120 Megabytes – Episode 9

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

Being the all encompassing unstandardised weirdoes that we are, we make no attempt at ranking our choices, or to classify them by format. We just about manage to drop them into different buckets which aren’t quite genres, but a chromatic scale of the kirlian aura colours that they impressed upon us.

Let’s begin with black. Things that go slash in the night.

Chris Carter – The Space Between: Optimo music present to us a resurrected artefact from the dawn of our current philosophies.  Instrumental sides to the freestyle battles of Gods.

Chris Carter – Clouds (posted 2008)

Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol. 1.: An urban survival guide for the modern existential hero. Can be read as a cyberpunk anthology, or as a collection of fashion tips for the cavalcade of the damned.

Eleven Pond- Watching Trees (posted in 2009)

Florene – Homemade Extacy. Those blips you see breaking the speed limit in your radar, lt. Strumpf, as you swig on your hip flask behind a battered roadside advert in the scorching Texan night, they aren’t your average joy riders. No, they are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and they are looking for a rave.

Florene- Homemade Extacy (new post)

Gatekeeper: Giza.Herr Mannheim, I think that upgrading the operating system of our robotic assembly line with a code sequence downloaded from an anonymous source located somewhere in the sidereal voids wasn’t such a hot idea.

Gatekeeper- Serpent (posted Dec 6th)

Indian Jewelry: Totaled. Dorothy is bored in her house in the middle of the desert. A whirlwind takes her to a world of impossible colour . She jacks a pickup truck and storms down the yellow paths with her gang of metal men and talking beasts, under a black cloud of flying monkeys. Oz is toppled and anarchy ensues.

Indian Jewelry- Excessive Moonlight (posted May 18th)

Liars: Sisterworld. This is the sort of pop music that fills the airwaves in those desolate places where prepubescent worshippers of a pagan cult slaughtered all the adults.

Married in Berdichev: Readying. Walking down the private collection of the Hunterian museum at night, where beauty stands still, preserved in aspic.

Married in Berdichev- I Need the Sun (posted July 27th)

Model Man – Shouldn’t I be Dead by Now? Dry ice and airbrushed laser beams thunder over a brutal coastline as Tron’s less binary characters engage in fatalistic plans for their escape.

Model Man – Shouldn’t (posted October 18th)

Mueran Humanos: S/T. The dead are not quiet in Mueran Humanos’ album. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone. And we who walk here… walk alone.

Mueran Humanos: Festival de las Luces (New post)

Psychic Ills- FRKWYS 4: Doomsday ragas kinaesthetically synchronised with the infra-red output of the Predator’s mask, while manhunting in the Arabian desert.

Psychic Ills- Mantis (Juan Atkins Remix) (Posted August 26th)

Puerto Rico Flowers: 4. Me and Bauhaus getting it on in the abandoned abattoir (a love story).

Puerto Rico Flowers: Let’s Make Friends (new post)

Salem – King Night: Filling 20JFG’s lungs with bewitching dreams since 2008, Salem deliver the album that brushes past any middling concerns of genre partisans.  Exquisite beauty lurking beneath waves of delay and syrup.

Salem – Frost (New Post)

Scorpion Violente: Uberschleiss. The Gabber Meinhof aren’t a wild bunch of decadent noisemongers hellbent on collapsing society by industrial means. No, they are the research & development department of the survivalist massive, prototyping sonic armaments to be deployed against the undead hordes crawling from an oversubscribed hell.

Scorpion Violente: Viol et Revanche (posted October 18th)

Teeth of the Sea: Your Mercury. Sexual transcendence you achieve while your flesh dissolves under the leathery wings of the bat people of The Beastmaster.

Teeth of the Sea: A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. (posted October the 7th)

Xander Harris – Urban Gothic Synth drenched ode to Brian Keene.  A mix tape of all our favourite horror scores ripped to shreds and assembled into terrifyingly catchy shapes.

Xander Harris – Opening Credits (posted August 20th)

We wrap up Gatekeeper week on day 5 with the video for Storm Column.  The tracks arpegiated, gated, EBM dread gets the Outer Limits treatment in a video that begins with a suitably portentous track around the Statue of Liberty before quickly wrapping its stock footage into universe building spheres.  Got that?

While we’re dwelling in the embedded video realm we thought we’d share with you a recording of current (and past, and future) 20JFG obsession Mueran Humanos. The Argentinian duo journeyed high above their current Berlin home to record some songs live to filmmaker Mariano Báez’s camera.  The description that opens the video covers all the bases:

August 2009. Mueran Humanos go to the abandoned CIA Station at Teufeslberg (Devil’s Mountain) to use the fabulous acoustics of its higher dome. The dome was build to catch soviet radio frequences and therefore produces a natural amplification and huge reverb. Mueran Humanos use there a casiotone toy keyboard, a walkman with prepared tapes and a hammer as instruments. No amplification and no electricity were used and no effects were added afterwards. This is the real sound there direct to the camera. This is a small extract for their performance, filmed by Mariano Báez.

What follows is a minimal version of Monstruo, from their début album on Old Europa Cafe (who insightfully name-check Possession in their write up).  Seemingly recorded at twilight the Berlin cityscape spreads, vertiginous, out behind them through a breach in the domes wall.  The pale light brushing over their faces or, just as likely, casting them in silhouette depending on where Báez moves his restless camera.

The recording itself is breathtaking not just for the quality of the recording – something unusual straight to camera – but for the beauty the pair conjure up with a battery powered keyboard and their unamplified voices reverberating around the huge acoustically perfect space.  For those paying attention, the tension – conjured first, by the inclusion of a hammer in the description and then by its threatening appearance in and out of frame – is finally released in the sparse appearance of percussion towards the song’s end.

Mueran Humanos’ album is out now and you can get it here. Which you should do. Because it’ll appear in our year end round-up-thing that may or may not take the form of some sort of list of music we liked. Which is the fashion these days, we understand.

Gatekeeper day 4 marks a return to the bloodbath most grizzly. This one is most definitely not suitable for work, small children, vampophobes or hemophiliacs. If you are from New Line Cinema and you are watching this, rest assured that the original footage was taken from a movie called ‘Sword’ starring Wallsey Snips as a teenage slayer ridding his high school of a Vampire conspiracy, led by Christopher Lee as the Demon Headmaster. Enjoy!

Whilst on the subject of untimely demise, we would like to pay our respects today to the brothers Troutman, via this lamentable jam taken from a forthcoming Mahjonng/Chandeliers split on Captcha records.

Chandeliers – Whip the Gift

A cut from the lost Zapp album that was produced by Chris Carter, ‘Whip the Gift’ is ethereal, mournful robo-soul at its ghost-in-the-shell finest. A tragic tale of 2 brothers – one a flamboyant, sequined trouser wearing Talkbox virtuoso, the other a brooding power electronics-improv nerd, the fission of their creative differences impacted many fine works, until the day they fell out of balance and went into a Chernobylian meltdown. Recorded the day before the elder brother’s untimely demise caused by some suspiciously faulty wiring in his Korg VC-10, it is surely a beauteous thing indeed. But it is not all machine-grievance, the Chandeliers part of the EP also contains the guaranteed boogie-splice euphoria of ‘Sugarscoop’ – which is not leaving 20JFG’s bone encrusted DJ box for the forseeable future.

Upon the flipside, Mahjonng are also taking it there, maneuvering their Trans Am into a parking space once populated by Grabba Grabba Tape. We leave you today with the video for Running On Air. Mahjonng and Chandeliers ‘Roule’ EP is out on the 25th of next month on Captcha records.

Deep in the eye of the swirling bloodstorm, it’s day 3 of the Gatekeeper video unsheathing. ‘Mirage’ is ‘X-Mix 3 – Enter Digital Reality’ as re-shaped by the peyote-fueled visions of the cleric in a tribe of psychic desert beings. It’s soundtrack an environmental catastrophe where the Na’vi’s homeland is nuked by the remorseless machinery of the Nitzer Ebb alliance. In addition to Thunder Horse, this video was created in collaboration with the Lenox Brothers , a pair of brilliant twins from chicago who created many of the animations.

As you well know, 20JFG ain’t about no rabid hyperbolical statements. Hysterical maybe, but never rabid. And with that in mind, with the traditional hyperbole disclaimer in place, from the bottom of the chamber where our hearts should’ve been, we feel safe to tell you that Vision Air should be absolutely massive.

Vision Air – Totem

Massive in the sense of a celestial being, too large to be comprehended by mortal beings. Massive in the sense of our galaxy being one particle in a large hadron collider. Anyone who knocks around with 20JFG faves I am the Cosmos was likely to be worth several listens themselves, and we weren’t disappointed. Vision Air make the kind of high-grade electronic music that nineties Warp would sign, before they went missing in Maximo Park*.

We are sending in a search party cuz ‘Totem’ is an epic light-headed cruise across the upper registers of the emerald land, where we drift atop a gaseous carpet of microscopic sapphires into a cloud of static-electric bliss, and in our humble opinion it’s right up there with the Autechres and Clarks of this world.

Totem is taken from the Autumn EP which is available free from their soundcloud.

*cheap gag – we are of course loving the Rusties and Mohawkes of these days.

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Also a casual reminder that some of 20JFG will appear in three dimensions in a Soju bar in Berlin for a few short hours this Thursday. Brought to you in association with Ree-A.L.T. Holograph devices and featuring the unrivaled musical knowledge of the Mo Probs.

Day 2 of the Gatekeeper video premier week brings the ‘Oracle’, and a terrifying depiction of what happens when a group of teenagers in Hackney try to order pizza using their weird Uncle’s ouija board. Press ‘Play’ and ye may pass through to the next day….

(A couple of weeks into the future)

The King mopes in the cyclopean boogie chamber of the Nastic Mothership, awaiting for the puny envoys from Mankind to offer something worth the survival of their civilisation. He is half a mile tall, and wears an outfit that looks like a Rammellzee extravaganza designed by Jack Kirby. He is impatient, rather keen on bombarding Earth with enough gamma rays to turn the end of year celebrations into a re-enactment of the finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The sergeants of the Nastic fleet stand ready by their planet-busting ordnances. The time of reckoning looms close, why should these hairless apes expect any better than the Betelgeusians or the Centaurians?

The King speaks in his vocoderised growl. The envoys tremble at the powerful vibrations.

-So what do you have to say, you 20jazzfunkgreats insects?

-Listen to us, master of all that wiggles in this sector of the galaxy, we know that our planet disgusts us, our leaders behave in petty and vindictive ways and have forgotten the ways of the funk. Our populace revel in the shallow cult of the Autotune. But don’t punish all for the sins of the few, we tell you, our planet has potential as a cultural contributor to the wider empire, we have brought proof with us.

-And what proof is this, scum?

The 20jazzfunkgreats envoys slide a couple of record sleeves from their pouch, and respectfully lay them at the feet of the sulking colossus.

-We have scoured the music temples of our planet for a worthy offering, mighty overlord, aware as we are of your enjoyment of the genuine synthetic sounds that most of our peoples’ abandoned with the arrival of the digital technologies. Take them to your turntableship at once and broadcast them across the fearless Nastic fleet, look into the eyes of your race and witness its joy. There are many more where these come from, goodness didn’t end with the 1980s. We don’t deserve to be purified quite yet, at least not all of us. We are happy to give you the coordinates of some of the most evil ones, for your magma drones to obliterate at once.

-Hrumph, you test my patience, you puny creatures. I should melt your whole species and recycle the remains into holy vinyl to be embossed with songs of tribute to the Booty gods, but who knows, maybe you are right and it is not yet time for your deliverance. Lackeys, take these musics to the Pastorius vessel, and beam the sounds up through the battle channel. This better be good, feeble midgets. Untold tortures await those who waste the time of the boogie master.

A tense wait ensues, then sound. 20jazzfunkgreats illustrate the sounds with inappropriate commentary.

Awesome image sourced through the very greatest Sci-fi-o-rama

Kristal Klear’s pristine synthetic boogie re-enactments have been provoking some waves amongst the ranks of the human resistance. Premier sites representing the coalition for the willing have already spoken about his output. This piece, by the name of ‘Persuaded Me’ sounds like Harold Faltenmeyer (who we know you dig) reading the newspaper in bed on a Sunday morning before going jogging across Beverly Hills, under a dawn sky whose perfect gradients are an imperfect approximation of your absolute wisdom. Or that moment of lazy reminiscence that never went into Daft Punk’s ‘Discover’, soothing pastel taking the place of strident glitter.

Kristal Klear- Persuaded Me

Kristal Klear’s Persuaded Me is included in a 12’’ record your hordes will surely be acquiring.

Gary War’s is perhaps a less obvious proposition, but one we are sure you will appreciate in your eternal omniscience.

In their most recent output, a 12’’ by the name of ‘Police Water’, released by the aptly named ‘Sacred Bones’ label they have grafted the synthetic flights of fancy of 1980s pop, as re-appropriated by a coterie of cold wave believers, into the bewildering charivari of echo and reverb that infects the opus of bedroom maestros such as Ariel Pink, John Maus or Paul Rosales. Layers of sound pile upon each other like Persian rugs of intricate design smoothing the metallic edges of the corridor of a spaceship jumping into weirdo hypersoul-space.

Gary War- Grounds for Termination

Did 20jazzfunkgreats convince the King of the Nastic? You will have to await until the New Year to find out. If the apocalypse didn’t happen, leave us a comment saying ‘thank you’. And for Christ sake, buy the records!

And so it is. Look in the mirror, say Gatekeeper 5 times. The only valid boarding pass on this voyage is your soul, so please have them open and ready. Now you are able to journey the chasm of fear that is the Gatekeeper Video Premier week on 20JFG. First stop on this advent calender of destruction is ‘Serpent’.

Serpent is a soundwave created by group of other-dimensional mystics, immaculately designed to paralyse unexplored areas of the human psyche with fear and delight. Upon launch from the wave playback device, it will burrow its way down to the spinal column, where it will take control of the human body by injecting the Front 242 serum directly into the nervous system. The subject will contort wildly in dancefloor context, whilst experiencing disturbing visions of scenes from large-boxed VHS horror films which were never made. This EP is literally a killer.

Gatekeeper – Serpent

The Giza EP is out this week on Merok, a VHS of all the videos is available on Hippos in Tanks. Keep it tuned to 20JFG for the others…..

The Emperor Machine return with album number trois with much rippling of synths, bulbous polymorphic cloudscapes punctured by the stabbing points atop the Martian radio masts and sonic batshit accounts of the interstellar clashes of lunar violence between moon-monkeys and the giallo Saturn marshalls, lost in space and time forever where no-one can hear them scream.

“Dave Gent” is pure vintage synths quaking on the burning cold surface of the frozen tundras of Pluto, an Assault on Moon-Unit 13 by invisible but deadly lifeforms – a tense scene of stealthy combat played out across the reflective visor of a spacesuit, shattered and dripping with blood that floats out in zero-G globules glistening amongst the stars.

The Emperor Machine – Dave Gent

For yet more organic spacefear, exchange funds for the excellent “Space Beyond The Egg” LP and check the awesome video for recent 12″ “Kananana” by director Cassiano Prado.

Faze Action travel back in time to 1978 to hijack Osé’s Orgasmachine and ride it back to the year 2525. With the chrome-plated funk of Kano, the ‘cisco strut of Sylvester and the vocal pattern of The Supremes locked inside a super-computer, “Stratus Energy” is formed which spontaneously transporting the Mayan transcedental third eye formations of Latin America and the ghostly wooden bangle-beats of deepest Africa to the surface of a far-flung planet in a disco dimension.

“Danae’s Journey” is a disco-expedition across silver sands on a backdrop vista of purple palm trees and golden pyramid clusters, the arduous journey of a princess on her faithful cyber-augmented camel to her beloved robot prince.

Faze Action – Danae’s Journey

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Here is a sweet mixtape of jacking summertime murder and mayhem from demonic synth brigadiers and best mates of Michael Myers, GATEKEEPER. Best listened to with blood-filled ears.

GATEKEEPER – Summer Hits Mixtape

Everyone in the esoteric network knows that the yearly accounts of many a big firm are signed with human blood. We have been too busy to deal with this kind of thing, small fries as it were. But since the meltdown in the global financial system, a few cultist leaders in the top echelons of the corporate world have decided to step up their ante, fearing that the collapse of their shares is a punishment from a forever hungry God Mammon furious at the lack of tributes piling at his bloated feet. Hence the reports about squads of black-clad goons rounding up people in the streets, and driving them to those frightful towers of power with roofs covered in pentagrams, to be tortured, and dismembered, their life forces offered by frenzied executive boards as a late sacrifice to those sneering deities, oh please sort out our balance sheets and purify our toxic assets, powerful ones.

Appalled by this massacre, and well aware of the impossibility of using such means to turn the wheels of a financial catastrophe for which very human lust and greed are more to blame than the designs of the supernatural, we decided to take a night train to Victoria lugging bulky leather suitcases packed with the usual set of remedies, Gurkha knives and custom-made revolvers loaded with silver bullets, ancient scrolls covered in spells of vanquishing. We are now back after a night which was somewhere in between the Evil Dead, Wall Street and Die Hard, weary but satisfied with a job well-done, Having stashed the sacred weapons in the cellar, I am off to the launderette with a big bag full of blood-splattered clothes. I leave you with some songs I was playing in my iPod while fulfilling the role of a wrathful God across pristine corporate halls, enjoy!

Chicago’s finest GATEKEEPER continue enthralling us with their macabre reveries, blood-curdling sound vistas of cancerous urban landscapes you can actually breakdance to if you are our kind of guy. Bring out the knives.

GATEKEEPER- Optimus Maximus

Rude 66 makes filthy electro and acid tinged cold-blooded industrial music with ghoulish gusto, it’s not a coincidence that his new album is called ‘Sadistic Tendencies’. The tune we are posting today is a glorious piece of high-energy undead disco which would have surely made all those meatwagon party leeches at the beginning of Blade spin delighted under blood-spurting sprinklers.

Rude 66- No One Had a Clue

Cheers to Simon Thisisnotanexit for the tip.

Chicago macabre squad GATEKEEPER fulfil your 20jazzfunkgreats’ thirst for the nocturnal with another black morsel of thrills and kills. Their music embodies all that we like about 1980s cinematic suspense, paranoid hallucinations, a phantasmagoria of green lights and ectoplasmic mist seeping through multiple fracture lines on the thin walls of reality, you can of course see the long shadow of one true master John Carpenter projected over the icy electroid landscapes and obsessive synth melodies painted on damp concrete with sounds made of black leather, cursed silver and blood-splattered celluloid. A knock on your door, look through the peephole to face an empty corridor, unlock it to find a parcel wrapped in coarse brown paper laying at your feet, the chaotic diaries of a detective who disappeared while investigating a string of child abductions, scant evidence hinting at the existence of a dark conspiracy, listen to “Final Approach” and know that this is the music of the horror that awaits beyond should you decide to step into the dark alleys where the ghastly truth awaits.

GATEKEEPER- Final Approach

Great streams of fiery white light, much like dragons from Heaven bought us into contact with Oneohtrix Point Never. We were instantly transfixed like rabbits in the headlights of the apocalypse once the stuttering repetitions pulsated from the dark planets in the shadowy star system that these knights of new age synth happenings reside in.

Oneohtrix Point Never – A House in Rasinari

“A House In Rasinari” is all glittering harmonies, various beautifully synchronized sounds rising from spray from the waves of the sea on the Moon. It spirits through time and space with an ethereal air of arch knowingness – the world and all its people thinking the same thoughts, moving in the same collection of gestures, the sound bleeding into different streams of consciousness through osmosis, sliding cold across deserts and crevice-littered vistas, weaving through inverted snow-capped mountain ranges. It reaches an all encompassing existence until like a sun exploding supernova, it fades out in waves of undulating energy – all caught as a glint in the collective eye of Tangerine Dream.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Soft Program (You Knew)

OPN then capture the same feelings on ‘Soft Program (You Knew)’ that maybe Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom had when they gave cosmic birth to “Days Of Mars”; the slight feeling of creeping dread at the sight of wolves dashing slow motion through icicle forests, splashes of blood across the white walls of undiscovered caves, forks of phosphorous blue lightning striking glass structures in desolate wastelands, the sun setting upon fields of deceased Nephilim and foretold planetary alignments in future years of war.

Support your local musician, in the sense that we live in OPN’s neighbouring galaxy – go unto the website, these lo-fi DIY astronauts need your help in spreading the spacial gospel of inverted clockwork pyramid soliloquies.

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.