit of camp exhibitionism as a way of reinstating their manhood to the perma-tanned ladies, the type of guys who’ve become more accustomed to pretending to be in uniform whilst spelling out letters with their hands blissfully ignorant of the fact that kind of thing has been pretty lame for the best part of, well, forever. In fact this is the kind of thing that would probably send them screaming off the dancefloor, trousers around their ankles and boot prints in their backs, because even though this is admittedly “nelly” as fuck, there’s definitely something quite sinister about the way this high octane hi-NRG tribute to the more sex, more drugs, more everything lifestyle that epitomised gay San Francisco in the 70s manages to sound like a psychotic mind storm of discordant, descendant synth lines and chugging metronomic beats whilst “that” voice begins to sound like a hundred manic voices spiralling around in your infiltrated cranium. Taking into account everything that we know about what happened to the Castro area not long after this was made there’s something oddly poignant about a line like “He’s a castro boy and there is no cure.” Fiddling while Rome burns indeed.

Danny Boy and The Serious Gods – Castro Boy (Somewhat Normal)

(Image courtesy of Tommy Boy)

In the coming weeks the ever impressive forces behind Tirk Records will be releasing a very nice compilation of super duper nu-wave disco treats, that give the Paradise Garage corpses a buff and a shine and transform them into sleekly mechanized entities waiting in the pixelated mists ready, willing and able to destroy mirrorball palaces everywhere. One definite highlight is Morten Sorenson’s contribution which takes a Chic sample and layers it over the top of a Kevin Saunderson stutter synth riff to create the kind of rave up that once upon a time used to have people weeping in warehouses all over Chicago.

Morten Sorenson – Start Something

And finally one of our all time favourites, Diamond Vampires, have seen fit to transmit to us across frozen, battered wastelands another of their digitized distress calls that make us pine for a time when John Carpenter films promised us a ghastly, glorious future of monochromatic grey skylines illuminated by distant starbursts.Their deathly codeine saturated italo which has been stripped of all joy and that leaves us with nothing but a deliciously mechanical impulse to twitch and judder transports us to a time when we believed in our naivety that one day we would awaken to find ourselves stripped of the mundane lives we’d come to know and find ourselves in the company of impossibly pale, black eyed beauties who lounge and prowl in a gargantuan Romanesque chrome cathedral that sits ominously atop a mountain cloaked by a crystalline blue mist that fails to shield our ears from the sounds of chaos that emanate from the neon expanses below, the cacophonous racket created by the slow, painful descent of a civilisation that we nonchalantly dismiss with an icy, gleeful detachment.

Diamond Vampires – Studiostorm

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XXJFG have got a few fun things coming up that we think you should know about. First off we’ll be hosting So Bones, a dance party of sorts that will see us try to pretend we were ever those kids at the back of the bus who blasted Mary J. Blige records out of tinny mobile phone sound systems. Basically we’ll be playing….

FUTURE FUNK, SOUTHERN SYNTH CRUSHERS, SCREWED & CHOPPED, FLORIDA VIBE, CHICAGO JUKE, BOUNCE, ROBO-SOUL, METAL MACHINE JAMS….

So thats Cash Money and the Cassie stuff no one will release. There will be a DJ set courtesy of Edwin from Foals and more TBC…there might even be cough syrup shots on the door if we can work out whether that’s legal or not. Probably not.

Also a few days later we’ll be DJing at this loft party being thrown by the awesome Throwback guys….

Erm…needless to say this will be immense! Buy your tickets now because very soon you probably wont be able to and that would be terrible.

We leave you in the capable hands of Tommyboy for the post today.

David Bowie and Amanda Lear

About Tommyboy :

I am the by-product of a Texas Republican, Evangelical, middle class upbringing. I escaped from this conservative, chaste, conformist culture by watching endless hours of television and film. Science Fiction became my genre of choice since it proposed endless possibilities for the future that didn’t revolve around Armageddon. I became enamored with retro-futuristic imagery found in late 70s and 80s television and film. Like the Challenger explosion, they left an indelible mark on my subconscious and imagination.

My visual aesthetic today has been informed through years of intensive research in film history coupled with the extensive use of mind altering drugs. I enjoy exploring visual metaphors which juxtapose supernatural phenomena with technology and science.

I am a firm believer of repurposing intellectual property with the creative use of sampling. I aspire to create video art that incorporates my sensibilities with the artistic integrity and ingenuity of such luminaries as E.B.N, Negativeland, Coldcut, and Nam June Paik.

tags : metaforms, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, transcendental cosmic disco, artificial intelligence, Hajime Sorayama, Boris Vallejo, Nam June Paik, Dan Flavin, “rock n’ roll people in a disco world” fluorescents, neon signs, culture jamming, hactivism, convergent technologies, nostalgic computer animation, Neuromancer’s, retro-futurists, -ism’s, electronic civil disobedience, erratic consistency, multimedia, power, relativity, video art, the idea of peace and positivity thru geometry/science, finding beauty in pure forms, celestial beings, higher consciousness, neo-digital hippy shit, the clock on the wall…

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/2208814[/vimeo]

My other recent work includes video projections for the Butthole Surfers fall ’08 tour, the Maker Faire festival in Austin Texas, Show Cave’s “Summer Sizzlers” series, Dallas Museum of Art late night series, and multimedia performances with Operation Playmate.

I also DJ sets around town and contribute content to arawa.fm

I am presently working on a video for CFCF‘s new release on Acephale Records.

About Texas ?

I love Texas. Seems like every time I think the grass is greener elsewhere, I’m reminded how special this place really is. Please allow me to share these local, kindred spirits with you. If this doesn’t prove that we have what it takes, I don’t know what does.

Darktown Strutters
Survive
Tense
Jake Five
Prince William
Ben Aqua
VC CHLDKRFT
Totally Wreck Institute

lastly, I would like to share the recent mix I made.

Tommyboy – Love Running Down

This mix is indicative of my current interests in dance music. I am very much into the baleric, italo, cosmic sound. My favorite artists at the moment have to be JAZ, Daniel Baldelli, Beppe Loda, DJ Harvey, Thomas’n'Eric aka Rub’n'Tug, and Lovefingers. I have a deep appreciation for the Netherland disco scene and all their exports. Love Viewlexx, Clone, Flexx, etc. You get the picture….

You can see further work/stalk Tommyboy on Youtube or his Blog.

Along with Fan Death, Diamond Vampires are one of our new favourite bands, a band who intricately weave delicate baroque images through the medium of slow bpm-ed disco aurally painting pale skinned princes on skeletal thrones, sipping blood from champagne flutes and translucently glowing in the inverted shade of the moon. Us nerds can only dream of such wonderfully beautiful violent ways of life in alternate lands (cos Brighton’s too windy and London’s too polluted), so we go about our business dressed in tight jeans, flannel shirts and the various accessories that such people need to complete that look, all the while dreaming that time will shift and the world will be reborn on a new day in 1984 where everyone lives in penthouses that resemble cyclopean spires on limestone citadels.

Diamond Vampires – Lumiere

‘Lumiere’ begins with a synthesized coda of pulses through fragile porcelain that stirs the inner ghost, but then the drumbeat knocks the steady rhythm a few degrees to the side and the song becomes 3D, arching outwards with beams of molten electric blue. A collection of spheres of bright white congregate around a clearing in a forest where a statue has fallen to its death from atop a freshly opened tomb. A vampiric corpse is crawling across the arid and dusty ground of the forest, the strobing lights of the city mirrored in the tarnished silver of its hungry eyes.

Now don’t get us wrong, we aren’t saying that Solale Christabelle is a vampire, but when she sings from high above on all the tracks she has appeared on, there is a certain ethereal queen of the damned aloofness to her, not arrogance, but like some omniscient beauty that sings with the solar system in perfect harmony that only an infinite soul can understand and therefore utilise.

Christabelle gifted Lindstrom with her vocals on ‘Music In My Mind’, ‘Let’s Practice’ and ‘Let It Happen’ (with yet more to come), transforming those tracks into musical scrolls found under giant fiery mountains, read out loud on the charred grounds of the summit by the deity of hazily psychotropic disco, an epic tale of lifelong struggles on alien worlds embedded between each stutter and fluctuation from the synths. Now, Dennis Jr. receives the same treatment.

Dennis Jr (feat. Christabelle) – Looking for Love (Downbeat)

This universe appears amongst microscopic beams of light in the reflection on the effervescent waves that lap at the shores of Mars. Theres a warm hum of fractured gravity running throughout and the last remnants of a great robotic army now lying rusted in the dust provide a minimal percussion as the wind glides through the bullet holes in twisted armour. Christabelle is shrouded in a hooded silvery wrap, cooing to the far off quasars for a hero to come and rescue her from loneliness.

With all this talk of Mars, disco and the undead, its no surprise that we come across Glass Candy for the final act. We have not visited for a while as we have still been reeling from the visit that the Italians made to the UK in May. We, like the rest of the audience, were left with eyes blinded by frozen moonbeams, and ears deafened by imploding mirrorballs and exploding crystals pyramids, flecking us with the blood of brave androids and the sweat of fiendish disco-nymphs. It was a lot to get over, but we made it.

Glass Candy – Animal Imagination (Instrumental)

‘Animal Imagination’ as a vocal-less affair is a galaxy spanning tale of crashing space-cruisers, the imposing power of mother nature on other planets, the stillness of automated cities at night, the sound of black holes as they consume entire star systems, the ageless movement of tectonic plates and the blur that follows beautiful people slow-dancing in Studio 54 – no drugs, just the love.

I see you look unsettled, it does take some time getting accustomed to the darkness, here, I’ll leave you in the hands of the Children of the Night, they will help you feel at home, listen to them, what music they make!

Fan Death sound like a black cat with iridescent emerald eyes teasing a mouse prior to its cruel, playful but intensely focussed dismemberment, oh, and disco, that string motif that kicks off ‘Veronica’s Veil’ grabs us by the pink lapels, hurls us into the centre of the dancefloor and impales our flesh with a merciless swarm of arrows so that we can become the late 70s NYC equivalent of St. Sebastian as painted by il Sodoma, taken to a quasi-religious ecstasy by the incandescent brilliance of the music engulfing us. Black like sin and sweet like salvation.

Writing an exultant disco song about a legendary relic used to wipe Jesus’ blood and sweat during the Stations of the Cross strikes us a bit genius, as is the way in which they create an alternative night vision to that of our beloved Italian stars Glass Candy, perhaps more muscular and upbeat, tracing the path of progressive masters Cerrone or Rinder and Lewis after they got lost in the crimson halls of Helena Markos’ Palace. Just check out the rest of their stuff and understand why they might well be our new favourite band.

Fan Death – Veronica’s Veil

Gatekeeper should have hailed from Haddonfield, Illinois, all cramped muscles, tension and the paranoia of a nebulous hallucination forever dancing in the periphery of your vision, their icy synthetic progressions unfurl in front of us like black pillars of smoke rising in the desolate streets of an empty suburban landscape from which everyone disappeared one spring night, TV still on, dinner cooling on the kitchen table, swings in a garden creaking ever so slightly – we still wonder what happened.

Or a silver blade held by a velvet fist cast in iron essaying a message of pain in the vertebrae of your spine, but not quite willing to deliver it yet, it’s all dark, the way we like it.

As it is they come from Chicago, which suits us fine and makes sense inasmuch their music has something of the Warehouse, just listen to ‘Mirrors’, which comes across like some sort of nightmarish scenario where Nitzer Ebb jacked Philip Glass’ studio during the recording of the Candyman soundtrack to inflict upon us one of the most gloriously macabre pieces of synthetic horror music we have had the pleasure to enjoy for a while, we can imagine such tableaux of carnage to these sounds!

Gatekeeper – Mirrors

In a city that never sleeps where the icey rain washes away the blood from a thousand slayings of the innocent, Diamond Vampires work at nite, lit by the dark side of the Moon. They lounge in the penthouse of a monolithic citadel that towers over the blue glass and granite landscape, pale vampirian flesh as cold as the brushed steel of the synthesisers that hum and click in an obsidian refrain of maddening mid tempo terror.

Its Friday nite in the city and all hell will break loose past the midnite hour. But until then, Diamond Vampires begin the chase for blood by constructing musical crystals from the frozen liquid in the stratosphere that then rains down rhythmically onto the phosphorescent spires of the unholy churches chiming a deeply malevolent beat, punctuated with slow motion attacks from the shadows by pan-dimensional creatures.

Diamond Vampires – Friday Nights

The day draws in and the violence from the previous nite is left encased in crystalline structures, the faces of the victims twisted, wide mouthed and bug-eyed in the last moments of terror. To escape the piercing burn of the sun, Diamond Vampires have retreated to the basement where they conspire with a coven of cosmopolitan witches to bring about sheets of rolling thunder and daggers of jagged lightning that will dance across the city with static discopic energy.

Diamond Vampires – Hungry Wives

Disco with a horror edge will always prick up the ears of your 2OJFG acolytes, and we thank the gods that Diamond Vampires have only just begun constructing the sound of Chromatics synths recreating the white noise in Ian Curtis’ head and then cross-processing it with the most potent strains of space disco viruses and recording the whole thing in black and white underground tunnels.