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.

Standing alone in the desert, pre-dawn.  A chill wind whipping up dust devils that catch the bright moon light.

For a moment.

Then the focus is pulled to the great spires that fill the horizon.  Glimmering against the deep blue sky.  Their windows filled with fire, their structures reconfigured by the light emanating from their crumbling floors.

The dust devils know where the party’s at.

Running into one of the many concrete valleys — which has slowly filled with encroaching sand — our vessel for this post’s extended metaphor plunges through the forest of cyclopean futurist hulks, the 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.  100s 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‘s transmogrification may have been foretold long in advance of their gonzo mixtape for this web-zine but that Ballardarian car crash seems like the appropriate forge from which Dolphins emerged.  Sunrise, the only instrumental on their latest EP is easiest to slip into the late 80s Chicago haze that stuffed Daniel’s record bag on their last trip to the UK but the entire EP is a love letter to much that 20JFG and Daniel and Damon (who now make up Mi Ami) hold dear.

Mi Ami – Sunrise

Out as part of the Dolphins 12″ on March 14th on Thrill Jockey.

Mi Ami‘s deliriously lo-fi mix for us got lost briefly in the flooded series of tubes that connect 20JFG to the outside world. Thankfully its battered form has been secured from the depths of Sendspace.

This is like being stuck in the middle of sensory depravation bubble in the trobbing heart of Detroit Techno circa ’89. As you near the sides the waves of distorted bass overwhelm you. You retreat attempting to find the event horizon for the vertiginous noise, sometimes straying into silence occasionally tuning to an alternate plane altogether and forever falling into bass.

If Ableton was used for this, its emotionally damaged shell will be walking the corridors of anonymous nightclubs approaching strangers and blithely offering them quantisation services. This isn’t perfectly bland mixing – it’s welding. Tracks crashed together, fused with audio fed straight from YouTube – I’m pretty sure you can hear the volume being turned up on a Mac towards the start. EQs dial in and out, not to accentuate the drop or build tension but with unfathomable almost organic logic. Like a restless animal, hi-frequencies are isolated, tossed around, dropped and fed back into the mix before the whole thing jumps through a portal to another mix entirely, glimpsing its own future (or past it’s hard to tell) before slamming back into the original timeline. For a moment. Then silence. In a mix.

This is glorious.

This could also have been a complete mess if the selections hadn’t supported this approach but thankfully each track seems part of a narcotic fever dream we drift in and out of, flicking channels within some schizophrenic PKD opera. Which I guess is like most music we love: the selection of the component parts support the unconventional ideas at their core. Well, most of the time.

Mi Ami – Deep In The Cut (4am Mix) with Diva Dompe and M. Geddes Gengras

Like a colossal bird emerging from Darwin’s Egg, spring spread its golden wings across our fair seaside city yesterday, an inverted Phoenix, bringing everything around it back to life.  Gentle breezes flicking through the narrow streets, blowing away the cloak of grey that accumulates in winter’s dormancy.  Rays of light, in training, waiting to ambush, with nostalgia for moments past with friends and beer and battered stereos only temporarily avoiding the urge to consume your precious tapes.  For in our ill defined seasons this weather-purgatory seems at last ready to give way to the hazzy bliss of summer.  And as before (after the tapes but before today) Mi Ami are back to amplify that hazzy bliss of summer with gentle waves of building distortion.

Dreamers rolls around in the dirt of teenage nights spent in suburban back gardens, the battered wooden fences dividing you from the worlds of possibility beyond.  Feral, half glimpsed in the blue/orange night, stalking your periphery with hints of reckless futures.  A growing crescendo calling out across decades of electric guitars, rusting in the salt heavy sea air.

Mi Ami – Dreamers

Mi Ami’s new album Steal Your Face (artwork above) is out next week.

Like some totem of Balearic bliss Maxxi & Zeus pre-empted this welcome herald of warmer times by dropping their new 12″ for International Feel through the portal.  Deliriously and unashamedly ambient The Struggle stands with its back to the lapping waves of dusk facing forward, into the dark forest on the edge of the beach.  The tension and release of shaken percussion forming the spine to synth cameos.  The ghostly shell of Vangelis’s Deckard, blissfully washed ashore, lifespan ending, wishing he’d seen the Tannhäuser Gate.  Eno’s Ambient works filling the atmosphere, paving the way for the quasi-self-help sample.  Strangely unsure, self-deprecating yet eerily charismatic.  Gloriously at odds with the simple natural beauty of the synthesised sounds that served as prelude.

Maxxi & Zeus – The Struggle

Maxxi & Zeus’s 12″ will be out some time in May.

Bonus video for Peepholes‘ Ladder from the Lair 12″ out on our very own Hungry For Power.

//TENSE// travel to us via the ethereal medium of TommyBoy.  Hailing from what we can only surmise is an alternative concrete Texas permanently shrouded in a damp leather-black haze where all heat is absorbed by the giant solar panels used to drive the multitudes of synthesisers and drum machines slaving away underneath their blue silicone sky.  So a bit like Highlander 2.

Mine Too eases in with with its EBM pad sounds worn proudly around its muscled torso.  Giant fucking neon sword hanging by its side.  Which it promptly drops down into the gaps between stairwells ’cause this is music for strutting not stabbing.  The sense of all of EBM history contained in one track is almost overwhelming.  The waves of simple synths and surging levels of drum machines leave you giddy, vaguely disorientated and lost within the repetition.  A lyrical focus on the sort of financial concerns of the last great surge in individualism (which coincided with the last great surge in EBM) can’t help but to leave you lost with the loops.  But remember kids, correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation…

//TENSE// – Mine Too

Mi Ami sneak their first first Thrill Jockey release into 2009 with their new 12″ (new album in 2010).  Thanks to the vagaries of digital sorting their dubed out B-side hit first.  Leaving the equally excellent ‘Cut Men’ to stand around waiting for its mist shrouded brother to depart the room.

But ‘Out at Night’ can not leave.  Lingering, winding its synthetic sinews around the speakers and flexing, gently, driving the noise under waves of briefly heard guitar lines from some Balearic epic; the last chimes of disco captured in ash like a distant party near Vesuvius; an eerie voice calling out from the other side (of the record) trapped in its own reverb prison.

Aguirre stalks through these grooves sending out darting stares of madness as the track mutates around him, quietening, then making way for crunched handclaps.  Torturing the poor conquistador as his navigation of ancient rivers is sound-tracked by an amorphous beast hiding in the overgrown river bank.

Thrill Jockey have asked us to take this MP3 down but the two tracks are available to stream here (click the titles in the right hand column).

Limited to 750 copies worldwide you can get it from Thrill Jockey’s site here.

Bands bereft of ambition, watch how Mi Ami continue taking it to the next level, and repent of your sinful ways. When you start down the path of creation, you shouldn’t dare settling for less, least the furious Gods decide to reincarnate you into a wingless insect in a garden full of hungry birds the next time you’re around. In their Towers Fall 12 in Hoss Records they homestead misty lands where the boundaries between dub techno ruminations, kosmische astrology, Ike Yard post punk blitzkrieg and acid house voodoo blur and meld into a lumbering colossus of flaming eyes and an attitude to boot. Whole landscapes are reshaped with the pulse of a rumbling bassline, rivers steered off their course following the mesmerising radiations of a synthetic piper, forests grow in the flicker of an eye to accommodate a tribe of little humans worshipping at the feet of a menacing totem, these are the heart-rending images that their primeval music summons, like sitting in the shoulder of God while he plays Populous in HD 3D total surround soundsystem styles. Now this is shock and awe, in slow motion.

Mi Ami- Towers Fall

Harder, Faster, Faster, Stronger, Foot Village’s fierce drums continue accelerating like an unhinged virus which at some point in the near-future shall evolve into spiky teethed creatures of the sea destined to crawl into our shores and grow bristling fur and vicious claws and climb up the trees and borrow under the land and dwell in thick shrubbery and search throughout the infrarred spectrum for enemies, incumbents from an old era that foolishly believe this is still their time. Naw, they are over, the future is a new country- they will find out soon enough when, upon stepping down an unfamiliar path, they feel a slight vibration in the air, subtle movements in the edge of their vision, the initial spin of a vortex which is the beginning of a charge which is this noise you hear. Foot Village shall be unleashing Anti Magic in Upset the Rhythm very soon. You will know them by the trail of grimacing skeletons, missing tibia and femur to replace broken drumsticks another example of their furious efficiency.

Foot Village- Reggae War Zone

Mi Ami are the hungry tiger that roams slender and green-eyed in a murky space beyond your pulsating speakers, waiting to leap out and shred you to pieces in a methodical, almost caring way, so you can lay in your back as your innards spill over the floor in a tide of irrepressible red, beholding a space of blinding light above your eyes towards which you seem to rise very slow while blurry figures you can’t quite make out stand around you silently, there is something strangely soothing about this gruesome experience, a warm drone that envelopes you in a hypnotic daze as you make your transition.

Mi Ami- Echononecho (Version)

This is included in the Echonoecho 12 that came out a couple of days ago, we are almost unbearably excited about their debut album, ‘Watersports’, which will be released by Touch and Go Records on the 17th of February. Upset the Rhythm are putting them on in London on Friday the 10th of April, a show where we will be proudly DJing.

I got home from London today and an envelope was waiting by my door,  I opened it and I found an intricately decorated USB key inside it. I plugged it into my computer and suddently the screen went black in that strange way that black has as if it was but the surface of an abyssal depth at the bottom of which things lurk, which was actually the case, because slowly at first, then faster, bizarre and convoluted shapes of a neon green started dancing in front of me, maps of devilish complexity and hyperdetailed schemata into which the perspective zoomed at vertiginous speeds, like the clinical autopsy of a dead civilisation. This was the sound of my trip.

Gyratory System- Thermidor (removed by record label request)

Gyratory System rule, this is included in a digital single release on Angular Recording Corporation which shall be available on the 23rd of February.

And now for that well-deserved splash of sunshine, here you have Tanlines going all calypso on your frostbiten faces, Bejan is colourful postcard full of loveliness and cuddly hugs sent from a tropical beach where playing volleyball after a bout of clumsy surfing is perfect preparation for a barbecue which illuminates the night sky with glimmers of red, and not the sort of thing that a bunch of jocks who say ‘kowabunga dude’ ironically would do. We love music that bring us back to the simple pleasures of life beyond decades of crass stereotypification (is that a word?) with a pure heart and a smile, and Bejan does precisely that, thank you from snowy Limeyland, dearest Tanlines!

Tanlines- Bejan

The forth of our Telepathe – Devil’s Trident remixes comes from Mi Ami, with a video by Dan Nixon.

Over to Dan-

Having your home flooded can do strange things to the mind. Shortly after the August ‘monsoon’ in Brighton, 20JFG sent me the Mi Ami remix of Telepathe’s Devil’s Trident and asked if I’d like to make a video for it. So, surrounded by all my (slightly damp) possessions and trying to sleep on the couch one night, I plugged in my headphones, fully intending to think of ideas while listening to the remix on repeat.

The remix is dense. Dense and layered and (I’d come to discover) incredibly intricate. Probably too intricate for my tired mind as I started to have the most intense ‘visions’ of trees and strobes and pagan rituals and other oddities no doubt influenced by the M.R. James book I was reading. This went on for about an hour. Finally snapping out of it I placed the headphones down beside me and fell into a deep sleep. In the morning I sketched out the video you see here.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/2227084[/vimeo]

Adventure – Unknown Track

This is the final track on Adventure’s 2007 self-titled album. Though I’m actually quite a sucker for ADD 8-bit music I like nothing more than when it transcends its functional roots and hints at something epic. This does that in spades. The melody is actually quite mournful but layered over the propulsive beats it perfectly encapsulates an almost nihilistic plunge through the deadly hordes of pixels that our ur-hero takes in the side-scrolling nirvana this track creates.

There’s something so plaintive about this though. I kinda’ want to tease out the resolve on the melody’s face rather than wash everything in a rapid cycle of primary colours. Giving it a mental pixel-art interpretation robs it of its most exhilarating quality: its glorious moments of release. It’s a cry for contrast and a recipe for the contradictions in these two paragraphs.

Hatchback – The Lotus and the Robot

This isn’t the ‘best’ track on Hatchback’s wonderful Colors of the Sun. Nor is it the most immediate but it is the one I’ve had the strongest emotional response to. Maybe it’s the Eno. That sunkissed synth loop. The naive melody the sounds like dips in a Balearic pool. Maybe it’s the pace. I’m pretty sure it’s the pace. Slow, deliberate building in stages. Not necessarily one thing at a time but one idea at a time. Calling out to each other like some alternate soundtrack to the end of Close Encounters.

Then the beat. Upping the ante but simply the kinetic response to the same languid dialogue as everything that led up to it.

5:30 – that’s it. That’s what this has been leading to. Without the pacing it’d be a lovely melody but with it, it’s something emotional. That indescribable synth calling over all that has come before it. I heard it properly for the first time riding on a train at sunset and came over all asymmetrically fringed.

[previously posted at Urlaubshits, I now discover]

Arthur Russell – Eli

This is about a dog. It’s by Arthur Russell so it’s also…indescribably beautiful.

I’ve been obsessed by music and video for pretty much my whole life. If you’re interested in any collaborations or would like me to create a music-video for you please get in touch. My website, which includes other work, is here

YouTube mixtape fun:

Popol Vuh – Improvisation (1971)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DON-CogKcfk[/youtube]
Il-Conformista – dance scene (1970)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KbD5W1qcDOY[/youtube]
K√°rhozat (1988)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=45py8pY_J1Q[/youtube]
Beau Travail (1999)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8e5g_wXJf1I[/youtube]

all blog images today taken from videos by Dan Nixon.

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As a sidenote to Dan’s wonderfully weird woodland wanders if you head on over to Viceland today you will find that XXJFG have made an infiltration. It’s going to be a weekly thing so be sure to check it out. Kind regards.

Also thank you to everyone who voted to bestow upon us the accolade of Best Blog at the Record of the Day Awards last week. We’d like to thank the little baby Jesus, George W, and the world in general.

Well, Mi Ami infiltrate our interstellar space with a new 12”, so we thought we’d say WHA, in Ark of the Covenant they continue reading the crooked ways of the drum straight off the black source without resorting to post-punk translators, and the message strikes home fierce n deep. The sheer intensity of its death wailing, which surfs over a red tide of stomping dub bass and no wave guitar shrieking, yellow-eyed panther chewing through its own flesh to escape that cruel trap, burns into our brains images feverish like Malaria-induced hallucinations, camouflage nets covering barracks where taut guerrilla muscles tattooed with the severe faces of Fela Kuti, Sun Ra and Jah Wobble flex resolute covered in a sweaty sheen.

Mi Ami- Ark of the Covenant

Mi Ami’s music sounds made in the treading of hidden paths across a war-torn spiritual jungle, from the splinters of punji sticks, empty shell cases, the sun shining stroboscopic through punctured blood-splattered leafs, caterpillars of unbelievable colours contorting in bizarre shapes, and tribal echoes in the distance of a revolutionary heart of darkness. We so fucking dig.

And now some balm to cover those lacerations, you know that Hugo’s image shines forever reflected in the pool of blood flowing through 20jazzfunkgreats’ syncopated-beating heart, which is to say in a gory way that his intrepid adventures and excellent spirit inform and inspire us in equal degrees.

As we have already told you, he just about kicked off a record label, Capablanca discos, wise communications from a Cuban disco legend some witnesses have described as a cross between David Mancuso and Jodorowski’s Alchemist. His first reference is a seed that grows into a tree of slender delicate limbs reaching towards pearls glimmering in the velvet black, the fulfilment of a loving promise, and the beginning of a very special trip.

Grackle- Jungle (T.Keeler and Capablanca remix)

Grackle’s ‘Jungle’ is thus transformed by the mediation of that gentleman T.Keeler, and el hidalgo Capablanca into chiming alkaloid bliss, warm synthetic waves washing our bodies through the psychedelic membrane into the mother-of-pearl shores of a Balearic island so that, from his vantage point in the deck of a ship sailing valiant away in the night, Steve Reich may behold our faces, white smears of pleasure, through gold-gilded binoculars and tell his attentive students with a knowing smile, ‘this is how it’s done kids’.

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We are back “live” this Saturday at the Penthouse, 8-1AM FREE ENTRY

Death disco vs Love dorky

It’s like the photo above if Larry Levan had produced it and we couldn’t find the record anywhere.

Fierce love

XXJFG

You excited? You better be, this is banging!

African drums are the root of almost everything we dig, the primeval stomp of blues evolving, mutating and being spliced into r&b, garage rock, punk and so forth, as well as, in a return to their droned up roots, the metronome pulse of disco and subsequent dance genres. Percussion is an affirmation and a pushing forward through this world, it is construction, destruction, sex and play, a warning, I Am Here, listen, and an invitation to join a collective celebration, dance, you don’t even need to move a finger to play the drums, or doesn’t everything begin with the beat of the heart? It also finishes with one, as we shuffle more or less gently off this mortal coil, we drum in the curious loop from zero to zero, no surprise we are so affected by their passionate call, particularly when they surround us with the fury and intensity of water flowing close to its source, hence this music.

You can see why Babatunde Olutanji’s percussive anthems were spun by David Mancuso at the Loft, they bristle with the life-affirming epic power of what would then become (eternal) disco music, inside ‘Drums of Passsion’ you confront that Masthodon lurking in the swirling shadows of every good party from whence it blows the dancers thither and yon with its mighty flame-incensing breath, a reflection of their own animal energy growing, condensating and building upon itself to reach a climax where they burn as one in blissful abandon.

I think Arthur Russell picked up a couple of tricks from here.

Babatunde Olatunji- Jin-Go-La

Babatunde Olatunji- The Beat of My Drum

The catalogue of Sublime Frequencies, that excellent label run by Hisham Mayet and Alan Bishop (of Sun City Girls fame) is one where I should like to get lost more often, as it is they released last year ‘Group Inerane: Guitars From Agadez (Music of Niger)’, a collection of fierce psychedelic Tuareg music which brings to mind something to a extent familiar, also very special, say, the Velvet Underground freaking out with OOIOO under the revolving golden dome of a furious desert storm (Mo Tucker’s drumming is strongly influenced by people such as Olatunji) and then something else completely, perhaps because inside it throbs an incandescent kernel of truth hard to find in the music produced in this (perhaps too knowing for its own good) post-modern culture we are immersed in.

Because this is the music of the people, their lives redoubtable in the beautiful cadence of shuffling drums.

Group Inerane- Tenerte

Mi Ami have us totally psyched, they are a SF trio including members from the oft-missed Black Eyes, and in their debut 12” ‘African Rhythms’ released by White Denim, they unleash a percussive no wave barrage into the very blackness of space drawing lines of power between imaginary constellations of afro-disco muscle and super-heroic noise verve, totems such as those of Liquid Liquid, Can, Lightning Bolt, Kid Creole and the Coconuts or MARS have in legends appeared to other shamans partaking in such psychedelic journeys, they are an esoteric coda for an attack plan executed with Jaguar-spirit-like carnivorous intensity which ends with our bodies cast into a sweaty spirit world of frantic shaking & twitching.

Mi Ami- African Rhythms

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