We are celebrating Upset The Rhytm’s US tour with a bunch of glorious exclusives from artists that shall be participating in the jaunty shindig, beautiful stuff and much much love to Chris, Claire and Brian ‘tunes’ Miller. Remember:

This Friday (3rd July): New York at Monster Island Basement

Saturday 11th July: Los Angeles at the Smell

Sunday 12th of July: San Francisco at the LAB

Check here for more info, and for Christ’s sake, DON’T MISS OUT and TAKE MUCH LOVE TO THE SHOWS.

We begin with the High Places-related The Urxed. Gardening After Dark is like listening to Technotronic while playing hide n seek across blooming forests illuminated  by Japanese lanterns, stop for a second and you will see the pale ghosts of dead children beholding your game from the distance with a smile in their thin lips. Eerie fun is where it’s at, if you don’t believe me go and ask Calvin Johnson.

The Urxed- Gardening at Night

Lucky Dragon make deceivingly intense transcendentalist gamelan music which burrows a hole under your ribcage, slides across layers of flesh, fat and muscle without rupturing a single blood vessel and reach a cowering heart they proceed to massage with delicate and slender fingers. Moments of breathless warmth ensue. Aww.

Lucky Dragons- Open Melody

Former Ghosts are people from Xiu Xiu, This Song Is A Mess But So Am I, & Zola Jesus. The term haunted balladry gets hurled around with too much abandon in modern music journalism, but these people really do own it, and then some. If you have sat in your bedroom surrounded by the machinery of a world which continues operating furiously ignorant of your suffering, and then looked up to see a crack in the clouds through which a wisp of sun shines for a second, to make everything even more painful, then you know what I mean. Cheree Cheree.

Former Ghosts-Us and Now

Oh, btw we have opened one of those Twitter things. Follow us for brief insights into the hive mind of the 20JFG massive, and perhaps some goodies too.

On a primordial sea that stretches into the searing magenta horizon of the world’s end, a galleon constructed from the bones of nameless creatures long forgotten glides aimlessly, at times towards the apocalypse skyline and sometimes towards the distant mountain ranges of forbidden countries. From the cargo bay of this vast deathly freighter, Oneohtrix Point Never operate their lo-fi label of epic medieval robot & molten lava music – Point Never.

Infinity Window – Internal Compass

Infinity Window hail from a time before the big bang, when everything was just dust slowly merging into a particle storm that would then spark existence in a supernova crescendo of infinite swirling light, the beginning of something endless and beyond understanding. With every vibrating oscillatory gesture of the synths, new worlds are formed and destroyed.

At the end of the world, after dropping off the edge of the ocean, a miasmic plain of magenta pierces its way into your screaming soul and slick black tendrils snake around your limbs pulling you into a burning light of sinister warmth where all knowledge is bestowed upon you via your third eye before your grand cosmic death.

Smycken – Waterworld

Lo-fi label no.2, Psychic Malmö, weave searing/serene krautrock 2.O across humble cdrs. Newly released and self-titled Smycken album, goes down the serene route via an underwater system of connected caves where crystals embedded in the lichen covered rocks resonate a sound so pure and regally avant garde. “Waterworld” flays the skin of Manuel Göttsching across a backdrop of a blue and black battleground to later be used as a macabre flag waving atop a crumbling enemy fortress.

In keeping with the universal drone of Point Never and Psychic Malmö, we continue to that by now over-subscribed boarded up house in the dark woods, the one that Steve Moore splattered oily demon’s blood across and CFCF graffitied obscene images of sexually perverted synths writhing in some ancient Mayan dance routine. For Volume 4 the guys from Anticon pay a visit, bringing with them a slashed up swaggering schizo mix by Subtle, a doom-electro mix by Telefon Tel Aviv and Odd Nosdam’s field recording of a building being demolished by the soundsystem of the death metal club residing in the basement. The pick of the bunch for 2OJFG’s ears is the reworking from Lucky Dragons.

Genghis Tron – Endless Endless (by Lucky Dragons)

Lucky Dragons pull Klaus Schulze’s synths backwards through a vacuum of mirrors, then they prey silence for the coming of the vocoder-overlord before a procession of Swarovski drummer-boys dressed as Clockwork Orange droogs stride past in a pulsing fanfare of dazzling violence.

- – - -  -

One of the 20JFG crew shall be playing a few records at the Top Nice Late Night Special on Friday, you should come as it’s going to be totally awesome.

In this room of shadows the dust dances jaunty to a tune played by timid rays of light and Lucky Dragons, a strange Friday morning turns into a reverie, a flight over prairies different tonalities of golden shifting with the sunset, descending upon the strange coralline configurations of a city blinking at us from the darkness, Lucky Dragons’ new album ‘Dream Island Laughing Language‘ sounds like High Places kit rattling in the back of a van being driven by Philip Glass and Steve Reich up into a place of magic at the summit of a blue Appalachian mountain, or Dan Deacon dreaming placid of the place ‘Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees’, and that’s all you need to now, now, listen.

Lucky Dragons- I Keep Waiting For Earthquakes

The ghost of love stops to visit us as part of its journey between the pale provinces of longing and mourning. We haven’t seen Harmony Korine’s new film Mister Lonely, but it would seem from the brief dialogue excerpts included in its soundtrack, which Jason Spaceman and Sun City Girls have sewn with beautiful threads of ambient and folk, that it is concerned with the escape from one-self which aspiration and impersonation entail, this flight is one that appears to unfold upon a strange path scribbled in a slender font so that a secret story can be tattooed in the skin of haunted landscapes (whoah).

This is a magnificent soundtrack, perhaps the best we have heard recently with that of ‘There Will be Blood’, and one that draws the contours of a film we shall be watching soon.

Sun City Girls- Mr. Lonely Viola

Mus have accompanied me for a long, long time, like a revenant shrouded in the memories of past loves, lost friendships, bereavement and melancholy, music that has always managed to bring tears, or the prelude of tears, to my eyes and which, if it was to be left behind would perhaps make for a sunnier life, but also an emptier one. As I was writing the previous songs up, I thought of them and, when researching their current whereabouts, stumbled upon an album they released last year, La Vida, and one I didn’t know about maybe because of being here in a country which looks mostly eastwards, and inwards, or because of the way my own life has gone, leaving that ghost on the side of the road, under a grey Asturian sky and bitter rain. Either way, sliding inside Mus lush architecture of despair feels like coming back to a place that I haven’t visited for a while, and one where I wouldn’t want to live in, but which nevertheless lives inside me.

Mus- La Vida