When things are so disgustingly minimal that they are sometimes not even there, falling freefall into gloopy crimson love with it is all you can do. Its why Dopplereffekt rules so hard and darkly, its why I-f’s mastery of skeletal dance music elevated itself quickly away from the full teeth melting sickness of Electroclash back when all the Shoreditch DJ’s were dropping the two together in 2002. Minimal is one of the bestest.

Africans with Mainframes – Zodiac Rythms

But then work it like Africans with Mainframes (awesome name!) and chuck in an afro twist by gleaning the sheen off of Africa’s cityscapes in the year 2525 and coiling it meticulously around the wireframe of a track called “Zodiac Rythm”, and then you will have a beat workout that stutters with all the best hiphoppers and clicks like ADULT. mannequins got a pulse. Take aim with the weird noise gun and fling a metallically elastic buzzsaw sound periodically for maximum queasiness and disorientation.

Heroes of Greek discoplectic mythos, Hercules and Love Affair have seen fit to release the best track off of they’re sublime debut LP as the next single, namely “You Belong”. The standard album version sees vocal tradeoffs between the solarized pan-gender white ghost of aching emotional icey hell Anthony, and Nomi, the new wave chanteuse created from the dream of Shakatak collaborating with the RZA, crossed with the spirit that is released when Yazoo’s ‘Situation’ is played backwards in an empty New York warehouse.

Hercules & Love Affair – You Belong (Instrumental)

But the genius of the track with its subtle nods to the throbbing underbeat of Chicago, is even more so evident on the instrumental. The rudeboy bass undulates like a slick oil demon on a prowl that clashes in the most perfect of ways with the dubby piano riffs, illuminating iridescently in blackened corners of the clubs and creating polygonal cityscapes in the mind’s eye where everyone is dancing in a completely non ironic house disco way throughout the glowing streets.

picture supplied by Tommy Boy

Space – the final rhythm. Space is infinite as is the sound of the collage of torn circuitry that Reinhard Lakomy cascades across the cold blackness between Jupiter and Mars on bonkers Germanic sci-fi opus LP “Das Geheime Leben ~ Electronic”.

When Unicron was imploding with smaller but by no means lesser Transformers scurrying around his immense planet body in a classic struggle of the good vs the evil, he felt an aching sense of imminent defeat. Then the Matrix poured forth its blue flame of life and death and his horned head was blown clean off, flung to the cosmos with all sparks of life extinguished from it, left to forever orbit the Earth with dark dead eyes fixed on a planet that he should have consumed. Here is the sound that plays in his forgotten brainbox:

Reinhard Lakomy – Begierde Und Hoffnung

Or, echoing cybernetic death coils, sparkling nebulan Saturn rings unfurling from the gravity of its host into the negative pull of the Moon, beams of lazer strobes across a sky blighted by a solar storm, and nocturnal gatherings of the metal creatures who dwell in a sillicon jungle.

But back to the old skool:

Mr. Knuckles mixed this awesome 80′s pop-house crystal for Kevin Irving and it was released on seminal label Trax in 1987. It sits right in the middle of the 80′s pop explosion and the underground throb of the Chicago sound. Vocals on the subject of cool kids out on the dancefloors of dance-town loosely echo the demonic stomp of the video for “Thriller” if Diana Ross had replaced Michael at the last moment. Its like the Shakatak of an alternate universe (made up of actual real versions of the characters from Streets Of Rage) where they formed in a Martian acid house rave, then travelled back in time to the late 80′s and showed us all what bionic sound ninjas dipped in an acid and glitter broth can do to your disco limbs.

Kevin Irving – Children Of The Night

Check it in its 4 minute edited version for maximum pop-song appeal, and watch out for low flying piano loops made of jewel encrusted titanium that appear from nowhere between verses, twinned with rolling blasts of synthesised drums and heart-based bass.

Now onto our ’08 heroes of the moment, Hercs’ ‘n’ Loves’ (our pet name), who – after adding paradoxical neon-green voodoo trance to Goldfrapp, and stuttering hi-hat blue/purple pastel shards of ’89 bass & warp effect to Aeroplane’s new track, “Whispers” – is casting Chaz Jankel in gold and displaying him on a plinth in the middle of the VIP area in a Miami club, backlit with lurid pink light.

Chaz Jankel – Get Myself Together (Hercules HercHouse Mix)

There is a disco version of this remix too, a Studio 54-era bump ‘n’ flex-a-thon complete with pink-tracksuited trampolining ESG girls and Liquid Liquid rhythm-section back up. But its the glacial HercHouse mix that’s forming ice over our dance-brains and transporting us to sophisticated Arctic igloo-set club nites.

Its those special little sounds in Hercules & Love Affair remixes that make them so appealing; the “get-my-get-my-get-my” vocals puncturing this track like meteor fragments burning up in the stratosphere, or the cyber-Zulu chants on the Goldfrapp mix and then the warped totally tropical steele-drum effects on the Kathy Diamond assisted “Whispers”.

From the ‘Get Myself Together Remixes’ 12″, out soon on Tirk.

Crystal Castles! They have not graced these lowly pages for a while now (mainly due to the fact that they are getting heavy play on virtually every other blog) but now that the album, self-titled, is due March on Last Gang records, we can once again immerse ourselves in that familiar Gameboy-raping blitzkrieg refrain of looped bleeps and nasty little sinewy synth snaps.

Crystal Castles – Untrust Us (Album Version)

Now ‘Untrust Us’ opens the album, and yeah its been kicking around for a while, but with CC it doesn’t matter cos they slay you like V lizard men – the baby with the long snake tongue, thats what this track is, if it leaped out of its horrified mother’s arms and straight through the TV in the hospital recreation room where little Jimmy (now scarred for life) is playing Mario. Lizard baby eats Mario and spits out beats amongst the chewed up 8-bit bones. Love!

Channels 3×4! The album is named “Christianity” and is coming out, er, soon on the ever-excellent Summer Lovers Unlimited. But before all that fun there will be a CDR with a deluge of Johnny Jewel productions on it, not released on the ‘Christian Girls Like To Get Cut’ 12″ or anywhere else, limited and sought after. But until the full album hits allow yourself to be punched in the face by this LP demo:

Channels 3×4 – Meeting (Album Demo)

What manner of sex crimes must they perform on that keyboard to get it to make that horrid growling sound? Channels come on like a taut Marvel Comics panther, flexing its black-furred muscles before spreading its claws and springing forward at stroppy bored teenagers who just don’t know how lucky they have it. We like that Ch.3×4 keep it simple and direct; statement lyrics repeated for full effect barked over shimmering walls of hi-hat and robust synth booms.

SUPER BONUS!

Agh! The disco odyssey continues! The Hercules & Love Affair album is bound for 2008, complete with the most amazing discopic cut of fragile diamond beat n’ bass funk with new single ‘Blind’, coming February. You can check that on Beats In Space, but here we turn our attention to Hercules’ remixing skills:

Goldfrapp – A&E (Hercules & Love Affair Remix)

I cannot say enough good things about this, its too perfect IMO. Andy Butler whisks Goldfrapp away from their sunny springtime country garden lifestyle and throw them slap bang into the middle of a warehouse rave inexplicably sited in the middle of the African desert. Technotronic Zulu warriors from 1989 stab at them with spears in time to the stuttering beat and a giant gold cube suspended over the dancefloor emits liquid effects. But then at 3:30, nitetime falls and the rain washes over dark skinned shamen as they throw skulls into the sky that then transform into green ghost huskies, coiling Goldfrapp upto the Moon and beyond.