Gaia’s sister is made of concrete and chrome, and she has two faces. One face has a name, its name is Jane of the mixed use and the vibrant neighbourhood. The other face doesn’t have a name, it has many names (which is the same thing), you will see them graffitied in cul-de-sacs and tattooed in the arms of transients, projected in a new kind of sky by the glaring insect eyes of the beast that coils below.

Babylon, Metropolis, Gotham, Big Smoke, you know the archetype.

If Gaia operates like a homeostatic system, her dark sister acts viral, vertically and horizontally, spreading like a Sim City iteration loaded with assets designed by Zaha Hadid and H.R. Giger.

The modern tradition of Chicago dance arcana works as a collection of hymns to her metastasis and darkest symptoms: aberrant sex, murderous tendencies, noise pollution, harmful design, an addiction we can’t get out of, like in VALIS’ recent remix of Joie Noire, a beastly disco creeper sloppy and awesome like pheromone italo-lipstick smeared over Molly Millions’ retractable claws, closing in for the kill over a max contrast zoetrope.

Joie Noire – Kup Kup (Valis remix)

Get the album featuring the original from Desire Records.

Golden Birthday’s ‘Eqlipst’ illustrates this mutant dusk at the micro level, and in doing so, feels like the coda of Last Highway’s unreleased prequel: Arquette and Pullman content & quiet like 1950s dolls in a chiaroscuro mock-up, no saxophone, rather, a Talking Heads 12’’ spinning in a stainless steel turntable, lovers rock straight off the new wave swamp that Carly ransacked to become eternal. And then the sinister presence glides in like a Badalamenti spectre, a manta ray of weird vibes.

Something comes over them, glimpse of violence in their eyes, a psychic infestation.

Fade in black, or maybe red.

Golden Birthday – Eqlipst (feat Beau Wanzer)

This track, which features the very awesome Beau Wanzer on guitar, is included in the Illusions LP forthcoming in Catholic Tapes.

If Ariel Pink was to one day awake from the 1980s dizz-ney landscapes that inhabit his semi comatose mind where the sunbaked California streets lined with friendly faced anthropomorphized apple pie trees are alive with bleached, drooling beach bunnies in black ray-bans and pink scrunchies hitching rides with perma-tanned creeps in white suits driving busted up night rider cars that blast out tinny, warped Fleetwood Mac songs and compete with the sounds of the crazed day-glo freaks dressed up like various McDonalds characters (Grimace the Purple Blob on drumpads) playing Adam Ant covers with pastel keytars that emanate from the boulevard corners, chances are he might sound a little like Golden Birthday who in “Exposure” have crafted a wonky dew eyed, fuzz-synth bliss ballad that would be perfect for playing the penultimate scene in a future-fantasy John Hughes movie where inside an empty auditorium a beautiful robotized Molly Ringwald dances all alone beneath the light show of a rotating mirrorball reflecting off her chromium body in a sea of silver balloons, before running out into the night air to find her beloved for a midnight kiss in the pixelated pink fog.

Golden Birthday – Exposure

Recently there’s been a stupid wealth of goodness drifting out of Canada; the slo-mo disco of Tuxedomask, the black lipped Kate Bush, marble floor murder chic of Parallels, and the shamanic gabba rhythms and jagged trance waves rode on by Basketball. Babe Rainbow is another magnificent sea-shell washed up on our shores, except when we put our ears to this shell we don’t hear the serenity of the sea, but the cavernous, bombastic sound of inverted dubstep cave recordings documented beneath an oppressive futuristic mega city that constantly rumbles above with the noise of titanic machines in the midst of a apocalyptic takedown.

Babe Rainbow – Popcommon

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Our heart kin, Salem, have been good enough to stitch together for us a disarming patchwork of haunted juke hall malevolence, cave crunk atmospherics, brain breaking tekno noise, and crackling transmissions from a childhood spent floating down beautiful starlit rivers in the constant glare of hidden monsters. Thank you smoke.

Tracklisting:::
1-PEARL – Pearl’s Dream
2-NEOPHYTE – I will have that power
3-DJ NATE – I’m a Burn
4-DJ NATE – Ghostmix
5-YOUNG CREAM – Angie Juke
6-AiDS 3D – Back Once Again (Forever)
7-THA POPE – Track 41
8-UNKNOWN – Track 20 Chicago Juke
9-NEOPHYTE – Catastrophe
10-THREAT MISSES – Juke that Girl

Salem XXJFG Mix

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Lastly Dummy Magazine recently asked XXJFG’s gum chewing, back of the bus sista blog So Bones to make them a mix which is now available for all those who may wish to hear Britney Spears vomit and chant over a black-funk forest floor of twitching stripper limbs alongside various other goldplated fidget funk robo-workouts. CLICK HERE and N-joy.