120 Megabytes – Episode 15

A Best Of / recap / wrap up / selecting our favorite videos from the past 14 episodes of 120 Megabytes

brought to you in association with @markbrown and our friends over at Network Awesome

It was as if, glimpsed from the right angle, all of the attempts at categorisation had but cascaded into one. Moving the three lists back into their proper position temporarily solved this issue but the great list-master remained disturbed. For what could this mean, he thought. What were the semantic implications of this perilous discovery? Were the three lists secretly as one? What would the creators of the lists think of this? A year’s work, carefully separating and categorising reduced, by a tilt of the head, to a universal soup.

Darkstar – North. In the best possible sense, the synth-pop album of the year.

Echo Lake – In Dreams. Metronomic dream-pop for Black Lodge parties.

Echo Lake – In Dreams (posted May 20th)

Future Islands – In Evening Air. The house band for a desert plateau from which you can see only stars.

Future Islands – Inch Of Dust (posted May 13th)

Girl Unit – Wut.  Minimalist mirrorball-Bass. A torch song for the drop.

Girl Unit – Wut (New Post)

Guido – Anidea.  Soundtrack to lone walks through a metropolis you’re falling back in love with.  Until this ends…

Guido – Tantalized (New Post)

Hotel Mexico – Its Twinkle.  Teaching us how to love the guitar overdose once more.  Like falling on psychedelics.

Hotel Mexico- Its Twinkle (posted August 3rd)

James Blackshaw – All is Falling.  An album of serene beauty that performed a feat of alchemy by making travelling back from London at 3AM a pleasurable experience.

James Blackshaw – Part 4 (New Post)

Night Gallery – Constant Struggle.  In a world of (reanimated) Cold-Wave we nuzzle in the warm embrace of an anglo-centric synth-pop…that includes songs about child killers.  What darkness lurks in the heart of synthesisers?

Night Gallery – Real Normal (New Post)

No UFO’s – Soft Coast.  A cascade through the experimental heart of early dance music. A transmission picked up from the desert wastes of a future built on Kaotic Harmonies.

No UFO’s – 00/00/2010 (posted July 1st)

Oneohtrix Point Never – Returnal.  Universally praised culmination of an epic journey of minimal synths into the night desert skies -  criss-crossed by star patterns that resemble a patch-chord diagram.  This is what happens when someone wires that up.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Where Does time Go (posted July 1st)

Solar Bears – She Was Coloured In.  “The metronome of this song swings with the circumference of a horizon beheld from high above, where the clouds glow with a tincture which is both the warmth of the sun, and the deep blue of the space above, it makes me wanna cry for everything we have forgotten”. – Florian

Solar Bears- Neon Colony (posted July 12th)

V/A – Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa.  Without a shadow of a doubt the compilation of the year.

Zinja Hlungwani – N’wagezani My Love (New Post)

We sit sprawled within the nebula-grey walls of our collective zine. Drifting amongst the vast bodies that exert their eternal pull on our fragile mass. Directionless and infinite; endless inquiry is expended on our destination, but we simply do not know; mere amateurs that we are at this low-budget journey. All we can do is gaze at the sights.

The industrious and prolific Oneohtrix Point Never returns to these shores with (appropriately enough) Returnal, his latest album that came out last week on Editions Mego. Pretty much all of it’s been covered on other blogs but thankfully the album’s so chock full of gems that we could find one track that hasn’t hit the Hype Machine just yet.

Daniel Lopatin’s vast analogue electronics slide once more into life amidst the vast expanse of silence that exists for a moment at the start of Where Does Time Go, their bubbling, oscillating waves lapping at the air. If this was meant as a meditation on the irrepressibility of time, on the ability to lose yourself in something beautiful only to find weeks have passed – it’s fairly successful. The looping oscillations never retreat, instead providing a lattice with which to thread the washes of melody that fade in and out – their purpose glimpsed only through a veil, obscured and fleeting.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Where Does time Go

We love it when people name things after things they love. The URL of this site being the prime example of us living by that maxim. Someone calling themselves No UFO’s could only go one of two ways. Thankfully for all involved the first thing we received from them was the Soft Coast album. It’s not techno but I’m sure Mr Atkins would approve – moving, as it does, between some of the founding blocks of techno: the early electronic throb of Chris & Cosey, the steamy fizz of electro (here slowed with one thumb on the tape), hell, there’s even one track called Cajmere Dreams which would be nice to think of as a documentary.

Many tracks are snatches, attempts perhaps at understanding the function these sounds have. A few are longer and they are glorious.

00/00/2010 begins with nothing more than a slow, looped bass guitar straight from the bar of a David Lynch western, joined eventually by both a suitably distorted guitar and muffled, far off vocal: all disinterred, stoic, warning. As so it rolls. Suicide-al tendencies on display. Around two and a half minutes in we’re exposed to a horn blown like a tranquillised James Chance. Where infernal energy has finally deserted him and he’s left, in our imagined Lynch western, to prop up the bar and breath fragile life into notes that last an eternity.

No UFO’s – 00/00/2010

Soft Coast by No UFO’s is out now on Nice Up International. There are only a few left so get yours here.  Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

As some of you may have seen on the internet the last few days, we’ve been invited to participate in a new website called Altered Zones. Being the endlessly curious lot that we are we it would have been churlish to say no. 20JFG will still be here doing the same thing it’s always done – scampering about in its own amateurish way, writing about music that we like and we hope you like too.

Our contribution to Altered Zones won’t be unfamiliar to those of you that read this everyday. Altered Zones is for the people that don’t. Saying that, if you like the stuff you read here then the odds are you’ll like some of the stuff other people post over there.

Of course if you’re deeply allergic to Pitchfork Media Inc. then FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T CLICK THAT LINK. It’ll burn your mouse finger. Stay here with us, it’s safer that way.

In this post we go into these Gothic lands and beyond, to embrace the propulsive spirit of true progressive music, which races past and above the warbled notebooks of the mundane and take us to a world where everything is possible. Pegassus takes the star child on its stride and into the land of epsilon, we are riding shotgun. There is room for more, there is space for all, step in.

Belbury Poly- From an Ancient Star- In a house made of paper, a girl named Marianne, distracted by a glowing screen and it’s analogue warnings of dirty water fails to notice the ancient stones closing in outside.

Blues Control- Local Flavor- The chalk drawing of a mandala in the brick wall of the basement opens the door to a dimension where snakes with leathery wings twitch to the tune of a mad organist.

Boredoms - Super Roots 10 – n hallucinated odalisques whisper into the ears of the God of Thunder tempting him so that he can get the Dyonisian party rolling, why don’t we get Lindstrom involved in this bitch?

Cloaks – Versus Grain – When the bass speaks it coughs up ash and broken bone first.

The Detachments – The Flowers That Fell (Thee Four Horsemen remix) – One of our own stalks The Detachments original through blue lit corridors and across tranquil woods, its collar turned up on its impeccable rain coat, its hand hidden until the glorious moment at 3:48…

Emika – Drop The Other (Scuba Vulpine Remix) – As it beats and pounds inside her chest, watch out for the smile on her face when “it” finally breaks through those fragile ribs.

Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport- We couldn’t put it better than HEALTH: ‘prog music for 13 year olds with beards’

Factory Floor – Lying -A rain slick 24 track Loop in the church of Neu! bring preached at from beyond.

Gatekeeper – Optimus Maximus EP- Diamond tipped Giallo talons scratch the stony face of Nitzer Ebb, the ensuing trashing is something to remember.

Hind Ear – Coconut – Rolling organic waves of pastoral beauty.  The 70s Agfa to Fever Ray’s b/w Ilford.

The Horrors – Sea Within a Sea – A love letter to a more metronomic time.  One of the most pleasant surprises of the year.

ΤΗΞ LΔΖΣ- Spacetime Fabric Conditioner- Sexy stories that the Alpha mother dwarf recounts in her catacomb while the gods crack mountains in the barren surface of a demon-ridden world Mahavishnu Orchestra didn’t dare to tell you about.

Oneida- Rated R- I crafted bow and arrow with the bones of my forebears, and climbed up the snowy the mountain to hunt the Pterodactyl.

Prince Rama of Ayodhya – Zetland- Cinnamon scented snuff for Ennio Morricone to clear his nose before getting on with the soundtrack for the Holy Mountain.

Teeth of the Sea - The space disco soundtrack for the sex bits in God of War, if they had been shot by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Throbbing Gristle – The Third Mind Movements – Back in the kidneys of our creators.  Filtering out your life and leaving you meat.  Pure, grinding, bliss.

This is the year when that unholy union and grim phoenix of obsidian which Zombi are reached, with Spirit Animal, the apex of their transversal trip towards the abyss where all our nightmares meld lascivious into each other. Alas, it seems unlikely they will populate our nocturnal path home with invisible, unimaginable horrors again.

But despair we shouldn’t, because both Steve Moore and A.E. Paterra are to continue tormenting our feeble minds with macabre melodies in their own separate and wild-eyed ways. You have heard your fair share of remixes concocted by the former in these pages, now check out the hellish motorik cavalcade which is Teleforce, as included in ‘Timespan’, a one and half (or double if you dare play the slab of esoteric geometrics) sided album recently released by the latter”s incarnation, Majeure, in Temporary Residence.

Analogue banshees cry for your soul,  surrender.

Majeure- Teleforce

Oneohtrix Point Never’s Zones Without People was the point in the sky where the red clouds of dusk touch the glistening sea. Russian Sea is the energy of the primeval forces, physically embedded or configured as networks of hungry potentiality which swarm and twitch under the surface, waiting to devour the unwary listener with jaws made of light.

Oneohtrix Point Never- Russian Mind

Order some more psychotropic synth symphonies from here.

Our last addition is something which we heard this year but will actually be released on a 2010 which is already looking swell- it comes from the always excellent vaults of Permanent Vacation, and it goes by the name of Mandarinen Träume- it is an absolutely mindblowing compilation of kosmische musique produced in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik between 1981 and 1989, as put together by Florian Sievers.

The excellent press release we received with the album frames the compositions herein contained as ‘escapes into the above’ from the claustrophobic confines of a totalitarian state, and we couldn’t have put it any better than that, just slide between the perfect sheets of heart-achingly beautiful 3D soundscapes projected from your speakers in Reinhard Lakomy’s Eswachst Das Gras Nicht Über Alles, and visualise mankind’s struggle for liberation from a concrete planet of brutalistic architecture dominated by shadowy forces as directed by Rene Laloux and soundtracked by Jean Michelle Jarre at the Moonwalk epic style height of his powers. And surge.

Reinhard Lakomy- Eswachst Das Gras Nicht Über Alles

Some of the images for this post were provided by masters of things that perhaps should not be but thankfully are Tommyboy.

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For those of you rattling around London this Friday, one of your faithful XXJFG brothers will be DJing in the basement of Jaguar Shoes from around midnight. Come and shake bones. Obligatory Facebook event here.

Time For Dreams hail from Melbourne but apparently this track was mostly recorded on a plane (to Basel).  Which if they hadn’t told me, I’d have probably made up.

Cooing Sally Shapero-isms echo round the midnight synths.  The very early hints of destruction evident in the distortion on the first chorus.  A soft analogue fog obscures the expected, violent denouement.  An ending heralded by a bubblegum break straight out of the Glass Candy school of soundtracks to open roads and dead of night journeys to after hours clubs.  Breathlessly becomes a slowly disintegrating vehicle as its destination approaches, coasting to a stop as fire consumes the car.  The screaming twisting of metal under the intense heat daring Fuck Buttons‘ tortured electronics to join it.

Time For Dreams – Breathlessly

In terms of starting well you probably can’t beat a pre-credits lion roar and lasers.

Oneohtix Point Never has already neatly placed the Zones Without People LP within his discography and is preparing to release TWO LPs in November.  Which includes Rifts, a double CD collecting the three albums in the ‘Rifts Trilogy’ (which included the Zones Without People LP).  Got that?  This is the title track from Zones Without People and is very much worth holding tight in the maelstrom of Daniel Lopatin’s creativity.

Arpeggiated synths, unencumbered by the local gravity of a rhythm section, allowed to float free in space, brushed by ancient solar flares reduced to whispers.  Their luminous golden shapes twisting into endless spires in front of an infinite starfield.  All this, seen from the lonely, brutalist balcony of pyramidal structure on a distant plain.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Zones Without People

You can order all sorts of things from OPN direct here.

For whimsical mood-music that further enhances warm but breezy summer days you can always rely on the French. Whether its the soft focus porno music and midnite drive jazz groove of Karl-Heinz Schäfer’s “Les Gants du Diable” soundtrack, or the Nico-esque melodies plucked from icicle clusters of Brigitte Fontaine, or the rolling and diving strings of Jean Jacques Dexter, there is sometimes nothing finer than strolling through the misty silken corridors of ’70s French psychedelia. Quentin Tarantino picked Christophe’s “Sunny Road to Salina” as the soundtrack to The Bride’s journey from Texas burial to white-trash desert motor-home showdown, and international dj’s Dirty Sound System collect such luminaries together for their best compilation yet, “Dirty French Psychedelics”.

Ilous et Decuyper – Berceuse

“Berceuse” by Ilous et Decuyper is something Quiet Village would surely approve of, with its echo chamber vocal windmills set heavily in the soft grass of the southern French countryside where a farm house is burning backwards and a funeral procession for an angel glides slowly past.

Disc and limited vinyl out 25th May, bon.

Seguing perfectly into tarnished brass Wicker Man territory is the magically fearful work of The Time & Space Machine or Richard Norris, one half of the purple psychedelic paradox known as Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve, whose second 12″ spans the chasm between The Emperor Machine and the aforementioned Karl-Heinz Schäfer, cramming the gaping space with acidized folk and “Psychomania” home-counties hillbilly rock, all warped by the blazing sun and flinching like a jazz-funk corpse.

The Time & Space Machine – The Trip

“The Trip” is a stand-out with bubbling Tangerine Dream atmospherics on a low heat and chase the blue dragon through the eye of the orchid guitars and panpipes, and a silent Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg from “Performance” pirouetting back and forth, fading in and out like a mirage on a star studded black chiffon background.

Second half of Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve, Erol Alkan (seen here as editor Disco 3000) brings on the electrics with an inspired retake of Supercharge’s strutting electro-italo coke-fuelled love anthem, “I Think I’m Gonna Fall in Love”.

Supercharge – Think I’m Gonna Fall In Love (Disco 3000 Edit)

Keeping the subtle “I Feel Love” bassline, Disco 3000 reduces the vocals and elasticises them so they ping back on themselves and bounce off the curvaceous walls of a glass disco ball where the song resides, clamouring around in a power-ballad vs. Moroder utopia cloud of pink and blue, all the time restrained by a schematic synth effect stuttering like cold rain on a hot robot.

From the 12″ out on Ballerino.

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Mixtape number 2! This one comes from the organic crimson mindscapes of mind-dimension apocalypse, Oneohtrix Point Never and its an hallucinogenic collection of bleeps, new wave and synths.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Superjammers Vol.1: Mirage Against the Machine

Tracklist:::

Eduard Artemiev- Rekkens
Martin Dupont- Just Because
Carlos Maria Trindade – Nuno Canavarro- NC Blu Terra
Model 500- Future
The Shadow Ring- Don’t say no
Claude Larson- Lotus Eater
Doris Norton- Norton Music Research
Vidna Obmana and Asmus Tietchens- 4th Theme
The Cure- Charlotte Sometimes
Absolute Body Control- A Better Way (Sensational Version)
Emerson Lake and Palmer- From the Beginning
Supermax- Ain’t Gonna Feel
Lazy Smoke- Come with the Day

With the reissue of the most excellent “Betrayed in the Octagon” LP on No Fun, Oneohtrix Point Never are finally getting more recognition. The LP is a wondrous clash of sinuous organic totems and sheer metal floating mosaic patterns, a battle watched by the 2001 homo-sapiens as a bone turns into a spacecraft. Its an image glimpsed in a mirror at the end of a generation and with tracks like “Woe is the Transgression I” OPN easily weaves horrific terror into tone-perfect tranquillity. The title track follows a team of explorers entering the ear of a giant crash-landed Mega Man covered in rust and battle scars. “Laser to Laser” pins a star beam to the point directly in the middle of these two styles. Previous readers have left comments expressing a desire to climb into OPN’s tracks, and “Laser to Laser” is a perfect gateway to the warm comfort of a cybernetic womb, cradled in a sea of robotic nerve endings, watching as the plumes of cloudy synths spread across a sulphuric sky and My Bloody Valentine records drape over tree branches like Salvador Dali clock faces.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Laser to Laser

Oneohtrix Point Never mixtape transmogrifying to 2OJFG soon…

This month, SALEM follows up the soundtrack to ecliptic smoke beings on Merok Records with their happiest song (its still about Ketamine though) on Japan-based label Big Love. “OhK” is backed by “Sweat (l)” a gurgling fear anthem for Team Sertraline. Guaranteed to be one of those mad scrambles to the Rough Trade/Puregroove digital record shops; 300 copies fast diminishing to zero.

SALEM – OhK

“OhK” is one of the achingly tarnished silver and reversed wicker-cross torch songs that Heather sings over, a surprisingly upbeat shuffling 4/4 thud, lit by the frozen morning sun as lost souls stumble from the underground into life again, only to be punctured by tendrils of serrated keyboards, deafened by shrill death rattles from a Roland MC-505 graveyard.

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For yet more of SALEM’s fever dreams head to SO BONES, the newly established blog from Robin and Steve, featuring odes to the translucent androidical beauty of Cassie and Ciara, the chrome and crystal knuckleduster chic of Usher’s most mental (and therefore unreleased) ice ballads, Lil Wayne’s feral malfunctioning robot vocals oozing over filth-rhymes, The Underdogs Italo-baiting neon-monolithic productions, and so much more….

(no Akon or Flo-Rida and no ill-advised collaborations with Enrique Iglesias, promise)

Chicago macabre squad GATEKEEPER fulfil your 20jazzfunkgreats’ thirst for the nocturnal with another black morsel of thrills and kills. Their music embodies all that we like about 1980s cinematic suspense, paranoid hallucinations, a phantasmagoria of green lights and ectoplasmic mist seeping through multiple fracture lines on the thin walls of reality, you can of course see the long shadow of one true master John Carpenter projected over the icy electroid landscapes and obsessive synth melodies painted on damp concrete with sounds made of black leather, cursed silver and blood-splattered celluloid. A knock on your door, look through the peephole to face an empty corridor, unlock it to find a parcel wrapped in coarse brown paper laying at your feet, the chaotic diaries of a detective who disappeared while investigating a string of child abductions, scant evidence hinting at the existence of a dark conspiracy, listen to “Final Approach” and know that this is the music of the horror that awaits beyond should you decide to step into the dark alleys where the ghastly truth awaits.

GATEKEEPER- Final Approach

Great streams of fiery white light, much like dragons from Heaven bought us into contact with Oneohtrix Point Never. We were instantly transfixed like rabbits in the headlights of the apocalypse once the stuttering repetitions pulsated from the dark planets in the shadowy star system that these knights of new age synth happenings reside in.

Oneohtrix Point Never – A House in Rasinari

“A House In Rasinari” is all glittering harmonies, various beautifully synchronized sounds rising from spray from the waves of the sea on the Moon. It spirits through time and space with an ethereal air of arch knowingness – the world and all its people thinking the same thoughts, moving in the same collection of gestures, the sound bleeding into different streams of consciousness through osmosis, sliding cold across deserts and crevice-littered vistas, weaving through inverted snow-capped mountain ranges. It reaches an all encompassing existence until like a sun exploding supernova, it fades out in waves of undulating energy – all caught as a glint in the collective eye of Tangerine Dream.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Soft Program (You Knew)

OPN then capture the same feelings on ‘Soft Program (You Knew)’ that maybe Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom had when they gave cosmic birth to “Days Of Mars”; the slight feeling of creeping dread at the sight of wolves dashing slow motion through icicle forests, splashes of blood across the white walls of undiscovered caves, forks of phosphorous blue lightning striking glass structures in desolate wastelands, the sun setting upon fields of deceased Nephilim and foretold planetary alignments in future years of war.

Support your local musician, in the sense that we live in OPN’s neighbouring galaxy – go unto the website, these lo-fi DIY astronauts need your help in spreading the spacial gospel of inverted clockwork pyramid soliloquies.