120 Megabytes – Episode 16

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

The 20jfg bestof lists attempt no such feat of greatness. We are as confused by the infinity of stuff out there as any being. It’s fun to look back at our best of lists in retrospect, and i guess in this way they are cultural documents for ourselves, which we hope you also enjoy.

This is our final bestof lists for 2011 – we probably missed some of the things we loved, and you loved so let us know any in the comments box.

Mind Over Mirrors: I’m Willing to Stagger Bursting forth with a droning, lackadaisical klaxon rippling through the heavens, I’m Willing to Stagger twists and distorts its tape delayed harmonium into something completely off-worldly. Mind Over Mirrors has managed to recreate that lost La Monte Young soundtrack to the birth of the universe. A huge pounding piece of processional music that locks you into it’s footstep grove as hard as any percussive track can ever dream. If the temple at the end of the universe were designed by Gaudi, its aisles measured in kilometres and its entire focus, an exposed space above the alter where the final rip in space will occur – this would play, as millions of dignitaries assembled among the alcoves and observed the refolding of the universe’s expansive fabric.

Mind Over Mirrors – I’m willing to stagger – Part 1

Buy: as far as we can tell it’s sold out

Pechenga: Helt Borte Pechenga is Rune Lindbæk and Cato Farstad. The story goes that after recording this album in 2007 at Lindbæk’s grandmother’s house they self released the record in Norway where it sold 57 copies. Evidently one to found its way to Smalltown Supersound‘s Joakim Haugland because that label’s just re-released it. Thankfully. It’s an incredibly beautiful ambient work, full of a sense of infinite blank vistas and silent winter light. Where Thomas Köner traverses beneath the ice, here we often soar above, watching our perfect black shadow dance along the white sheets below.

Pechenga – My Frozen Spirit

Buy: Helt Borte

The Advisory Circle: As The Crow Flies The cracks in our memory have always been open to the sounds produced by Ghost Box and 2011 was no exception with As The Crow Flies providing those fleeting glances out the corner or your eye of something not being quite right. Pastoral electronica pushed by undercurrents of the other side.

The Advisory Circle – As The Crow Flies

Buy : As The Crow Flies

Peepholes: Tunnels Having lapped up their last EP on Upset the Rhythm and it’s epic closer Carnivore we feel suitably prepped for the increasingly wide pendulum swings by the band, out and away from short bursts of kinetic drum/keyboard frenzy. New mini-LP Caligula opens with another long builder, a Mayan temple of an incline up to a plateau of the breathtaking and bloody.

It’s 3rd track Tunnels that stands out. Synths are no longer ripped apart oscillation by oscillation as they struggle against voice and drums. Instead they’re allowed to form the stem of Tunnels with an honest to god drum machine as accompaniment. They drift over plains and open up blue/black vistas for Katia’s mesmeric sing/chanting to roam. There are minor traces of early Techno floating around but these could well be the shadows of Techno’s own progenitors: the electronic minimalism of your pick of Cold-Wave bands.

Peepholes – Tunnels

Buy: Caligula

Bubble Club: the Goddess A balearic hymn to an unnamed Goddess that masters the art of gentle euphoria so completely, combines cosmic-disco tropes with such loving care, that it becomes, by the end of its seven minutes, one of the most moving things we’ve heard in a long time. Synth stabs, co-opted African rhythms, cooing male vocals under waves of arpegiated bliss: Bubble Club’s The Goddess is one of the very reasons we write this blog and we can’t praise it higher than that.

Bubble Club – The Goddess

Buy: The Goddess

The Stepkids: The Stepkids So your kid brothers stole your Hall & Oates tape that had Sly & The Family Stone on the other side, and got confused as to which was the cool in ‘Mojo’ terms side, cos lets face it you didn’t really know either. Dam-Funk produced the entire resulting jam and stuck it out on Stone’s Throw records. Yeh – this is kinda what happend.

The Stepkids – Santos and Ken

Buy : The Stepkids

Mushy: Faded Heart Faded Heart is the field recording of a night of slo-mo psychic bloodshed at a crumbling coliseum, a debut of uncanny mystique and ghostly enigma accomplished beyond the glummest dreams of most drag apprentices. It drenches pages torn off Zola Jesus’ grimoire in the thick waters of the swamp where Christine Baxter drowned, deep in the woods of a death country shrouded in thick ambient mist, roamed by shapeless beasts of Lynchian provenance.

Mushy – Losing Days

Buy: Faded Heart

Cult of Youth: S/T If Songs:Ohia read All the Pretty Horses, then Cult of Youth are into Blood Meridian. They make Appalachian black magic, a satanic barn dance where the damned spin in dervish-like abandon over pagan symbols carved with Bowie knives. ou can almost see the bald and sweating dome of the Judge towering above the filthy scalp-hunters, an archetypical Dionysian troubadour which recurs through the ages – Flipper, Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Country Teasers, GG Allin, now this – to enthral us with tales of beautiful massacre. They are doing it so that we don’t have to, and we owe them for that.

Cult of Youth – The Lamb

Buy: S/T

Drums Off Chaos and Jens Uwe Beyer: Magazine 3 In Magazine 3, Drums off Chaos (Jaki Liebezeit’s percussion ensemble) and Jens-Uwe Beyer channel the millennial wisdom of a shaman who stares into the sky and sees the future instead of the past, because the gods are up there, and through the rituals codified in this music, the tribe eventually becomes them. It evokes an alternative branching in the life-story of Gang Gang Dance, where, after God’s Money, they decided to kneel at the altar of DRUM with the Boredoms, instead of trotting down the shining path to become the best dance music band in the world.

Drums off Chaos and Jens-Uwe Beyer – Second Half

Buy: Magazine 3

Way Through: Arrow Shower Way Through capture the joy of the elusive English sun breaking through a sky which gives and takes away, to shine upon the communal procession by which the years are counted. It is rather fitting that it is Chris and Clare who are behind it, seeing as their wonderful London happenings bristle with the unfakable communitarian spirit of the true, archetypical festival.

Way Through – Salmon Patch

Buy: Arrow Shower

Prince Rama: Trust Now Trust Now is a prodigy of exo-transformation. Upon slipping into it, we witness the world around us shape-shift. Boarded up shops become desecrated temples, malls are replaced by golden Ziggurats. Where not a minute ago stood gaudy theatres peddling crass pantomime, we now see impossible coliseums premiering Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest psyche-drama. Fractured glimpses of the alternative present that would have been if the high and beautiful wave had never broken.

Prince Rama – Portaling

Buy: Trust Now

Yacht : Shangri-La You don’t get many concept albums in these days of the mp3 download but Yatcht’s second album as a duo – Shangri-la – is a concept album in the very old school sense. Unlike Rick Wakeman’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table On Ice Yatcht’s Shangrila is less of an exercise in self indulgent wank, and more of an exploration of their record collection. No matter what you feel about The Gaia hypothesis it’s difficult not to feel a little more like we need some earthly care and fun while listening to Shangri-La.

Yacht – Dystopia (The Earth Is On Fire)

Buy : Shangri-La

Ga’an: Black Equus and S/T album Ga’an are a steel Hydra coiling and snapping from the undifferentiated sludge of contemporary music, an enigmatic troubadour staying for a night at the inn of this reality, regaling us with uncanny ballads about the chaos without so that we can writhe in gorgeous nightmares when we go to bed. They take off like Magma, into the heart of darkness like Goblin.

Ga’an – Arms Can Speak

Ga’an – Servant Eye

Buy: Black Equus; S/T

Gold Zebra: Love, French, Better Minimal synth throb passified the gap left by the italians for most of this year by feeding us somthing a little colder.

GOLD ZEBRA- Love, French, Better

Buy : Love, French, Better

The Haxan Cloak: S/T The Haxan Cloak suck us in into a vortex which is Edgar Allan Poe Northern Sea dirge and modern composition drone, also the dark cave where pre-human tribes developed their first myths, which in a barely evolved form haunt us to this day. Like the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, if directed by Lucio Fulci.

The Haxan Cloak – The Fall

Buy: S/T album

Pink Skull : Psychic Welfare Struggling to try and create minimalism, while having too many things you loved love to put into an album, made Pink Skull’s Psychic Welfare a grower in 2011.

Pink Skull – Mu

Buy:  Psychic Welfare

Made Do and Mend Finders Keepers consistently release fantastic records, no mater what year it is. This year, like many uk independents, they suffered badly after a fire in the distribution warehouse of PIAS. The make do and mend compilations were issued to alleviate this situation, and turned out to be one of our favorite compilations of 2011.

Jacky Chalard - Super Man, Super Cool

Buy : Make do and mend

Bad Passion: Liquid Fire This is music bought into at both ends. The wry smile of an angelic voice crooning “it’s really got me buggin’” is married to an elaborate sexual metaphor involving badminton — but at the same time the music does that transporting thing, like Low or Galaxy 500 (when you concentrated on the voice and let the guitars fade away). A transporting thing that makes you fall in love with the heartbreaking sound while simultaneously being entertained by the knowing sexual intent of the words.

Bad Passion – Liquid Fire

Buy: Doin’ it Slow

And finally…

A huge shout out to our prodigal son at Tri Angle. Righty cleaning up on the ‘best of…’ lists wherever they appear. Afraid of the spectre of nepotism we probably don’t cover the output of the label as much as we should but releases from Balam Acab and Water Borders would make anyone’s list. Interesting times in 2012 as Robin follows in the footsteps of Kode9, Gas and Dub Narcotic Sound System and starts putting out his own music. If its anything like the lineage above, we’re psyched.

Buy: All the things

So is it 2012 yet? Well, for 20jazzfunkgreats the answer is almost. Thanks for being with us in 2011, sub-normal service will resume some time in 2012.

120 Megabytes – Episode 7

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

We close out 2010 with a series of shout outs to the great and the good that have a special bond with 20JFG.  From guest writers who’ve put out spectacular albums to alumni that have hopped the fence and started their own labels, with this post we salute you because we love you and we kinda’ feel all proud about what you’ve gone and done.  20JFG doesn’t do nepotism.  If we did you’d see through it a mile off for we would present the damning mp3 proof with every post.  So, this isn’t an infected zone of back slapping, this is a collection of music that would have slotted neatly into the other sections (free-form as they are) but we thought, if anyone’s going to cast aspersions on these picks we may as well make a big song and dance about it.  Guns blazing, at it were.

It’s appropriate then that, a year on from his last words for 20JFG (helping us collate last years lists in fact) we begin with Tri Angle records.  Arriving at our black gates in 2007, Robin strung together the gothic folk soundtracks of Luboš Fišer with the necro-bass of early Cassie – a genre agnosticism that we hold very dear in the 20JFG citadel.  Tri Angle began their vinyl life with the Balam Acab 12″ which ends with one of the most beautiful pieces of music we’ve heard all year.

This year was also the first full year of operation for the label owned by half of 20JFG: Hungry for Power.  We managed to get our act together long enough to put out two disparate 12″s from two disparate duos.

Peepholes are Brighton/London pair Nick and Kat who kindly gave us three tracks to form the A-side of the Lair EP which we then invited people to remix for the B.  This is what we said about E*Rocks remix:

E-Rock slows it down into some sort of amaze communion of tribal stomping and holy riffarama which comes across like Gang Gang Dance and Fucking Champs massacring Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, literally banging.

Peepholes- Lair (E-Rock’s remix) (posted February 22nd)

Water Borders hail from San Francisco and brought along their friend Glasser for our third release: the Akko EP.  We described the Petals remix as:

This is terrifying music. The pure heart of every Giallo disco scene. This is the vision of the killers. Grooving to their own murderous 4/4.

Water Borders – Akko (Petals remix) (posted September 17th)

And finally, we journey to the land of occasional contributor Taraka Larson.  Prince Rama of Ayodyha had been featured in these pages long before Taraka started contributing (indeed their inclusion was how she started contributing) which, in all fairness, should have prepared us for the tidal wave of drum centric synth infused psychedelic landscapes that unfurled from within the Shadow Temple LP.

Prince Rama – Raghupati (New Post)

Which is a wonderful way to end the year.  If you’re in Brighton come party with one of us here.  If you’re not, have fun doing whatever it is you’re doing.  We’ll be back in 2011.

Post script:

We’ve stuck here to people that have written on these dark pages this year or who we’ve worked with so directly it’d be absurd not to include. There are vast, vast swathes of the other lists that — hoping we were not being too presumptuous — we’d consider ‘friends and family’ of this shuffling electronic zine.  We salute you all and eagerly anticipate devouring your 2011 wares…

It’s summer and with the heat comes the irresistible clench of kinetic forces, a whirlwind tug of hair and sweat and clinging clothes, eyes staring for hours into hypnotic spirals of oscillating fans that make you yearn for linear motion, a pulse, a push, a pull. Before you know it you are speeding down zig zag lightening bolt highways at 85 mph on a road trip joy ride to the kingdom of nowhere. You gaze out your window at a landscape haunted by monuments to forgotten heroes, paradises constructed from rubber bands, towns tottering on the fragile memory of some obscure historical pastime, utopias constructed then abandoned.

Sometimes the past becomes so degraded that it fades into an ectoplasmic abyss that thickens the air around it with its darkness. Sometimes it slips in stealthily under the un-batting eyelashes of kitsch. Other times it merges into a flash of light and endows the present moment with revelatory sparks of divine wisdom. Either way, when the past transmutes into a spirit form that possesses the present so seamlessly, a new time is created, and that time is GHOST-MODERNISM.

These are the top 20 radio hits of that time: pop-odes to sub-aqueous pyramids, imaginary political figures, chaos, mania, flashes of light, electric lives, moccasined gods, serpent deities of Bahamian voodoo, and murdered lovers whose crosses dot the haunted highway and endow it with everlasting power.

Taraka Larson’s Haunted Highways and Hymns for a Ghost-Modern World Mixtape

∆ SIDE A ∆

1. Dancing Gods- Silver Apples
2. Keinsein- Teeth Mountain
3. Pyramid of the Sun in the Heavens- Peace In
4. Electriclife- Psychic Ills
5. Oceans- Indian Jewelry
6. Laughlines- Cocteau Twins
7. Haunted Graffiti- Ariel Pink
8. Nasirli Eller- Selda
9. Big Sound- Amon Düül
10. Governer Rhodes- Jandek

∆ SIDE B ∆

1. Kuujen halti kuuterhan- Lau Nau
2. In Caroline- Amen Dunes
3. Blue Basket- Unknown (Cambodian Cassette Archives- Sublime Frequencies)
4. Bounce Four- Gary War
5. Flash of Light- Silk Flowers
6. Cheer Up!- MCSquared
7. Tummyache- Sleep ∞ Over
8. Exerpt from Radio Calcutta- Unknown (Radio India- Sublime Frequencies)
9. Dambala- Exuma
10. That’s All For Everyone- Fleetwood Mac (screwed by Taraka Larson)

Upon the discovery of these two tracks, both b-side underbellies of recent 7 inches put out by Captured Tracks, I felt myself paralyzed by the spectral power. I surrendered unquestioningly to their necromantic commands— before long, I found myself unwittingly turning the speed knob down until 45 rpm became 33 and the voices in these seemingly innocuous and digestible pop songs all of a sudden became enchanted oracles ominously imparting a dark and unforeseen realm of prophecy.

I realized that only through embracing a whole-hearted exploration of our haunted state can we hope we bring about a deeper awareness of ourselves as our only exorcisers.

It is thus with this intent that I invite you to be possessed.

∆ COSMETICS ∆

∆ BLACK LEATHER GLOVES ∆

In this spirit realm, nostalgia is the language of knowing and fantasy is the landscape of being. Spidery synths scamper across the glass dance floor of infinity as a hand reaches down from the sky cloaked in the black fetish of mystery. Like some gothic recreation of the Sistine Chapel, a crooked finger beckons you to follow it across the swirling threshold of fog and mirrors to some amorphous disco dome of a bygone era. Before long, you have lost yourself to this hand and you find yourself dancing with everyone in the room, but then, you realize you are everyone in the room and the gloved hand you have been holding is none but your own as you watch it dig your grave.

∆ BEACH FOSSILS ∆

∆ DESERT SAND ∆

The coast ghosts that have haunted the sonic landscape for over a year now seem to weave a wistful eulogy for their lost union with the archetypal beach, whose promise of discovery has possessed residents to the brink of mania. Where is this elusive beach? Who are its inhabitants? What is it really? The Beach Boys who once set out on their mystical quest to find it have shape-shifted into Beach Fossils and their oneirogogic vision of sand once wet by waves is now but a mirage on the horizon of a vast desert expanse. A lone rider drags a beat-up guitar across this sea of quartz and mineral dust, strings plucked in eerie harmony by the skeletal fingers of a daydream unrequited, its bones left to bake in the sun.

Put your ear to the ground;

beneath this field of windblown carcasses

one can hear the soft roar of a new tide rising up through the bedrock

and slipping silver tongues through the cracks in the sand.

It seems to be the week of psychedelic awakenings at 20JFG’s White Castle, what better way of getting the ball rolling than by the gold and ruby beringed hand of Prince Rama of Ayodhya, one of our most favourite bands and last victims of the iniquities of the world, i.e., they had their totemic instruments of spiritual lore stolen by some fools, here’s hoping that these devices are recovered, and that the culprits suffer all manners of karmic retributions, i.e. a thousand reincarnations as wingless insects in a garden full of hungry birds. Check the report here and see if you have any ideas about how to help.

At the very least, do purchase Architecture of Utopia, where the jam we are posting today, ‘Land of the Apocalypse Transcended’ is included. It will be released soon by Animal Image Research. Get ready.

Because if the visitors were to arrive to our planet, coming not from a faraway corner of the universe, but from deep inside us, powerful archetypical distillations from a genetic memory which is both biology and magick, this would be the soundtrack to which their palace of glimmering light and frightful darkness, their palace where every window is an unblinking soul-searing eye of understanding yet forgiveness would rise in the apex of the holy mountain, that drone you hear are the hinges of its massive portal swinging open, inviting us in so we may know. It’s end is only the beginning.

Prince Rama of Ayodhya- The Land of the Apocalypse Transcended

Many Mansions‘ Oneness is a condensed story of the evolution of life in this planet, it kicks on with the simmering of molecular bonds in the primeval soup of the Atlantic sea near the coasts of what we would eventually call Africa, things go out of focus for a moment, it might have been a fraction of a second, it might have been a million years, next time you look, slender creatures of strange shapes are dancing their manatee dance in the crystalline waters, slowly approaching and crawling into land, respiratory systems stretching and becoming more complex, scales and claws and then fur and fingers and opposable thumbs one after the other like life trying on different outfits, expanding forward and sideways, and next thing you know you have a hominid with a spear standing on the top of a mound staring at a Sun that surely was  bigger and redder in the olden days, a moment of reminiscence and wonder and delight at the capacity to revel in the beauty of it all, thinking, yes, thinking, ‘now that was a trip’.

Many Mansions- Oneness

Many Mansions rule- he makes us jump like Steve Reich doing the tropical boogie. Get his album, Return to Source from The Whitehaus Family Record.

And what is the story that they utter?

One of sweaty bedrooms where some kids fight for the fate of the universe against overwhelming forces, armed with but a handful of dice, paper and pencil, from dawn til dusk. Yes, role-playing games, the last refuge of the imaginative and shy teenager who, rejected by a world where success and acceptance are monopolised by those who are big and mighty and good at kicking the ball, where action and consequence seem to be utterly and confusingly disconnected, suddenly finds a portal for becoming whatever he wants and making a difference through sword, sorcery or lethal blaster.

This is the definitive moment when disbelief is suspended, look at a form covered in numbers, that’s you, look at a reticle in the floor where a bunch of citadel figures lay scattered, behind and between plastecine blobs that simulate furniture and landscape, that’s the world, look at that chubby and spotted fellow staring at you from behind his cardboard screen, that’s God, sometimes cruel, sometimes benevolent. All of which will eventually become useful skills.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, stay in the past which is what matters today, because somehow, off the mixture of these odd trinkets something amazing emerges, battles are fought and friendships forged, stories unfold, new universes explored. Astonishing shit, I tell you, but also requiring all that time that starts becoming scarce as one grows up. I haven’t played RPGs for ages, and I miss it. I used to be a dungeon master, and a guardian, I used to craft and rule over worlds, now I have to live in but one, and one which can be quite boring while we are at that. So I feel thankful whenever I stumble upon music which is epic and fierce and demented, progressive and mindblowing, music which simmers with that old time magick that my friends and I used to get wasted on before we even tried alcohol or psychedelics. This is it and this is what we are about. Now roll those dice.

The new Lightning Bolt album does what it says in the box: imagine all the best things in life according to the private diaries of a Greek deity- slaughter of foes and kin alike, throwing rays around like there was no tomorrow, reconfiguring clouds into horrible grimaces with which to inspire fearful prophecies amongst the oracles, the shattering of temples’ pillars with but a handclap, gobbling wine and fighting hand to hand with tigers and lions. Fixing up Aries’ spears down at the ironsmiths while listening to Slayer and Hawkwind, chaos unleashed and unspeakable orgies.
That’s the life kids, and that’s what Earthly Delights sounds like: 360 degrees onslaught in infinite intersecting planes of pure vicious ravishing sound, a bit like one of those killer spheres in phantasmagoria if only they were covered on Peyote slime. Impaled again, such capers.

Lightning Bolt-Funny Farm

It’s a shame I didn’t know much krautrock in those role-playing days, because I could hardly think of more suitable music to skate across the avenues of mind-bending fantasy, science fiction speculation and maddening crawling chaos which used to be my bread and butter then.

Krautrock is the sound of an adventurous spirit expanding like a 3D fractal virus across virgin taigas begging, in their silence, to be populated by the products of a hallucinated imagination. Against the eternal return of pop music, with its choruses and bridges, Krautrock represents the hero’s journey, forever forwards towards the big eye in the sky whose iris marks the end of this world and a precipice into the beyond, a falling which is floating.

In HyBoLT, his latest 12’, Von Spar gives us krautrock and then some, metronomic trip in a silver chariot pulled by a mechanic Pegasus of slender grace, over awe-inspiring dreamscapes, idyllic villages and vast garrisons, menacing crystal castles configured in impossible angles from whose minarets loom devious sorcerers made of brimstone and shadow. It really sounds like the soundtrack for some 70s animation film produced by brainfried hippies, or a video game which we just about have the technology, but not the attitude to deliver.

Von Spar- HyBoLT

How many times must have I described how it feels to slide under the massive arches of an exotic citadel, the wonder of a bazaar where a thousand wares lie displayed for demanding adventurers to inspect, words from a thousand dialects fence in bargaining followed by the tinkling of a thousand currencies stamped on the same gold they all chase, white-robed penitents march under the angry gaze of sneaky pickpockets very aware of suspicious guards in iron breastplates at the feet of marble towers at whose top lounge damsels covered in silk who long with misty eyes for the opportunity to slide under those arches alone, bereft of vassals, bodyguards and assorted minions, free and outside into the plains.

I could have done a better job if I had read Samuel R. Delany, Fritz Leiber or Italo Calvino, or if I had put into the stereo the rather astonishing ‘Zetland’ by Prince Rama Of Ayodhya. Particularly Gold Dawn, which sounds like an intoxicating melange of Magma, Gang Gang Dance, Fremen country music and Neveryon gospel.  It is prog as fuck, and in the best possible way, unhinged, whirling beautiful music which soars like layers of fabric covering the bodies of the Gods as they dance beyond the blue veil of the sky, shedding them one after another, each of them becoming a different season.

Prince Rama Of Ayodhya- Golden Dawn

BONUS

Go to IGETRVNG and buy the first FRWWYS. Or even better, subscribe to the whole series. Check out the video of Excepter remixed by Carter Tutti. w00T!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPJcps5pDkM[/youtube]