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

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

Glass Candy – Life After Sundown (Diamond Vampires Remix)

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

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

Lazer Crystal – Love Rhombus (Instrumental)

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(image conjured by TommyBoy)

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

Richard Sen – Milky Disco Mix

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

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

We are always up for a hot compilation, and Lo Recordings will be delivering the goods in May with the third chapter in the Milky Disco series – “Milky Disco 2: Let’s Go Freak Out” (Volume 1.5 can be sourced via iTunes).

The dark-disco feast features Black Devil Disco Club restructured by Richard Sen and This Is Not An Exit’s cloaked alien lords, Brain Machine, plus some of 2OJFG’s favourite sounds; the hallucinatory long lost cousin to Debbie Deb, Nite Jewel, the murderous vocoders of Pink Stallone, the soaked by summer rain synths of Subway and the chilled dæmon funk of Gatto Fritto.

Chilled By Nature’s “Otherworld” is given the double re-rub treatment and renamed to “Otherness”, firstly by Windsurf who creates a syrupy dub of looping bleeps that bleed into each other through cascading bass. Black Mustang follows with a colder and denser mix, stealthily photocopying in black and white the main arpeggiated synth bassline from Chris & Cosey’s “This Is Me” over snapping syndrums and the less reckless parts from the chattering killing doll vocals of that Akira track. Both can already be found on 12″.

Chilled By Nature – Otherness (Black Mustang’s Frozen Moon Jam)

Also featured is a remix of stellar-chic beat vampires, Glass Candy, by elfin god of backward slow motion disco epics Johan Agebjörn. Its pretty rare that Glass Candy get officially remixed, so its nothing short of perfect when the remixer is an acolyte of the nu generation of ambient disco, a fellow who can stand alongside luminaries of the darklights like Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and Gavin Russom.

It all starts off very familiar with a subtle shattered echoing glaze, transporting Ida No to the vast hallways a mile under the surface of Mars. Then the song is dragged into a sound vortex, colours inverting and synths polarizing, singed by stray laser-beams. New vistas of jagged red rock are formed by the corrosive acidic beats and pulses of the deconstructed original.

Glass Candy – The Chameleon (Johan Agebjörn Remix)

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Cargo in Shoreditch, London hosts the release party for “Milky Disco 2″, on Sunday April 12th.

LIVE: BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB
DJS: SOFT ROCKS + RICHARD SEN + BLACK MUSTANG + GATTO FRITTO + JOHN POWER
6-3
FREE ENTRY!

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

Diamond Vampires – Lumiere

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glass Candy – Animal Imagination (Instrumental)

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

When I Say I’m in Love you Best Believe I Mean I’m in Love L-U-V

The Shangri La’s and The New York Dolls said it earlier, but they didn´t say it louder than the original yeah yeah punk rockers from Washington D.C. The revolution will wear a black shirt and a white tie, get jiggy with it like Sting in Quadrophenia (sorry, but that’s Ian’s own comparison), and hide a gun in its perfectly creased sta-prests.

Guy Debord via Fugazi and James Brown via Minor Threat in a reinterpretation of musical politics and black funk (isn’t that the same thing?) that puts to shame the efforts of a thousand angry contorting raging machines chilli peppers.

The topic here is that of sensual rebellion, remember that “fucking in the streets” point of the White Panther Manifesto, but with a romantic twist: for Ian Svenonius love is a shelter, a Vietcong tunnel where revolutionaries hide from the napalm barrages dropped by the Capitalist system and the Military-Industrial Complex, a safe place where the next move is planned and true freedom enjoyed, a province of the Nation of Ulysses, that imaginary country of which we are proud inhabitants.

BUY Nation of Ulysses

Glass Candy – Life after Sundown

I’m a sucker for Glam Rock, so when I first heard Glass Candy I got an erection for about a week.

Ida No has this crazy Germanic Bowie/Siouxsie thing going on, that makes her sound like she is on placement from a loon unit, while Johnny Jewel plays guitar in the exact same way you would imagine someone with a name like that too – like he was raised on Rodney on the rock and worshiped The Runaways.

Then they go all disco on me!! Life after Sundown should be on the ZE Records back catalogue. They got that entire new york post disco punk thing going on, only they done it like a ballad – really killer cool – like Grace Jones is liking the back of my neck and it’s making me get goose pimples….

It’s not crap disco punk like Radio 4, this is as authentic as your gonna get, even a crazy James Chance sax (via Roxy Music). Maybe they have been checking out Lizzy Mercier Descloux et all – who knows.

Ida still sounds like she needs mental help, but then so did Nico.

Glass Candy did a cover version of Josie Cotton – Johnny are you Queer?, which they start with -

When I Say I’m in Love you Best Believe I’m in Love L-U-V.

See what we did here? it’s like the Kevin Bacon game.

Glass Candy are on the awsome Troubleman Unlimited lable (hosts some more mp3s by Glass Candy – so go get em!) which has a wonderfull roster, well worth exploring. Buy stuff – these are the good guys.

BUY Glass Candy