120 Megabytes – Episode 19

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

120 Megabytes – Episode 12

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

In an alternate 80s pop landscape, where simple synth chords co-exist with the sinister ambient rumblings from the sensory periphery of Italian horror composers.  In an alternate 80s where less was really more, where Chicago’s minimalism travelled back in time and co-opted the top of the charts.  Here we find The One, slicing through the wine bars at the end of the universe.  Prescient as ever they bricked themselves up behind that old Tron cabinet and lay in wait until we needed them to bring the croon back to the glacial synth slow-jam.

The One bring their love of (80s) Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis productions to glorious effect here.  With vocals by Emeson and music by Fair Ohs drummer Joe (with that unexpected and deliriously subdued guitar solo by Serious Lover) The One are a super-group for 20JFG’s world.  Striding across continents bringing a soft kiss back to methadrone’d dancefloors.  Thank god.

This will feature on a 12″ out in April on a new label by the guys that run the Road to Rimini night in Newcastle.

correction: the 12″ will feature ‘Let’s Get it Straight’ and ‘Change My Name Change My Number’ but sadly not ‘Double Life’.

The One – Double Life

Pictureplane created one of 20JFG’s favourite moments in last years vast sea of excellent music.  Managing to marry the big room crushed synths of Euro-disco with something cold, damp and personal with Dark Rift.  We’re back to this side of the Atlantic again.  Back at the source in a strange way.  while Dark Rift excelled at draining the blood from the bloated corpse of European super-club excess and leaving us with the exquisite, crystalline beauty here we have something more direct, more…reanimated.

Like some club-music golem Let Me Be Your Fantasy continues to lumber through the collective unconscious of generations of tortured souls.  A lethargic Amen break and a disinterested bit of piano house barely competed with Dee Galdes-Fearon’s vocal back in the heady days of 1992.  Pictureplane redresses the balance.  Crushing everything upfront, giant punches of drums and those half-there snatches of synths as they smash into the red.  Like a circle of tape recorders arranged around an FM radio trying to work out what they’re meant to be hearing, giving up and creating what they think rave should sound like.

Pitchfork beat us to this but it’s too interesting to not be included on these dark pages.

Pictureplane – Beyond Fantasy

image from petespix75

DJ Murlo graces these pages having lapped the internet since Hungry For Power included his Cold Pumas remix on their first release.  Cropping up on various mixtapes and providing succour to us Brighton types with his Angry Dance Party.  Here he takes the latest almost great Rhianna single and turns it into an infectiously low key exercise in dancehall minimalism.  Polite, quiet, chamber music for crystalline Jamaican cathedrals.  The effect, to foreground the rolling repetition in the vocal track, leaving a reverent space for Rhianna’s slyly insincere, phoned-in flirting.  Take it, take it, baby, baby…

Rihanna – Rude Boy (Murlo Remix)

Activate liminality drive, slide like a knife through matter butter into the vast theatre where the alt molecules perform their geometric dance, drawing baroque patterns of unfolding complexity as lines bend into curves, strings vibrate to accommodate your favourite conceptual framework re the birth of the universe, shapes coagulate and order emerge and expands, it’s an astrophysicist’s delight and nerd porn of the highest order, but it finishes, or perhaps it continues in a different dimension, else all would be darkness and silence, and you would have nowhere to come back to. But believe it or not we do have silence while the next troupe of performers sets up in stage, it’s going to be heavy, a squadron of liquid metal spheres, if they had eyes you would say they have the thousand mile stare, they don’t, still, it’s somehow wrong that a ball can look so badass. And then they start jacking to create the primeval techno beat which echoes across all planes, the primeval techno beat which seeps through cracks in the spacetime continuum giving black men in alien outfits nightmares while they sleep the sleep of the psychedelics, it is that shadow which gives whatever is being played at a German warehouse party at 7AM that extra bit of boom that makes all the crowd throw its hands in the air. It keeps going forever, that’s the way it is, trance you bitches.

Erik XVI- Kalabaliken i Bender

Now you wish rave season wasn’t over. Grab Erik XVI’s album from Highpoint Lowlife Records, because, as Dan said, it’s pure gold- perhaps the gnarliest piece of dark rumbling colossal euro-techno I’ve heard since Motivii Tuntenaton’s 1939.

If I was going to start a war against God I wouldn’t tell you, he’s got all sorts of spies, infiltrators and fifth column perpetrators mingling with the general populace. I wouldn’t tell you because there’s a chance he might send one of his agents in the middle of the night to smother me using a pillow filled with angel feathers. But if I did, and I’m not saying I am going to, today I would choose Krikor and the Dead Hillbillies‘ ‘God will Break it All’ as the hymn for my campaign. Because the message is true, and gives us a good reason to stop the chap right on his tracks- decadence, death and corruption, we want none of that. We want to strut in the dancefloor to a sweet piece of pumping electro-pop which somewhere in between Devos’ 80s jingling and Nitzer Ebb’s murderous chugga chugga in a weird but novertheless great way. It is included in Krikor and the Dead Hillbillies’ new album, ‘Land of Truth’, which as one has come to expect from Tigersushi’s releases touches all the sweet spots with that strange and wonderful mixture of taste, energy and je ne sais quoi romantic creepiness.

Krikor and the Dead Hillbillies- God will Break it All

As a bonus, and what a bonus, here is a mixtape that Pictureplane has put together for us. The future now and the future is power. What a dude.

Pictureplane Dimensional Rift IV 20JFG Mix

And finally, here you have the tracklist…

/ / / / /

Also, Saturday coming up we are playing some records at Cargo in London for the launch party of one of the best records of the year, Joakim’s Milky Ways. Get down and say hi!

Pictureplane has been surfing the waves of the tie-dyed pop nouveau atoll for a while, a bit like Patrick Swayze in Point Break, but wearing x-ray specs and heavy liquid tattoos. Telepathic dolphins, megalodon sharks and surreal all-encompassing consciousness coralline configurations stare in his wake as he lands careless from his last wild stunt and wonder, ‘where will he go next?’. This question will be answered on the 4th of August when Lovepump records release a new album, ‘Dark Rift‘, which is a perfect storm of 90s jacking paraphernalia, digital savant sorcery and warped soul.

You know how in all those 90s cyberpunk films (Johnny Mnemonic, you come to mind like chrome nails scratching a silicon blackboard) everyone seemed to assume that the music of the future would be a pastiche of dissonant opera being sung by a fat Tina Turner look-a-like mixed with some ethnic vibes concocted by a second-rate Vangelis ambient hack? They were so wrong it was hilarious. They should have had a Pictureplane jam playing in the background and then they would have been closer to what we should hope future pop was going to sound like. But then the future is here, only it’s unevenly distributed- and while some wallow in the sterile shores of nostalgia, others stand up tall and reconfigure the beautiful detritus of the past to push things truly forward. Enter Dark Rift.

Pictureplane- Dark Rift

All of which does of course apply to our fave ‘council state answer to Butthole Surfers’/'Jamming Bohemian Rhapsody across the plains of the Fantastic Planet’ dudes Gay Against You, who shall be releasing the most definitive statement of digital progressive Sorcery ‘Righteous Signals/Sour Dudes’ via the totally excellent Upset the Rhythm label in but a month. These are the  pyrotechnics of your brain collapsing into itself as beheld by that little man-shaped creature that inhabits your pineal gland, or the music that will happen when Christian Zander, doubtful of the survival of the human race,  launches a golden capsule into Space crammed with unruly children, this will be the beautiful primeval shriek, gloriously sprawling glam mess and new babylonian poetry they intone upon crashing through the last atmospheric gate beyond the grasp of the gravitational thug and across twinkling stars looking for new lands to colonise.

Fuck choosing between my wings and my song, I can have ‘em both, this is Gay vs You’s message.

Gay Against You- Righteous Signals

Listen to Wall Wizards at UTR.

We’d like to welcome LA fellow conspirator Bianca O’Blivion for a sweet and hard hitting postcard from LA, top Sympathy for the Record Industry distressed jams and much tribal stomping, absolute kowabunga!

The Press Fire! aka TPF! needs no added emphasis, but who can resist a good exclamation point? A trio of total rock dudes (Justin, Clay, Pepper) fronted by the sassiest of lady singers (Merisa) and you’ve got yourself a most volatile solution of chemistry class proportions…forget the fire,  get your hazard suits on because TPF! is majorly exploding onto the LA scene with robot alarms and disco punk bass/drums that keep you dancing ’til the end.  Merisa beckons you to join in her antics, chirping all cutesy-core like the favorite femme leads of Les Georges Leningrad, Kap Bambino and Sick Lipstick.  “Hard to Break” blasts neon fireworks that transform into rainbow sprinkles and gummy bears on your strawberry frozen yogurt…I’ll take two please.  With some production love from Anavan’s Aaron Buckley, expect nothing but high ponytail hits from TPF!’s upcoming “ES SLASH TEE” EP, coming to a backyard moonbounce party near you July 7th.

The Press Fire- Hard to Break