120 Megabytes – Episode 17

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

Whether your with Dunbar on music and dance evolving as mass social grooming, Darwin and his strutting peacock, or feel dancing and music is tickling the brain in ways nature cannot, dancing is a part of our humanity and has been for a very long time. 2011 was a good time for music you could dance too…

Lindstrøm : De Javu When you play a Lindstrom track in your dj set its always difficult to follow. It’s normally difficult to know what to play it after too becuase, lets face it, no one else makes records that sound like this. The new album Six Cups Of Rebel is out on Small Town Supersound in February.

Lindstrøm - De Javu

Buy : De Javu

James Fox: New Jack Swing James Fox laces pristine mid-tempo dance with some silky new jack swing vibes, projecting us inside an utopia of white and honey which is to mainstream house music what romance is to porn.

We are believers in the possibility of a non-fucked up after-hours club where the tribes congregate to squeeze the last ounce of physical sweetness of the ephemeral night, rather than gurn their way into infinity. If that place exists, this is its theme tune.

James Fox – New Jack Swing

Buy: New Jack Swing

SebastiAn: Love In Motion Feat. Mayer Hawthrone  More Stones Throw related goodness by way of the loudest Banger on Ed’s roster pitching Patrick Cowley’s Lift Off Down to an unmistakably Purple Oneesqu slowed clap groove.

SebastiAn – Love In Motion Feat. Mayer Hawthrone

Buy : Love in motion

Machinedrum: Come1  Riding last year’s bubbling up of Juke and snapping it into a piano-house ghost-ballad workout.  With an opening the hits right in the feet and then proceeds to gently let up over the next six minutes Come1 is the reverse of most dancefloor equations.  Drawing you in with it’s hedonistic intensity from the off then taking you on a tour of its sorrow.

The whole album’s a near effortless reminder of how good dance albums can be.  building upon a Footwerk foundation to deliver everything from a dancefloor Boards of Canada (Now U Know Tha Deal 4 Real) to one of the most cathartically maudlin pieces of music this year in Lay Me Down (which has the audacity to not actually be the last track on the album).

Machinedrum – Come1

Buy: Room(s)

Graphics: Adjectival E Well Rounded are quickly and efficiently becoming a treasure of the Brighton Vs. Hove demilitarised zone.  Graphics is the second release on offshoot, Well Rounded Individuals and is a towering example of Fractured British Dance Music.  A sliced vocal looped and buried under fabric-thin waves of synth washes haunts the intricate drum programming and sweeping siren-calls that interleave and enchant.  Which is not to say it’s adverse to a break and a surging refrain, that’d be silly.

Graphics – ‘Adjectival E’

Buy: Adjectival E / OK Rainbow

Den Haan: Gods From Outer Space Bandying “macho disco” around like leather, sweat, and guitar riffs were about to go out of fashion Gods From Outer Space is probably more fun that you can actually ever have in a club, but with this as your soundtrack it would be impossible not to try.

Den Haan – Gods From Outer Space

Buy: Gods From Outer Space

D/R/U/G/S: Connected Connected doesn’t waste much time bringing its snippets of Techno and House to bear on the floor.  Far too much has been written about ghostly reconfigurations of former genre glories and the pillars that this stands upon are amply described by the track itself in the opening minute and a half.  Exercising aCraig-ian approach to the build, the drop finally arrives and the euphoria is suitably unleashed.  Not ones to paddle in the pool of anti-intellectual hedonism, 20JFG are satiated by the wiring machine ballet that seems to underpin the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE HANDS IN THE AIR PIANO HOUSE that forms the back end of the track.

D_R_U_G_S – CONNECTED

Buy: Connected

Magic Touch: I can Feel the Heat  Imagine a unicorn leaping out of an original pre-hipster/Urban Outfitters post-everything appropriation 1980s t-shirt, into a rainbow pond of everything that’s awesome about disco music, and out again into the garden of eternal delights that lies beyond, where it dries itself with an almighty shake, droplets of joy splattering all over in a kaleidoscopic rain which is photographed with minimum exposure, the ensuing images (or their emotional equivalent) are then pressed on vinyl for the whole world to dance to.

Magic Touch – I can Feel the Heat

Buy: I can Feel the Heat

Ital: Ital’s Theme Ital soundtracks the muscular leaving party for a space marine squadron. A glimpse out of battered portholes onto the uniquely specular beauty of crystalline asteroids, for a moment…before the pounding of the room draws their attention back to the dancefloor with a heaving, looping ecstatic roll of wave after wave of 23rd century Italo instrumentals.

Ital – One Hit

Buy: Ital’s theme

Death in Vegas: Trans-Love Energies Richard Fearless returned with a 7+ minute track referencing the soundtrack to New York’s The Loft and the UK Acid House scene featuring the considerable vocal talents of Katie Stelmanis of Austra, and we couldn’t stop playing it. The only thing that could have made it better would have been a 30min extended remix. The rest of the album wasn’t bad either.

Death in Vegas – Your Loft My Acid

Buy : Trans-love Energies

Austra : Beat and the Pulse EP This Domino records early 2011 release of haunted industrial folk has, deservedly, has stayed with us all year.

Austra – Beat And The Pulse (Extended Version)

Buy : Beat and The Pulse

Hans Tanza: An Audience with Hans Tanza Nutjob consultant extraordinaire Hans Tanza convenes a board meetingto discuss the quarterly impacts of psy-trance flotations on the  futures market of electro-acoustic academia circa 1976

Hans Tanza – The Insight Generator

Buy: An Audience with Hans Tanza

Mi Ami: Dolphins EP Mi Ami’s vessel plunges through a forest of cyclopean futurist hulks, its distorting, tape-bent beats pounding off the walls.  High above Gavin Russom watches from a former car insurance office (now sans walls) and smiles to himself in the knowledge that there are others.  Glancing upwards for a moment he catches the forms of Derrick May and Carl Craig huddling around a fire, lit on an equally exposed floor of an old financial institution. Down below the vessel nears the source of the sound as light cascades from the rising sun.  Hundreds of people throb around a fire giving thanks to those who came before, those who provided us with such riches.  A badly painted cloth hangs from an old piece of corporate art and reads: ‘Things should be made anew before they are destroyed again.’

Mi Ami – Sunrise

Buy: Dolphins

Virgo: Resurrection (reissue) To call this life-changing is no exaggeration. Imagine the most intimate moment of ‘It’s You’ by ESP’ time stretched across a 3 hour movie about Jamie Principle floating on the ethereal plane and perhaps you’re getting there.

Virgo Four – The Mop

Buy: Ressurrection

Daphni: JIAOLONG001 While we found Caribou’s recent album to be not as up our street as the previous few we did very much enjoy the Daphni remix project which re-visited the gratuitous psychedelic elements we loved about Caribou’s sound.

Cos-Ber-Zam – Ne Noya (Daphni Mix)

Buy : JIAOLONG001

Wheez-ie: All Werked Up EP Texan Juke desperado Wheez-ie’s  veers between hardcore footwork punishment and futuristic heartbreak – ‘Leave her Alone’ hovers above the battlefield like the X-Men’s Storm, convening from the summer skies a purple hurricane of emotion at whose eye spins a silver music box delicate ballerina.

Wheez-ie – Leave Her Alone

Buy: All Werked Up

Xander Harris: I want more than Just Blood/Urban Gothic If you like your drum programming hand built from the Dopplereffekt textbook of absolute rigidity,  and your synth lines played straight from the pained claws of The Phantom of Paradise, then Xander Harris is the pick for you.

Xander Harris – I Want More Than Blood (High Heels Remix)

Buy: Urban Gothic/I want more than Just Blood (sold out)

Innergaze: Shadow Disco Innergaze take us in a strut through a parallel land where mirrors, glitter and dances are the holy sacraments of a mainstream religion whose father  is Liquid Liquid (on a dubby bender), the son is Daniel Wang and the holy spirit Arthur Russell. On its journey it collects a thousand scuzz tropes and redistributes them across a skeletal groove so lazy, it makes E.S.G sound like a clinical minimal techno project devised by the appointed keepers of metronomic purity. Spectral hedonism, that’s our new calling.

Innergaze – Shadow Disco

Buy: Shadow Disco.

Factory Floor: Various 12’’ Factory Floor strip dance music down to its bare components, and configure them with the grim nonchalance of a murder squad retained by the black ops soviet. Synth loops blast like machine language glyphs straight off Nitzer Ebb’s and Front 242 body music usage dictionary.  The motorik beats read like input-output flows in a 5 year programme of industrial production that measures results in terms of sweat. The shards of distortion are cruelly designed to produce collateral damage, demoralization and mass surrender.

Factory Floor – Lying (Chris Carter Remix)

And then there’s this…

Buy: Blast First 12; Two Different Ways.

Zomby: Dedication Zomby  buries us in a frozen dead ocean, where we float surrounded by a constellation of discrete music molecules floating in stasis. They recall the past (massively compressed Jarre, blocks of primary colour which are the slices of a Jan Hammer gradient) but aren’t it. Rather, evolved echoes, nano-designed DNA blueprints for a future fauna of Cupertino Panthers and fractal wing dragonflies.

Zomby – Mozaik

Buy: Dedication

Lumpen Nobleman: Grusha Lumpen Nobleman’s (no link, alas) is all about the deepness, the abyssal and the sub-dermal, ochre drones awesome like the ornate dome of a defiled Orthodox monastery breaking through the mist, grim commandoes in ghillie suits pulling their best Snake moves up the snowy hill, an inhuman metronome ticks away at the heart of the ruins, counting down the time left for the start of the paranormal firefight.

Lumpen Nobleman – Scaling the Yablonois

Buy: Grusha..

FWY: Ventura EP We continue our love affair with Edmund Xavier and his FWY’s trucker techno-gamelan escapades. Watch out for the title track’s superb melancholy drone, like Cormac McCarthy’s existential cowboy gazing into a neuromantic dead-channel sky, a moment before stepping past the borderline.

FWY – Ventura FWY

The Passenger: \_| The Passenger’s \_|  combines Armando’s optimistic bass rumbling, Orbital’s playful chimes, Wendy Carlos binary fairy-telling and the sort of acid riffs that Plastikman would have come up with if he had been commissioned to update Maurice Sendak’s bibliography, in collaboration with Paper Rad.

The Passenger – Entitled One

Buy: \_|

Pye Corner Audio: Black Mill Tapes Vol.2. The first post witch house record? Made by someone who probably never heard of witch house? Slow techno and radiophonic electronic passed through a hauntology filter to create one hell of an immersive experience. Why this isn’t on everyone’s albums of the year list is mystifying.

Pye Corner Audio – Electronic Rhythm Number Seven

Buy : Black Mill Tapes Vol.2.

(Quote from Iain M. Banks, image is concept art for the Forewer War film adaptation that is on the works)

You may be aware that members of the 20jazzfunkgreats community infiltrated the sprawling Barcelonan fields where Primavera Sound took place last week. This was a great endeavour for us crowd-challenged agoraphobes, but one that bore its fruit in many a mind-blowing concert. It is with retrospective wisdom that your rapporteur has come to realise how great the overall thing was, in spite of some software issues that you may have heard about or experienced, and a lingering feeling that the whole event has reached a scale beyond what we can manage. The reason why such hijinks and concerns have faded into nothingness as we recovered from our festivalesque exertions is dead simple: some of the best shows we have seen this year, or any other year, took place at Primavera Sound 2011.

Rather than engage in a protracted description of the craziness and glory of that went on, we will over the coming weeks be referring to the festival and the acts therein represented when it feels relevant. Let us begin with Factory Floor, who utterly obliterated the ATP stage on Thursday night, with some help from one Chris Carter.

Factory Floor – A Lying (Chris Carter remix)

Factory Floor strip dance music down to its bare components, and configure them with the grim nonchalance of a murder squad retained by the black ops soviet. Think Dutch’s squad in Predator with no wisecracking and a snappy Helghan fashion sense.

Synth loops blast like machine language glyphs that could be translated into simple instructions such as ‘ATTACK’, ‘EXTERMINATE’, ‘CARPET BOMBING’, ‘TAKE NO PRISONERS’ or ‘FIX YOUR BAYONETS’, all straight off Nitzer Ebb’s and Front 242 body music usage dictionary.  The motorik beats read like input-output flows in a 5 year programme of industrial production that measures results in terms of sweat. The shards of distortion are cruelly designed to produce collateral damage, demoralization and mass surrender.

It isn’t user friendly music, this militaristic acid groove thing, it leaves psychical scars in the shape of weird flashbacks of a tour of duty in a stressful zone of asexual physical release and automated dance alienation. It is quite fucked up and in a class of its own. Get on it if you dare.

You can find the Chris Carter remix above on this Blast First 12.

Led Er Est may well be your scribe’s favourite representatives of the new wave of cold wave (followed by Xeno and Oaklander and Blank Dogs). They have just released May, a new six-track EP with Captured Tracks, and it truly is a sweet follow up on their Dust on Common LP (one of the best albums of 2009, go get if you haven’t yet – vinyl here).

Above you can see House Plants’ video for Lonesome XOXO, an Adam Curtis-esque stream of consciousness collage of archive footage representing violent globalisation and commercial spectacle, two removers of individual agency easily linkable to the contemporary angst manifest in this paradoxically catchy dark pop hit.

A Ballardian conflagration of the hi-tech and sexual; the sounds of electronic music so intractably bound in the aural flourishes of lasers and deep space.  Booming like stars and metallic.  Vast and often beautifully empty.  The forces shaping those sounds, not immediately those of craft and intricacy, but something more elemental, more eternal.

Factory Floor‘s entry into this space seems drenched in the entrails of Industrial Records.  A dry black birth into a space that plays so effortlessly with brutal dehumanisation and finds beauty every, single, time. The throbbing pulse to ~ (R E A L L O V E), ritualistic and mind-controlling;  relentless and comforting.  A heartbeat to an impossibly vast machine.  Optimo (in the form of Twitch and Dave Clarke) turn the speeding pulse from a hurtling descend into a controlled glide the makes expert use of the electro-thermal currants drifting up from the haciendas below.  Nik Colk’s vocal paces between the beats and beams, delivering her lines from every corner, sometimes barely heard, sometimes brushing just by your ear.  The juggernaut of early electro noise barely contained as if caught by intractable tides, constantly ready to overwhelm and gorgeously relentless.

Factory Floor – ~(R E A L L O V E) (Optimo Remix)

~(R E A L L O V E) (Optimo Remix) is taken from the forthcoming Optimo Music 12″ out on April 6th.

Design A Wave take another route.  Far from descending from a cloud-black sky they emerge from an ice-flow; glacial, blue and pristine.  Magicar is a neon-lit Fortress of Solitude, a dance party for geological processes: glacial disco.

Magicar is taken from the Snake Jam tape out soon on (our good friends) Sex is Disgusting Records.  the tape itself is made up of tracks culled from a four year period (2005-2009) but manages to slip right in to these days of synth-wave obsession.  This takes us back to a time when Glass Candy and Chromatics filled these dark pages with ethereal delights and for that, we are grateful.

Design a Wave – Magicar

One of the wonders of the Internet is how it allows curmudgeonly little bastards like ourselves to launch arbitrary assaults on whatever novel fad that happens to slip into the wrong side of the soiled bed where we lay, like the unwelcome head of a shit stallion running ahead of the pack of popular culture.

We whisper at it with wet lips. This is what dawns look like in our decayed habitat.

It is teenage vampires which concern us today, those pale and pseudo-satanic cherubs with chiselled jaws and gelled hair which have infested the wistful minds of confused youths, like acceptable role models for anorexia because the digestive system of the undead is a barren land, like Patrick Swayzee in dirty dancing if only a non-descript post-emo outfit was the house band.

Nay we say to these avatars of kitsch ferality, nay, we were weaned on the stench of Dracul the impaler, rotten gums encrusted with millennial blood-clots under a mantle of fungal Transilvanian soil, on the impressionistic shadows of Nosferatu’s derelict demesne, on Brian Lumley’s trashy Necromantic chronicles, where the wampyr thrives on the body of the infected like a cthonian cancer, projecting leprous tentacles across deformed fangs to feast on the blood of the victim, on the cryptic masquerade of the World of Darkness as illustrated by Tim Bradstreet, under the showers of gore of the slaughterhouse rave that Blade gatecrashed, even on the new wave rebellion of the Lost Boys, surely soon to be remade, perchance inadvertent antecedent of the blight that afflicts us today.

Nay we say, let us retch engulfed by the whiff of the second hand haemoglobin nourishing these super-evolved leeches, let us stare into their corrupted pupils stretching like rusty razorblades over yellow iris beyond which  unhinged bloodlust lays, no morality, no restraint, these guys are not pretty, they don’t want to sleep with you, they don’t want to show off their superhuman speed like quarterbacks strutting their feathers in front of quivering cheerleaders, no, they are monsters roaming in a misty land beyond good and evil, in their lonely and sad world thirst rules absolute, you are prey, nothing else.

Some time ago we had the perverse pleasure of introducing you to the macabre delights of Mueran Humanos. Theirs are Gothic echoes of Argentina, from Argentum, latin for silver which kills werewolves, and sometimes vampires too, but also the material of which the knives wielded at satanic masses are forged, echoes we say, echoes that spread across the authoritarian landscapes of Possession-era Berlin like ink stolen from an apocryphal sequel of the house of leaves, now set in pock-marked concrete whence mouths stretch agape frozen in a silent shout.

Remember the dazzling urban landscapes of Demons? You should, smudge them with a layer of surrealism straight off a Lynch noire and slip into unsettling dreams where a coven of devilishly handsome cyphers stare at you in silence, stern examiners in the viva voce for a doctorate in the dark arts, with telepathic tendrils which are Leones en China they scour your mind in a psychic carpet-bomb operation worth of Spacemen 3′s esoteric brethren.

Over the conflagration levitates disembodied Carmen, like a Death’s Head Hawkmoth, her croon that of a rapporteur broadcasting from a dantesque scenario of satanic distortion and fluttering raven wings.

Mueran Humanos- Leones en China (Pre-mastered)

Mueran Humanos are looking for a label to release the album. Get in touch with them, the rest of it is as good as this.

The kinaesthetic optical output of EBM is a strobe shower of pillars of white light framing muscular shapes clad in leather, golden pendants dangling off ears protruding from emaciated faces, shaven scalps.

If we close the sensory loop back into sound we are confronted with the archetypical paranoid bassline, that which harkens back to a Nitzer Ebb gangbang, to a Front 242 manhunt, to a DAF riot, shock-waves project us into a tactile realm of  bondage fantasies and cybernetic interfacing, the body revels against such intrusion, vomits itself back to a mechanistic dome of audiopain where beats pummel with the indifferent precision of hateful machinery.

Past this gauntlet we escape into ideological spaces where the propaganda of nihilistic politics spreads across synaptic circuits firing up like baroque weapons systems commissioned by a deranged military complex.

Faced with this lethal battery we leap into the level below.

Into another quagmire.

Like Cabaret Voltaire said, quoting the Seeds, there’s No Escape. From our hunters, or the thrill of this chase.

Factory Floor- A Wooden Box

A Wooden Box is included in Factory Floor’s A Wooden Box 10”, get it here.

So here ends our descent into underbelly of the prince of darkness, a spiderleg forest leading to genitalia shrivelled like the putrescent carcass of an antediluvian white worm. The Bram Stoker reference is surely apt, for isn’t he the one who resurrected the wampyr like some clueless Transilvanian peasant spilling blood upon the tomb where Peter Cushing thought he had finally, and once and for all, laid the sucker to rest? He did, he did.

Brusque Twins’ ‘Black and Without Eyes’ brings to mind Jonathan Harker’s excursions into the forbidden sections of Dracul’s rotten manor, orchestral manoeuvres of a deathly ballet which begin down dusty corridors decorated with faded portraits projecting holographic memories of the father replicant, and continue into the boudoir that precedes damned bliss, past a door of heavy oak into a bedroom where the Wives lure the meek Englishman with mesmerising chants like venus flytraps of undead flesh, synthetic stabs stand for the caress of fangs against puritan skin, staccato drum machines for lusty foreplay against animated mannequins.

It would all be a wonderful tale of sexual awakening if it wasn’t for the fact that this millenial succubi are Satan’s own whores, weaned on the tender flesh of innocent babies.

Brusque Twins- Black and Without Eyes

Knights of Vipco struts through its martial streets, the red dawn poking through unforgiving edifices.  Unpeturbed by the increasing use of dutch angles to track it’s progress and oblivious to the Bernard Herman Noir-horms that encircle it like sirens…it rounds a corner and runs straight into the pulsating Old God of euphoric 8-bit title music.  At which point 20JFG falls head over heels in love.

Bronnt Industries Kapital – Knights of Vipco

Bronnt Industries Kapital is Guy Bartell’s  post-millennial outlet for much wonderful music.  Not least a bespoke score for the proto-exploitation silent Haxan.  He’s also got a remix on the same ΤΗΞ LΔΖΣ 12″ as the previously posted Steve Moore.  This track is from his latest album Hard For Justice which you can buy here.

Factory Floor seem to have been on an endless mutation for the last few years, now settled on the rigid form of a three piece, they still exist in the same world of battered This Heat reissues and reverb made of concrete and rust.  Only now, with the addition of Suicide covering Nik Void they’ve been infused with the totemic heart of Neubaten and the feet of Berghain‘s throbbing hordes.

Anyone who was lucky to see them confound and beguile during their summer outing with The Horrors, or catch their Offset show, will have some sense of just how gloriously brutal this all is live.  Not for them some imperfect attempt to wrench techno into a bastard live form.  These are rhythmic hymns in the church of pagan machine gods.  Vicious, cold, beautiful.

If you’re wondering when to start praying: it’s at 1:47.

Factory Floor – Lying

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Bonus video of the day is for Cold Pumas’ Jela.  The first release on Hungry For Power, the label some of 20JFG run (we may have mentioned this).  Keeping it in the family, one of your 20JFGers directed/shot/edited this too.

Cold Pumas – Jela from Dan Nixon on Vimeo.

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Friday bonus event!  One or more of your 20JFG may well be glimpsed in the darkness at the ever excellent Cocadisco this Saturday.  But don’t let put you off.