Whether your with Dunbar on music and dance evolving as mass social grooming, Darwin and his strutting peacock, or feel dancing and music is tickling the brain in ways nature cannot, dancing is a part of our humanity and has been for a very long time. 2011 was a good time for music you could dance too…

Lindstrøm : De Javu When you play a Lindstrom track in your dj set its always difficult to follow. It’s normally difficult to know what to play it after too becuase, lets face it, no one else makes records that sound like this. The new album Six Cups Of Rebel is out on Small Town Supersound in February.

Lindstrøm - De Javu

Buy : De Javu

James Fox: New Jack Swing James Fox laces pristine mid-tempo dance with some silky new jack swing vibes, projecting us inside an utopia of white and honey which is to mainstream house music what romance is to porn.

We are believers in the possibility of a non-fucked up after-hours club where the tribes congregate to squeeze the last ounce of physical sweetness of the ephemeral night, rather than gurn their way into infinity. If that place exists, this is its theme tune.

James Fox – New Jack Swing

Buy: New Jack Swing

SebastiAn: Love In Motion Feat. Mayer Hawthrone  More Stones Throw related goodness by way of the loudest Banger on Ed’s roster pitching Patrick Cowley’s Lift Off Down to an unmistakably Purple Oneesqu slowed clap groove.

SebastiAn – Love In Motion Feat. Mayer Hawthrone

Buy : Love in motion

Machinedrum: Come1  Riding last year’s bubbling up of Juke and snapping it into a piano-house ghost-ballad workout.  With an opening the hits right in the feet and then proceeds to gently let up over the next six minutes Come1 is the reverse of most dancefloor equations.  Drawing you in with it’s hedonistic intensity from the off then taking you on a tour of its sorrow.

The whole album’s a near effortless reminder of how good dance albums can be.  building upon a Footwerk foundation to deliver everything from a dancefloor Boards of Canada (Now U Know Tha Deal 4 Real) to one of the most cathartically maudlin pieces of music this year in Lay Me Down (which has the audacity to not actually be the last track on the album).

Machinedrum – Come1

Buy: Room(s)

Graphics: Adjectival E Well Rounded are quickly and efficiently becoming a treasure of the Brighton Vs. Hove demilitarised zone.  Graphics is the second release on offshoot, Well Rounded Individuals and is a towering example of Fractured British Dance Music.  A sliced vocal looped and buried under fabric-thin waves of synth washes haunts the intricate drum programming and sweeping siren-calls that interleave and enchant.  Which is not to say it’s adverse to a break and a surging refrain, that’d be silly.

Graphics – ‘Adjectival E’

Buy: Adjectival E / OK Rainbow

Den Haan: Gods From Outer Space Bandying “macho disco” around like leather, sweat, and guitar riffs were about to go out of fashion Gods From Outer Space is probably more fun that you can actually ever have in a club, but with this as your soundtrack it would be impossible not to try.

Den Haan – Gods From Outer Space

Buy: Gods From Outer Space

D/R/U/G/S: Connected Connected doesn’t waste much time bringing its snippets of Techno and House to bear on the floor.  Far too much has been written about ghostly reconfigurations of former genre glories and the pillars that this stands upon are amply described by the track itself in the opening minute and a half.  Exercising aCraig-ian approach to the build, the drop finally arrives and the euphoria is suitably unleashed.  Not ones to paddle in the pool of anti-intellectual hedonism, 20JFG are satiated by the wiring machine ballet that seems to underpin the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE HANDS IN THE AIR PIANO HOUSE that forms the back end of the track.

D_R_U_G_S – CONNECTED

Buy: Connected

Magic Touch: I can Feel the Heat  Imagine a unicorn leaping out of an original pre-hipster/Urban Outfitters post-everything appropriation 1980s t-shirt, into a rainbow pond of everything that’s awesome about disco music, and out again into the garden of eternal delights that lies beyond, where it dries itself with an almighty shake, droplets of joy splattering all over in a kaleidoscopic rain which is photographed with minimum exposure, the ensuing images (or their emotional equivalent) are then pressed on vinyl for the whole world to dance to.

Magic Touch – I can Feel the Heat

Buy: I can Feel the Heat

Ital: Ital’s Theme Ital soundtracks the muscular leaving party for a space marine squadron. A glimpse out of battered portholes onto the uniquely specular beauty of crystalline asteroids, for a moment…before the pounding of the room draws their attention back to the dancefloor with a heaving, looping ecstatic roll of wave after wave of 23rd century Italo instrumentals.

Ital – One Hit

Buy: Ital’s theme

Death in Vegas: Trans-Love Energies Richard Fearless returned with a 7+ minute track referencing the soundtrack to New York’s The Loft and the UK Acid House scene featuring the considerable vocal talents of Katie Stelmanis of Austra, and we couldn’t stop playing it. The only thing that could have made it better would have been a 30min extended remix. The rest of the album wasn’t bad either.

Death in Vegas – Your Loft My Acid

Buy : Trans-love Energies

Austra : Beat and the Pulse EP This Domino records early 2011 release of haunted industrial folk has, deservedly, has stayed with us all year.

Austra – Beat And The Pulse (Extended Version)

Buy : Beat and The Pulse

Hans Tanza: An Audience with Hans Tanza Nutjob consultant extraordinaire Hans Tanza convenes a board meetingto discuss the quarterly impacts of psy-trance flotations on the  futures market of electro-acoustic academia circa 1976

Hans Tanza – The Insight Generator

Buy: An Audience with Hans Tanza

Mi Ami: Dolphins EP Mi Ami’s vessel plunges through a forest of cyclopean futurist hulks, its distorting, tape-bent beats pounding off the walls.  High above Gavin Russom watches from a former car insurance office (now sans walls) and smiles to himself in the knowledge that there are others.  Glancing upwards for a moment he catches the forms of Derrick May and Carl Craig huddling around a fire, lit on an equally exposed floor of an old financial institution. Down below the vessel nears the source of the sound as light cascades from the rising sun.  Hundreds of people throb around a fire giving thanks to those who came before, those who provided us with such riches.  A badly painted cloth hangs from an old piece of corporate art and reads: ‘Things should be made anew before they are destroyed again.’

Mi Ami – Sunrise

Buy: Dolphins

Virgo: Resurrection (reissue) To call this life-changing is no exaggeration. Imagine the most intimate moment of ‘It’s You’ by ESP’ time stretched across a 3 hour movie about Jamie Principle floating on the ethereal plane and perhaps you’re getting there.

Virgo Four – The Mop

Buy: Ressurrection

Daphni: JIAOLONG001 While we found Caribou’s recent album to be not as up our street as the previous few we did very much enjoy the Daphni remix project which re-visited the gratuitous psychedelic elements we loved about Caribou’s sound.

Cos-Ber-Zam – Ne Noya (Daphni Mix)

Buy : JIAOLONG001

Wheez-ie: All Werked Up EP Texan Juke desperado Wheez-ie’s  veers between hardcore footwork punishment and futuristic heartbreak – ‘Leave her Alone’ hovers above the battlefield like the X-Men’s Storm, convening from the summer skies a purple hurricane of emotion at whose eye spins a silver music box delicate ballerina.

Wheez-ie – Leave Her Alone

Buy: All Werked Up

Xander Harris: I want more than Just Blood/Urban Gothic If you like your drum programming hand built from the Dopplereffekt textbook of absolute rigidity,  and your synth lines played straight from the pained claws of The Phantom of Paradise, then Xander Harris is the pick for you.

Xander Harris – I Want More Than Blood (High Heels Remix)

Buy: Urban Gothic/I want more than Just Blood (sold out)

Innergaze: Shadow Disco Innergaze take us in a strut through a parallel land where mirrors, glitter and dances are the holy sacraments of a mainstream religion whose father  is Liquid Liquid (on a dubby bender), the son is Daniel Wang and the holy spirit Arthur Russell. On its journey it collects a thousand scuzz tropes and redistributes them across a skeletal groove so lazy, it makes E.S.G sound like a clinical minimal techno project devised by the appointed keepers of metronomic purity. Spectral hedonism, that’s our new calling.

Innergaze – Shadow Disco

Buy: Shadow Disco.

Factory Floor: Various 12’’ Factory Floor strip dance music down to its bare components, and configure them with the grim nonchalance of a murder squad retained by the black ops soviet. Synth loops blast like machine language glyphs straight off Nitzer Ebb’s and Front 242 body music usage dictionary.  The motorik beats read like input-output flows in a 5 year programme of industrial production that measures results in terms of sweat. The shards of distortion are cruelly designed to produce collateral damage, demoralization and mass surrender.

Factory Floor – Lying (Chris Carter Remix)

And then there’s this…

Buy: Blast First 12; Two Different Ways.

Zomby: Dedication Zomby  buries us in a frozen dead ocean, where we float surrounded by a constellation of discrete music molecules floating in stasis. They recall the past (massively compressed Jarre, blocks of primary colour which are the slices of a Jan Hammer gradient) but aren’t it. Rather, evolved echoes, nano-designed DNA blueprints for a future fauna of Cupertino Panthers and fractal wing dragonflies.

Zomby – Mozaik

Buy: Dedication

Lumpen Nobleman: Grusha Lumpen Nobleman’s (no link, alas) is all about the deepness, the abyssal and the sub-dermal, ochre drones awesome like the ornate dome of a defiled Orthodox monastery breaking through the mist, grim commandoes in ghillie suits pulling their best Snake moves up the snowy hill, an inhuman metronome ticks away at the heart of the ruins, counting down the time left for the start of the paranormal firefight.

Lumpen Nobleman – Scaling the Yablonois

Buy: Grusha..

FWY: Ventura EP We continue our love affair with Edmund Xavier and his FWY’s trucker techno-gamelan escapades. Watch out for the title track’s superb melancholy drone, like Cormac McCarthy’s existential cowboy gazing into a neuromantic dead-channel sky, a moment before stepping past the borderline.

FWY – Ventura FWY

The Passenger: \_| The Passenger’s \_|  combines Armando’s optimistic bass rumbling, Orbital’s playful chimes, Wendy Carlos binary fairy-telling and the sort of acid riffs that Plastikman would have come up with if he had been commissioned to update Maurice Sendak’s bibliography, in collaboration with Paper Rad.

The Passenger – Entitled One

Buy: \_|

Pye Corner Audio: Black Mill Tapes Vol.2. The first post witch house record? Made by someone who probably never heard of witch house? Slow techno and radiophonic electronic passed through a hauntology filter to create one hell of an immersive experience. Why this isn’t on everyone’s albums of the year list is mystifying.

Pye Corner Audio – Electronic Rhythm Number Seven

Buy : Black Mill Tapes Vol.2.

Munch Munch rule hard. We have been going on about them for years now, and are happy to announce that they will finally be releasing an album soon, huzzah! There is also a 7” coming out in Fear and Records, and Cyclorama is included in it.

And what is Cyclorama?

Perhaps the last 20JFG pop hit of the year,  an exhilarating sleigh ride down pixelated hills- think 3D Mario Kart if Shigeru Miyamoto was into the United States of America, a odyssey of progressive verticality dodging glittering pines and befuddled badgers, unexpected drop down a cliff, inertia propels us into the pure air for a moment of perfect quiet when we stare at the vast vistas of the psychedelic snow country these guys have lovingly drawn for us, but gravity rules here too, or so she thinks that uppity bitch, because as we start precipitating into the vertigo vortex, a slender unicorn picks us up and sends us soaring into the sky to the sounds of a perfect melody, pastoral scene of absolute euphoria decorating a t-shirt we wear under our skin and shines into our eyes.

Munch Munch- Cyclorama

And check out the video here.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/7825370[/vimeo]

I stumbled upon Silver Pines across the lands of the Interwebs, and the freezing wind of their beautiful stomp made my eyes melt and my throat ululate in that shriek which is the animal spirits of the 20Jazzfunkgreats way of communicating to the world just how cool things can get some times

You know how Little Claw represent mother nature at their Khali the merciless gnarliest, a pack of hungry wolves chasing a deer across forsaken landscapes, sacrifices in the altar of life which get paid in blood? Well, Timefather is the other side of the coin, limpid winter sun rays shining upon a litter of cubs as the awake in their bed of branches and bones, exploding into a million glimmers upon the drops of dew that pelt their fur, powerful music written in the tracks criss crossing the snowed-upon skin of the Earth. Very powerful stuff.

Silver Pines- Timefather

Timefather is included in the Forces EP, which you can get from Light Lodge. Here you have the video for Invitation to Surf, included in a soon to be released 7, also on Light Lodge. *this is brilliant*

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/7511949[/vimeo]

And how is this for a bonus? Lindstrom has produced a 40 minutes long version of Little Drummer Boy for Rough Trade, which you can get here. Rough Trade have kindly sent us a shorter edit of this, and it is totally amaze. It sounds as if Wendy Carlos had produced the soundtrack for the psychedelic toys that haunt Tetsuo in Akira to begin their ominous procession to a crystal manger where a laser-eyed baby jesus await for their tribute, levitating over his cradle. God wouldn’t have it any other way.

Lindstrom- Little Drummer Boy (Edit)

Boredoms are actual magicians spewing forth unto the world rainbow acid oceans of spazzed out, foaming mouth free jazz noise and haywire tribal drum workouts that sound and feel like the threat of legions of stampeding war elephants charging towards you in endless waves of destruction, and so we hope you can relate and understand if our eyes watered up just a little bit when we discovered Super Roots 10 was heading our way, and that one of our most beloved purveyors of milky-way, kosmische soul, Lindstrøm would be conjuring up a remix for the release, a mean task if ever there was one.

Well DJ Lindstrøm, as he’s known here, has done the unthinkable and somehow turned every bodies favourite Japanese freakniks, the ruling masters of brain shredding drum gabba into avant disco Gods fit to sit on gold leaf thrones and watch as throngs of once restless Studio 54 phantoms finally ascend through candy cotton clouds into the Heavens to throw the mother of all parties all thanks to them. What starts as a twitchy, fidgeting no wave art-funk track gradually transforms into the epic sound of Chic having a full on freak out, accompanied by discordant wailing harpies shrieking like crazed ADHD muppets to remind you that in the midst of all the decadent synthetic strings and silken yacht synths that what you’re listening to is undoubtedly Boredoms.

Boredoms- Ant 10 (Lindstrom Remix)

Sticking around in the giant rotating mirrorball palace in the sky, for a while now I’ve been meaning to write about La Parisien, an almost forgotten 80s euro classic from Danielle Deneuve and perhaps one of my all time favourite italo / hi-nrg songs ever. Listening to this frothy, mighty addictive piece of breathy computer pop it’s easy to imagine Sally Shapiro as a young girl singing this in front of her bedroom mirror, a handbrush in one hand, and a fistful of fairy dust in the other.

Danielle Deneuve – Le Parisien

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As one of the XXJFG crew spins records at Top Nice Late Night Special in London, another will be doing the same at Sausage Party in Nottingham. Needless to say if you’re around you should be there cause it’s going to be immense.

And just to remind you all our XXJFG night in London at the ICA is happening very soon, so spread the word and and come make friends.

Check out the obligatory Facebook events page.

Love Saves the Day (facebook group here) is back on Saturday at Micro, just by Digital in Brighton’t Seafront. Dan Nixon is the man leading in this glorious return, with the 20JFG crew eagerly involved, and excited. Some of the most joyous dancing your caring ‘n’ sharing nerds have subjected the world to this year took place at this underground rendezvous, but in its previous, not optimal venue. Well, we have been to Micro and it’s definitely the perfect spot for everyone to swing to the sweetest sounds of eternal disco: we are talking about the old skool Brooklyn shit, italo extravaganza, balearic bliss, the nouveau kosmische wave and even some minimal for your ass, you can’t go wrong with this shit. All of this probably under a ceiling covered in helium balloons. So you know kids, everyone get down, it’s a love thing.

History Clock is a new source of vinyl goodness run from a Dr. Phibes style vault in the centre of a pyramid somewhere far beneath London by Nathan Gregory Wilkins, Johnny Burnip and Tiger Timing. They say they are devoted to ‘modifying obscure musical relics from the distant past to better serve the eccentric tastes of the modern discotheque. Style-wise History Clock will be covering rock, primitive electronics, disco, soundtracks, psychedelia and just about anything else that feels good‘.

They are definitely talking the talk, listen to Fitzcarraldo Variations now, because they are walking the walk too.

They also got Susumu Zongamin to design their record sleeves for some extra awesomeness. What a dude.

Fitzcarraldo Variations- Gamma Model

Or German prog wizards Birth Control pulling a total Aguirre in their bloodthirsty search for the psychedelic funk Eldorado. Total kraut glossolalia, a percussive stream of conciousness onslaught and zenta riffarama somewhere in between the MC5 and Funkadelic. Yes, they are talking the talk, and we are dancing the dance, you can totally imagine the Loft crowd flying high on this one some decades ago.

We are celebrating a psychedelic mass under red lights, impressionistic splatter and burning shadows, and the launch of Lindstrøm’s epic opus ‘Where you Go I Go Too’ on suitably heavy double vinyl by finally unleashing upon you one of the best remixes of the year.

Lindstrøm- Grand Ideas (Johan Agebjörn)

Where genius designer of synthetic dreams, Johan Agebjörn, takes Lindstrøm’s Icarus-like Grand Ideas over frosty tundras, through foreboding chrome clouds and into a portentous summit where the spirits if ice rendezvous for a Sabbath of relentless spiritualist techno, stomping on the ground to summon white lightning bolt and black thunder, Johan says he felt particularly inspired when he came up with this, I reckon he was indeed, because this is the sound of drum machines talking in tongues, a conduit for powerful forces which our senses were not really evolved to behold.

Johan is DJing around the UK this week, catch him at these excellent shindigs in London and Nottingham.

Its an eternal question, one that will only be answered in some synthetically sanitised dystopian future, many millennia from now, directed by Ridley Scott and starring a reanimated Kurt Russell. You heard it here first.

Ilya Santana – From Uranus To Mercurius

Ilya Santana will be one of those great synthesiser composers of the classic italo-renaissance period of the early 21st Century that will be reconstructed into powerful circuitry to record the soundtrack to this sci-fi opus.

As we can see from his most recent EP, ‘Arcanus’, Ilya Santana has the true spirit of finely tailored Italian disco coursing through his central processors, by spinning together an elegant multi-layered ode to the planets and the elegant movement between them. Many melodies interlace nicely across each other with enough reverb to keep the boosters running on cruise-control so the real power can be channelled through to the lasers that pan across the blackness of space in lines of increasingly subtle structures and pastel colouring.

In Space no-one can hear you gasp at Greatness

Lindstrom’s debut album (not counting the 12″ collection, ‘Its A Feedelity Affair’) is about to hit the disco loving world in August and it does not disappoint. Packed into these 3 grand totems of awesome motorik-balearian lullabies is enough stuttering synth shimmers and driving polymorphic basslines to saturate the listener in icy discotasms, beamed through a thousand points of light from far off planets where higher consciousnesses create landscapes of thundering metropolis with only the gift of sound.

Lindstrom – Grand Ideas

Grand Ideas indeed, an idea where Jan Hammer has assimilated ‘Ghost In The Shell’-style with the sentient robot Cerrone, and that collective ‘they’ have collaborated with John Carpenter to create a bleeping soundtrack to camo-clad mercenaries fleeing the wastelands, ever vigilant that the diseased zombie hordes are fast approaching and hungry for flesh. But at the same time this scenario is reflected in the lurid purple puddles of acid rain that have collected in the craters created by the nuclear firestorm of the old days, and in this alternate plain these zombies are now jet black panther-like liquid creatures, playfully chasing the silver suited mercenaries with the singular aim to dance they’re troubles away under the irradiated green skies.

So yeah, Lindstrom goes the way of everyone’s hero Vangelis, and creates a 3 track album that is mixed, thus creating a whole new concept for alien living – and yeah, thats the next track rumbling into existence at the end of ‘Grand Ideas’ – be good and buy ‘Where You Go I Go Too’ upon its release, look, its pretty!

PS-

If you are in Glasgow tonight you should go to this shindig our pals from Huntleys & Palmers Audio Club are putting on, we shall be hopefully coming up for something fun soon, huzzah!

I think this might be a reason why the Electrocla$$h bubble, which merged a number of 80s cliches with the coldest, most detached attitude one can think of fell flat in its face after a few coked-up parties, while the kosmische wizards, all those disco nerds out there digging up obscure gems from the vaults, and of course our Italian soul brothers go from strength to strength, their music has inherited not just the warm analogic sound of the 80s, but also its romantic passionate feel, that’s the reason why even in our forward looking-ness we embrace their talented and honest nostalgia fully, the past becomes present and future in the best of ways, let these garish sounds envelop you in a cloud of pastel colours and neon flashing, and dance into the light.

‘My Occupation’, a compilation of 80s disco hits by Chaz Jankel from Ian Dury and the Blockheads fame which has recently been released by very nice & caring label Tirk, synthesises in a nutshell what I was talking about above: open this box and be blinded by a treasure trove of delightfully crafted off kilter disco gems which glimmer with hedonistic energy and oh so 80s Fame-style individualistic competitiveness, just check out the lyrics of ‘Number One’, they would make Milton Friedman proud… funnily enough, I can’t think of a better environment to enjoy this killer than the collectivised environment of a sweaty disco dancefloor, party up and make it hot enough to melt the Berlin wall.

Chaz Jankel- Number One

As part of their 10th Anniversary, our favourite purveyors of vinyl delights, Juno, have commissioned a bunch of remixes of classic tunes, here is one, where you find the sorcerer of breath-taking kosmische tango-disco, Lindstrom, pull an Arthur, and pick a bouquet of blossoming flowers from the beautiful garden which is Imagination’s ‘Just an Illusion’, to then fill the gaps with piano-key shaped silences and echoes, the outcome is a reverberating rainbow-coloured cloud of 80s Lover’s Rock Soul raining pink teardrops over the hairy heads of your wide-eyed-in-their-astonished-delight 20JFG nerds.

Imagination- Illusion (Lindstrom Vocal Remix)

Finally, Aeroplane, who amazed us beyond what is radically possible with his lovely S/T 12” goes on to remix Balearic stalwart Coyote’s ‘Too Hard’, the result is another slice of heavenly disco that should be soundtracking your most beautiful romantic moments, sitting by the Miami waterfront holding hands in an emotional interlude as the neon lights draw imaginary laser constellations in the black sky, or french champagne spilled over the smooth sands of an Italian beach in the midst of which rests a red convertible like some toy abandoned by a Harryhausen style Greek Colossus, this is the sort of respectful, perfect, beautiful tribute to the spirit of the 80s we love, thank God we live in a world were music like this exists.

Coyote- Too Hard (Aeroplane Remix)

And let us finish paying homage to one true 80s icon, this is, thee Eddie Murphy, particularly as Beverly Hills Cop, remember those stone-washed jeans, high-tops and bomber jacket and how he rocked L.A. with wacky streetwise flair? well, he also dabbled into the music biz with the epic results you can hear below, perhaps this song is not the ultimate apex of electro-pop brilliance, but it still shines with the sort of euphoric charm I was talking about before, there’s something in those trebly synth melodies, dramatic lyrics about hedonistic jealously (think of it as Bagarre’s hyperkinetic brother…) and inane repetition which make my heart swell like fantastic Air Jordan pumps, *wheezes*, how sweet.

Eddie Murphy- Party All the Time

This post goes with a big holla at Piers Martin off Vice’s Electric Independence for the lovely mention last issue, much respect & thanks for fighting the good fight, always smooth.

VISUALLY

Check this out, awesome Videokitten put together a collection of computer animated films from 84-8, which is just the right thing.

HOTT

COMING UP

One of the 20JFG ones will be playing some records at the most excellent Dan Deacon/No Age/Gay vs You Upset the Rhythm gig in London on Friday, together with people from 13 Monsters & Where To Now. You should come.

You should also go to Gay Against You at the Greenhouse Effect in Brighton on Thursday and give Lorrie a kiss before she goes to the USA on holidays.

You should also DEFINITELY come to the Zombie Zombie gig in Brighton we are putting on with Dan and Lucy Tuesday next week- GREENHOUSE EFFECT 11TH DECEMBER- French horror dance party, in their own words:

We use Sound and Rhythm as a medium to explore the feeling of fear growing deep inside of you. You’ll go through different emotional stages with the analogic effects. The drumming will make your heart beat faster:”like in a horror movie when the car won’t start, you give it one last try

NEU! versus JOHN CARPENTER was always going to be ACE BLOODSPLATTERING MOTORIKK TIMES OUI? CHECK IT OUT, WAKING UP THE DEAD, STANDARD

Medicine and Duty and Tall One Behind support.

Get tickets (£5) in Resident, Rounder or Edgeworld

Putting the caring back into funeral since 2004.