Anyhow, Shadow of the Colossus is probably the best game I have ever played, and I recommend it to all of you with a taste for the grandiose, poignant and beautiful, roll down the hills of its world on a horseback lonely, chasing after those lumbering and seclusive colossi you need to defeat if you are to bring your beloved back to life. Never have I felt so sad when defeating a ‘boss’ in a battle before, the moment before sinking my sword into the gleaming rune representing its life-force there is a moment of absolute and utter guilt, an awareness of the fact I am obliterating some of the magic which animates this old world for utterly selfish reasons, hence all those black tentacles shooting out of the Colossi’ corpses. This is of course a metaphor of what mankind has done with its environment more or less present in all the games mentioned before, and also in the beautiful work of Studio Ghibli.

All of which one could also connect to American Gods, where Neil Gaiman describes the final battle between the Old Gods of yore, those which have been forgotten and scrounge the back alleys of the modern world, starved of worship from a humanity which has found new divinities to believe in, celebrity, media, technology, the culture of the material.

It is perhaps an easier, more convenient world we live in, but sometimes it feels as if there was something amiss. That is the reason why some of us who have a particular inclination, a thirst for the spiritual but a distaste for the organisationally religious, to search for this old magic simmering through the pages of a book or the spell encrypted in the transmissions from a screen, the communal spirit that can animate a multitude dancing a good dance, or this music.

Rob(u)rang’s (also at discogs) music is fierce like a torrent of black tigers, primal like the tongue of Ougun to Mi Ami’s Papa Legba. Its sinuous percussive cycles bring to mind Olatunji’s drum magic and the tribal mass of the Boredoms, but also the progressive cadences of minimal techno at its hypnotic ritualistic best, there is an intense feeling of foreboding in those screeching horns, as if you were advancing into the psychedelic heart of darkness across a jungle of emerald, up hillocks of densely packed earth which are the decomposed bones of the old ones, then along furious streams and whirlpools where black shapes lurk, stare at you with indifference or perhaps hunger, eventually reaching a big wound on the land, a bottomless cliff from which this music leaps fearless, so do you.

Rob(u)rang- Voor Lukas (version)

This is a version of the final piece that will be included in Rob(u)rang’s album, to be released by Off. You can feel intuitively the ghosts of those sounds, flutes, clarinets, guitar, more percussions and voices that will eventually adorn its muscular body, but then it is perhaps now, this bare, when the intensity of its onslaught, inspired by Yoruba magic and the Voodoo, transpires more clearly, hits harder. We can’t wait to hear the final result in any case, hopefully deployed to devastating effect in the set of some adventurous DJ (Optimo should dig I think), because if there has been a recent place when your 20JFG dervishes have been lost in the radiance of the drum, it has been here.

Medicine and Duty continue their burning transition to some place which I can’t describe, which is your loss, because if I had the skills to put into words the sounds of their martial onslaught, then maybe the facets of a Hellraiser-style rubik cube would reconfigure in this screen sucking you into an alternative dimension where kraut rock fiends carve drumsticks off the worn wooden stocks of vietcong AK-47s and advance between rivers of lava as beheld through the lens of a bloodsplattered camera, warlock masters of the synthwave stormbringer slicing and hacking with the discipline of This Heat, past a steely wall of Spartan shields, pumped on sub dermal injections of oscillating oomph distilled from the bulking shadows of Silver Apples, Mars, warm leatherette and gnarly dubstep, yes, you would find yourself trading the ashy grounds of a universe of instinctive and violent dialectics which these dapper gentlemen rule from a throne of skulls, heroes incarnate of a Moorcock epic as yet unwritten. You wish I could put their music into words, you wish.

Keep going strong like a satanic hurricane boys.

Medicine and Duty- Jury-Rigged

Medicine and Duty will be playing at the Greenhouse Effect in Hove, Brightonia with rather aces A Middle Sex on the 9th of October.

I saw a tree shaken by the wind furious, its branches stretching feeble into the air like the bony hands of an emaciated white witch begging for a miracle from the elements. A trembling ray of sun was granted, and in the pool of light it created there was a glittering, but for an instant. I found a small stone of a green hue lying on the grass at the foot of this tree, which I put to my ear like it was a seashell far away from home, lonely.

This is what I heard.

Aja Rose Bond- The Flood

Perhaps the echo of a melancholy tale whispered into the green stone, sad surrogate for the ears of a lover, a long time ago, buried into the earth with other sediments, every single one of them hurting to tell a story. But this is the one I found, only because a finger of light pointed me in its direction. I put the stone in my pouch and walked away from the tree, I looked back afterwards and saw it standing uncertain in the grey distance, like a mourner grieving silent at a funeral for dead memories.

The sky stretched wide populated by a tumultuous army of clouds. I surveyed this battlefield from a vantage point at the summit of the smooth hill, and commanded my forces with a stick like the ghost of Napoleon, surrounded by a squad of scarred hussars, or a deranged orchestra director trying to harness the crazed winds into a symphony.

We fought to the last man, I remember with fondness a renegade corsair which sailed redoubtable towards the enemy lines, a lightning bolt fractured the sky when it crashed against their mighty formation. Repelled every time, its crew scanned the daunting opposition for a crack, grim eyed and dry lipped like mathematicians chasing after the tail of that elusive variable that would solve the ultimate equation. Defiant and proud they howled and roared, pulling ropes, unfolding sails, mopping blood from the deck and loading cannons, busy aides making their lady presentable for a date with the maker, one date for which she was running late.

They sank to find what they they were going to find, and this is what they sang as they dissolved into the mysteries beyond.

Medicine and Duty- Going Down With The Ship

I walked into the woods, but my path was interrupted by a forbidding fence of black barbed wire. I walked around its perimeter searching for some hole or gate, to no avail. I eventually came upon the fallen, rotting tree where I had started my circumnavigation, and accepted that if I was to continue this way, I would have to climb over spikes wicked like badly shaven hairs bristling demonic jowls, and this kiss would spill my blood. I was pondering upon what to do when I noticed the strange pattern in the fence. Odd objects, dead birds and flowers of faded colours, yellowed carcasses, mysterious debris lay impaled in it like notes purposefully arranged in the rigorous reticle of a music score.

I noted down those signs into a crumpled piece of paper which when reproduced into a player piano gave me the following song, and I present it to you now.

Zola Jesus- Nativity

This is both a message and a symbol of what must lay in the misty highlands beyond that fence, beautiful corruption I should avoid visiting now, least I never be able to return to this side of the world again.

The moon had spread silvery fingers over the woods when I found myself treading the ground of a cemetery with gravestones raising in crooked angles as if they were standing on tiptoe so as to better behold that stranger leaving a trail of comically white footsteps in a soil the consistency of ash, what began on stone continued pale bone inside the mouldy coffin down beneath. A crow croaked from its turret on the trees above and jumped into the still air drawing the silhouette of a crow on the white moon a beacon in the blackness of the night, and I saw less for an instant.

At the end of the cemetery stood a cabin and inside it a pile of books shrouded in dust, I went through their crumbling pages, my fingers tracing down family lines like a shadow lagging behind death, turning them into dust erasing the memories of those who had been born and lived and loved and hated and come to rest under this ground, still together and guarded in their sleep by silent inhabitants of the woods who would never forget, I am giving you their song now.

Revenge of Shinobi- Two Clutch

– - – - – - – - -

Aja Rose Bond is a mystery, we first listened to her in Art for Spastics. Most excellent Vancouver label Isolated Now Waves release her music.

Medicine and Duty are a fucking legend. Their new album, Flags and Cannons is the best yet. They will be playing in Le Malterie in Lille on the 22nd of March with John Fucking Sinclair. Finally someone they won’t be able to outstage? I doubt it.

Zola Jesus hails from Madison, Wisconsin and she has bewitched us. She is releasing 7”s in Die Stasi and Sacred Bones. Must. Hear. On. Black. Wax.

Revenge of Shinobi are frankly astounding. They are also based in Brighton and we shall see them supporting Black Dice at Audio on Sunday.

BEFORE THAT

Tell Sofia and It Came from The Sea tomorrow. Power to the awesome now delay.

20Jazzfunkgreats Night on Saturday at the Penthouse (see above for a photo of Stuart on a strut to fetch a pint of sider), 8-1AM, Free entry, super-special guests and the usual bloody pastiche of noise, disco and 20-sided dice. You know how we roll.

AFTER THAT

Get tickets at Resident, Rounder or Edgeworld. Total winner.