Fan Death‘s new EP plays across a broad spectrum of their growing fan base’s expectations: hi-nrg disco workouts at the start of the EP before venturing into more ambiguous but still hook laden spaces towards the end of the 5 tracks. Soon is the penultimate track on the EP, stripping back a rousing chorus, a saturated video but a reverie, this acts as a summer morning sequel to Chromatics’ eternal Night Drive. The constant bass rhythm and reverb drenched synth pings of dub run downhill to the sea. The clipped, resolute vocals remain but are joined by Joker‘s legion of pitch-bended synth melodies and 20JFG’s secret obsession: horns in dance music. Blissful.

This is regretful sunrise music as the night once again fades from view and the makup-caked morning comes into focus.

Fan Death – Soon

We first posted a track by Appaloosa back in December 2007 and are delighted to herald their return with this freshly mastered delight. Where once there was delicate piano intros and souring heartfelt choruses over simple drum machines in a pure distillation of what is indeed soaring about dance music…here we have a baroque journey through Mellville’s Noir: Le Samouraï techno if the club singer had been Nico and Alan Delon’s character was played by Carl Craig.

That glorious kickdrum straight from Chicago, the ethereal 70s Parisian organ sound layered wonderfully under Anne-Laurie’s vampish, distant siren calls serve merely as preludes to the devastatingly disinterested chorus. A withering put down of distracted intent. Who dances with whom seems less at issue here than in what physical configuration the bodies will be arranged in against the black rocks of a shrouded island. This is nightmarish disco flirting with the tropes of lust and vigour while sucking the naive life from an endless parade of enchanted youth.

Appaloosa – You Will Never Hurt Me

The celestial noise forces behind The Rollercoaster Project were kind enough to have very recently sent their newly remixed take on Fan Death’s mystic analogue boogie-shuffle, “Jealousy”, our way and all things considered it’s really quite lovely stuff even if they have completely torn the insides out of the original animal and created an entirely different creature altogether.

The Rollercoaster Project make music that sounds like the beautiful blossoming of something epic emerging from a puddle of memetic polyalloy blood shed by one of Hans-Joachim Roedelius’s wounded synthesizers over a pastel bliss pop altar inside the parallel universe Church of John Hughes that was built on hallowed grounds baptized with the pink teen tears of a thousand androidal Molly Ringwald replicants, and with “Jealousy” they drag two of our favourite discowitch goddesses out of their self mythologizing world of fantasy-dance where they work their strange magic in recreating darkglass Studio 54 vibes for glamourous diviners self exiled in bejeweled caves hidden away underneath dense forestry, and throw them into a barren windswept silver desert of grunge Vangelis tones and monastic atmospherics.

Fan Death – Jealousy (The Rollercoaster Project Remix)

Sombrero Galaxy’s debut wave of shimmering star beat descends from the heavens in the form of the first 12″ release to be made available very soon on ESP Institute, a new label conjured into cosmic life by the wizard of noir-disco, and true 20 Jazz Funk Great superstar, Lovefingers. Needless to say with that kind of knowledge in mind this was almost pre-approved before we’d even heard a single note. Thankfully though there was absolutely no let down. Lulling us out of gravity and into an orbit of spatial bliss where we we lie back on a floating beach composed of the dust of dead ancient planets, whilst comets made of glowing, neon green rock drift past in slo-mo and the constellations overhead twinkle in time to the undulating space yacht grooves of a kosmiche spell being cast on Planet Earth.

Sombrero Galaxy – Journey to the Centre of the Sun (Removed for now, we got ahead of ourselves)

We have been banging on about Telepathe since they began on their path, crafting haunted noisecapes across the elegant halls of the Social Registry, tables have turned and these days they are on the way to global stardom on their own weird terms, mysterious hooded figures dancing up the baroque paths of nocturnal forests like a Liars Super-8 tribute to Don’t Look Now, you will know them by the trail of enigmatic dayglo glyphs splashed over the gnarly branches of millennial trees whose shadows make awful faces, you will find them by the echo of their phantasmagoria lullabies, which resonate from the left as their silhouettes vanish into the right, coyote magick tricks, sleight of hand dancehall mirages and lunar pop hooks that’s the trade they were born with, you can’t learn this stuff, or figure it out either, that’s why it rules so much.

Effi Briest- Chrome’s on it (Telepathe cover)

Here you have an awesome cover of Chrome’s on it by Effi Briest, who bumps up the mystery styles and ororo drone for awesome effect, find it in a split just about released by the good folks from Skinny Wolves.

And let us continue on the lovepath with mystique disco wonders Fan Death, as their demo of Jealously demonstrates they surely can get a good groove going. This infectiously metronomic jamboree sounds like Arthur Russell shuffling tarot cards in a studio of analogue delights as the girls unleash their vocal glamour into a space of shifting colours, we are once again blown into swirling smithereens by the perfect combination of 54 classy bang and quasi-religious exalt-exaltation, strings which are both chic honey and gypsy drama, that hint of nuyorican boogie that underscores it all shows an instinctive understanding of the secret kernel of longing for dance-induced ecstasy beating in the heart of all good disco, hear hear kids, this is only the end of the beginning.

Fan Death- Jealously (Demo with strings)

Smoothest Runes by Thick Business is a digital spell of African shades, loving barrage of percussion which strokes and smothers like shadows projected by a green canopy, thick curtain through which unknown birds of garish plumage peek, or the constant cycle of oars propelling you towards a heart of darkness which for once isn’t Joseph Conrad’s rotten and grim realisation, but the life-affirming sweat-shine covering smooth muscles as they flex upon resonant wood, natural sound of things growing and reaching their peak and eventually dying like an already perished star that glimmers aeons away in the perfect black of a tropical sky.

Thick Business- Smoothest Runes

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We have our own little shindig going on as part of the whole Great Escape extravaganza, 13 Monsters, you know the score, and if you don’t- well, come down for a total blast.

Whilst Ciara single-handedly continues to bring to life the Arabian Prince, chrome plated Janet Jackson collaboration of my electric dreams, I await with a foaming mouth and bloodshot eyes for Cassie to emerge from the vapour mists once more with a record which if the faint callings that have so far managed to emanate out of the night are to be trusted will be a chronicle of all the time our heroine has spent wandering around the cavernous, lonely spaces of a vast, impenetrable Castlevania style fortress that’s been built upon the ashes, of every cyborg nympho that Prince ever dreamt up and allowed to die, and made out of towers of haunted synthesizers that react and groan with every footstep the lady takes, imprisoned and hopelessly lost, stalked by wires that creep and cover everything as she chases after the fragmented and soaked in sorrow whisperings of her fellow doomed divas of the past. Consequently it should be a robo-siren masterpiece.

Cassie – Me & U (Chopped & Screwed Version)

To pass the time by I’m consoled by what’s been before, like this chopped and screwed version of ‘Me & U’. Where once Cassie with a steely gaze in her eyes slinked confidently across desolate twilight cityscapes sound tracked by strains of minimal John Carpenter dub disco, in this gravity free incarnation a line like “I think I’m gonna make a move” which was once announced with such cool and collected predatory threat, now sounds like the melancholy admission of a hunter who has never stopped moving and who knows now at her lowest ebb, having reached the ends of the earth, surrounded by frozen wasteland, that all is lost and the game got away.

Fan Death officially carved their name in to our collective hearts this year when they took us by the hand and led us to a strange wooded enclave not too far from the Black Lodge where without any shred of abandon we danced the night away beneath a full moon and before the owl’s gaze till our noses bled to the kind of disco music Giorgio Moroder might have made if he’d had more offers to soundtrack sleazy, sex soaked slasher films from the eighties.

Fan Death – The Constellations

On their new song the pillowy synths and casio keyboard strings they use conjure up an alternate version of a John Hughes movie, wherein instead of Wang Chung, Planningtorock queasily haunts the school corridors with all the melodrama of a tear stained, adolescent diary decorated with drawings of stars and hearts. And so our love for Fan Death only intensifies as they take us on a bare foot waltz through rococo halls of cracked mirrors that seem to have no end, and serenade us with the kind of harpy balladry that thousands of years ago would’ve soothed the souls of unfortunate sailors enticed to the rocks, unaware of the fate that had been sealed for them, and possibly for us too.

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In just over two weeks time this particular XXJFG comrade (Robin) will be departing the land of ghosts and castles on a plane headed for New York City. If anyone wants to show me a good time, point me in the direction of fun places to get drunk and safe places to smoke, give me a job (one that pays would be all kinds of awesome), and just generally illuminate my days and nights with all manner of festivities, emails and messages will be very welcome. Email the new series of words and symbols: coms @ 20jazzfunkgreats.co.uk. Thank you.

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.