Welcome, welcome, to 20JFG’s fantabulous end of year round up.  Once again we’ll be raiding the year’s archives for the tracks that made permanent homes on our digital/analogue devices.  We’ll also be posting a few things that we loved but didn’t cover at the time: music that had already been blogged to death or music that its owner wasn’t happy to give away…until now!

So, over the next couple of weeks we’ll tease out a stream of songs that made us happy to be writing this blog, year in, year out.

At 20JFg we create worlds.  And one of the worlds we like to create is one where we’ve assumed the X-Factor’s fascist control over the pop charts and have installed Chris and Cosey to provide the theme tunes for all the shows.  But I digress.  In this world the idea of the weird, the mutant and the outre is as unfathomable to the populace as karaoke manequins holding up mediocrity as canonical brilliance.  And so, the following songs storm the public consciousness — without dominating it to the point of numbness.  They are 20JFG Top of the Pops and this year would have been poorer without them.

RIP Jimmy

Roberto Cacciapaglia: The Ann Steel Album (Reissue) Through the gaudy chaos of the imaginary toy procession that Roberto Cacciapaglia soundtracks, we visualise an alternative branch of history where the gloom of the synthetic undead was balanced by the exertions of an odd-wave army of glamorous extravagants fighting for the futuristic utopia. It never happened because being fun is hard, and that is also why this album is something to cherish, maybe its rediscovery will jolt contemporary creators from their abstracted numbness and copycat jangle. We can only hope.

Roberto Cacciapaglia – Media

Buy: The Ann Steel Album.

Mirror Mirror: Interiors Stop bickering and listen to Mirror Mirror. Look at them as they levitate over the battlefield like Doctor Strange, and deploy the musical equivalent of the Eye of Agamotto to illuminate the edges of the one diamond where all these spiritual faces are bound, the light thus projected is black not because of a malign tendency, but because it is made of all the colours, the album named Interiors because it sweeps us inside, like a storm.

Mirror Mirror – Interiors (Jamstation Exteriors Remix)

Buy: Interiors

The Dreams: Morbido The Dreams (no link soz) are to us the sound harbingers of an abstractedly sexual, matter-of-factly violent religion whose commandments are tattooed in skins, tattooed in drums.

The Dreams – Aloha Miami

Buy: Morbido LP

Horrid Red: Celestial Joy: Horrid Red’s  rituals and songs pay tribute to the gods of metronomic velocity, kaleidoscopic bloodshed and enlightenment through beautiful strife, and to the enemy, beloved because it helps resolve their violent algebra. If you were to follow their trail of carnage across the vast steppe, reach their leather tent, slide inside and sit with them during a rare moment of calm spent sipping on stolen elixirs, and you asked them what is best in life, this song would be your answer. And Conan would be proud.

Horrid Red – Horrid Life (Burial)

Buy: Celestial Joy

Gang Gang Dance: Eye Contact  There was a brief moment in history when it looked like we were on the brink of a proper bottom-up global pop revolution. M.I.A. had a good go at it. Alas, it was not to happen. The window of opportunity is now closed, and all we are left with are the vaudevillian contortions of lab-designed boy outfits, X-factor derivalia and meat-clad Madonna obsessives delivering mangled italo. Sex like projectile vomiting, no seduction. If we were to fit this scenario into a Grant Morrison template, then Gang Gang Dance would be the Invisibles, integrating splendid riddims, psychedelia, baroque hooks, and future (because it is eternal) soul into a cleansing ritual and inclusive gathering occasion for the rebel factions.

Gang Gang Dance – Chinese High

Buy: Eye Contact

John Maus: We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves  John Maus is a marginalised political platform with a romantic expressionistic agenda. His posters resemble Cartier Bresson snapshots of an intellectual sombrely contemplating the future of society and culture. His campaign videos, shown in local TV stations in the deepest of the night, are Adam Curtis-esque affairs where slogans float half-formed, adrift a turbulent sea agitated by fierce subconscious streams. His anthems are ectoplasmic parcels that can only be holistically de-encrypted, bearing in mind words, their sound context and their interactions. When we do so, we find lots of horror, but also much hope. We’d definitely vote for him.

John Maus – Head For The Country

Buy: We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

Peaking Lights: 936  20jazzfunkgreats love to be surprised. If anyone had told us that we were going to have a white-man reggae/borderline chillwave crossover album in our top of the year, we would have said, No Way Jose. Watch our preconceptions scurry like roaches under 936’s mighty tropical light, a light that is born in a weird crucible of good pop vibes and syrupy echobox exhalations.

Peaking Lights – All the Sun that Shines

Buy: 936.

Chevalier Avant Garde: A Difficult Whole/Heteropias Chevalier Avant Garde curate an exclusive store with artefacts ransacked from a variety of periods. In each of these converge powerful vectors of context and imagination, defining new possibilities full of weird spin and momentum.  These are not songs but the stuff that songs are made of – the cheeky melody of a Throbbing Gristle lullaby, the poetic cycle of a Kraftwerk automaton, Chicago’s soul machine code.

Chevalier Avant Garde – Canyons

Chevalier Avant Garde – Over the Fountain

Buy: Heteropias; A Difficult Whole

Echo Lake – Young Silence  One of 20JFG was asked to make a video for ethereal/Nu-gaze/really nice folks Echo Lake late last year.  This is the result.

If only we could afford to describe every band using points of light.

The Big Pink got remixed by Gang Gang Dance, there. What begins like a psychedelic excursion of portent and wonder across paths strewn with the corpses of Beach Boys and other sunny Californian types, all of which shine in a very fluorescent grey flips, halfway through, into a vicious skank which is pure shoegazing voodoo, the result is a mesmerising trompe d’oeil where seemingly incongruous landscapes blend, dark tropical forests in whose shades shine wild eyes, strobes bouncing against the corrugated metal walls of an anonymous warehouse, epic moors illuminated by fragments of a full moon that break through the spidery shroud of wind-distorted clouds.

The Big Pink- Velvet (Gang Gang Dance remix)

This will be available in their website in a couple of days, you should also check out the remixes by Van Rivers/Subliminal kid and Mount Kimble.

Patten’s Version is listening to Liquid Liquid while you await for the last tube at night, alone in the dishevelled platform but for something at the other end, close enough for you to be aware of its presence, too far to be able to distinguish gender, features of age, it is listening to Liquid Liquid as this something starts getting closer and the adrenaline kicks in, a thousand urban legends of psychotic headhunters and underground cannibal tribes queuing at the doors of the lizard brain sending electrified impulses all over a system that begins sweating, microscopical contractions of muscle and viscera heuristics of a subconscious plan first put into practice against a sabre-toothed tiger millennia ago.

You haven’t come a long way baby.

Version is the sound of the tube finally arriving, trembling lights that would feel like a horror film cliché if you weren’t the starring character, step in an empty carriage as your companion blurs at the other end, speed up into the night across shadowy wormholes with the wind howling and every single fixture rattling like a festival of the ghosts sharpening their knives, or Liars’ own death disco dub. Nothing will probably happen, but vicarious thrills such as these deserve a definitive holla.

Patten- Version (test mixxx)

Blank Dogs are the definitive US Invasion outfit- in the same way in which some 60s brits got totally wasted on R&B and electric instruments and by some brilliant accident of genius and teenage fearlessness came up with the stomping dance craze that would eventually become rock and roll, it is some American savants who now rummage hungry into the fascinating pile of debris of that wonderful car-crash that was post-punk and its melodic heir C-86, dig out shiny jewels and trinkets, reconfigure them with their awesome fuzzy sensibility and come up with something which is awesome and timeless, Under and Under, or their best album to date (out in In The Red), end outcome to inspire crazy kids over here to go down the second hand record shop and rediscover those original 7” their cool uncles used to headbang to down in the club or the DIY commune, what have you, everything is a cycle and we spin delighted.

If you want an example, check out Night Night, definitive classic of Great Wall of Sound Minimalism if there ever was one, sonic vomit never sounded this pretty, the Ronnettes caught in the Normal’s meatgrinder? Perhaps, a second-hand tape found in the midst of a crime scene of ink and blood and lipstick smeared in beautiful patterns over the once white tile reticles of a dingey toilette at the back of a condemned apartment flat, could have been recorded there too, it sounds so much closer and beautiful this way.

Blank Dogs- Night Night

‘we are talking Gang Gang Dance here, one of those rare outfits who manage to remain duly out there, like some sort of weird organic satellite floating in the interstice between atmosphere and a black space which is the place, feeding on mestizo transmissions from all over the globe which are then condensed into a primeval halo of muscular percussive energy shot back to make us speak tongues, imagine a booty version of the Sun City Girls and you aren’t there, but then you never will be there, until you press play and the ghost radiations enter your body like technological loas in a Gibson dream of the future that is here and now.’

Well, here you have 4 awesome tunes chosen for your total delight by Lizzi, Josh and Brian. Enjoy, say thanks in the box below and get the record because it’s total bloody sex echo ritual beyond the walls of the inner jungle yonder the invincible spirit dances unbridled.

Don Cherry- Brown Rice

A twisted children’s rhyme set to a strange atmosphere gamelan style track. Witchy and floaty, could give you nightmares but could give you some great dreams too….it depends.

Francis Bebey- Forest Nativity

The REAL version of welcome to the jungle

Phil Collins- I’m not Moving (Edit by Idjut Boys)

We heard this on a mixtape from Brian from Animal Collective. It sounds like Phil Collin’s under water / in outer space / inside a volcano

Growing- Rave Pie Only

Beyond the third dimension. A great visual tune. Close your eyes and watch it move.

And let us put the icing on the winning cake with this mixtape that Max Tundra (with help from our main man G£nuin£ Guy) has prepared to celebrate the launch of his album ‘Parallax Error Beheads You’, out in Domino now. Ok, so the album is the genius pop explosion equivalent of a technicolor holographic trip up and down the corridors of Prince’s Chocolate Factory. If that’s that, and you know it is, then this is a handheld camera recording of that trip sent in a cold fusion reactor powered capsule to explore the outer confines of a warm universe operating under the approving gaze of a benevolent watchmaker, sliding into a post-euclidean loop which is the psychedelic equivalent of a bowling gutter in future P-funk city, spinning past the fourth dimension and into your eager ears so you can flip out like the progressive equivalent of Flipper the dolphin. Now there, 50 tunes in 30 minutes which are full of soul, and a few tasty morsels from the aforementioned album. B for Brilliant, and total love.

Max Tundra- Radio Mix Tape

Tracklist

1.Max Tundra: Orphaned
2.The Funky Worm: Hustle!
3.Jensen Sportag: Cocktease
4.Set The Tone: All Tied Up
5.Ark: Le Magicien D’Os (Mr Oizo Mix)
6.Linda Scott: I’ve Told Every Little Star
7.Soundhack: Rodeo
8.Roberto De Simone: Secondo Coro Delle Lavandaie
9.Jerry Goodman & Jan Hammer: Like Children
10.Skeletons & The Girl Faced Boys: Git
11.Von Südenfed: Fledermaus Can’t Get It (Max Tundra Mix)
12.Mr Oizo: Patrick122
13.Louchie Lou & Michie One: Shout (Accapella)
14.Frank Zappa: Night School
15.The Art Of Noise: Snapshot
16.Funk D’Void: Jack Me Off
17.Basti: Man At CIA
18.Trans Am: Cold War (A Grape Dope Mix)
19.Royal Trux: Money For Nothing
20.Thomas Bangalter: Ventura/Into The Tunnel
21.Ivor Cutler: The Railway Sleepers
22.Mint Royale: The Effect On Me (Max Tundra Mix)
23.George Duke: Stand
24.Ronnie Hazlehurst: Sorry! Theme
25.Busta Rhymes: Gimme Some More
26.The Flying Lizards: Gyrostatics
27.Eskaton: If
28.Max Tundra: Which Song
29.Scritti Politti: Small Talk
30.The Jammers: Be Mine Tonight
31.Gentle Giant: Interview
32.Mr Oizo: Skatesteak
33.DJ Brokenwindow: Hair, Nails, Percolator
34.Dominique Leone: Nous Tombons Dans Elle
35.The System: Now I Am Electric
36.10cc: Clockwork Creep
37.Trans-X: Digital World
38.Harry Merry: Bye Bye, Here’s Some Stuff
39.Kimitaka Matsumae: Dekanime Theme
40.Slick: Space Bass
41.IQ: Beef In Box
42.Max Tundra: Glycaemic Index Blues
43.Neil & Iraiza: Wasted Time
44.Devo: Theme From Dr Detroit
45.Patrick D Martin: I Like Lectric Motors
46.Manfred Mann: Can’t Eat Meat
47.Ride: Leave Them All Behind
48.Brandy: What About Us
49.Illreme: Kyou Wo Tou
50.Prince: Let’s Go Crazy (12″ Mix)
51.Steely Dan: Bodhisattva

Mirror Mirror’s music is a crypt of mystery and sex, a moist opening on the side of a rock wall, enticing entrance to a cavernous corridor darken illuminated by feeble red candles down which you walk surrounded by cloaked figures, eventually reaching a grotto where naked bodies lie, silver amulets, strange flowers and sharp knives gleaming under the light of the moon which reigns supreme in the centre of the black dome of a sky covered with the medieval script of ancient constellations.

Mirror Mirror are indeed special, they drink from esoteric sources, the pagan drone of psyche folk is brought back and reconfigured to soundtrack ceremonies of quasi-satanic languor, shadows of wild-eyed teenagers rendezvousing on hidden places to beckon forbidden forces, a Goyaesque hallucination, or the sound of Arthur Machen’s twisted scripts. It is beautiful stuff, imagine Deerhunter’s cryptic incantations turned inside out to tell us about those who shan’t be named, those who live in the green outskirts of wild paths, those who play strange music that leads lost children astray, dancing joyous never to be seen again.

Mirror Mirror- The Inward Way Out (Retrotrip)

Mirror Mirror’s debut album, ‘The Society For The Advancement Of Inflammatory Conciousness’ is out now in Cochon records, Half Machine records take care of their releases in the UK, which they will be visiting really soon to play some shows in London, including Upset the Rhythm on the 24th. Magick.

I’ve been hot on the heels of one Mat Colegate, trying to get him to write for us about Magma, alas, he is too busy these days, I imagine engaged in indescribable transactions across the portals of space and time which have been known to occasionally appear in certain back alleys of the Big Smoke, possibly under the shadow of a Hawksmoor Church or the like. All commendable activities which justify his neglect of us, so you will have to do with my inadequate prose when trying to address the topic of one of the greatest bands that ever existed.

French prog gods Magma’s grandiose opus concerns the colonisation of planet Kobaïa by Earthen refugees, as sung in the language from that place. This sort of psychedelic dystopian vision would be sufficient to get the attention of your delusional 20JFG scribes, but it is perhaps anecdotal, marginalia on the sides of an epic scroll crafted with blinding energy. We shall be writing about Magma in the future (or perhaps Mr. Colegate will!), possibly focussing on their earlier more Zeuhl stuff, but today we leave you with music from Attahk, one of their most accessible albums.

Magma- Lirïïk Necronomicus Kanht (In Which Our Heroes Ürgon and Gorgo Meet)

Which is I guess as close as Magma got to making disco. Frankly astounding stuff, a swirling vocal maelstrom spinning demented and exhilarating over the scaly body of a fierce funk dragon as it hovers majestic over the sands of an Arrakean landscape (that’d be Colossus 13!) to the beat of a drum that vibrates with the same sort of martial yet free energy that animated the movements of that behemoth Can. Now is this the most exhilarating piece of music ever thrown up on the face of the Earth or what.

Also from Attachk, you can hear Nonono featured in the rather incredible mixtape that Joe put up the other day at Silkytooth. Cheers to Chris Pell for the tip.

Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna must be one of the most eagerly awaited albums of the year. And it so fucking delivers. Not the way we expected, check out Princes’ grime synth ride, but then that’s what we expected, we are talking Gang Gang Dance here, one of those rare outfits who manage to remain duly out there, like some sort of weird organic satellite floating in the interstice between atmosphere and a black space which is the place, feeding on mestizo transmissions from all over the globe which are then condensed into a primeval halo of muscular percussive energy shot back to make us speak tongues, imagine a booty version of the Sun City Girls and you aren’t there, but then you never will be there, until you press play and the ghost radiations enter your body like technological loas in a Gibson dream of the future that is here and now.

Gang Gang Dance- First Communion

Nigerian guitar melodies, the metronomic stomp of the beat of life and a bassline shining with that ecstatic glory !!! sadly lost converging wild into a pop apotheosis which is layer after layer of sound growing into a tidal wave that they master like God-crazed riders of the storm, or maybe fragments of a perfect piece of mutant soul you might have heard coming from a distant radio while roaming lost in the coruscating labyrinth of an Algerian bazaar, just before you turned a corner and the unexpected sun blinded you with its stroboscopic radiance.

Saint Dymphna is out on October the 21st in the Social Registry/Warp Records.

It really can’t come soon enough, but in a few months time one of our most beloved of NYC experimentalist groups, Gang Gang Dance, will return to bestow upon us a new album of their intoxicating neo-tribal tekno trance that should sufficiently have everyone‘s bodies violently convulsing soon enough. Following on from the mind-blowing goodness that was God’s Money, and a slew of other awesomely mind melting releases, Saint Dymphna, will probably be one of the best things our ears will hear this year, and few things recently have sounded as exciting as the prospect that grime artist Tinchy Stryder will indeed be gate crashing their pharaonic rave.

House Jam, as a taster of things to come, has been made available as an xxxchange remix which on first listen will definitely rattle the cages of those who have become accustomed to Gang Gang Dance as the conjurers of broken riddims, haunted by decaying synths and visions of regretful Gorilla and vengeful father Nzame, because never before have Gang Gang Dance sounded so structured or well equipped to bring about the destruction of limp-ass indie discos everywhere, having been somewhat cleaned up by the Spank Rock cohort who‘s temporarily rubbed the foam from their mouths. So no, this isn’t exactly the same kind of primal dub workout we’re used to, but all the same it’s still nicely heavy stuff that should provoke the devoted into unwittingly hitting the dirt as they mutter strange, dead words to themselves, their eyes rolled into the back of their heads hypnotised by the tropical grunge and shamanistic diva wailings of Liz Bougatsos who incessantly asks the mystifyingly cryptic question, “Will the clouds carry my tears to you?”, evoking more wonderment the more its repeated.

Gang Gang Dance – House Jam (xxxchange Remix)

Joining Gang Gang Dance out in the vast technicolor Paper Rad deserts where Brooklyn and Cairo converse and become one, where Hummer convertibles caked in dust are pimped out with brightly coloured feathers, and gold beads, and idols of Sekhmet and Anuba sit on the dash as weathered speakers blast the streets with the sound clash of Wu Tang beats and Faiza Ahmed, are husband and wife duo, Rainbow Arabia.

Rainbow Arabia – Omar K

Adventuring on a similar dark star safari, Rainbow Arabia wearing their kaleidoscopic militia uniforms, and armed with unforgiving jet-black machine guns adorned with rainbows of ribbons, stampede into town on crystal war elephants, painted red with Nubian scrawl and decorated in chains of silver plated animal skulls, firing bullets into the sky to announce their arrival, creating the kind of noise you could imagine the DFA might make had they ever decided to throw a party in the underground ruins of Egypt, the ghosts of the Pyramids shaken into action by the sinuous rhythms and earth quaking basslines. They may very well be some of our newest favourite people.

How it happens, an inorganic molecule floats whimsical in that primeval soup which will one day become sea, not crystaline enough to reflect the swirling constellations in the black sky, its jelly-like bosom absorbs the music floating down from them through the ever so thin, nascent, atmosphere, a melody from the void which activates an irreversible process which ends on yesterday’s post, but wait, some things happen in between, read on.

Eric Copeland- Hermaphrodites

Black Dice have been busy building the sonic equivalent of the Aztec Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Bermuda Triangle and Area 51 all compressed inside a slab of black vinyl, ther eerily, strangely beautiful music throws blue bolts of feeric energy which turn your stereo into a feline alien, sometimes it purrs, sometimes it roars. Member Eric Copeland continues the research with ‘Hermaphrodite’, although the antennas of his tribal SETI program seem to be targetted the other way around, at the bottom of the sea, where enchanted melodies float with the blind scaly behemoths who live in the Herzogian abyss, then penetrate rock and lava to get through to that hollow core inhabited by beautiful & fierce crimson dinosaurs, Jules Verne was right, your geography teacher better shut his mouth.

190 Billions Before the Present- a great east-west crack appears across Pangaea, separating Laurasia in the North from Gondwanaland in the South. The remnants of Valusia are plunged beneath the waves, into what will one day be the Mediterranean Sea. A separate Antarctic/Australian landmass has drifted free of Gondwana towards the South. About this time India breaks loose from it and heads north towards Asia.

What the chronist of times ancient fails to identify is the mysterious shadow of a dark skinned hand which end in sharp claws, some say that of Kali, perhaps another manifestation of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, which cuts through the crust of the Earth sending the genetic code of the song which began it all in so many different directions, it will take Aeons for its beautiful fragments to be reunited again, in a dingey basement, in NYC of all places…

Or wasn’t Nyarlathotep the Sphynx too, in that wonderful spoof piece ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ which H.P. Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Harry Houdini?

Gang Gang Dance- The Earthquake that Frees Prisoners

Gang Gang Dance, one of our favourite experimental outfits come back in breathtaking form with ‘the Earthquake that Frees Prisoners’, a dense piece of throbbing organic psyche dub included in their forthcoming Rawwar EP, it swirls & coils crazy, dizzee and free summoning scents of perfume, sweat, sometimes rotting flesh, always sex, smoke, flash, mirrors, and the hardhitting drums which reverb in the back alleys of dark streets where the djinn roam, north and east, more, south and west, if you ever happen to look in their direction you’ll see but a black cat jumping in the arms of a small girl lying in the shadowy threshold of a house, her eyes shine for an instant before the door ajar slams shut, another secret the Kashbah won’t reveal.

25000 Before the Present Age- The Serpent Men raise their Second Kingdom on the Thurian Continent, which has arisen in the Atlantic from the ashes of Lemuria and Atlantis. They are Eventually overthrown by Humans.

As you might know if you read Hyperborean transmissions from times past (i.e. King Kull, Conan the Barbarian and other documents summoned by telepathic authors) the Serpent Men were never completely exterminated, they still roam the Earth, and thanks to their shape-changing spells they have managed to infiltrate government, church and corporations, you can hear their evil hissing in those high places where far reaching decisions are made. We should thank noble warriors of the proud lineage of Kull, Brule the Spear Slayer, Conan as well as some 20th Century Marvel Super-heroes for fighting these gnarly creatures with the sharp edge of noise and a righteous heart, if it wasn’t for them, we would be in a world of shit. I mean, even more shit.

Enter Medicine and Duty

Medicine and Duty- Travis Click

Lord Nuneaton Savage and Andy Puffinboy have been turning Brighton into rubble for a while (incl. support in one of the gigs of the year, Dan Deacon, read about it here), both in their initial incarnation as Raised by Wolves and now, their bad-ass krautrock improv skeleton of sex voodoo chaos enhanced by the synth spasms of one Mr. Jack Cooper. Bursts of beautiful fury to make Oneida do the Spirit jig do swing and spill wild like the wicked witch of the East riding a broom which to be honest is also drum-stick and axe, there she floats in the eye of the black hurricane a stern childhood priest might have given you nightmares about, don’t worry, they’re here to free you from all the linguistic barriers standing between you and magic powers with the acid pendulum of a true psyche stomp.

In Travis Click, off their last album ‘Cloud Burns Slowly’ they sound like Liars masticating a metronome made of razorblades to summon with the blood they drool the Insect Loa Baron Zaraguin, kind of scary but hey, no pain no gain. Really, someone release their stuff on vinyl, put them in the spotlight, the teenagers of today could do with more paganism and samba.

Medicine and Duty- Live in the Studio Set

Some excerpts above taken from the 6th edition of the Call of Cthulhu RPG.